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Object Relations: Melanie Klein Pt. 4

Richard

Because Melanie Klein's method of psychoanalysis is full of insight, but not altogether systematic, she felt it would be good to provide a case study example to show how interpretations could affect children and change their style of play and show some therapeutic value. Her case study was of a child named Richard who was 10 years old. His symptoms ranged from hypochondria, depression, and avoidance, because the second world war had instilled fears into him about air-raids and bombs, and he also had a fear of other children and an inability to control his anger. He didn't get along with most people except for adult women where "he tried to impress them by his conversational gifts and to ingratiate himself in a rather precocious way." Breastfeeding when he was young only lasted weeks and was unsatisfactory. He was delicate and suffered from colds and illnesses. The mother "worried about any illness in Richard, and her attitude had some effect on his hypochondriacal fears. There was no doubt that Richard was rather a disappointment to her and that, although she tried not to show it, she preferred the elder brother, who had been a great success at school and had never caused her any worry. Though Richard was devoted to her, he was an extremely difficult child to live with; he had no hobbies to occupy him, was overanxious and over-affectionate towards his mother and, since he could not bear to be away from her, clung to her in a persistent and exhausting way; his hypochondriacal fears related to her health as well as his own." The father also left the raising of Richard predominantly to the mother. The older brother was friendly, but they had very little in common.

Melanie treated Richard in a playroom in Pitlochry, Scotland, and then moved him to a Welsh village in the countryside that was away from much of the bombing in WWII. "In my interpretations I tried, as always, to avoid (as I would with adults as well as with children) introducing any similes, metaphors, or quotations to illustrate my point. In practice, even when reminding a patient of former material, I never use technical terms...I make a point of using whenever possible the words that the patient has used, and I find that this has the effect both of diminishing resistance and of bringing fully back into his mind the material I am referring to. With Richard I had to introduce in the course of the analysis certain terms which were unknown to him, such as 'genital', 'potent', 'sexual relations', or 'sexual intercourse'. From one point onwards Richard referred to the analysis as 'the work.'"

In this work, the interpretations Melanie provided, had the goal of illuminating the transference, which is how a reaction from an earlier relationship is being used to predict the behaviors of others. This brings to mind the dichotomy of reality vs. distortion and Klein aimed at getting the transference mistakes traced back as far as possible to their origin. In Richard's case, it was back to the earliest time that it happened: A fear that daddy was doing something bad to mummy at night. At the age of ten Richard knew that "babies grew inside [his mother], that she had little eggs there and Daddy put some kind of fluid into her which made them grow." Probably to be more general about children at this time in the 20th century, they were more aware of the attention that their desired parent received, and they were more fearful of the aggression that they might experience in response to competition for that attention. Being in the Oedipus Complex is like being a third wheel. Good and bad experiences lead to a worldview and then get transferred onto other authority figures, who are also fought over for attention by others, and these expectations manifest as more predictions of behavior or rehearsals on how to respond to those powerful people. Our worldview gets shaped by these experiences, especially if they repeat, and then we go into different environments and experience conflict when we act on these outdated expectations, like using a hammer and thinking everything is a nail.

Case Studies: 'Little Hans' - Sigmund Freud: https://rumble.com/v1gu93b-case-studies-little-hans-sigmund-freud.html

In this case, Richard was transferring the good behavior of parents onto world leaders, like Churchill, and the bad behavior onto Hitler, because this was 1941. There were also projections where Richard was aware of his own aggression and therefore would worry about retaliation if he acted on his violent urges. The playacting of roles often happens when there is a desire to wield the power of authority figures as a way to avoid helplessness, and then an identity with an aggressor can arise. Children also apply a splitting of "good" and "bad" characteristics onto themselves, leading to feelings of guilt, avoidance of guilt, manic defenses, and in some cases, attempts to pass off the guilt onto others. In these cases, the splitting has yet to be integrated so that people can be seen to be more realistically as a mix between good and bad, and to also accept that one has the capability of being both good or bad, depending on the situational pressures. There's also an envy at play when competitors who were considered bad before are forgiven after displaying good behavior for a period time. Forgiveness is hard to fathom when the onlooker is stuck in splitting. Splitting judgments are typically perceived as forever judgments.

Object Relations: Melanie Klein Pt. 2: https://rumble.com/v435lsq-object-relations-melanie-klein-pt.-2.html

The reason why the sexuality is so emphasized in such a blunt way by Melanie, has to do with the feelings children have related to the sexuality. Since many children have little understanding of biological sexuality at this age and time in the past, their early sexual theories, like children being born out of the anus, and penises dislodging and remaining in the vagina, etc., should really describe more the jealousy children have towards the amorous attention that parents give each other. The biological reality of sex, and the propriety of incest taboos, can be realistically described so as to get the young child to effectively start looking for better object choices than their parents, but of course these kinds of jealousies can reappear anytime there is a new fight over scarce partners and attention. There can also be projections that shift blame when loved objects are perceived to be the cause of the desire, like it was their fault for being desirable, like a returning of love being perceived as an entitlement.

Sexuality Pt 2: Infantile Sexuality - Sigmund Freud: https://rumble.com/v1gtort-sexuality-pt-2-infantile-sexuality-sigmund-freud.html

Richard's fears, related to conflicts with others, also connected to his desires and manifested in dreams and play scenarios. Melanie interpreted "Richard's concern about the disruption in his family if his desires to have Mummy all to himself were to be satisfied...[which caused] the strength of his feelings of persecution: he had said he felt surrounded by hundreds and thousands of enemies, and quite powerless." It's hard for adults, let alone children, to desire objects that are free when desires are mainly mimetic. If you have to imitate to learn what desires exist in the world, you'll likely bump into inappropriate objects that cannot be shared and suffer the consequences of envy, resentment, oppression, and repression.

What can be unconscious is the symbolism in dreams related to these conflicts, as well as a gradual understanding of boundaries and ownership to move more towards better object choices. Boundaries for oneself also allow one to be helpful towards others in protecting their boundaries, and ideally there is reciprocity if these are good family or friend situations. An ideal end result of therapy is for patients to pursue their interests and desires with others while at the same time making object-choices that are free from rivalry. This is why the Oedipus Complex is like an atheistic version of the Ten Commandments.

Crossing those boundaries leads to castration fears related to any prohibitions and threats of punishment coming from parents or other authority figures. When there is acceptance of how inappropriate a relationship a child has for one parent or another, that acceptance can lead to reparation and a desire to choose a different object. Positive social attention that is suffused with a clear conscience can then be added to the child's overall well-being and happiness. Social savoring was connected to emotional feeding for Melanie Klein, going all the way back to breastfeeding. Psychoanalysis is successful when wrong object choices are abandoned and replaced with more peaceful non-conflictual ones. To really be in reality is to realize that judging actual behaviors is the only way to see clearly the real mix of good and bad in a person and it allows one to notice development in a person and as well to notice any compartmentalization or hypocrisy. The granular detail allows people to notice if there's enough good in a person to negotiate with and still remain in their lives.

Any relief the child experiences from this kind of analysis then can turn into a positive transference towards the helpful analyst. One can also see this play out in pride towards nations and attribution of parental behaviors to others of the same nationality, or culture. National feeling is connected with shared values of a citizenry. Emotions demonstrated in therapy by the analysand, or drawing exhibits for example, like those of Richard, can be linked to inner conflicts, or inner peace, depending on the progression of the treatment. Peaceful drawings, for example, are about good relationships and sharing pleasure in a way that demonstrates social problem solving. The child improves as they see the good in themselves, and are better able to see the good in others, so new relationship negotiations can start. Eventually the child, or adult in analysis, can now connect the good in all the people in his or her life as well as the good helpful objects inside him or herself. This increases the belief that there is good in the world and it relaxes the feelings of idealization, devaluation, mercilessness, and persecution.

The idealization, or over-valuation also increases when the good in another is felt to be lost, and devaluation when there are punishments and defenses erected against the pain of that loss. A realistic appraisal of good and bad behavior reduces the idealization and devaluation so that distortion decreases. When envy and jealousy decrease, so does the distortion even further. Also if one feels there is good in oneself, losses of goodness in others leaves one not empty but with good enough self-esteem to find new relationship arrangements. One grieves, but continues to believe in love enough to pursue other relationships. The ego can now assert itself in negotiation, because now there are good aspects in people that one can see is worth connecting to, and the super-ego has already quieted down the alarm, rehearsals, and catastrophizing. By finding commonality with enemies, a compassion can arise when those formerly "bad objects" are found to be damaged. For Melanie, this is a sign of the life instinct increasing in power. The life instinct leads to negotiation, reparation, development, building, and creating. Contrary to Freud's idea of the Nirvana Principle and the death drive, Melanie construed the death drive as being more related to stress, internal conflict and fragmentation.

Beyond the Pleasure Principle - Freud & Beyond - War Pt. (2/3): https://rumble.com/v1gv855-beyond-the-pleasure-principle-freud-and-beyond-war-pt.-23.html

Children can't choose who their parents are, so they have to imitate the good aspects of their parents, if there are enough of them, and then do the same with others in the community to fill out what is missing. It's about developing skills to trade good with good; to have faith and trust that good can be reciprocated by others. This can be seen in businesses that have to have faith in their suppliers and customers. In intimate relationships, the faith is based on the belief that there are enough good behaviors in the person to make emotional-social exchanges with them in the long-term.

In conflicts over scarcity of love and attention, patients can regress into further splitting and distortion. Fear heightens the labels of good and bad, which is fine if labeled accurately for real behaviors, and especially if those behaviors haven't been deterred as of yet. Habitual aggression and frustration are reasonable in dangerous environments, but are distorted and inappropriate in peaceful environments. The world is full of opposites and childhood strategies need to change and adapt if there is to be any growth. The reason why so many interpretations lead back to the parents, is because the parents are modeling their level of skill and the child's sampling is limited by that environment. You can only imitate what is accessible to you.

Fears that inhibit

For Melanie, the analysis doesn't start with immediate attempts at play, but a simple exploration of what is bothering the analysand. She started the conversation with Richard by saying "I know why you are here..." allowing him to explain his predicament, which was a fear of other boys on the street and going out by himself, and it was why he hated school. He was also cognizant of the war and very angry about Hitler's invasion of Poland. There was a starting acknowledgement that Hitler was bad to Austrians, while he was also an Austrian, as well as Melanie. She had a world map in the playroom that allowed Richard to roam over and make freely associated judgments against the Axis or towards any perceived betrayal by Allies.

Melanie asked about Richard's worries over his mother when he couldn't think of anything else that bothered him at that moment. He was worried about his mother's health, which was sometimes bad, and he felt "lonely and deserted" before going to bed. He would have nightmares of a tramp coming in the middle of the night to kidnap his mother, which made Richard attempt to save her by scalding the invader with hot water from a boiling pot. Melanie already at this time started with her interpretations, and in this case she made a link between Hitler's behavior to others and this tramp. She then brought up the possibility that he might be afraid of what his parents were doing in the bedroom with their genitals. As he looked perplexed she found out that he didn't have words for going to the bathroom at this time in his childhood, which she had to introduce with rudimentary vocabulary like "big job" and "little job." He then told her his theories about sexuality as described above. Melanie eventually introduced the words "sexual relations" and "sexual intercourse" for what he described.

She also interpreted that, even though he felt that his dad was nice to his mom, that the reason why he didn't remember his father in the nightmares as a candidate to protect his mother, was in fact that he had more ambivalent thoughts about him than he led on. This "Hitler-tramp" was standing in the place of Richard's father. He was impressed with the interpretation and appeared to have accepted it. When Richard could see his dad in the daytime he had confirmation of his good behavior, but when he couldn't see him at night, theories would arise and transferences involving Hitler, plus nearby bombings that shook and broke windows, it was now possible for him to believe that terrible things were happening to his mom. This was a form of splitting for Melanie to make his father bad, especially at night. Melanie was looking for confirmation in Richard's attitude that the interpretations were affecting his behavior. He did reject some interpretations, but Melanie focused on his attitude at the end of the first session as being "friendly and satisfied." Already Melanie could see a displacement made by Richard to prevent the father from having a bad reputation in his eyes. By saying that his father was good in the daytime, he could accept that he must be all good, but at night, he could get relief from guilt by blaming the tramp instead for taking attention away from his mother.

Unnecessary guilt

Richard's later worries about planet collisions and countries at war were interpreted as transferences coming from object constellations in his mind in place of the family. In more concrete terms he felt jealous of the attention his brother got from his mother, but he didn't feel that it was inappropriate for the mother to behave in this way, because his brother wasn't entirely undeserving. In regards to Richard's references to Ribbentrop's lies, that Britain was the aggressor in WWII, Melanie interpreted that as being about how Richard worried that his envy or jealousy would make him out to also be an aggressor. Fears of retaliation repeat again and again in this case study. Hatred instead for Hitler or the "tramp" felt better because it didn't have the ambivalent feelings connected with hating his blameless father. When there are roles in the family that Richard didn't like, he could create new relations to get what he needed. In this case it was his spaniel dog Bobby. Melanie interpreted the love he gave for Bobby as a way to be in Mummy's place, and the love the dog returned was the love he wanted from Mummy.

The complexity that Melanie went through in this case study exemplifies the malleability of transference. In case studies like this one, there is usually a trauma of some kind, like his Mummy went through, when she was run over by a car, and there's now an effortful rumination to reenact the trauma in different scenarios to prevent those things from happening in the future. Rehearsals are distorted when they are too omnipotent and put to much onus on the dreamer who has little control over circumstances. These transferences include the level of skill and imagination that the child has at the time, which can increase the distortion with a child's predictable ignorance. Children sometimes feel helpless to prevent accidents and misfortune and take the blame upon themselves with this type of magical thinking. There was an example that Melanie interpreted with a link between Richard's beloved Granny dying as well as an older dog before Bobby that had to be put down. There's was a sense of guilt that those two events were connected and traced back to Richard. His mistrust of himself also appeared in transference towards Melanie with a worry that something bad could also happen to her through his own fault.

Projection

One of the challenges for readers of psychoanalytic case studies is that analysts appear to over-interpret everything. Readers require enough openness to realize that this is a 10 year old child that is being analyzed. Even adults who have unconscious memories from the past, that past is archaic in logic as well. From the point of view of Melanie, Richard's worries about Britain vs. the Germans can be translated as being about the marital bed. For an adult to make these connections it would be moronic, but not for an adolescent or child. From the point of view of a young child's small world, the news of the day can be a transference playground where current family worries can be projected on. Children are not likely to make accurate projections like that of a retired general analyzing military maneuvers, though adults are sometimes happy to use terms like "Mother Earth", "Motherland", "Fatherland", etc. It's clear that interpretations by a child can be more or less realistic at a surface level, but the motivations behind the surface usually involve deep fears and catastrophizing about what might happen if personal and embarrassing material is revealed. It's much easier to process shameful thoughts using the news of the day, or by watching topical movies, or playing with toys, so that the thinking process can be explored through fiction to avoid blaming or shaming that comes from airing dirty linen in public.

The unconscious usually includes more superstitious material than found in conscious thinking, and so guilt and blame may appear in the mind of a child as something that may lead to instant punishment or death, for example, which Melanie thought was representative of omnipotent thinking. By transferring unpleasant thoughts to a weaker object, like a toy, or a pet, they can be disguised. For example, Richard identified himself with his dog Bobby, because Bobby liked to takeover the vacant armchair that was his Daddy's favorite and leave little room for him when he returned and wanted to sit down again. For Melanie, this was an example of projective identification, which is an ability to put oneself in the shoes of another to resonate with others and their personal wishes, or to overlap one's wishes against the will of another, in another omnipotent thought process. How that kind of projection can betray one's intentions is if it is based on knowledge that "it takes one to know one." Again, there are many kinds of projections, but that is the one that mystifies people because of the jarring hypocrisy.

With projections that reveal one's hypocrisy, there is often a lack of reflection because the mind can only take in so many thoughts at once, and because it unconsciously knows familiar strategies, it projects them, and predicts the behaviors of others with that knowledge, while the mind is too overloaded to reflect on one's own identical behavior. A positive transference is about identifying a person being cooperative and a negative transference the opposite. If one is desperate enough, one can accept any means necessary to achieve a goal, because the end justifies the means, and if an enemy is blocking one's goals, it's easy to judge with a double standard. We are more sympathetic towards our goals, especially when people, objects, or situations, cannot be shared. Cooperative people appear all good, because the ends justify the means again, and conflicting people are all bad, for the same reason, and that's why standards are not fair until adjudication is administered by a fair body or court. I think the panic, and the importance of whatever goal is chosen, leads to blindness of this hypocrisy. Hypocrisy is also likely when a undesirable behavior is so common that many people are equally guilty. Also, if I know right from wrong, and demand good behavior from others, this knowledge may not be strong enough compared to my resistant bad habits. Like a doctor who smokes, the ideal behavior is simply a goal for society at this point. It hasn't been acted on yet.

Another reason why projection may be used is that it can be a defense mechanism. One can feel not like the odd man out when one's bad behavior is seen in others. By not being the only one, there's a chance that others are doing the same bad behavior, and maybe there is a chance they can take all the blame, or they can be allies in the future if the analysand has a desire for the bad behavior to continue. If there's a policing function that one wants to avoid, having a great many others who do the same behavior makes the policing action untenable. They would have to arrest everyone. For example, if everyone else is speeding, and getting what they want, which is to get some place faster, then if I'm caught speeding, my predictable excuse would be that it's human to speed. Why should they get away without a speeding ticket and not me? One could also avoid this problem by speeding, but put the spotlight on others by not speeding as much as the lead car. Let them get all the policing attention.

Goals are also blinding. If my goal is to eat a lot at the expense of someone else, I can't feel the cravings of another person, only my own. Conversely, if someone else acts just as greedy and eats portions that I crave, I can't easily empathize with another who has the exact same cravings as me. People can't taste their own medicine when it comes to their own goals. You would literally have to imagine yourself in your opponent's shoes and manufacture a simulated craving with the internal imagery to balance out this bias. That takes an extra leap of energy and cognitive load to process what others may be thinking. It is inevitable that many people will avoid this kind of reflection. Before one accuses others, it may be wise to make sure that one is not doing the same behavior.

With accurate interpretations from an analyst, anxiety usually increases along with denial in the analysand, until it evaporates with acceptance. That acceptance ideally moves the patient onto problem-solving thoughts to aim goals in better directions. Later on in the analysis of Richard, Melanie found that the working out of thoughts that he had about himself and others eventually came to a partial solution by entertaining the idea of his dog also having a family. She interpreted this as an early thought for Richard to also start a family of his own so he could be independent and be free of the guilt arising from the Oedipus Complex.

Another way Melanie found to detect Richard's fixation on his parents was in the form of humor. When having fun with friends and snow sledges another kid crashed into an adult couple and Richard laughed. Melanie interpreted that as an Oedipus wish fulfillment against his parents and a displacement on these strangers. Much like displacement on toys, or consumable entertainment, these wishes could be secretly enjoyed at the expense of these strangers. When children, or even adults are in a situation where other people are obstacles to one's goals, the mind is unconsciously trying to find a way of removing them to feel relief. Movies in particular love to exploit object relations by setting up good and evil splitting, and satisfy audiences when the representatives of complete evil are destroyed. More refined forms of storytelling involve making characters complex, nuanced, and mixed with both good and bad aspects. When one is frustrated with life it's very easy to turn to fiction stories or movies to find vicarious relief. This process can be more simply imagined by seeing oneself as a protagonist and people who are obstacles as antagonists. Others can more or less be cooperative allies or enemy confederates. You can then add complexity to the mental layout by looking at the analysand's roleplaying and behavior. These play scenarios can also demonstrate object-memories with higher or lower power differentials in the analysand's environment. Splitting at first denotes the stress experienced with these people as obstacles but relief happens when there is enough good found in people that can cooperate with the good in the analysand.

Richard at the time was processing Melanie's interpretations of Churchill being the "Good Daddy" and Hitler representing the "Bad Daddy." As a healthy adult, there are ways of working with good aspects of a person while navigating their bad side, especially when new goals are chosen to free up conflicts of interest. Instead for 10 year old Richard, it was more likely that he had thoughts about his mom's accident and how his inappropriate wishes towards his parents magically caused this serious accident. Interpretations that clear up magical thinking and guilt, in these kinds of situations, can be done by reminding the analysand that these were thoughts that were never acted upon. When that kind of rumination ceases, the analyst should be looking for signs of relief, renewed vigor in the playroom, and a more positive transference. Sometimes anxiety remains, because the interpretation is still being denied for a period of time. At this time in the analysis, Richard was showing some of that kind of anxiety, but a positive transference to Melanie still remained. Positive transferences can last a long time as long as the analysand has found some gains to build on early in the analysis.

Interpretation anxiety

In the fourth session, Richard seemed resistant to some of the interpretations and started asking Melanie about her life, family, friends, and their vocations. Melanie did give some candid answers, including about her husband who passed away, but she felt that it was best not to do this and it often left her with regret when she did. In this example, Melanie saw some jealousy appear about the good things in her life which attracted an envious transference originally directed at his own family. It was the same jealousy that he had when others got more attention than he did. This was a link for Melanie on how patients have epistemophilia, a pleasure to know, which connected with his uncertainty about Melanie's trustworthiness. This also appeared when he looked at the world map and talked about his uncertainty towards Melanie's Austria, and also Russia. Without new experiences, the mind has to ask questions about other people's experiences to try to improve predictions, otherwise people regress and predict based on their own experiences with family and culture. When dealing with authority figures, both children and adults also want to know about the authority figure so they can make their own judgments as to whether they should be taken seriously or not. The only positivity connected with the jealousy is that the patient believes the authority figure has enough status to be taken seriously. The danger of that positivity comes from patients becoming dependent on authority figures. The jealousy in this case continued with Richard and extended to another patient of Melanie's he knew about who was older than him. Being young he felt left behind and ashamed that he was being treated in a lowly playroom instead of in an adult analysis room. It connected to his need to have positive regard in competition with others. These kind of comparisons can also motivate patients with shame towards a reaction formation to imitate authority figures, to try to use them as a role model, to attain power, and attract that very same positive regard.

Object Relations: Melanie Klein Pt. 1: https://rumble.com/v3vru21-object-relations-melanie-klein-pt.-1.html

Richard's uncomfortableness predictably increased when Melanie explained sex education topics to him and interpreted his deeper intentions. These interpretations were making him want to leave some of the sessions early, but he stayed respectfully until the end every time. Melanie felt at this time that there was a sexual transference beginning. Again, any inappropriate desires could fuel more guilt and worries about punishment. These same fears of a punishing tramp-daddy towards his desire for his mom were now transferred towards Melanie. He felt that consummation of his wishes could lead to retaliation from his father or brother. The fears then would go spiraling towards catastrophizing that in the end he wouldn't be taken care of or protected by anyone. His fear of enemies extended towards doctors, especially when he could recount some details of his traumatic circumcision. Being helpless towards the doctor was like being helpless towards the father. A castration anxiety. Complaining about his hatred for operations, dentists, and ether, Melanie could see Richard was beginning to feel relief through his venting and his experience of comfort that a sympathetic person was listening with interest.

Object Relations: Melanie Klein Pt. 3: https://rumble.com/v4l5hvn-object-relations-melanie-klein-pt.-3.html

Positive transference

His relief led to an increased positive transference towards Melanie by the next session. It was easier for him now to talk about his castration anxiety, which was a symbol of his need to be competent to be worthy of his mother and Melanie. At this time, Richard was beginning to integrate good and bad aspects in people little by little. When looking at pictures and the brown clock, Melanie associated his dislike of the color brown with feces, and his hatred of other children stood for his dad, in the sense that they were just more suitors competing for his mother. Part of the reason for so many interpretations, is the assumption that everyone lies, especially about shameful wishes. This reality means that interpretations have to go beyond protests to the contrary from the analysand. It still leaves open that the analyst can be wrong part of the time. The tell on how right or wrong an interpretation is, is if the child is able to find relief after an interpretation. This usually has a pattern of discomfort and embarrassment before acceptance and relief.

Case Studies: The 'Ratman' - Freud and Beyond: https://rumble.com/v1gu9qj-case-studies-the-ratman-freud-and-beyond.html

Beyond news stories about countries and their involvement in WWII, Melanie's world map became a Rorschach example, where shapes of countries could be good or bad based on how they conformed to past good or bad experiences in Richard's life. The oscillation between positive and negative for Melanie has a manic-depressive bent, where negative topics appear depressing, but then positive things, like his looking forward to a visit to London, would provide a manic escape. Dwelling on guilt, negativity, or shame over aspects of oneself fuels a desire for escape into novelty or addiction. These are also patterns that many therapists feel is a signal to the missing aspects of one's life that one is running away from. While in this positive mood Richard was starting to move physically closer to Melanie and asked to put his feet on the bar of her chair, which Melanie of course found inappropriate. He realized this and began talking about what he liked and disliked in Melanie's room which she interpreted as displaced feelings about her. He continued with more epistemophilia, wanting to know about Melanie's other patients and how he compared to them, but he understood why she professionally couldn't reveal their details. The danger of positive transferences with analysts is that any irregularity on the part of the analyst can be construed as a possible abandonment, like when Melanie forgot to bring her key one day and had to go back home to get it.

Unconscious controlling

Dreams are another avenue for analysis and can reveal deep worries about potentially unpleasant life changes, like worries about his mother having a rival baby. At this time, Richard showed some early signs of the depressive position where he began to feel sorry for France, despite some of their abandonment towards the allies. He could see that they may have had not much choice in the matter. Melanie then interpreted that this reduction of splitting was also applying to his family. He was also starting to see more of his darker side in an example of projection where Richard hated a girl with protruding teeth that Melanie felt reminded him of his desire to bite. The hatred of oneself, for maybe having characteristics that one hasn't gotten a handle on yet, is defended against by outwardly displacing those characteristics towards others. Knowing what is dangerous about yourself makes you afraid that others can be dangerous in the same way. Melanie interpreted Richard's mother's womb as being displaced onto the playroom. He wanted to control the womb and it's rivals like he wanted to control his play environment. Slowly he began to associate the lovely countryside when he was out in the garden as the good side of his mother and there was a reduction of fear towards the possibility of rival babies. Hinted in here of the depressive position is that one can look at people less like a rivalry and find something positive about allowing for others the chance to develop their potential, because one can enjoy those potentials and successes like enjoying a nice day. A nice day can be shared as well, and if one can find a new relationship situation for oneself, there's no need to engage in rivalry. In this early stage, Melanie worried that this was still a manic defense in that this positivity was treated as an escape rather than a full acceptance. There is always a need in people to find usefulness in others to make alliances and it takes time to accept the aspects of people that are less cooperative. It takes time to accept the independence of others.

Melanie's interpretations of Richard's thinking eventually explored the possibility of his getting what he wanted from his mom without hurting her, and since his daddy and potential rival babies would be in the way, she might get hurt in the process of his emotional feeding. Melanie made a link with his thoughts of how Hitler could be removed without having to attack Germany. These kinds of thoughts lead to an understanding of inappropriateness in relationships and nudge the child closer and closer to wanting an object choice free of conflict. He also accepted that Germanic peoples included good things like Mozart. Just like there is sometimes good weather, life is not without opportunities for good combinations.

Art therapy

As talking and exploring the playroom was becoming boring, Richard became more interested in drawing. The first drawing included U-boats and names. Again, you have to imagine you are a child and know very little about how war is conducted and are projecting your life onto these objects. Melanie noticed a split in the ego where Richard and his older fellow analysand John were identified as the German U-boats, and his family were the English, represented by the Truant and Sunfish, but with an understanding that outside of his play he was not really against his parents. Melanie felt that John stood for Richard's brother Paul. He also showed his liking for U 72, because 2 is an even number, and for example, when pretending to hunt rabbits he could not know how one could share an odd number of 7 rabbits between 2 people. Melanie felt that was Richard wanting to share equally with John to avoid conflict. Melanie also felt that John was treated as an ally of Richard's against her because they were both in analysis together. U 102 was an object Richard also wanted to identify with and Melanie pointed out how much bigger he wished to be than his parents, the Truant and Sunfish. Wanting to be bigger was a result of his need to master his fear of counter-attacks. This also mirrored his desire to usurp is father's place.

Of course the way to track how the transferences are working is through feelings. How people predictably become labeled as obstacles is through frustration with them, and anticipation of an obstacle is often enough to cause those feelings to arise. They then can meld with any new faces and situations that are in the current environment, regardless of accuracy. Distortions are found when those 0bject-relations display much better behavior than the transference predicts. It's like remembering tactics and scenarios for further use with new situations, whether those tactics or strategies are helpful or maladaptive. Melanie pointed out that Salmon and U 6 were more representations of Richard and John. The anxiety and tension appeared when he didn't know who would attack first. Richard also pointed out that the periscope from Sunfish was inside Truant, and this represented sexual relations between the parents. Melanie elaborated how Richard was viewing himself as an enemy U boat and it also represented his fear of the damage he could do to his mom and how his wish for an inappropriate relationship, or any inappropriate relationship, could lead to conflict and retaliation. This also included his desire to neatly share the rabbits, which were represented by the parents that were shot, divided, and devoured. John, as his brother Paul, was only a sometime ally, because he only sometimes helped Richard against his nurse, who was also projected onto Melanie.

In Drawing 2, Richard was U 10, which was penetrated by both his parents' periscopes from Truant, and this time Salmon. He was also afraid of the damage he could do to his parents by being larger and dominating above them so he offset that by demonstrating how a swastika could be easily changed to a union jack, showing a reparative desire to change his U boat attitude towards his parents.

In Drawing 3, Richard wanted to add color and make a "lovely ship." This time he wanted the underwater to have nothing to do with the upper part. The fish was his mom and the starfish a baby, which was interested in the plants. Melanie felt that the ship was a corrected form of the parents with two smoke funnels representing their genitals. He hadn't seen a girls genital so chose to make her funnel thinner. Melanie interpreted Richard as the starfish and the plant was his mother's breast. When he wanted what he wanted and the parents prevented him, his identity flipped to the U boat that was dangerous to the ship. This was extrapolated to John as well, and directed against the special attention he got from Melanie. She saw that the analysis was treated as a form of emotional feeding for Richard. The greed, jealousy, and aggression were underwater because they were best left unconscious to avoid shame and embarrassment. His conscious mind was wanting harmony demonstrated by the lovely ship. Richard accepted Melanie's interpretation of a deeper unconscious and expressed relief.

When Richard was asked by Melanie if she could keep the drawings, he allowed it because he could return and see pictures when he wanted. Melanie's interpretations further confirmed to her that Richard's roleplaying was internalizing external relationships, making an inner world for him. Strategies found in external relationships could be incorporated (sampling), introjected (preferences), and identified with, (a habit of relating). A lot of a person's identity can be soaked up by the environment based on seeing the emotional feeding of others and wanting the same things they want. This led to competition with others to dominate the feeding objects, symbolized by the breast, but could include any objects that provide pleasure. Outer conflicts then could turn into inner conflicts when the superego conscience absorbs the external prohibitions. In the earliest stages of life, it's about dominating the breast as well as the mother who shows independence by controlling the availability of it. Splitting arises when the good and bad aspects of the mother are difficult to predict. Paranoia arises when the breast is deemed to be unreliable, and reparative feelings manifest when an imperfect mother is deemed to be mostly trustworthy, and patience grows in the baby.

Slow integration

In this session, Richard was sad because he was worried that his drawings would be seen by his mother and he magically associated her current sickness with his drawings, and this was especially true because she got indigestion from bad salmon. Richard wanted to make a new copy of the drawing for his mother, because he didn't want to begin favoring Melanie over his mother, like with his past experiences with his nurse. The drawing ended up being different where the fish represented the parents warding off the torpedo. The second U boat was Paul. Richard readily defended that his torpedo was not going directly to the ship. The two funnels in the new picture were now equal, as if to make the parents more aligned and respectful of each other. The red color of the funnels was representative of their injuries, and they also represented the two canaries he had at home that were going bald. Richard mentioned that his father was also going bald, but he said he liked him and liked the fact that his father was exempt from the war conscription. To Melanie, the picture represented repression from his parents trying to prevent harm and Richard's suppression, who also wanted to prevent himself from being harmful.

Richard's play continued to be a mixture between good and bad, but his jealousy was waning and he was becoming more happy for his parents for loving each other. Sexuality was still dangerous to him, as exemplified in Drawing 5, but his gratefulness for Melanie's interpretations overlaid a mother transference onto her. He went back to color in Drawing 6 where the Nelson was installed with portholes, which represented babies, as well as the many starfish. The octopus represented his dad's genital being removed from his mother and the many babies were a result of her feeling better. Both the analysis was being felt as a feeding as well as the portholes allowing access to the mother. The "blazing fury" of the starfishes was Richard's desire to replace the father so he could begin to feed on his mother. The swastika and union jack were melding together in the picture as well as in his super-ego.

In Drawing 7, Richard was the attacking boat above, and Paul was the bad ally below in the snoring boat, because as Richard pointed out, Paul snored. The mother was protecting the father against Richard and so he was depressed because his mother was betraying him for his father, so a reparation couldn't be attempted. Richard also described the sharp points on the starfish as teeth. During this time, Richard was still worried about kids in the neighborhood and started relaying dreams he had. One time he was dreaming about a German kid who he yelled at. He also frightened away the Japanese Matsuoka who appeared friendly at first but then turned into an enemy. He also imagined himself as an armored car that the Germans chased out of Berlin, but they eventually ran away when he spit fire at them. These dreams happened at the time when his family abandoned him for a short period of time.

As the sessions continued on, Richard was beginning to differentiate Melanie from his mother. She felt that keeping a good object copy of herself in his mind would be helpful because objects could endure when the analyst was not around. If an influence is helpful, then it means the object in the mind will also be helpful. The analyst is in the position of being helpful in that they help the analysand understand their own unconscious. Even if there is some discomfort there, a learning mentality can arise because the conscious mind can accept the limitations of the unconscious and a lack of control over one's unconsciousness reduces blame for mistakes. It's less about being pure and more about acceptance, learning, and hope. "It is in fact striking that very painful interpretations could have the effect of reviving hope and making the patient feel more alive. My explanation for this would be that bringing a very deep anxiety nearer to consciousness, in itself produces relief. But I also believe that the very fact that the analysis gets into contact with deep-lying unconscious anxieties gives the patient a feeling of being understood and therefore revives hope. I have often met in adult patients the strong desire to have been analysed as a child. This was not only because of the obvious advantages of child analysis, but in retrospect the deep longing for having one’s unconscious understood had come to the fore. Very understanding and sympathetic parents—and that can also apply to other people—are in contact with the child’s unconscious, but there is still a difference between this and the understanding of the unconscious implied in psycho-analysis."

Because both the internal environment and external have to work together for a therapeutic result, there are times when the external is easier to understand and vice versa. For example, when there was a fear of a German invasion of England, Richard felt that it was easier to fight Hitler externally. This could also be a source of scapegoating, when internal difficulties can only find relief in the external. External confirmations could also be a little obsessive for Richard. He often needed confirmation of his mother's whereabouts to prove her safety when internal representations of her were more in danger.

Denial can also happen when internal objects are preserved and made to spread goodness to feel better internally, even if the external world is not actually getting better. Of course, if the external world gets better, a lot of the internal world can too, if relationship problems are permanently resolved. For Melanie, all the perceived external relationships also included what could be deciphered of other people's intentions, and their inner objects, so that identity is like a strong vacuum cleaner that leaves little left to mystery in the external world. "In my view the processes of internalization and projective identification are complementary and operate from the beginning of post-natal life; they vitally determine object-relations. The mother can be felt to be taken in with all her internalized objects; the subject, too, which has entered another person, may be felt to take with him his objects (and his relations with them). The further exploration of the vicissitudes of internalized object-relations, which are at every step bound up with projective processes, should—in my view—throw much light on the development of the personality and of object-relations." The mind doesn't only take in oneself as a subject and keep others as Others, but it can also change roles with any of the personalities absorbed. In psychoanalysis, these are relationships based on emotional feeding goals and power differentials. Projective identification allows one to walk in the shoes of others and then imitate their internal nodal relationships.

Richard in his newer drawings was representing himself as a starfish and the color coding of his external influences, the conflicting goals, and their hungry intentions. The colors of the German and British flags were incorporated in the starfish. "...The black people were horrid and nasty. The light blue and the red were very nice people and were the ones the smaller countries did not mind having there...He said that the nasty black was Paul, the light blue was Mummy, the purple was the maid (Bessie) and the cook. The very small area of heliotrope blue in the centre was himself, and the red was Daddy. Suddenly he said, 'And the whole is a greedy starfish full of big teeth.'" It was a territorial battle inside him like the world map. "'This is me, and you will see what a large part of the empire I get.' Then he coloured some sections light blue, and while doing so he looked up at Mrs K. and said, 'I feel happy.' A moment later, having finished the blue sections, he said, 'Can you see how Mummy has spread herself. She has got much more of the empire.' While filling in some sections with purple, he said, 'Paul is nice, he is helping me.' He had left a few sections near the centre blank and now filled them in with black, saying that Daddy was squeezed in, surrounded by Paul, Mummy, and Richard." As internal objects became enemies or switched to allies, the colors could change as well as the level of internal help or internal sabotage could increase or decrease his well-being. Helpful objects ultimately are trustworthy and rely on those external objects to be role models of trustworthiness; to have helpful behaviors that can be imitated. The colors began to solidify the identities inside him. "From these sessions onwards, black referred to the father, light blue for his mother and Mrs. K., and red for himself." Part of the reason for domination of one color or another was how it communicated the internal cooperation or competition happening inside Richard. It also meant that he was either taking in a lot of influence from a helpful role model or he was feeling surrounded and persecuted.

"...He was also happy because the light blue—the good Mummy—and Mrs K., who had recently been wearing a light-blue cardigan, was felt to spread over the empire. The empire...represented himself swallowing everybody: he would get more and more of the good Mummy into himself, because she was spread over the empire, but she would not resent this if she were the good Mummy who would wish to be inside him and protect him there against the bad father and against his own greed and hatred." Good internal objects need to be trustworthy and cooperative. So in this case the mother became the light-blue cooperative and hopeful part of himself. Wanting cooperation externally is also like wanting cooperation inside the mind with the objects working together in the mind. Ideally, there is a relief and a saving of energy when the internal and external worlds are working together. For Richard, he was worried about his hatred and anger towards obstacles and how that didn't preserve the internal mother inside him. Therapy helped him to release the anxiety so the could touch that hope for future experiences of happiness. Those future forms of happiness would be connecting the good inside him and negotiate with the good in others; to not resort to aggression or avoidance when the independence of others was uncooperative. "...He also hoped to keep the helpful light-blue Mummy who was to protect him against the bad parents and the bad part of himself."

Reparation

By this time Richard was becoming more aware of his jealousy and temper and began asking Melanie for help, because he didn't know what to do about it. Yet this was a sign of improvement because it was evidence of his desire for reparation. At least he knew that reparation had the potential to relieve his anxiety. Expectations of endless cooperation are always doomed to failure, and the skills that people can develop to negotiate with the independence of others requires empathy and motivation for reparation. "I pointed out that the infant’s desire for an inexhaustible and ever-present breast—to which I had often referred in the past—has another and very important element besides the wish for food: the breast should do away with or control the infant’s destructive impulses and in this way protect the infant’s good object as well as safeguard him against persecutory anxieties. This actually means that the baby even at a very early stage experiences the need for a protective and helpful super-ego." So when the children get what they want, their anger is expected to go down, but as they get older, the parent's need for the child to unburden them by being more self-sufficient has to develop so that there is more reciprocity between parents and children. In fact, Richard's mother reported back that he was still aggressive, but more friendly, less tense, and easier to get on with. Richard was realizing that to get what he wanted, others also want to get some of what they wanted as well. Symbolically, you want the family at the dinner table to all have their own plate. It's important to be honest about desires, no matter how greedy, but it's equally important to be honest about consequences when dealing with the independence and well-being of others. Desires can include a sense of peace when they compliment well with the desires of others.

Suo Gan ( Lullaby ) - Lyrics - Anthony Way and St. Paul's Cathedral Choir: https://youtu.be/FB63gJkBE3c?si=XqJ3HAnj340vUisj

Melanie felt that he was beginning to internalize an attitude that could be taken out of therapy and applied to object choices outside of the family. "Mrs K. interpreted, referring to the empire drawing, that this meant that he had the good light-blue Mummy inside himself, and that she would help him to put his genital right. Then he could give her babies, revive her, and protect her against the bad Hitler Daddy...His greatest wish was to keep Mummy light-blue and good, and reliable." That kind of cooperation with others furthers the sense of potency, and conversely persecutory anxieties lead to impotence. This happens when the external or internal objects begin to show contempt, betrayal or rejection. "He didn't want the wicked brute-mother united with the Hitler-father and deserting him." Melanie also liked to layer complex interpretations that acknowledged that she understood the layers of pressure Richard was under. Each color harbored a potential ambivalence in that they could cooperate or disappoint at any time. The child then has to realize that they should not to be compared with adults because there are a lot of skills yet to be developed before they can handle the layered relationship pressures that adults are expected to carry. Looking forward to developing new skills provides hope. "If the hope to grow up enters, the feeling of impotence in comparison to adults diminishes, which alleviates anxiety and feelings of being inferior and useless."

Accepting his need to grow up was also a way for him to accept imperfection in himself and others. "...A person can be good without being perfect. This would imply that he himself could be dirty to some extent and yet useful, helpful, and valuable. Greater tolerance towards others was bound up with greater tolerance towards himself and therefore a diminution of guilt." These feelings create more opportunities for relationships, but envy and jealousy is the worst when all opportunities appear to be locked up and inaccessible for all time. "One fundamental element in paranoid jealousy in my view is that the strongest jealousy refers to the internalized father who, even after his actual death, might still be felt to be permanently inside the mother and would influence her against the son." The child has to grow up with the belief that it can rekindle beautiful and loving experiences and not feel that it will just be taken away or that they are not worthy of those experiences. "The fact that he so strongly expressed his desire to have the good breast forever was an essential indication underlying this change. The hope that the breast is uninjured and can be kept relatively safely as an internal object I found to be a pre-condition for dealing more successfully with destructive impulses and ensuing anxiety."

Some of this search elsewhere for object-love appeared with his desire for a bus conductress, who also was relieved of the pressure to be perfect. "Mrs K. interpreted that he liked her, although she was not altogether 'light blue' like the 'good' Mummy...Richard repeated that she was very pretty and added, with amusement, no, she was not 'light blue', she was 'dark blue'. Her uniform was actually dark blue...Then he added that he knew what Mrs K. meant about her not being altogether 'light blue'. It meant that she was not quite good and not quite bad...He said repeatedly that she was very pretty and that he enjoyed looking at her."

The light-blue connected with his love of blue skies, but he also began to accept imperfections so that other weather patterns could be tolerated. "Richard had begun to like clouds, whereas formerly he had only liked a cloudless sky. I attach particular significance to the fact that his idealization—the light-blue Mummy, the cloudless sky—had diminished and that he was more able to recognize both in his mother and in nature features which were not only pleasant." Despite the improvements, the analysis would have to end at some point and there was still a little worry about Richard not processing his splitting enough yet and still being dependent on Melanie or his mother. "He was always looking out for protective women and, as mentioned before, he always managed to find them. No doubt the fear of injuring his mother and me, which he had experienced strongly during this session, increased his need for a friendly woman—the good conductress."

Ego strength

Despite the inevitable idealization of his mother, Melanie felt it was an important part of the process to begin creating stability in the nascent mind of a child. "The good breast as the core of the ego I take to be a fundamental precondition for ego development. Richard had always maintained his belief in the light-blue Mummy. The idealized mother co-existed with the persecutory and suspect one. Nevertheless, idealization was based on a feeling of having internalized the good primal object to some extent, and this was the mainstay of all his anxieties. In the present stage of the analysis, Richard's capacity to integrate the ego and to synthesize the contrasting aspects of his objects had clearly increased and he had become more able, in phantasy, to improve the bad objects and to revive and re-create the dead ones; this, in turn, linked with hate mitigated by love. In the dream, Richard could also bring the two parents together in a harmonious way."

In a dream about an island, Richard could experience this internal object stability creating a strength in him to explore the dark uncertain world. "He said the island was on a river. On the bank of the river the sky was quite black, the trees were black, there was sand which was sand-coloured, but the people were also black. There were all sorts of creatures, birds, animals, scorpions, all black; and all of them, people and creatures, were quite still. It was terrifying...Richard said the island was not quite black, but the water and sky around were. There was a patch of green on the island and the sky over the island showed a little blue. The stillness was terrible. Suddenly Richard called out, 'Ahoy there,' and at that moment everybody and everything became alive. He had broken a spell. They must have been enchanted. People began to sing; the scorpions and other creatures jumped back into the water, everybody was overjoyed, everything turned light, the sky became all blue." Richard's details that conform to the patch of blue and green was a symbol of his belief that he could connect the good in himself with others. If he could achieve that, the world would be more open to him. "Mrs K. referred to the dream in the previous session and pointed out that the patch of green on the island and the bit of blue sky meant that he kept some of the good Mummy and the good breast inside him alive. She reminded him of the empire drawings, with the light blue in the centre, and that he had once said that the light blue was spreading and gaining more countries in the empire, which stood for his inside and Mummy’s. Such hopes were the reason why the dream had made him so happy."

Towards the final sessions, Richard was naturally feeling some anxiety and there were more searches for symbols that represented what could be kept inside him and nurture his growth when the analysis was to end. "Richard had during the last few minutes played with Mrs K.'s umbrella, which he had opened. He made it spin round and said he liked it. Then he used it as a parachute with which he was supposed to float down. He looked at the trademark and stated with satisfaction that it was British made. Then, again holding it open, he turned round and round with it and said that he was dizzy, he did not know where it was taking him. He also said over and over again that 'the whole world is turning round'. Then he let the umbrella drop gently; he once more said it was a parachute and that he was not sure whether it would go down the right way. He told Mrs K. that he had completely wrecked Mummy’s best umbrella when he used it as a parachute on a windy day. She had been 'speechless with rage'...

Mrs K. interpreted the umbrella as her breast; that it was British made meant it was a good breast, and that Mummy’s breast was good too. She referred to his doubts about what Mrs K. contained—a good or a bad Mr K. [Melanie's deceased husband]. The open umbrella stood for the breast, but the stick in it stood for Mr K.'s genital. Richard did not know whether he could trust this breast when he took it in because it was mixed with Mr K.'s genital, just as in his mind his parents and their genitals were mixed inside him. The question where the umbrella would take him expressed his uncertainty whether they were controlling him inside or not. The world which was turning round was the whole world he had taken into himself when he took in the breast—or rather Mummy mixed with Daddy, and her children, and all she contained. He felt the internalized powerful Daddy penis—the secret weapon—as something which made him powerful if he used it against an external enemy. But it became dangerous if it attacked and controlled him internally. Nevertheless, he trusted Mummy and Daddy—the umbrella—more than previously, both as external people and inside him. That was also why he now treated Mrs K.'s umbrella more carefully than he had formerly treated Mummy’s...During the present session, Richard had hardly paid any attention to people on the road. He was deeply concentrated on an internal situation and in that respect he felt more secure than formerly. This more secure internal situation included a stronger belief in the good protective breast, expressed by the parachute which would help him in an emergency. Although it soon appeared that the good breast was mixed in his mind with the penis, nevertheless it seemed more reliable than on former occasions. His distrust of Mr K.'s genital inside Mrs K., and of Daddy’s genital inside Mummy, persisted, but it was less strong because he had more faith in the goodness of the father. More recently Richard had become able to direct his aggressiveness more consistently against the bad, the Hitler-father, and to unite with the good mother and help her to defend herself. Instead of quickly turning his aggression against the breast when anxiety came up, he could in a relatively more stable way maintain his trust in the breast and in the mother, and face the fight with the father. (This change in attitude was the result of his aggression being canalized in a more 'ego-syntonic' way.) This increased belief in the good internal mother, and the good internal father, had arisen gradually. In the previous session the depression about being left by Mrs K., and the fear of loneliness reviving his early fears of being deserted by his parents, were expressed much more strongly than in the present session. At the same time, in the previous session, too, he had shown a stronger belief in both parents and their good relation, as was indicated, for instance, in the drawing in which they were sitting together in the bus. The change from stronger depression in the previous session to greater security in the present one was also due to a manic element in his mood. He used the stronger belief in the good internal Mrs K. and mother, and the good father, to ward off the fear of parting and his depression."

Even with these positive changes, Richard was still increasingly acting more desperate. He was trying to make friends with the conductress as a replacement for losing Mrs. K. "Richard’s mood during this session was on the whole much like that of the Ninetieth Session, with much unhappiness and tension. His increased desire to be cuddled showed repeatedly in his touching Mrs K., and he dropped things so as to be able to touch her legs when picking them up." He was also for the first time referring to his Daddy with light-blue as a replacement for Melanie. "Mrs K. interpreted that if he could not have the good breast, he now wanted to take in the good penis of the father...Richard played a good deal with the clock during this session. He caressed it, handled it, opened and closed it, wound it, and was deeply engrossed in these activities. When he set the alarm, he said: 'Mrs K. is broadcasting to the world. She is saying, 'I shall give the right kind of peace to everybody.' Then he added a little shyly, 'And Richard is a very nice boy, I like him...'"

Follow up

Melanie did do some follow up to determine the results of the short therapy and she based it on how behavior changed in Richard. If resources are unlimited, analysis theoretically could go on for years depending on how much unintegrated material remains. For Richard, "the result of [his] analysis was, as I expected, only a partial one, but it had in fact an influence on his further development. He was able to go to school for a time; later on he was taught privately and eventually went successfully through a University Course. His relation to his contemporaries improved and his dependence on his mother diminished. He has developed scientific interests and there are some real possibilities of a career for him. I have seen him on several occasions since the end of the war, but there has been no chance so far of continuing his analysis."

Luckily, Phyllis Grosskurth in her biography of Melanie Klein, caught up with Richard and provided some insights into his longer term results. At first she didn't know if she had found the right person, but he remembered the bus conductress. She described him as a "man in his fifties, well educated and in comfortable circumstances, he had no idea that he was the subject of a book or that he had been discussed in so many learned articles and lectures. Quite simply, his life does not touch the analytic world at any point. He travels widely, usually to remote places covered most of the year in snow, under which lie extinct volcanoes."

He began recalling his memories of Melanie. "I remember her as short, dumpy, with big floppy feet. I hope it's not out of context to tell you an anecdote about that subject. My aunt said to my mother that Melanie had bad feet. My mother, I hasten to add the least anti-Semitic of people, made the sardonic comment in reply, 'Well, if you had been walking in the wilderness for forty years, you would have bad feet too.' Melanie had a rather loose lower lip, I can remember that. It always seemed to hang a bit, and her mouth never seemed to be closed. She had a strong accent. She was always sympathetic."

Richard recalled that he was sent to therapy because he had "a certain amount of aggressiveness...I think I’m still a fairly aggressive kind of person." He was afraid that other children "would hurt me, or hit me. That’s what I feared. The odd thing is, they never did hurt or hit me...I was always frightened of being hit." When looking back at himself he recalled that "I think I was a pretty appalling sort of kid. I'd cuff his ear if I could get hold of him...I always had quite a temper. I think I'm still somewhat like this. I flew into a panic several days ago at the office about something very trivial. Tiny things do rattle me. That's my nature. I've always been very impatient."

Richard continued to suffer from depression and returned to Melanie when he was 16 years old. "I had the feeling that she was brushing me off, in a very polite sort of way. She wasn’t prepared to do anything for me. Perhaps that was my feeling about it, but it was the feeling I had at the time. Looking back on the episode, I suppose she was getting to be an old and tired woman, and didn't wish to become involved." Despite leaving the toys and drawings behind "he still has in his possession the maps prominent in the Narrative; and he showed me how he had effaced the border of Russia because the lines of advance and retreat changed frequently. He is still deeply interested in international affairs, and is greatly concerned about the prospect of a nuclear holocaust." Phyllis stirred up the remaining transference in him with a copy she brought of Melanie's book "which he had never seen before. He gazed at the photograph of Melanie Klein on the back cover. 'Dear old Melanie,' he murmured. Then he suddenly put the photograph to his lips and kissed it affectionately."

A year later Phyllis asked him about his impressions of the book. Certain memories stood out more than others. "Fears were reawakened: an imbecile on a tricycle who made animal-like noises, and the occasion on which he heard of the invasion of Russia while in his parents' bedroom about a month before his father’s heart attack. Reading through the book, he believes that the circumcision performed on him in his parents' bedroom had a profound effect upon him. He was terrified of ether, and felt deceived because his mother had failed to prepare him for this horrifying experience. He also clearly remembers finding his father lying on the bathroom floor, tea dribbling from his mouth. 'I can see it now.'" He still had a "'tremendous passion' for landscape." There still was a change in him after his sessions with Melanie. "He was not really unhappy, he believes, but becoming the 'sociable solitary,' never lonely, which is how he describes himself. Incidentally, his passion for red has altered to a preference for blue and orange." Even more dramatically, he said of the child version of himself that "the Adagietto from Mahler’s Fifth Symphony more perfectly than any words I could use sums up the complete truth of my feelings at that time."

Even when Richard had to move on from the therapy, an important contact for Melanie was his mother who kept her abreast of the situation, especially since the analysis had to end prematurely. "Klein encouraged these letters to a degree, and on two occasions sent her questionnaires to fill out about Richard's progress. At first the mother was filled with gratitude for Richard’s improvement, but soon a querulous note begins to intrude, she hints that Klein hadn’t got to the root of his real problems (e.g., the effects of the circumcision), and asserts defiantly that what the boy needs is a 'disciplined life...' His mother continued to find him deceitful, lazy, disobedient, irritable, and at times violently aggressive, especially to animals. Moreover, his fear of other boys had been reactivated. Nevertheless, she conceded that she did not think Klein’s efforts had been 'entirely wasted' because the boy had begun to gain insight into himself." Melanie found the increased aggressiveness as not entirely a bad sign, and continually emphasized the need for a longer analysis. She also insisted on the value of believing in the good aspects of her son; to be a good object for the son to introject. "I can only say one thing: as long as you maintain your belief in him, in his gifts and good qualities, which are present alongside the obvious flaws, this will be a great support to him and as I know has been until now the greatest support...I am quite sure that though this [aggressiveness] might perhaps be unpleasant for his environment it is kind of a safety valve in him, and in itself a good sign, if only one could have followed up all this through further analytic work." In some ways, the mother had to begin seeing her son without so much splitting and integrate her image of him more. "By January 1942 Richard's mother began to accept that she must cope with the situation day by day and not expect instant solutions. She was beginning to see her son as a whole person in his own right, and not the 'normal' image she had wanted to impose upon him."

The "Hitler Father"

The fallout of WWII led to a lot of soul searching for Germans and Austrians in particular, and the obsession with Hitler and identification became a worry that filtered into psychoanalytic sessions. What do you do if you love your father, but he was a NAZI in the past? Like with Martin Heidegger, he admitted that he made a stupid move and then moved more towards a psychology that was critical of Friedrich Nietzsche, who defined the ideal of the self-overcoming man, the Übermensch. For Heidegger, and other former NAZIS, this was part and parcel of the neurosis found in people who struggled with their real limitations and repeatedly failed to improve themselves. It's one thing to have an ego-ideal, but it's quite another to put in the work to self-overcome. Yet there is a great desire in people to feel successful and well loved by the community. This is a universal pressure that exists outside of the context of WWII. Because outward success is not something easily achievable for many people, it can be a source of narcissistic wounding for long periods of time where the ego-reality is so far away from the ego-ideal, that internal conflict becomes indefinitely maintained. The mind can attack itself with sadomasochism, and as René Girard pointed out, via Freud, and so much so that the need to vent goes outwards towards sadism against a scapegoat. This most often happens when self-preoccupation, rumination, self-loathing and masochism becomes too exhausting to endure, or suicide is rejected as an option by the subject.

Case Studies: Dora and Freud: https://rumble.com/v1gu2dt-case-studies-dora-and-freud.html

Psychoanalysis - Sigmund Freud and Beyond: https://rumble.com/v1gvgq7-psychoanalysis-sigmund-freud-and-beyond.html

Narcissistic Supply - Freud and Beyond: https://rumble.com/v1gveop-narcissistic-supply-freud-and-beyond-wnaad.html

The False Self - Various Authors: https://rumble.com/v1gth6h-the-false-self-various-authors-narcissism-2-of-4.html

Götz Aly, of Why the Germans, Why the Jews?, equated this to envy. "What are the sources of envy? They include weakness, timidity, lack of self-confidence, self-perceived inferiority, and [conversely an] excessive ambition." He also noticed a fear of personal freedom, because freedom doesn't guarantee success like an entitlement does. "The mortal sin of envy—together with a belief in collective happiness, modern science, and specific techniques of political rule—is what made the systematic mass murder of European Jews possible. There is no way around the pessimistic conclusion that evil can never be quarantined once and for all in a way that would rule out such horrors. Another event structurally similar to the Holocaust could still occur. Those who want to reduce the danger of its happening should work to understand the complex human preconditions of the Holocaust. And they should not kid themselves into thinking that the anti-Semites of the past were completely different from who we are today."

Matching with social psychology, Aly points repeatedly to successful competition, and a regressed section of the population who sometimes cannot keep up, or at least they feel that they can't keep up. There's a double edged sword here, because there are victims and there are people who are disadvantaged and exploited, but alongside that there are people who put more effort than others. This is how these attitudes can harden in any culture and it's not exclusively about those two cultures. It can happen anywhere. Aly provided an example from the 19th century on how certain ambitious types of behavior can trigger others. "No matter what experts saw as the root cause of Jews’ educational advantage, non-Jews sensed the difference and reacted with displeasure. In 1880, liberal Reichstag deputy Ludwig Bamberger noted Jews’ 'unusual thirst for learning' and 'obvious haste' to catch up on what had long been forbidden to them and concluded: 'It is certain that the revival of hateful behavior toward them is closely connected to these things.'" This points to ambitious people who are willing to make the "haste" and work to develop themselves. In any human hierarchy, social mobility is a source of panic and it's common in organizational behavior for entrenched interests to play politics against any potential role reversals, even if it's done legitimately by being outworked or through demonstrations of skill. There's also a difference between someone who loves their job, feels well-being while taking on challenges, versus the more common situation where jobs are a means to an end, and therefore a complete and total grind. When a worker is listless, or what people call today a "quiet quitter," it is more likely they will feel envy and resentment towards someone who is loving their workday, being chipper, and making progress. Conversely, history shows situations where the workplace is a monopolistic master and slave situation where the worker is to be paid as little as possible, leading more justifiable conclusions that one cannot change one's lot without political revolution. These two forces of envy and shame operate in the world of abundance and scarcity, and both abundance and scarcity are often confused with each other, because they are subjective and are based on comparison with a target group. It excludes any wisdom or appreciation for improvements over time, or a healthy comparison with one's past self. It makes one take a second look at one's own ambition and how it may affect others. As you try to improve your lot in an environment where other people can watch your every move, it's clear why rivalries follow ambition like a shadow. The lines blur as mutual claims and grievances arise with the onset of ambition. Obstacles to one's ambition can trigger again the Oedipus Complex, but now transferred to a new authority figure that is in the way. This desire for vengeance potentially extends to the entire adult world, including projections towards political leaders who are an obstacle to one's personal ambitions. Entire ethnic groups that are ascendant can also appear to be a threat.

Once a person with a grievance exacts a revenge, or even just imagines a revenge, towards someone who is blameless, a Kleinian guilt can arise. "How do I feel about myself when I want to hurt an innocent person?" If you have a loved family member who became a NAZI, for example, how does that label tarnish the family name? How does one live with that kind of family history as a pathological secret? Can one love a parent while at the same time accept that they were morally reprehensible? Chasseguet-Smirgel was categorical. "What is one to do with a Nazi father? Apparently, the only solution is to reject him. If you speak of the need to integrate your identifications with that father, you are immediately treated as a Nazi yourself. But in the absence of identification, where there is only counter-identification, there can be no genuine choice between acceptance and rejection, and sublimation becomes totally impossible. In order to become a human being in the full sense of the term, we have to be able to discover, confront and own the Hitler in us, otherwise the repressed will return and the disavowed will come back in various guises." I think this is a good example of how one could turn into the monster one hates unconsciously if the pattern of grievance and vengeance is not seen to be universal. Though I think too much splitting remains in the example, because one could like legitimate skills from a parent while having totally different political attitudes. Even further, no child can choose their parents. If they were a parent that raised you with love before the war started, you wouldn't discount all of that, because one thing doesn't connect with another. As Klein pointed out, the super-ego can have conflicting and compartmentalized personalities that are unintegrated. I think my view has less contradiction because in psychoanalysis, whether you symbolize targets of hatred as a "Hitler-Daddy," Satanic, a descendent of a slave-holder, or just treat them as all-bad in the transference, you are probably still stuck in splitting, unless they were 100% all bad in actuality. The danger of judging a person who is 90% bad and 10% good, is that you might detect those very same 10% good behaviors in others and do a 100% negative transference on that blameless behavior. It's how conflicts can escalate from small disagreements and misunderstandings. Carl Jung also talked about this as well when people disliked different personality types that he categorized. For example, many people who are into emotion cannot identify with someone who is mostly about cold logic, and vice versa. People can also overuse their best aspects and skills with a detrimental result in the environment, for example, a NAZI who was good at engineering, but morally bankrupt in their personal goals on how they were going to use those skills. Engineering skills can build residential housing, and there's nothing that says that those skills must only be used for concentration camps. Ultimately, the real danger is when a patient has no good objects in the mind, or core positive memories, which leaves the therapy in the difficult situation of starting from scratch to create a first time good object in an older child or an adult. A dark inner world will find any reason to setup a dyad of grievance and vengeance. This is why any institutions, including ones that are aiming at peace and happiness, could easily harbor individuals with this mentality. All institutions, governmental, corporate, or even smaller groups of people, have ego conflicts as each individual jockeys up the success and responsibility ladder. Institutions start off usually very well, but then they gradually become hypocritical, corrupt and have to be dismantled, moved, and rebuilt again and again. It's a problem that has never been solved, only mitigated and reformed. Revolutions and reforms endlessly circle around.

Simple Minds - Waterfront: https://youtu.be/vxXfu-Kbtbc?si=E91lAJcTY9KAcxai

The Who - Won't Get Fooled Again: https://youtu.be/UDfAdHBtK_Q?si=_94vpM6ON10w8U1H

For Melanie, if the internal problems aren't seen clearly and resolved, a manic attitude may appear in the external world as a form of escape from oneself. "...A process by which anxieties connecting with the unknown and dangerous internal situations may be alleviated when a definite external-danger situation becomes operative. As is well known, this can be carried to extremes, and the mechanism of seeking external dangers in order to relieve internal ones, is characteristic of a manic attitude." In mild situations, children may want to escape their internal conflict by playing with toys, or adults may watch movies or TV programs to get away. In more extreme situations, people escape into dangerous political associations, or cults, in an effort to scapegoat others to solve the internal conflict. This manifests especially when a Fatherland or Motherland is identified with a leader, along with projections of idealism from the populace, leading to denials of wrong-doing, with wrong-doing usually being thrown into a psychological shadow and then supported by gaslighting. Wrong-doing piles up, along with internal shame and conflict, leading to the need for more addictive manic pursuits to numb internal pain externally. The way to avoid developing an inner Hitler requires a realistic assessment of oneself and ones capabilities. The past is the past and it cannot be perfected anymore. One can only learn and move on by building new positive experiences repeatedly.

Narrative of a Child Analysis by Melanie Klein: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780029184509/

The Kleinian Development - Donald Meltzer: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9781855756786/

Melanie Klein: Her World and Her Work by Phyllis Grosskurth: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9781568214450/

Essential Readings from the Melanie Klein Archives - Jane Milton: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780367337902/

Why the Germans, Why the Jews by Götz Aly: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9781250062642/

Laubender, C. Empires of mind: postcolonial cartographies of 'The Empire' in Melanie Klein's Narrative of a Child Analysis. Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society 26, 323–344 (2021).

Psychology: http://psychreviews.org/category/psychology01/

#psychoanalysis #object relations #oedipus complex #melanie klein

[psychreviews2]

Analytical Psychology: The French School

Charles Féré and Social Hygiene

Before jumping into Carl Jung and Analytical Psychology, there were a lot of precursors that informed his theories on psychological depth in humans and unconscious reactions. Kind of like the Presocratics before Socrates and Plato, these scientists of the unconscious were precursors for Freud, Jung, and many others.

Studies in Hysteria - Sigmund Freud and Josef Breuer: https://rumble.com/v1gtdvl-studies-in-hysteria-sigmund-freud-and-josef-breuer.html

The Discovery of the Unconscious - Henri Ellenberger: https://rumble.com/v1gtd1r-the-discovery-of-the-unconscious-henri-ellenberger.html

It's clear from the precursors in the 19th century, that authorities looked at mental health, sexual development, and morality based on imitation, and the way to control society therefore was to ban examples for imitation that were deemed corrupting. Charles Féré provided a good summary, albeit in a blunt, brutal and uncompromising Darwinian style. "Books about the sexual instinct and its anomalies have often been denounced as dangerous to public morals." To get books translated and published from the continent into English, that talked about sexual development, was difficult in Britain because those books were considered, "obscene and tended to corrupt the morals of Her Majesty’s subjects."

In response Charles supported knowledge over ignorance. "Truth and science are never immoral but it cannot be denied that the narration of facts relating to sexual physiology and pathology, if their real significance is not pointed out, may be the cause of perversions in the case of predisposed subjects. The danger appears more serious to those who think that normal individuals may be perverted under the influence of environment, and yet more serious when the sexual instinct is represented as an uncontrollable instinct, which nobody can resist, however abnormal the form in which the instinct may reveal itself."

Through knowledge Charles felt that conventional morality could still be upheld, though with a strong control against those who deviate from the norm. "The evolution of sexual instinct shows us that it is subject to the necessities of environment, and that it has played a principal part in the development of morality. The history of sexual perversions proves that they are only developed in individuals who differ individually and in their descendants from the normal type, or whose condition is pathological." Sexual development to Charles was hierarichal in that the ultimate goal is a Darwinian preservation of the species and social cohesion. "Free-will is denied by science; but the necessity of individual acts implies the necessity of social acts. If a man's acts are only reactions from the forces of environment, the same rule applies to commonwealths as to individuals. But the absence of free-will does not connote absence of responsibility, which is a necessity of social preservation; nor does it connote the absence of individual liberty, which is necessary to the progress of humanity. The sense of responsibility to society is most beneficial in developing the control of the instincts. As a matter of fact there is no reason why sexual acts should escape responsibility; and they do not. Nature and society unite in eliminating perverts and favouring the normal."

Early psychology was developed by seeing patterns in families, mating, marriage, and the dissolution of family units. To make a cohesive society, certain hurdles of individual interest and social interest had to be bridged. "Instinct is characterised by a definite hereditary activity, which is not acquired by personal experience; it thus differs from habit, which is the result of individual acquisition...Instinct is nothing but a complex reflex: it is called into play by exterior stimuli which awaken a hereditary potentiality. It is often said that the natural activities of living beings are innate, but if this statement implies that such activities arise without excitation, it is obviously false. Nurses are aware that children do not seek the breast without previous experience. As a general fact, the instinctive activities manifest themselves at first in a more or less clumsy way, and require to be perfected by habit."

Because children aren't completely inborn with adult capacities, it requires the function of parenting. "Imitation plays an important part in the evolution of instinct by preparing it for its development. When a young bird imitates the flight of its mother and succeeds at the first attempt, it is because the mother stimulated its activity, but it could not have learnt by itself all the details of the method of flying. The history of mimicry, especially among animals whose intellectual growth is rudimentary, shows that imitation is a biological phenomenon. The tendency to imitate is based upon an innate and constitutional inclination to find pleasure in reproducing the acts of others...Imitation is therefore the more easy in that the subject is prepared by congenital aptitude to reproduce the act. Intentional imitation can only occur if there exists a previous experience. But the sight of a movement may determine its reproduction, independently of the intention to obtain the unknown result of this activity. This is the phenomenon of psycho-motor induction; its effects are indelible."

Yet, there's a biological formation that allows one to be more talented when it comes to skill acquisition, so the learning process is made smoother. "...The intelligence acquired by one generation seems to be acquired with less effort in the following generations, as if an acquired modification prepared the way for a congenital variation, or determined a congenital plasticity—an aptitude for being modified by experience." Féré hinted at what later psychologists felt was dormant in the unconscious, which was an archaic mental inheritance. "Amongst adults, impressions produce the representation of similar or of associated impressions felt during youth. This is what is called memory. Amongst young persons, impressions appear to call forth representations of impressions which go back to the childhood of the race and are hereditary recollections, which Plato believed to be 'memories of a former life,' and which Descartes termed 'innate ideas,' although they only appear as a consequence of exterior excitation, nevertheless do not seem to be acquired by the individual himself. He has inherited potentialities which can only be awakened by exterior excitation; but exterior excitation alone cannot awaken them, apart from constitutional conditions."

Confusion arises when there's an inability to differentiate habits from instincts. "Habit may be regarded as an activity based upon congenital instinct, which has been modified by acquired experience. A short experience is often enough to establish an association. The repetition of activity which is determined by individual experience results in an automatism which is the same as instinctive automatism. Habit is a second nature; and whether automatism of instinct or automatism of habit be in question, the appropriate excitations bring about a state of instability which only ceases with the performance of the habitual act. Impulse arises in this way."

The way to differentiate the two is to notice talent that allows a more quick development of habits, whereas intense practice may yield only small improvements. Developing youthful skills also lays the concrete foundation for further recall from the adult brain. The guardrails are developments that move away from ancestral survival. "It is in the plastic period of youth that the mind plays the greatest part in producing automatism of habit. The more intense the congenital predisposition, the more easily the automatism is developed; the older the habit, the keener the impulse to yield to it. The power of choice amongst young persons is aided by the inclination (which is especially marked in those possessed of strength and energy) to move about, to see things, and to find out about them. The overflowing exuberance of young people is favourable to variation: it is combined with a plasticity which helps adaptation, which can only depart slightly and slowly from instinct. It cannot run counter to ancestral acquisitions that have become instinctive because they were advantageous to the race." The difficulty is to go against the instincts because of the ego effort needed to provide a counterpressure. "It is difficult for habit to oppose instinct with any prospect of success. For, instinct is transmitted together with the somatic constitution, and, being bound up with the bodily structure, causes men under the same conditions of environment to act like their ancestors and like all individuals of the same organic type."

The hierarchy of instincts is to develop three skills: survival, sexual reproduction, and harmony with social groups. Each individual develops them more or less depending on the circumstances of the world, for example, if there's war, peace, prosperity, or scarcity. The instincts can also be satisfied more or less depending on environmental circumstances. In youth and old age, there are more limitations that lead one to abandon one or more instincts towards the individual, a rearing or dotage. "An instinct which is useful to the species can only establish itself if, under given conditions of environment, it can be reconciled with the interest of the individual. As sexual reproduction is a condition which is indispensable to the continuance of the species, the individualistic instincts must be subordinated in a certain degree. And as social instincts develop, there is bound to be an analogous effect upon the instinct of reproduction."

Instinct can make things easier when choosing a sexual partner, where confidence becomes less needed since a comfort of familiarity with certain personalities makes seduction mutual. The sexual compatibility may also harbor unconscious benefits for society. "It has been recognised that sexual choice is unconscious (Chamfort, Schopenhauer, Hartmann, Delboeuf, etc.), and many go further and admit, with Schopenhauer, that love must be regarded as an instinct which impels to sexual union two beings, whose coition, in consequence of some special fitness, would result in progeny most suitable to the interests of the Species. The conformity of sexual selection with the interests of the Species may be the characteristic of physiological love; but it is not conscious. This conformity of choice is not limited to a single union; progeny suitable to the interests of the species may be begotten by the same person in coition with various other persons. Although in some cases love necessitates systematisation, still it is not indispensable to the interests of the species. If each woman were only fitted for one particular man, and vice versa, the aim and object of nature would probably never be attained, and the species would already be extinct."

From a Darwinian perspective, pathology in fitness and survival leads to bad marriages, dissolution, and a lack of fitness for future generations for Charles. If pathological types don't create a new generation, typical of proto-eugenicist views of his time, this is a good thing for Charles. In his book The Evolution and Dissolution of the Sexual Instinct, there are copious descriptions of low levels of sexual development, with rudimentary masturbation, fetishes, wrong object choices, involving idiots and imbeciles. In those days, idiots and imbeciles were equated with low IQ and with criminality, and a lack of impulse control. The control of impulses is required to direct sexuality to the heterosexual object and produce another generation. Anything outside of that in those years was considered degeneracy. "It is astonishing to find that invalids, madmen, and idiots are rare among savages and barbarians. It is not because none such are ever born; but they perish through want of care. The sympathy of civilized peoples encourages misery by favoring the survival and reproduction of a great number of degenerates, constituting a social burden which is increased by the tendency to be lenient with our criminals." Charles then described what the world was like before social work, where everything is measured by social burden, which can be dangerous when the definitions are too general and open to atrocity, which at that time they called "social-hygiene." "Legal measures, that strengthen the motives for not yielding to impulses that are hurtful to the community, are not only justifiable but needful...Responsibility is no less necessary to social evolution than individual liberty." Now this would only make sense if you are talking about direct damage to people, not an abstract "society." Naturally, you wouldn't want criminal minds and low IQ types to follow a vocation of brain surgery and let them loose on hospital patients. You would have them work in appropriate jobs for their level, and there would have to be at this time, which there was much pressure then, to provide social services that balanced their dignity with the protection of others. Predicting the brutality of the early 20th century, the seed was already there in Darwinism.

This is the 1800s unfortunately, and Charles conflated homosexuality at that time with bestiality and other perversions, and he disliked movements in Germany that increased sympathy for homosexuals. "Since the writings of Ulrichs there has grown up, in Germany especially, a sympathy for inverts and a public opinion in favor of the restriction of the penalties in connection with sexual perversions. Is this sympathy justified? Whether sexual instinct be considered as the foundation of moral evolution or a necessity of the race, it must be admitted that its perversions which are negative of sex, in their methods and their purpose, are harmful and dangerous, because they are remarkable for impulsiveness; and imitation is the more to be feared as the tendencies can be less restricted...It is not because they are in a minority that inverts are harmful and immoral; it is, on the contrary, because they are immoral and harmful that they will remain in a minority, and that the majority will take care to protect itself against them and their example." At the time, both arguments were used when it came to the origin of homosexuality being either habit or constitution, and this muddied up the waters, especially since there's usually a mixture of both constitution and environment in everything. "If it is admitted that habit and example may by themselves alone develop inversion, the mere contact of inverts is a social danger." If homosexuality was from constitution, then there would be no children arising and therefore no problem for Charles. If it's imitation, then the desire for society to apply control measures becomes sought after. "If gratification of the instincts cannot be a crime, there is no such thing as crime; 'all beings are irresponsible.' If a system of social hygiene is imperatively necessary, the aim of the law should be to ensure such hygiene and to repress everything injurious to society without distinction of persons." At that time, conversion therapy was a brutal and crude form of conditioning where you would try to strengthen craving, which Freud called libido, by simplistically introducing new sexual object choices, and use the withdrawal of rewards, or the threat the punishment, as a deterrent, but there was always a problem with people who had no such heterosexual cravings. "Suspension, by means of substitution, of perversion has been regarded as a method of treating perversion itself. The invert, [or homosexual,] who has gone through the whole system may gradually find pleasure in relations which used only to fill him with loathing, and think only about such even in his dreams. The same thesis has been utilized by modern physicians and it is very true in regard to normal subjects. But does it also apply to degenerates who possess abnormal emotivity? It is doubtful even about the attitudes and gestures which are subject to the will; whereas in perverts the attitudes escape the will, and are hardly ever conscious. This kind of treatment, therefore, is of very limited use."

What they didn't know at the time is that suppression is to be used when someone is worried about consequences towards others and oneself. To be authentic is to accept what gives you pleasure, unless it goes through the boundaries of others, or it harms one's health. Repression is there from authority figures to protect society from criminal behavior. To want to change a desire to make authority figures, such as religious leaders, economic leaders, government leaders, celebrities, parents, friends, etc., happy, is replacing one pleasure for another very particular one: Narcissistic supply. Since this is totally inauthentic, the next step was to have lifestyles that didn't conform, and allow them to exist within boundaries to have a live and let live situation. Yet there's always a need for unconscious people to change others. Unfortunately, because people imitate others and are tempted by seeing open savoring that others demonstrate, a splitting of all good and bad can occur and interfere with the splitting of all good and bad aimed at oneself. For example, if someone saw a homosexual couple embracing and kissing in the street, a quite many people may imitate the savoring in their mind and go into a self-hatred and hatred towards the role models for inspiring this desire. A new imperative may arise to change this couple and prevent them from being a savoring example that is deviant from norms. The role models in this case could also see the envy in others and see their own latent homosexuality and try to coax it to come out even further. People feel strength in numbers and naturally want to increase the size of their communities and exchanges. This makes sense, since acts of masturbation are attempts from people to get relief with their own homosexual equipment. It just has to move from a component instinct to an object choice.

Narcissistic Supply - Freud and Beyond - WNAAD: https://rumble.com/v1gveop-narcissistic-supply-freud-and-beyond-wnaad.html

Case Studies: The 'Wolfman' (3/3) - Freud and Beyond: https://rumble.com/v1gulsf-case-studies-the-wolfman-33-freud-and-beyond.html

Sexuality Pt 3: Homosexuality - Sigmund Freud & Beyond: https://rumble.com/v1gtqk5-sexuality-pt-3-homosexuality-sigmund-freud-and-beyond.html

Object Relations: Harry Stack Sullivan: https://psychreviews.org/object-relations-harry-stack-sullivan/

Maestro Trailer (2023): https://youtu.be/d1wZy_L-j8A?si=a6XAo6R3uRDzboZk

Humans always had an element of incorporation, which is sampling, and many people with differing values like to try to go beyond boundaries to coax their version of sampling in others, which is a form of projective identification. It's ultimately about evangelizing a habit identity. This led and still leads to internal conflict with conscience and external conflict with role models. It leads to splitting where people are viewed as all good or all bad. It also exposes the inherent bisexuality Freud and Fliess were on about. This "normality" that Charles was saying works with conversion therapy is only in the realm of bisexuality where craving is capable of fluidity between masculine and feminine object choices. As Melanie Klein learned later, splitting takes both time and repeated reflection to have objects and their characteristics of good and bad appear at the same time giving it an accurate perception immediately. This can be true about any objects in the environment that are up for judgment. For example, people who love cigarettes, alcohol, drugs, etc., see it as all good until they are notified of consequences. Notification of health risks may not be enough, so the person may have to go through health challenges to finally integrate the perceptions. At some point the object becomes a mixture of good (pleasure) and bad (pain), and both arise at the same time so that the older time lag between pleasure and consequences diminishes. Now some people may be able to mitigate the consequences, like their genetics allows them to smoke and have a long life, or one accepts that one will die eventually and it's not necessary to live as long as possible. In some situations, the consequences aren't really that bad and just another lifestyle. This is also why so many people have to join organizations to provide social support, with examples, to try to bolster imitative influence that one needs as a crutch. Those who are more integrated, which usually means older, more experienced, etc., don't find they have a lot of impulses to imitate and rarely get carried away. They can be around very different people and not feel a strong pull to imitate.

When splitting is resolved, it's much easier to say what is authentic for oneself because the good and bad arise at the same time whenever an example manifests in consciousness. Yet many people need to go through an experience to truly learn. This is partially because the information communicated is not accurate or believed at the time. It can also come from omnipotent feelings arising from the illusion that slow changes won't eventually lead to consequences, or because the medicine or healthy food tastes bad, therefore it's not worth waiting for the positive results later. To be sympathetic, this is very hard for most people. To read consequences in literature and to act only on that takes quite a bit of reflection where people imagine with their projective identification abilities, and put themselves in the shoes of a sick patient. The reflections would have to be so realistic and detailed, with no agenda or manipulation, that emotions related to consequence arise naturally. Here Freud and other psychoanalysts would call this reflection working-through and repeating. Without that, many people will have to go through those consequences before they feel dispassion for what was originally thought of as all good, or accept the loss of a good enough relationship that they undervalued as all bad, for example. This is why influence in politics or awareness campaigns can have limited effect to change minds. Yet those types stuck in extreme splitting, who have an irresistible urge to change others, will use any method known to them until all of this dawns on them: It's better to have boundaries and to live and let live. That is the realistic freedom a society can attain.

Object Relations: Melanie Klein Pt. 2: https://rumble.com/v435lsq-object-relations-melanie-klein-pt.-2.html

Poor Things | Official Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RlbR5N6veqw

To continue here in Charles' epoch, they even tried hypnotism to change sexual variants with limited results. People authentically change when they have realistic examples that they crave to imitate, because they see enough pleasure and goodness there for themselves. "Hypnotism has been called to produce a change of aptitudes; but, as M. Bernheim himself had to admit, all patients are not hypnotizable—'though some can be put to sleep, the majority cannot be.' In most cases we have to be contented with suggestion in the waking state and with training, which is not always very effective...It is known, too, that even persons who are most sensitive to hypnotism are able to resist suggestions that are opposed to a deeply rooted feeling." All these methods go against people's willpower and studies 100 years later have shown that people make changes only when they are able generate cravings on their own, as described above. The weak-sauce "solution" for Charles was pure repression, including no masturbation, and even those who superficially became heterosexuals, he was worried about their fitness for procreation and social hygiene for the next generation. "I have already maintained that the best solution of the matter is continence, which banishes the dangers of perversion. But should the abnormal person after being treated by the substitution method, and having become capable of normal connection—in fact, after being apparently healed—be regarded as a sound person, fit for reproduction? That is a point which is neglected by the writers who have published accounts of marvelous cures; they do not tell us if their patients have become worthy of reproducing the species. Everything tends to the opposite opinion...Treatment should be confined to the prevention of [masturbation] and the repression of abnormal tendencies...To persuade congenital perverts to marry, or to have extra-conjugal relations, is to act contrary to the natural law of instinct, the law of utility, and the law of evolution."

MONSTER Trailer - Hirokazu Kore-eda: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JYIRWnnatBU

Yet Charles tried to relax some of the harshness by accepting that with biological constitution, it's not so easy to determine such things, and if homosexuals don't reproduce, then it works itself out automatically if you are Darwinian. "Reproduction of degenerates cannot be universally proscribed, in spite of the fact that among the descendants of persons who rank among degenerates there are persons who are useful to society. This justifies toleration and sympathy on our part. Those who show signs of sex-dissolution are noteworthy among degenerates. It is not a doctor’s duty to combat by unjustifiable methods their natural tendency to elimination...Seek to restore the proper physiological conditions. When the evil tendencies have vanished, by means of physical treatment, there is nothing to be done but to let matters go as best they may, whatever ideas may be had as to the dangers of a defective generation." Charles ends up being stuck between saying that perversions must be repressed to avoid imitation, but there is a danger of having people who are converted to heterosexuality in getting married and passing on imperfect generations, but then it's not so bad because any future "degenerates" who don't receive treatment will not procreate anyways. The sticking point with him is the power of imitation, and how so called "normal" types could be influenced. The problem with social hygiene is that if treatments lead to someone that is only pretending to be "cured," because the treatments are only about narcissistic supply, to avoid social ostracism, then they will fail. Any proper treatments will require enough free association for people to find what is authentic for them, regardless of the preferences of the psychologist. Craving has to come out of the body of the patient naturally.

So the concerns for Victorians were to avoid the ignominy of not being able to reproduce and not becoming an excellent sexual specimen of the human race: a pervert, or a lousy lay. Those interested in perversions at that time were seen as biological errors and these concerns developed into some strands of psychoanalysis later in the 20th century with castration and Oedipus fears of intimidation and inadequacy in bed, for example, premature ejaculation or being a frigid or a barren female. Sex was also not supposed to end with the sex act, or be a focus only on sexual pleasure as the end goal, but it had to include the social instinct for families and communities to become the real deal. "Degenerate types of mankind seek each other out and find each other; and it is quite indirectly that their systematic attraction is in conformity with the interests of the species. It hastens their elimination. In the case of these individuals, the attraction often arises in the shape of that impulsive anguish known as 'love at first sight' which constitutes a symptom sooner than a manifestation of the normal instinct." The stability of the families leads to stability for societies and whole countries for Charles. "Among degenerates, sexual preoccupations are often in inverse ratio to their sexual powers. Nations that perish through sterility are remarkable for licentiousness. It is the same with individuals. Hysterical attacks have been attributed to sexual preoccupation; but such preoccupation is of itself a symptom of something amiss."

The next level of skill constitutes harmony between couples so that parents last long enough with their children to raise them to adulthood. After criticizing low intelligence, he begins attacking over-intellectualization, leading to a "salt of the earth" type person who isn't too intelligent or an imbecile. "The more exclusive the intellectual factors become in sexual choice, the greater are the risks of dissolution; the slightest psychological antagonism may check physical sympathies. The saying that the best-loved persons are the most brutal—or the least refined is not without its truth; their means of attraction are of the most material and enduring nature. The value of a union cannot be measured by a few special qualities, but rather by the harmony that may exist between imperfect individuals. The harmonious union of mediocre persons often results in progeny superior to that issuing from the discordant union of individuals endowed with higher qualities."

Phylogenetic inheritance is the realistic form of immortality and it requires that generations reduce unnecessary trauma and increase fitfulness to manifest healthy descendants. A passing of the baton, free of obstacles to development, with a patience to delay gratification. "The evolution of sexual instinct points to chastity as its end, and those who keep chaste are the best spouses and the best parents; they escape the diseases connected with promiscuous intercourse, and they have offspring who are free from predisposition to vice and degeneration. Moreover, they act in conformity with their own physical and moral interests in avoiding the risk of transmitting contagious diseases to their spouses and to their children, as well as the danger of sterility which is attached to such maladies. Lastly they escape the troubles arising from the procreation of illegitimate children, from the desertion of the mothers of the latter, etc. Those who, in consequence of defective up-bringing, have had to drink the bitter cup of experience in sexual matters, perceive clearly enough that they might have postponed for a longer period a gratification which they desired rather from an unenlightened sense of amour propre than from any pressing need."

The need for willpower in psychology was omnipresent in the minds of earlier researchers. "The object of education is the mastery of the instincts; thus raising man above the animals." Charles then railed against prostitution and the spread of venereal diseases. At first he blamed women, but he accepted that men can't use the excuse of not being able to help sexual urges, since they are equal participants in spreading diseases. Anyone who can spread an STI must be responsible. "A revolution in morals can hardly be expected from mere recital of the history of evolution. But it may be said that those who assert that sexual impulses are irresistible, and who persuade young men that they can prove their virility solely by incontinence, and the more wild oats they sow the more they show their mental ripeness—such persons derive their ideas from the psychology of animals subject to periodic rutting-seasons, and not from that of civilised man." In short, controlling impulses is the human pathway towards morality for Charles. "The history of Oriental and Roman despots proves that they were both cruel and lustful."

Because everything is interdependent, the survival of a social group needs strength in all areas of life for Charles. "The evolution of sexual instinct shows that the individualistic instincts gradually give way to the social. Social sympathy has its origin in conjugal and family sympathy, which itself is based on parental sympathy and love of children. Adaptation to environment is founded on a state of equilibrium established between these various sympathies. The individual can only continue living and reproducing if he is in harmony with the milieu. All excess and all insufficiency are proofs of a state of unfitness." Despite the lack of sympathy for those who didn't conform to Darwinian principles, the empathetic solution for Charles is to accept that it's up to you, and you must figure it out. "Though the success of the day and hour may belong to the best and strongest fighters, the fitness for survival and the future belong to him who best knows how to adapt himself to the most precarious conditions of life."

In the 19th century, any psychological understandings, mostly rooted in philosophy, were to be conflated with the role of a doctor. Doctors who excelled at that time knew to look at psychological factors beyond physical maladies. This was before the time of social workers as a separate vocation. "It may seem strange to treat the absence of conjugal harmony and disorder as symptoms of disease. Still, a doctor who should make it his habit to inquire into the psychological antecedents of neuropaths and their ancestors, and to study the effects of family discord on mental evolution; on the development of illnesses in general, and of nervous and psychic disorders in particular—such a doctor might try his hand at a symptomatology of this conjugal discord which would be of interest both from the medico-psychological and the sociological point of view. By a study of the etiology of such discords, it would be possible to help in preventing them."

During this epoch, ancient influences in the mind were considered to be of lower development and not useful. It was called Atavism. It would be later with Carl Jung that those knowledges, albeit rudimentary, were necessary for people to develop new skills that required something rudimentary to start with. "When atavism appears in any given individual, animal or vegetal, it shows itself in characters lacking in the immediate parents of the individual, but which are actually possessed by beings which may be considered to have been among its ancestors. Atavism includes at least two groups of facts which should be kept distinct. It is well-known that plants perfected by culture revert very easily to the primitive type if they are not looked after, or if their nourishment is unsuited to the condition they have reached. One can imagine, and even reproduce experimentally amongst these plants alternations which are like the alternating generations. That is a case of complete atavism, if I may use the phrase, which reproduces beings capable of evolving like their ancestors...Atavism does not appear in this shape in man. An individual scarcely ever reproduces an ancestor completely. As a rule, there is a dysharmonic, or rather partial, reversion in connection with one or several organs, which causes unfitness of the whole organism for its actual milieu. Such an individual would be also quite unfit to live in the milieu of the ancestor whom he anomalously reproduces." The lack of development can't always be attributed to heredity, but instead to missing developmental stages in life. "Degeneration is characterised by a congenital or acquired diminishing of the general or partial vitality...[and] frequently manifests itself at first in the diminution of the processes relating to choice or to control." If there is to be an atheistic religion coming from this it is an acceptance of an unconscious influence in life from the past that manifests as an extremely powerful determinism, and then the conscious personality tries to predict what progress is for those subsequent generations.

Alfred Binet and Hypnosis

Because mental pathology was always accepted as being real, there was always a need, via religion or philosophy, for a "...medicine for the imagination." Charles Féré as well as Alfred Binet, wanted to investigate ways in which mental content could change the biological reactivity of the mind. This was done at the time via "...suggestive therapeutics. The process is as follows. Influenced by a persistent idea, suggested by external circumstances, a paralysis is developed. The physician makes use of his authority to suggest the idea of an inevitable, incontestable cure, and the paralysis is cured accordingly. This cure, as well as the development of functional disturbance, was directly effected by an idea. An idea may, therefore, be, according to circumstances, a pathogenic and a therapeutic agent...Diseases caused by the imagination—that is, produced by a fixed idea—are real diseases, and, at any rate in some cases, display undisputed objective symptoms." One of the main methods used at the time was automatic writing and hypnotism. This led to theories of a double consciousness in humans: a conscious and unconscious mind.

Through many tests, these early theoreticians found that the short-term mind could resist suggestions from others, but when it was overloaded, or if it was distracted, it would free up unconscious contents and open up for suggestion. "Suggestion, when successful, consists of an idea impressed upon a person and reigning dominant in the consciousness of that person; reason, critical powers, and will are impotent to restrain it. If a subject believes he is holding a bird upon his knee, in consequence of the simple fact that I have told him so, the conclusion evidently is that he has lost the power of controlling, examining, and judging the ideas given him. For suggestion to develop itself, accordingly, it is necessary that the subject's field of consciousness do not contain too many antagonistic ideas. Now, it is exactly this psychological situation that is found realized in the duplication of consciousness. As a consequence of such a phenomenon of bipartition, each of the consciousnesses occupies a more narrow and more limited field than if there existed one single consciousness containing all the ideas of the subject. This retrenchment of the field of consciousness constitutes what is called suggestibility."

The way to overload the mind in these tests was to give reading or mathematical exercises so that suggestive stimuli could be introduced and mimicked without the control function interfering. "When a person is asked to do two things at a time—to read a book, for example, and to execute some manual task—two motor impulses are evoked which start from the same personality, from the same focus of consciousness. For it is the same person that is charged to do the two things at once—to divide his attention and will between the two things. This coexistence of the two operations must evidently make each separately less perfect. The more attention each exacts because of its complexity, the more both will have to suffer from being carried on together...In the case where a person performs at once a mental addition and a muscular act, let the first operation be called a and the second b. Observation shows that each of them is prejudicial to the other, tends to inhibit it. Let the automatic activity of the hand be called c. There is in each subject a power to perceive this activity and to suppress it by holding the hand motionless. Let this operation be called b. The operation b then can inhibit c. But occupation of the subject with reading, by provoking the operation a, prevents him from inhibiting the movements of his hand; that is to say, a is permitted to inhibit b, and this prevents b from inhibiting c. There is here, inhibition of a cause of inhibition."

Pierre Janet and Mental Hygiene

These understandings could of course be used to manipulate people, to create effective government propaganda, or insidious advertising, but for Pierre Janet, it was an opportunity to do therapy. For hysterical patients, who became relatively automatic, unconscious, and unaware of their behaviors, correcting beliefs that were buried in the unconscious and repeated, hence idée fixe, suggestions that grounded the patient towards reality would be an easy enough operation, but with obsessive patients, Janet found it more difficult. "The immediate implication of these obsessions is described by Janet as a characteristic self-disgust. It is difficult, he says, to contrive a single word or phrase that will resume and express this attitude. It shows not merely as remorse but as a species of contempt for the subject's own mental attitudes and actions. Religious writers have used the expression 'conviction of sin' to describe this; Freud speaks of 'conviction of guilt' as an invariable character of the mental background of obsessive thinking. The patient is continuously possessed by the idea that what he is, and what he does, is thoroughly worthless. Everything he does gives rise to self-torment and self-accusation; even when he is not compelled to self-punishment and self-torture, he will decry his own motives and humiliate himself. 'Such patients are obsessed by the thought of madness, claim that they are insane, and, what is worse, feel themselves urged to behave as if they were.' The patient is perfectly well aware of the reason why, in his estimation, he should suffer such a symptom. Moreover, the conviction of sin enters into the situation as a determinant."

The fixed ideas are more about one's identity rather than distorted problem-solving. Every so often Janet required much more time to finally see these ideas manifesting in therapy, especially with obsessive patients. "This type of thinking becomes accentuated in a crisis until it becomes an internal chatter, which may easily seem to be entirely meaningless at the beginning of an interview. Nevertheless, if the patient is permitted to talk freely to his physician, after a period of some hours the pattern begins to reveal itself. John, a patient of Janet's used to beseech him 'simply to, listen' in order to comfort him. And for a period of an hour and a half or two hours he would pour forth a stream of apparently random associations without stopping for a moment. At the end of such a session he confessed himself comforted and relaxed 'he had exhausted in words an agitation of which he could not otherwise rid himself.'"

A functioning human just functions until they don't. "Janet maintains, and rightly, that the best indication or symptom of normality is the ability every physically fit person possesses of turning his attention, immediately and easily, to a topic or object presented for his consideration by his surrounding. If he is ill, obviously his capacity to do this will be immediately affected." Some of these are situations that involve congenital origins but Janet knew that the habitual side could also be affected. "Janet [went] on to show that this incapacity in the great majority of instances is due to a failure to develop in infancy and adolescence those social skills that are necessary to the most ordinary human communication with other people...Even though some one incident during infancy may be significant for the understanding of an individual failure to develop social skills, nevertheless, the physician must take account of the entire infantile and adolescent history, since only the long range history will account for the failure to develop the very ordinary capacities for easy human interrelationships that characterize the normal person."

In The Psychology of Pierre Janet, Elton Mayo summarized that in "every moment of our waking lives is an adaptive moment. Continually we discover that some one or other of our customary perceptions or ideas is inadequate. The development of skill therefore demands additional experience and reconsideration of the inadequacy. This moreover affects not only our mental life of active effort, it affects also those moments of relative passivity that we characterize as reflective thinking...The importance of reflection to the development of knowledge and skill was strongly emphasized by Janet in lectures and in conversation...It is by reflection, Janet says, that we give unity to our experience. In moments of reflective thinking, our attention is withdrawn from the outer world, and we are preoccupied with some problem that we may, if asked, find difficult to define. But this at least can be said, that at such moments some recent experience has caused us to doubt the adequacy of one of our conceptual schemes, or systems of ideas that we have been accustomed to use. And at such moments we are, whether we know it clearly or not, occupied with an endeavor to reconcile the contradiction or to decide upon a direction of inquiry that will throw new light on the apparent inconsistency. Reflective thinking, therefore, may be described as an inner act of attention, demanded by experience, intimately concerned with the systematic arrangement or rearrangement of our knowledge. This is what Janet means when he says that it is by reflection that we give unity to our experience." So the way to pop into a learning mentality with Janet, and if you include Darwinian understandings, it would be to accept that one is alive and needs to continue on living, regardless of past mistakes. If there is an adaptation problem, then one only has one option, which is to learn to adapt through reflection and then keep it simple by believing in action, and understanding that only adaptive action can make any real changes that are more harmonious with oneself and others. One also has to conclude that Janet's idée fixe, which includes self-disgust, is so rigid because patients feel that they are not worthy of change because if society knew more about them, they would prevent them from having those opportunities. In a social hygiene world of Féré's, that would not be an unsurprising terror. A therapist, as well as nearby social contacts, would have to allow enough forgiveness so that new behaviors could be engaged in with trial and error. If this doesn't happen, then a paralysis of self-preoccupation will continue.

For many psychological disorders, including obsession, "the person who shows symptoms is unable to put any finality into his reflective thinking. The conception of experiment, of trial and error, has eluded him; he is attempting to solve all the problems of living by sheer logic in situations where he has had little or no experience. He is consequently a person who is unable to give unity to his experience. He is preoccupied incessantly with persistent efforts to create a merely logical harmony in his thinking; and his misused reflective powers consequently inhibit his capacity for normal and easy attention to events about him. This incapacity limits the systematization of his responses to things, persons, and actuality. In other words, incessant preoccupation with verbal topics interferes with the development of his capacity to give attention to events. It is not surprising, therefore, that the obsessive lacks social and other skills." By realizing that reflection, and especially having a belief in one's actions, in the method of the French school, it is the only way to bridge the gap between the individual, sexual and social spheres.

The Psychology Of Pierre Janet - Elton Mayo: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780415730235/

The Evolution and Dissolution of the Sexual Instinct - Charles Féré: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9781497826007/

Scientific and esoteric studies in Sexual Degeneration - Charles Féré: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9781258912451/

Animal Magentism - Alfred Binet, Charles Féré: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9781498062534/

On Double Consciousness - Alfred Binet: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9781428622838/

The Hidden Self - William James: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Hidden_Self

Psychology: http://psychreviews.org/category/psychology01/

#analytical psychology #Pierre Janet #Charles Féré #Alfred Binet #hypnotism #social hygiene

[psychreviews2]

Object Relations: Melanie Klein Pt. 3

Getting her act together

As Melanie Klein put her past behind her, she began conversing with analysts in England. There was a mixture of skepticism with a sense of wonder and mystery about her process. She appeared both as a riff raff in the psychoanalytical community, but others were curious to see if she had been underrated, a diamond in the rough. Alix Strachey got the impression that "Mélanie is rather tiresome as a person—a sort of ex-beauty and charmer—and she’s unpopular with a certain section of the [Society] who pretend she’s quite sound in practice, but feebleminded about theory." Melanie felt that she was ahead of Hug-Hellmuth, because she found the Oedipus Complex with her play technique, whereas the former had not. "She’s not only got vast hoards of data, but a great many ideas, all rather formless and mixed, but clearly capable of crystallizing in her mind. She’s got a creative mind, and that’s the main thing." Hug-Hellmuth on the other hand was an influence to Anna Freud, who went more in the direction of Ego psychology.

Even as Melanie was keeping her personal life secret in many ways, like not talking about her estranged husband, she was willing to live life fully. "She’s really a very good sort and makes no secret of her hopes, fears, and pleasures, which are of the simplest sort." The two were in Berlin and living it up at dances and balls, despite having different personalities. "While Melanie was extremely perspicacious about analysis, Alix found her limited as a person." Regardless, Alix was sending copious letters back to England with the insights she was learning from Melanie. The translations into English were difficult but when Klein arrived in England, she found the experience positive overall and wanted to stay. "In 1925 I had the wonderful experience of speaking to an interested and appreciative audience in London—all members were present at Dr. Stephen’s house because at that time there was not yet an institute where I could give these lectures. Ernest Jones asked me whether I would answer in the discussion. Although I had learnt a lot of English privately and at school, my English was still not good and I remember well that I was half guessing what I was asked, but it seemed that I could satisfy my audience that way. The three weeks that I spent in London, giving two lectures a week, were one of the happiest times of my life. I found such friendliness, hospitality and interest, and I also had an opportunity of seeing something of England and I developed a great liking for the English. It is true that later on things did not always go easily, but those three weeks were very important in my decision to live in England."

Her impact was immediate and Melanie was starting to network with other experimental child psychologists in England, and she began taking the extra money she was earning to dress more professionally and reinvent herself after her failed marriage. Ernest Jones responded to Freud's objections, with a crossed out word that the author Phyllis Grosskurth thought was a slip that revealed his new allegiance. "I know that Melanie Klein’s work has met with considerable opposition in Vienna and also in Berlin, though more at first than later. I regard the fact as indicating nothing but resistance against accepting the reality of her your conclusions concerning infantile life. Prophylactic child analysis appears to me to be the logical outcome of psycho-analysis." Alix at the time was growing tired of Melanie's fastidiousness and goody-two-shoes persona, but she still respected her knowledge. "However, I like her, and she’s very impressive in her line, there’s no doubt of it. (I now think that Anna Freud simply hates her on personal grounds because she thinks she’s a 'low' woman. Someone ought to speak to her about her general sniffiness, don’t you think?)"

Melanie was also involved in a fling with C.Z. Kloetzel, in her last days on the continent, but it was a mismatch between a woman who wanted a long-term relationship alongside a strong sexual compatibility, but "Melanie Klein was too intense, too serious, too depressed for the kind of lighthearted liaison Kloetzel had in mind. She seems, however, to have continued to exert a strong sexual attraction for him since, according to Eric Clyne, he made periodic trips to England to visit her. She was an intelligent woman who was capable of losing her head. The man whom she always considered the love of her life seems to have regarded the relationship as one of a series of trifling flings." When she was invited to England to analyze Ernest Jones's children, it ended up being the last time she saw Berlin or Vienna.

Around this time, Melanie's analyst, Karl Abraham, died at a young age leaving her analysis in limbo. For her it was "a great pain to me and a very painful situation to come through. When I abruptly finished my analysis with Abraham there was much that had not been analysed, and I have continually proceeded along the lines of knowing more about my deepest anxieties and defences." She loved Abraham because he defended her in Berlin, but after his death, the Berlin Society increased their attacks on her. Sandor Radó in particular was very jealous and refused to publish Klein's works, because he was passed on Freud's papers from Ferenczi to read, and so he felt close to the source of true knowledge. A continental vs. English rivalry was beginning to brew.

Criticism

When Anna Freud was beginning to publish, she was having trouble getting acceptance in England. Her theories on child psychology differed from those of Melanie's. For instance, Anna was less into interpreting everything that arose within children and wanted to allow more simple explanations, to avoid being too suggestive, but ironically, she supported an educational mentorship, partially because children are still developing and need to learn so many practical things. They also disagreed on what the transferences meant, both positive and negative towards the analyst. The big differences between Klein's methods and Anna's was the differences in ages of the children. Melanie wanted to go as far back as possible, whereas Anna felt that this could be too intense for the children. Those convinced by Melanie Klein found that the analysts themselves may have had their own blocks to their infantile lives, and their fears of penetrating more deeply were limiting their progress. Even Ernest Jones wrote to Freud about the benefits of not waiting. He wanted to engage the neuroses while they were "still in a plastic state, than after the mind has become set and organized on an unhealthy basis and at great cost." He deftly avoided saying that Melanie Klein was analyzing his children, to spare Freud's feelings.

Sigmund Freud responded by disavowing Anna's theories as well as Melanie's, especially her theories of an independent super-ego in younger children. In terms of the superego, he agreed more with Anna. "I would like to contradict Mrs. Klein in this point, that she regards the super-ego of the children [to be] as independent as that of adults while it appears to me that Anna is right in emphasizing that the infantile superego is still under the direct influence of the parents." Anna then responded with her own papers on connecting to the Oedipus Complex in the classical timeline.

In the end, both theorists claimed results in their methods. Certainly there are similarities despite differences in the timeline. Both theorists explain emotional investment as a build up of tension and then a release, like the sex act. Anna emphasizes skill development, which Melanie wants the child to do more on their own accord, and this may be a weakness in that the child cannot always be counted on to develop any of the requisite skills to deal with life's challenges. After an interpretation in the Kleinian method, some children do go into their own searches for solutions in their family life, and let go of rumination at the same time. Anna's weakness could be that the education from the analyst may impose too many restrictions on the child and make them dependent on the analyst, like a parent or teacher. Also, the analyst may not know the child or parents well enough to make those decisions, so in many circumstances it would be better to let the child make their own determinations, especially when it comes to hobbies and interests.

Children, like adults, all have desires and are affected by obstacles and frustrations that stand in the way. This is true in the early days of an infant's life as well as throughout adolescence and adulthood. Rumination is let go of when there's discharge and venting, but especially when problems are solved and put behind oneself. Otto Rank was criticized for his birthing pains theory, but his acceptance of a meditative response is very instructive in that it can help to save energy. Venting has its limits if there are no solutions to problems. Endless venting may result in a lack of tact in social situations. Some problems also cannot be solved, so a certain amount of letting go of endless interpretations can save energy that is more needed in the arena of skill development. A daily meditation practice that goes along with work, to check in on one's breath and to relax any unnecessary tension, to let the breath move on it's own, can clearly demarcate attachment and resistance in the Buddhist way, but also in the psychoanalytic way, one can see the beginnings of wasted energy when thoughts begin to dwell on unnecessary topics or on things that cannot be controlled. Venting, on the other hand, can then be more appropriate when there are severe shocks and misfortunes. Part of the reason why venting is so helpful is that it's part of a grieving process where a misfortune cannot be changed, so the patient can exhaust emotions in grieving until acceptance arises naturally. In situations where it would better to face problems and solve them in a practical way, a more constructive and active approach is efficacious. Helene Deutsch also noted that all desires always end in larger or smaller depressions, so the child may not necessarily be autotelic enough to just quickly pick up new goals to regulate emotions. They may not think that this is what is needed and be stuck in depression. Goals can also be tiring, and a meditative rest is desirable for a burnt out psyche. On the other hand, both Melanie and Anna supported a resilience and persistence with Ego in some cases, because being intolerant of delays in gratification would limit skill development. It isn't always skills that should be analyzed, but also goals. Many goals are futile, and therapeutically helping the patient let go of those types of goals is a way to teach the patients on how to be autonomous and use their own agency to make choices without the need for added suggestions, education, or more analysis.

Object Relations: Otto Rank Pt. 1: https://rumble.com/v1gvrq9-object-relations-otto-rank-pt.-1.html

Object Relations: Otto Rank Pt 2: https://rumble.com/v1gvsf5-object-relations-otto-rank-pt-2.html

Object Relations: Helene Deutsch Pt. 1: https://rumble.com/v2wrvg5-object-relations-helene-deutsch-pt.-1.html

Object Relations: Helene Deutsch Pt. 2: https://rumble.com/v2yepky-object-relations-helene-deutsch-pt.-2.html

In the text, Freud-Klein Controversies, the British Psychoanalytic Society saw the danger of the different methods splintering into their own schools with autocratic leaders and administrators punishing heretics, like in Freud's own circle, so they intelligently agreed on a compromise where people just joining the association could choose among three avenues. There was still some control over theoretical divergences, but the flexibility allowed for new advancements. "The Kleinians were organized around Melanie Klein’s contributions to theory and technique, the Viennese or ‘B’ group, as it was called, around the approach to psychoanalysis and technique supported by Anna Freud and her colleagues, while the 'Middle' group (later referred to as 'Independents') carried on the tradition and technique of the indigenous Members of the British Society, while maintaining their right to learn from all reasonable sources of knowledge."

There were a lot of competing theories around at this time on how to be a good analyst. Those criticizing Klein offered that Kleinian analysts didn't express their emotions enough so a rapport with the patient couldn't develop. The lack of social reassurance and physical contact created a non-therapeutic atmosphere. Despite this aloofness, critics also felt that Kleinians were too active paradoxically, and didn't allow the patient to do more of the insight work themselves. The most common complaint, which is leveled at all psychoanalysts, is the invasiveness of interpretation. Critics felt that interpretations alienate clients so their personal story remains buried under theory. Negative feelings were also a bone of contention, since many people look at therapy as a way to become happier. Those types of critics were more interested in the role that love plays in Melanie's theories than the dark side she explored. The worry was that negative thinking would be habituated. Exploration takes a long time in psychoanalysis, and so cognitive behavior therapists felt that they were more efficient by just focusing on conscious thinking, and by clarifying distortions there, many of the same results would manifest, and in some cases, there are even better results because clearer thinking improves thinking skills directly so the client could apply those very skills immediately after therapy. Because psychotherapy focuses on the past, both patients and cognitive behavioral therapists often wanted to focus more on the future, since that is the only place where opportunities for change emerge. As important as transference was, critics felt that it could be interpreted too much and not always reflect accurately. Not everything needs to be traced back to the primal scene in family life. Finally, many patients simply have skill deficits and nothing will improve until they are addressed.

In response to these criticisms, Kleinians felt that expressing their own emotions too much would interfere with the transference, since the goal of the analyst is to be a screen to land on, for projections from the patient to reveal themselves. As pointed out in Part 2, patients are bringing their current level of social skills and predictions, so they can't help but demonstrate these to an analyst that is a blank canvass at the beginning of therapy. When it comes to being social and physically welcoming, Kleinians are more comfortable with a friendly, non-judgmental attitude, because without dealing with underlying problems you are still stuck in a surface situation like in any other. Any therapeutic hugging or petting risks being too shallow and ineffective in the long run. Kleinian interpretations may seem too active, but as they relieve stress bit by bit, the therapy is actually progressing in depth. By also interpreting negative feelings, a lot more information could be discovered with negative transferences. Those insights further relieve anxiety for the analysand and allow a natural opening for love and a positive transference to arise, like a sunny day after the clouds disperse. Like in meditation, love is considered something that is naturally there but covered over with rumination. This means that negativity is not actually being strengthened but instead it's being understood. With strong supportive internal objects in the mind through positive transference with the analyst, the need for psychoanalysts to be just a teacher of skills can then offload that responsibility to patients, who will probably want to do it themselves and enjoy the pleasure of making their own choices. The future is also important for Kleinians, but without dealing with the past it is likely that habits will repeat themselves regardless of the skills taught. If teaching skills was all you needed then you could just replace therapists with a trainer. Finally, if cognitive therapy and clear thinking was all that was needed, how do they deal with behavior that is unconsciously driven?

The mind's creative expression

Because the unconscious is a very intuitive place, where in real time experience ideas pop out of nowhere, it made sense that Klein would want to explore creativity and play as it pertains to child psychology. From her point of view, play was just another language that could describe the inner world of a patient, and transference itself is a kind of creativity, where you take the inner world and make it manifest in the outer world. From Klein's point of view, both methods can expose the current skill level of patients, which includes their arsenal of reactions that are used when there are obstacles or there is a delay in gratification. How do they adapt to reality? "At a very early age children become acquainted with reality through the deprivations which it imposes on them. They defend themselves against reality by repudiating it." One of the markers of a good adaptation to reality is if the analysand has enough patience to tolerate how things are.  "...One of the final results to be attained is successful adaptation to reality. One way in which this shows itself in children is in the modification of the difficulties encountered in their education. In other words, such children have become capable of tolerating real deprivations." The earliest deprivation for psychoanalysts of all stripes is being able to tolerate the Oedipus Complex.

As children grow up, through many weaning processes, they have to gradually become more independent and choose ever more appropriate relationship choices all the way up to adulthood, and somehow make a satisfactory final choice. For most parents, they want a heterosexual result with the opportunity to have grandchildren, so they can watch the inheritance they leave behind, to bring solace to the last years of their lives. It's their stamp of immortality. How typically people find new object choices is by being disappointed with the current one, for one reason or another, and then trading up for the next available person who appears more sympathetic or helpful. For adults, this can be good if the current object choice is pathological and dangerous, but it could be frivolous if they underrate their current choice. This often appears after a disappointment and then love transfers to another object-choice based on the lifestyle they provide, as well as an initial flattery and a welcoming flirtatiousness. Prospective partners need some skill at seduction. In fact, this mechanism can be exploited in toxic relationships, which starts with "love-bombing," and a welcoming with slutty demonstrations, but sooner or later, the adult who traded up will have to experience deprivations again as normal life resumes. They now have to decide if they made a mistake or not. Whether you call it "grooming" or conditioning, even an adult mind can be hacked easily, because most people react unconsciously to ALL flattery in a positive way. Even ugly people can appear sexy if they show signals that you are free to go all in and use them as you will. Though, a cold mechanistic feeling may arise if the relationship has no authentic connection beyond flattery. It requires some life experience, including about typical love triangles, and reflection to see beyond the warm and fuzzy feelings.

The Lovebomb - Narcdaily: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gh9SXcJnILk

Daft Punk - Instant Crush (Video) ft. Julian Casablancas: https://youtu.be/a5uQMwRMHcs?si=cZxxiaFy_yNx6KKw

Rick Springfield - Jessie's Girl: https://youtu.be/qYkbTyHXwbs?si=bEdxRXzEIRczVUeO

New Order - Bizarre Love Triangle: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tkOr12AQpnU

For children, they instead do this in their restricted environment with their nuclear family. "In a number of children's analyses I discovered that the little girl's choice of the father as love-object ensued on weaning. This deprivation, which is followed by the training in cleanliness (a process which presents itself to the child as a new and grievous withdrawal of love), loosens the bond to the mother and brings into operation the heterosexual attraction, reinforced by the father's caresses, which are now construed as a seduction...On the other hand, however, the oral and anal deprivation of love [by the father's competition] appears to promote the development of the Oedipus situation in boys, for it compels them to change their libido-position and to desire the mother as a genital love-object." So for more heterosexual boys, they get jealous of the attention that the mother gets from the father and their rivalry makes the mother a stronger object choice. That then loosens because of it's inappropriateness and the boy then has to find a mother replacement, especially since the bond between mother and father is mutual and aligned more often. The heterosexual girl is in the same situation and has to find a father replacement. The united parents for the children provide the most potent relationship template, and the children will likely soak up identifications and repeat that template throughout their lives, especially if this is done with zero awareness of psychology. The influence of encouragement and discouragement can also go throughout life with people trading up and playing people off of each other. People who are rejected by others are discouraged by them, and make a transference to others who look similar, like having a similar personality, sex, or sexual orientation. Their similarities trigger a negative response, or transference, to the old situation. People who find candidates who apply flattery, act slutty, welcoming, and non-judgmental, they will have a strong feeling of encouragement. The mind is always looking for replacements in desires, and if it can't find it in one place, it will consider other options and possibilities. There's also the influence of lifestyle, where providers and nurturers of all different kinds are trying to meet up in whatever combination can be found. People can also adjust their contribution as a provider or nurturer depending on the vicissitudes of life as they happen. Sometimes people have to switch roles.

The Oedipus Complex now can be seen as the sum total of the reactions and inhibitions that arise when there are human obstacles to wish-fulfillments, goals and desires. It doesn't stop with parents, as René Girard pointed out, and some people are stuck with endlessly perceived challenges and obstacles, and will be attempting to trade up for their entire lives. All these psychoanalysts also had to accept that children have different constitutional dispositions and may respond to the same shocks differently. "I cannot determine whether it is neurotic children whom the early working of the Oedipus complex affects so intensely, or if children become neurotic when this complex sets in too soon." Children absorb their parental and familial role models and reenact their behaviors and also internally control their own minds with the same introjected personalities. This process starts with incorporation, which is a sampling of what is good and bad in the limited environment of the person, then it goes into introjection, which is a preference found in said environments, and then a habit of introjection of the same actions can turn into an identification, which phenomenologically appears as an image of oneself as the main agent acting in the world, devoid of the role models that supplied the earlier influences. Lesser identifications down the line may include more images of people who influenced you and a psychological distance between self and internal object is seen more clearly. If one has a meditation practice, and it is used for internal reflection, one can catch oneself, for example, imitating a way of speaking from another person, and you may see an image of that person while you're speaking in their same manner and accent. With a strong identification, that image of the role model doesn't appear and it feels like your sense of self. This is why imitation can be a sly and unconscious process. If you didn't invent something that you feel is the real you, you can improve clarity by asking "where did I imitate this from?"

The Origin of Envy & Narcissism - René Girard: https://rumble.com/v1gsnwv-the-origin-of-envy-and-narcissism-ren-girard.html

Our role-modeling goes beyond speaking and can permeate our play, which is why authenticity is more connected with culture than many of us are willing to accept, and has more to do with our current skill levels on how to deal with obstacles and challenges, and the zeal or taste we can sense when we can see our way through obstacles successfully. If people are open enough as adults, they need to look at how their wish-fulfillments are almost 100% taken from family and culture, and any originality has more to do with original mixes of those influences. Play is another illuminating method for children to reenact what they copied in their household and it provides clues for the analyst as to how developed the child is. Skills = Development. They also point to those original influences that have gone under the radar of the analysand, as well as unresolved negative emotions. "A fundamental and universal mechanism in the game of acting a part serves to separate those different identifications at work in the child which are tending to form a single whole. By the division of roles the child succeeds in expelling the father and mother whom, in the elaboration of the Oedipus complex, it has absorbed into itself and who are now tormenting it inwardly by their severity. The result of this expulsion is a sensation of relief which contributes in great measure to the pleasure derived from the game. Though this game of acting often appears quite simple and seems to represent only primary identifications, this is only the surface appearance. To penetrate behind this appearance is of great importance in the analysis of children. It can, however, have its full therapeutic effect only if the investigation reveals all the underlying identifications and determinations and, above all, if we have found our way to the sense of guilt which is here at work."

For Melanie, guilt is more powerful in the child, because the ego is too weak to accept mistakes and come up with adult solutions, but if the therapeutic result is achieved in child analysis, the child's nascent ego can now handle things at the appropriate level that the child is expected to be at. "As the analysis of children teaches us, we strengthen that ego when the analytic procedure curbs the excessive demands of the super-ego. There can be no doubt that the ego of little children differs from that of older children or of adults, but, when we have freed the little child's ego from neurosis, it proves perfectly equal to such demands of reality as it encounters demands as yet less serious than those made upon adults." Children of course have limitations on what they can do, because they have many years of education ahead of them. "Children cannot change the circumstances of their lives, as adults often do at the end of an analysis. But a child has been very greatly helped if, as a result of analysis, we enable him to feel more at ease in the existing circumstances and to develop better. Moreover, the clearing-up of neurosis in children often diminishes the difficulties of their milieu. For instance, I have repeatedly proved that the mother's reactions were much less neurotic when favourable changes took place in her children after analysis." The child begins to project, or predict accurately the behavior of parents, and is now not surprised or vexed. Interpretations help to understand reality so the thinking becomes less distorted and children know what to expect, which is important because inaccurate expectations usually lead to stress and rumination. Expectation is stressful because it has a mental element of control, which is felt as an exertion, especially when expectations are dashed. Expectations met are encouraging, and disappointments are discouraging, or inhibiting. If the children know better how to respond to situations, then rumination decreases in daily life. Even more of a prophylaxis is if the child can prevent a pathological secret from developing in the mind, and learn skills so as to avoid being in highly shameful situations.

Object Relations: Melanie Klein Pt. 2: https://rumble.com/v435lsq-object-relations-melanie-klein-pt.-2.html

When interpretations are done well, the child saves energy from the rumination found in the severe super-ego, and that translates into happier play and it creates a positive transference with the analyst that now appears so helpful. "The pleasure in play, which visibly ensues after an interpretation has been given, is also due to the fact that the expenditure necessitated by a repression is no longer required after the interpretation. But soon we once more encounter resistances for a time, and here matters are no longer made easy in the way I have described. In fact, at such times we have to wrestle with very great difficulties. This is especially the case when we encounter the sense of guilt." Guilt is difficult for a child as it is for an adult, because if there's any perfectionism and a lack of acceptance towards mistakes, the self-preoccupation continues unabated as a low self-esteem and can begin a masochistic streak in the patient. Developing a learning mentality is crucial for parenting to be successful and helps to avoid pathological secrets from developing and metastasizing in behaviors.

As noted in prior reviews, any of these feelings of guilt are usually about traumatic or embarrassing sexual encounters, early masturbation that was punished, or the result of severe conflicts with others. The tension and discharge in sexuality inevitably moves into any tension and discharge with regular activities. If the embarrassment and guilt is connected with sexuality, and any other forms of passionate exploration in play and hobbies, it can stunt the growth of a child. They freeze at a particular level until a learning mentality is discovered, usually after a surrender and acceptance of imperfection in the self. If children freeze they will not be able to make any more approaches towards challenges. This is why Melanie focused on the Oedipus Complex to try and get an awareness to appear in the child through interpretations. "Inhibitions in play and in learning have their origin in an exaggerated repression of these phantasies and, with them, of all phantasy. Sexual experiences are associated with the masturbation-phantasies and, with these, find representation and abreaction [catharsis/discharge] in play. Amongst the experiences dramatized, representations of the primal scene play a prominent part and they regularly appear in the foreground of the analyses of young children. It is only after a considerable amount of analysis, which has partially revealed the primal scene and the genital development, that we come on representations of pregenital experiences and phantasies...Consistent interpretations, gradual solving of resistances and persistent tracing of the transference to earlier situations, these constitute in children as in adults the correct analytic situation." Again one sees a learning mentality being trained in the child, which brings awareness to the child of how the brain functions and provides the live-and-let-live experience of self-forgiveness and self-belief that one can try again next time and develop more appropriate behaviors. A sympathetic analyst can also provide a non-judgmental atmosphere that expects children to learn from mistakes and not constantly freeze in self-preoccupation and perfectionism. They have to understand that development is what human life is all about and that no human is born fully formed.

Guilt can also be connected with hatred for the human obstacles in one's life and lead to scapegoating, even if the victims are only toys. This can appear in play unconsciously, but if an interpretation is accurate enough, it can point to the real struggles that are looking for solutions, release, and freedom. "For instance, children begin to distinguish between the 'pretense' mother and the real mother and between the wooden baby-doll and the live baby brother. They then firmly insist that they wanted to do this or that injury to the toy baby, only the real baby, they say, of course they love. Only when very powerful and long-standing resistances have been overcome do children realize that their aggressive acts were directed against the real objects. When this admission is made, however, the result; even in quite little children, is generally a notable step forward in adaptation to reality...It has always been my experience that the effects of such knowledge, gradually elaborated, is in fact to relieve the child, to establish a fundamentally more favourable relation to the parents and thus to increase its power of social adaptation."

Beyond a simple education to tell the child what is right and what is wrong, Melanie wanted the children to reason things out through the consequences of their phantasies in their inner worlds. They unconsciously want to do something bad, but when made conscious, they see more clearly that they would prefer to try something else more appropriate. "When this has taken place children also are quite able to replace repression to some extent by reasoned rejection. We see this from the fact that at a later stage of the analysis children have advanced so far from various anal-sadistic or cannibalistic cravings (which at an earlier stage were still so powerful) that they can now at times adopt an attitude of humorous criticism towards them. When this happens I hear even very little children making jokes to the effect, for instance, that some time ago they really wanted to eat up their mummy or cut her into bits. When this change takes place, not only is the sense of guilt inevitably lessened, but at the same time the children are enabled to sublimate the wishes which previously were wholly repressed. This manifests itself in practice in the disappearance of inhibitions in play and in a beginning of numerous interests and activities." They accept that they are a kid and that they are growing and learning. They can laugh at themselves, because it's a part of their development. This is also one of the ways to alleviate that compulsion to repeat, where a patient repeats their bad experiences because they haven't really learned how to regulate their emotions to move to another level. The important realization for all patients is to see that there is more love and connection when one takes on attitudes and actions that make it easier for others to do the same. In fact, when patients start seeing ways in which they can be more harmonious with others, that is a successful pathway after a bout of analysis.

In each child, there are different manifestations of a severe super-ego. In one patient, Erna, it was a more paranoid one. "In her play Erna often made me be a child, while she was the mother or a teacher. I then had to undergo fantastic tortures and humiliations. If in the game anyone treated me kindly, it generally turned out that the kindness was only simulated. The paranoiac traits showed in the fact that I was constantly spied upon, people divined my thoughts, and the father or teacher allied themselves with the mother against me, in fact I was always surrounded with persecutors. I myself in the role of the child, had constantly to spy upon and torment the others. Often Erna herself played the part of the child. Then the game generally ended in her escaping the persecutions (on these occasions the 'child' was good), becoming rich and powerful, being made a queen and taking a cruel revenge on her persecutors. After her sadism had spent itself in these phantasies, apparently unchecked by any inhibition (all this came about after we had done a good deal of analysis), reaction would set in in the form of deep depression, anxiety and bodily exhaustion. Her play then reflected her incapacity to bear this tremendous oppression, which manifested itself in a number of serious symptoms. In this child's phantasies all the roles engaged could be fitted into one formula, that of two principal parts: the persecuting super-ego and the id or ego, as the case might be, threatened, but by no means less cruel." Exhaustion keeps coming back as long as the pathological responses to family and the community are not resolved and understood, and also because resistance and stress is exhausting, full stop.

When children feel helpless, they begin to proactively take the place of the powerful one that made them feel so vulnerable. "In these games the wish-fulfilment lay principally in Erna's endeavour to identify herself with the stronger party, in order thus to master her dread of persecution. The hard-pressed ego tried to influence or deceive the super-ego, in order to prevent its overpowering the id, as it threatened to do. The ego tried to enlist the highly sadistic id in the service of the super-ego and to make the two combine in the fight with a common enemy. This necessitated extensive use of the mechanisms of projection and displacement. When Erna played the part of the cruel mother, the naughty child was the enemy; when she herself was the child who was persecuted but soon became powerful, the enemy was represented by the wicked parents. In each case there was a motive, which the ego attempted to render plausible to the super-ego, for indulging in unrestrained sadism. By the terms of this 'compact' the super-ego was to take action against the enemy as though against the id. The id, however, in secret, continued to pursue its predominantly sadistic gratification, the objects being the primal ones. Such narcissistic satisfaction as accrued to the ego through its victory over foes both without and within helped also to appease the super-ego and thus was of considerable value in diminishing anxiety."

So in this case, the child needed an excuse for the super-ego to accept the sadistic id so that it could be discharged in aggression while the ego is being morally supported by that same super-ego. Roleplaying can illuminate if there is serious fragmentation in the psyche when the patient doesn't have a core self and is just acting out endless roles in daily life. It means that the same ego, and superego, which need the energy of the id, or desire, can attack itself and others, draining energy, becoming entangled in internal personality contradictions, and covering over the potential mental peace that could be had in more harmonious relationships with self and other. The cost of course was the exhaustion that Erna felt. "...in Erna's case it broke down completely because of the excessive sadism of both id and super-ego. Thereupon the ego joined forces with the super-ego and tried by punishing the id to extract a certain gratification, but this in its turn was inevitably a failure. Reactions of intense anxiety and remorse set in again and again, showing that none of these contradictory wish-fulfilments could be sustained for long." This leads eventually to an adaption to reality, to abandon unrealistic wish-fulfillments, or it can lead to psychosis where the dreaming takes over as well as draining internal conflicts. In an obsession example, in another case study, the child persisted in rituals that didn't function in reality, which is also exhausting and another waste of energy. Melanie also noticed that some children had more or less helpful imagos, which could be examples to strengthen and condition in the child. Those positive imagos can provide a sense of autonomy, and self-reliance, especially if they are hopeful, helpful, practical, and realistic, like the adults who have already modeled those positive behaviors for the child. The more severe the pathology, the more resistant the old behaviors are to treatment, leading to more repetition. These frozen states of being can manifest themselves at differing levels of development and remain into adulthood.

Throughout development, there is a pressure for the ego to take on the different identifications imitated from all the different role models in the child's life and to fuse them into a cohesive personality. "The more extreme and sharply contrasting the imagos, the less successful will be the synthesis and the more difficult will it be to maintain it. The excessively strong influence exerted by these extreme types of imagos, the intensity of the need for the kindly figures in opposition to the menacing, the rapidity with which allies will change into enemies (which is also the reason why the wish-fulfilment in play so often breaks down) all this indicates that the process of synthesizing the identifications has failed. This failure manifests itself in the ambivalence, the tendency to anxiety, the lack of stability or the readiness with which this is overthrown, and the defective relation to reality characteristic of neurotic children. The necessity for a synthesis of the super-ego arises out of the difficulty experienced by the subject in coming to an understanding with a super-ego made up of imagos of such opposite natures. When the latency period sets in and the demands of reality are increased, the ego makes even greater efforts to effect a synthesis of the super-ego, in order that on this basis a balance may be struck between super-ego, id and reality[-ego]." A meditation example of this would be to use the present-moment-ego to follow the breath and use the breath as an anchor while setting up goals and knocking them down. Different super-ego personalities may interrupt the good intentions of the ego and send one into a repetitive cycle of regression with archaic personality goals. It would manifest as a feeling of a comfort zone that prevents development. The different personalities and their weaknesses would manifest different types of internal distractions, like with examples above of obsession or paranoia. Each person has to see what their particular problem is. A wholistic personality, in ideal circumstances, has less internal battles. Since the id is desire without a cultural example to imitate, it is flexible precisely because of that. If you have wish-fulfillments that conflict with each other, because you have conflicting role models in your life and culture, you'll have super-ego reactions that want to punish other super-ego tendencies, which leads the id to wasting more energy. If the ego can pursue goals that do not trip up the conscience of any of the super-ego internal role models, then a feeling of unity and consolidation can be felt. This is felt in the amount of peace that manifests.

The value of play is further seen when the child's projections manifest in how the toys are used, and the splitting is readily apparent when certain toys are treated with more or less antagonism or cooperation. A toy becomes either all good or all bad. Projections appear in play and the child can then find satisfaction that cannot be found in the real world. Maybe the evil toy gets their way. Maybe in another battle, good wins out. "By their means the synthesis of the super-ego, which can be maintained only with more or less effort, can be given up for the time being and, further, the tension of maintaining the truce between the super-ego as a whole and the id is diminished. The intrapsychic conflict, thus becomes less violent and can be displaced into the external world." Anxiety, guilt and stress can then be emotionally released in the play, like an adult being caught up in a good movie. Ultimately, no amount of entertainment or play will replace realistic solutions, so the best forms of art will solve a problem in a way that an audience member can see how it would work for themselves. Play can also be a way to think through a problem and try out different responses until an optimum one appears. "...Every step forward in adaptation to reality involved the releasing of large quantities of anxiety and the stronger repression of phantasies. It was always a great advance in the analysis when this repression was, in its turn, lifted and the phantasies became free as well as more closely linked with reality." Adaptation described here is to see the pathological skills come out of the unconscious, be made conscious, discharge emotionally along with the understanding, then in ideal situations, the child may start to look for better solutions so that the phantasies can begin to conform to reality and increase both external and internal harmony.

Children as they develop can then separate their play into fiction and non-fiction. By having both forms of tension and release, there's more opportunity for more flexible children to find gratification in life with play and responsibility. Responsibility also has a belief in oneself, a confidence, and self-efficacy, that one can achieve goals in life. "Normal children are able to master reality in better ways. Their play shows that they have more power to influence and live out reality in conformity with their phantasies. Moreover, where they cannot alter the real situation they are better able to bear it, because their freer phantasy provides them with a refuge from it and also because the fuller discharge that they have for their masturbation-phantasies in an ego-syntonic form (play and other sublimations) gives them greater opportunities of gratification." So simply, it's not just love and work, but play as well.

As distortion in the super-ego decreases, the good and evil in mental objects begins to be more realistic, so the underrated becomes conscious as well as the overrated in people. "...The analyst must simply be a medium in relation to whom the different imagos can be activated and the phantasies lived through, in order to be analysed. When the child in his play directly assigns to him certain roles, the task of the children's analyst is clear...With children as well as with adults, we have to infer from the analytic situation and material the details of the hostile role attributed to us, which the patient indicates through the negative transference. Now what is true of personification in its open form I have found to be also indispensable for the more disguised and obscure forms of the personifications underlying transference. The analyst who wishes to penetrate to the earliest, anxiety-inspiring imagos, i.e. to strike at the roots of the super-ego's severity, must have no preference for any particular role; he must accept that which comes to him from the analytic situation." This can be a little scary, considering how traumatized many kids are, but Melanie made a compromise. "When children ask me to play parts which are too difficult or disagreeable I meet their wishes by saying that I am 'pretending I am doing it.'" Empathy for Melanie becomes a hallmark of development. "In ontogenetic development sadism is overcome when the subject advances to the genital level. The more powerfully this phase sets in, the more capable does the child become of object-love, and the more able is he to conquer his sadism by means of pity and sympathy." So when children can empathize with others, meaning they can love others, and themselves, that object-choice is going to be more healthy because of the reduced sadism. You're not going to be taking things out on them, and you don't expect perfection from them.

When it came to the use of toys, Melanie wanted the toy to dictate less what kinds of games would be played and instead require the child to use their projections to make them what they will and more clearly take on different roles that exist in the child's real life. "I believe that the toys provided by the analyst should on the whole be of the type I have described, that is to say, simple, small, and non-mechanical...In such games the child frequently takes the part of the adult, thereby not only expressing his wish to reverse the roles but also demonstrating how he feels that his parents or other people in authority behave towards him—or should behave. Sometimes he gives vent to his aggressiveness and resentment by being, in the role of parent, sadistic towards the child, represented by the analyst."

The aggressiveness may lead to damaged toys which can create a sense of guilt in the child over what they might do to their family members. Interpretations that connect the destructiveness to the reality of home life bring the sense of consciousness to the problem and an opportunity to see reality more closely, that the object was underrated, and bring possible solutions to more adapt to the reality of those relationships. A reparation. Everything about reparation is about adapting to reality and changing tactics when one method or another doesn't work. It's for repairing relationships. "Feelings of guilt may very soon follow after the child has broken, for instance, a little figure. Such guilt refers not only to the actual damage done but to what the toy stands for in the child's unconscious, e.g. a little brother or sister, or a parent; the interpretation has therefore to deal with these deeper levels as well. Sometimes we can gather from the child's behaviour towards the analyst that not only guilt but also persecutory anxiety has been the sequel to his destructive impulses and that he is afraid of retaliation...By then we have been able to analyse some important defences, thus diminishing persecutory feelings and making it possible for the sense of guilt and the urge to make reparation to be experienced...Reparation in this sense is a wider concept than Freud's concepts of 'undoing in the obsessional neurosis' and of 'reaction-formation'. For it includes the variety of processes by which the ego feels it undoes harm done in phantasy, restores, preserves and revives objects. The importance of this tendency, bound up as it is with feelings of guilt, also lies in the major contribution it makes to all sublimations, and in this way to mental health." And for those who feel that Melanie Klein pursues the darkness too much, one can easily see a danger if the darkness is not approached and unconscious reactions are left to play out in life. In the real world, a toy dismemberment can translate to murder and dismemberment in actuality. Perusing any crime stories or stories of war, one can see dehumanization, which is to make humans into pests, to make it easier for the super-ego to accept murder. A populace that engages in little reflection and is easily slighted will have consequences in predictable violence, kleptomania, and genocide.

Another criticism against Klein's therapy modality has to do with the capacity of the child to understand. "'Are young children intellectually able to understand such interpretations?' My own experience and that of my colleagues has been that if the interpretations relate to the salient points in the material, they are fully understood. Of course the child analyst must give his interpretations as succinctly and as clearly as possible, and should also use the child's expressions in doing so. But if he translates into simple words the essential points of the material presented to him, he gets into touch with those emotions and anxieties which are most operative at the moment; the child's conscious and intellectual understanding is often a subsequent process. One of the many interesting and surprising experiences of the beginner in child analysis is to find in even very young children a capacity for insight which is often far greater than that of adults. To some extent this is explained by the fact that the connections between conscious and unconscious are closer in young children than in adults, and that infantile repressions are less powerful. I also believe that the infant's intellectual capacities are often underrated and that in fact he understands more than he is credited with."

Because Melanie analyzed children as far back as she could go she felt that object relations were almost always there, and for any child that doesn't remember their birth, the reality is that they are becoming aware of their connections with others and developing enough of a memory and story of their lives which can't exist without object relations. "I found that object relations start almost at birth and arise with the first feeding experience; furthermore, that all aspects of mental life are bound up with object relations. It also emerged that the child's experience of the external world, which very soon includes his ambivalent relation to his father and to other members of his family, is constantly influenced by—and in turn influences—the internal world he is building up, and that external and internal situations are always interdependent, since introjection [to take in what is desirable] and projection [a defense] operate side by side from the beginning of life."

The mind is already reacting to the good and the bad experiences at the beginning of life, with splitting judgments of good and bad, then integration of the good and bad in objects help the judgments match reality more accurately, which is the insight that humans display a variety of good and bad behaviors within the same person. Eventually a feeling of wanting to take care of imperfect people, the feeling of pity, empathy, and sadness develops, kind of like seeing the good and the bad in people, but also witnessing their weak skills and behaviors with a non-reactivity and sympathy as to their imperfect attempts at managing life. They may hurt people sometimes, but they often mean well. Even if these experiences start early in life, they are reintroduced again and again with more and more added depth and complexity found in adults. "The conclusion to be drawn from the experience that depressive anxiety arises as a result of the ego synthesizing the good and bad (loved and hated) aspects of the object led me in turn to the concept of the depressive position which reaches its climax towards the middle of the first year. It is preceded by the paranoid position, which extends over the first three or four months of life and is characterized by persecutory anxiety and splitting processes."

As Melanie advanced her theories further, by adding a lot of material from younger and younger patients, a new more independent category of analyst was beginning to dawn: Those who were eclectic and integrative enough to not care what school a theory comes from, but only care that those theories explain real situations.

The end of the German Republic

In the lead up to World War II, Melanie's idea of being in England or the United States, was starting to be a good idea for other Jewish intellectuals looking for a safe haven. Repudiation of Judaism in Germany included even secular Jews. NAZIS were socialist, in that they attacked capitalists, but they preferred public coercion of the private sector as opposed to Marxist ideas of total government ownership, though many people found not much difference in totalitarian methods because all these labels cover the same power dynamic, where a powerful group of people give orders and everyone with less power has to obey, and this included rejection and retaliation towards supposed "thought crimes." The kinds of books that were burned or banned in the German example included non-affiliated socialist books, any books that were considered decadent or perceived as undermining NAZI prerogatives. Any books that supported social justice and wanted to improve working conditions were targeted. Naturally, Jewish authors' books, like the books of Albert Einstein and Sigmund Freud, went up in flames. Even Ernest Hemingway's and Helen Keller's books were not spared. "The first group of German-Jewish analysts from Berlin had begun arriving in Britain in 1933 after the Reichstag fire...The passing of the monstrous Nuremberg Laws, which deprived Jews of citizenship, forbade marriage between Jews and Aryans, and barred Jews from the liberal professions, made 1935 a crucial year...Eitingon had gone to Palestine. Erich’s former analyst, Clare Happel, settled in Chicago, as did Hans’s analyst, Ernst Simmel, before moving on to California. Melitta’s original analyst, Karen Horney, had already moved to New York; and Helene Deutsch, who had always regarded Melanie as a rival, was by 1934 establishing orthodox analysis in Boston. Klein’s old enemies in Berlin, Franz Alexander and Sándor Radó, settled respectively in Chicago and New York...By 1938 one-third of the analysts in the British Society were from the Continent. A comparison of the 1937 and 1938 membership lists shows the number of new names that were added—Bibring, Eidelberg, Hitschmann, Hoffer, Isakower, Kris, Lantos, Stengel, Schur, Stross, Sachs, Straub—and of course Sigmund and Anna Freud."

Book Burning - Holocaust Encyclopedia: https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/book-burning

Book Burnings in Germany - PBS: https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/goebbels-burnings/

With the arrival of the Freuds Melanie was in a panic that she would soon lose her cocoon. "'It will never be the same again,' Melanie Klein lamented to Winnicott. 'This is a disaster.'" After being an early champion of Melanie, Ernest Jones was already beginning to retreat into an ambivalence between the two schools of psychoanalysis, especially after Anna Freud's The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defence was released. Other analysts were also making their choices and aligning with more conservative views or accepting some of the updates that Melanie was proposing, like the theory of internal objects. Many others, like John Bowlby remained independent.

Those escaping fascism found English people more tolerant and they enjoyed the beautiful walkways and parks in contrast to the chaos of banishment and war, but they still suffered from confusion and homesickness after being uprooted. The Vienna and Berlin cultures were also refined up to the hilt, but now regressing to a barbarism. Even advanced societies can lose their freedoms. Both Anna and Melanie started separating their clients based on their different theories. Anna felt that those "who had been analyzed or otherwise trained by analysts holding different views would not be likely to benefit from her teaching." Sigmund Freud was very ill at this time and he gave his blessing before his death that London should now be the center of Psychoanalysis. Over time the divisions between the two schools gave way to some back and forth where the education side of the theories could reduce confusion and a synergy could develop where new analysts could pick and choose which parts of which theory they liked and discard what they didn't. Those interested in younger children, and the promise that psychoanalysis could nip any problems in the bud, so to say, would naturally be curious about Melanie's ideas, and those who felt that older children, adolescents, and adults, was where the action really took place, and because they are easier to communicate with, would prefer more orthodox methods.

Love, Guilt and Reparation: And Works 1921-1945 (The Writings of Melanie Klein, Volume 1) by Melanie Klein: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780743237659/

Envy and Gratitude and Other Works, 1946 - 1963 (2nd Edition) by Melanie Klein: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780743237758/

Melanie Klein: Her World and Her Work by Phyllis Grosskurth: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9781568214450/

Freud-Klein Controversies - Pearl King, Riccardo Steiner: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780415082747/

Melanie Klein Dr Julia Segal: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780761943013/

The New Dictionary of Kleinian Thought by Elizabeth Bott Spillius, Jane E. Milton, Penelope Garvey, Cyril Couve, Deborah Steiner: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780415592598/

The Language of Psychoanalysis by Jean Laplanche, Jean-Bertrand Pontalis: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780367328139/

Psychology: http://psychreviews.org/category/psychology01/

#anna freud #castration anxiety #castrationcomplex #child psychology #creativity #depressive position #ego psychology #ernest jones #melanie klein #oedipus complex #paranoid-schizoid position #psychoanalysis #sigmund freud

[psychreviews2]

Object Relations: Melanie Klein Pt. 2

Lectures on Technique

To demystify Psychoanalysis, I want to go into an aside in this series to bring therapy into phenomenological experience. The end point of therapy is to successfully, love, work, and or sublimate in healthy activities and relationships. The impediments to that are in the external environment, with obstacles, but there are internal obstacles to be considered as well. You want to see and feel how your inner world is holding you back. One of the ways to do this is through self-analysis, especially because therapy is expensive, and one is putting a lot of trust into a total stranger with your inner world. Just as they can make you better, they can also gum up the works. A certain amount of ownership and independence is required by the patient, if possible.

Anyone who has any meditation skills will be in a better situation when doing self-analysis. To start things off, there are a few basic practices that will demonstrate to you the level of health and well-being of your consciousness. In all these practices, you can meditate with your eyes open, but preferably you do this on your own, until you get confident with your skill to do this in daily life. The first practice would be to concentrate on the breath from the beginning to the end and see if flow states can be achieved just with continuity of attention. The second practice would be to get on with your life as normal, but include body scans where you scan to detect any needless muscle tightness in the face and body. This will show you a layer of wasted energy, and any muscle relaxation you apply, that still allows you to get on with your life, with not too much or too little effort, is a valuable energy saving. The third practice would be to notice tightness in the sources of your senses, like your eyes, ears, nose, mouth, but to also include the quality of your thinking and the quality of your breath. Technically, most of these functions work automatically without a need for one to tense up muscles with your amygdala. If you wait for your breath to move on it's own, without contraction, tightening, and superfluous control, then even more energy can be saved. Again, you would still be getting on with your life while doing these practices, but you realize that it's possible to over-control sensing functions that already work automatically. Finally, you can focus on thoughts and just notice tension and pain while allowing thoughts to just arise and pass away. Usually just noticing in a non-verbal way the pain associated with problematic auto-thinking is enough for the unconscious to notice that the mind is hurting itself, and in most cases it will learn and relax the tension on its own. Over many months and years, layers of habitual tension will fall away allowing for a new efficiency baseline of well-being and peace.

Adyashanti calls this True Meditation. He asks if the mind is bothered by a thought, and returns to the natural awareness of automatic sensation that works without need of an ego to control it. What is awareness's relationship with what's happening? Instead of having an idea of meditation as a reference, the reference turns to the natural state of being that operates independently of thought. Freedom must include all contents that arise in the mind with intimacy so more thoughts and feelings can be included. It reduces suppression and repression while at the same time allows for more memory-sensations to be countered by the body's natural operation. That natural way of being is already there so there's no need to figure out how awareness is supposed to be. Effortless Effort still requires an effort but it's the last form of effort needed, which is to make a priority to check in with the body. You're checking the automatic awareness and senses, not thoughts or images as a reference. What is awareness's relationship to the thought? Does it stay with it or move away? Use your moment to moment experience, not intellectual references. The effort is to be present. To reorient towards senses requires a little effort. The mind typically is conditioned by parenting and culture to analyze, get carried away, and act, but it requires a little effort to rein it in. The new habit is to prioritize that checking-in. Advanced skill allows you to be with conversations and experiences with sensory interest into the nature of what are sometimes difficult experiences. The prioritization requires a scientific interest to explore manifestation, including difficult manifestations. Reactivity becomes something that is more used when it's appropriate as opposed to a wild and uncontrolled response. The checking-in allows one to compare peace in the senses against stressful reactivity, and forces into consciousness a choice between relaxation or to stay with the reaction, if appropriate.

Adyashanti True Meditation: https://youtu.be/YAE1zaY-ogY?si=8_olVDd3BPmiGMH7

Adyashanti & Loch Kelly - The Journey After Awakening: https://youtu.be/MsVImg6imX8?si=jCvTUTW7PXBju8CB

This last point is important, because Psychoanalysis works similar to meditation in that with understanding how your brain works the structure of the mind reorganizes and learns to stop hurting itself. It's also similar in that the mindfulness in analysis gets people to notice how thoughts feel and how the kind of content in the mind affects the inner world, and therefore your well-being. For example, someone could be living in a lavish beach resort but their stressful job makes their mind into a jail. Some of consciousness in a busy life is under your control, but without enough understanding of what your actions are doing to you, opportunities are lost for well-being. The ultimate goal for therapy is for patients to move into a learning mentality where they can learn from mistakes without being stuck in ruminative preoccupation. On the other hand, what is different from Buddhism would be the feeling aspect. Instead of just looking at the pain, there's also courage to feel the pain and express it until discharge, because the patient understands that emotions can be exhausted, and therefore less problematic over time. The learning mentality then has to look at why the trauma happened and try to avoid the same thing in the future.

The Jhanas: https://rumble.com/v1gqznl-the-jhanas.html

How to gain Flow in 7 steps: https://rumble.com/v1gvked-how-to-gain-flow-in-7-steps.html

Mindfulness: Nirvana: https://rumble.com/v1grcgx-mindfulness-nirvana.html

For many people, meditation is plenty of therapy for them and all they will ever need. For many others, the content of thinking will be emphasized. Psychoanalysis moves beyond certain types of Buddhism and analyzes the problematic content that is interrupting concentration, well-being, and happiness. It looks at rumination, craving, and reactivity to see what can be resolved so that even more energy is saved. After exhaustion, problematic content desists its operation to steal attention away from your activities. This way, if you read about psychoanalysis, which most of the time is about an analyst helping an analysand in just this way, you can understand the therapeutic interpretations and interventions better, and hopefully benefit from it if it applies to your life. A later episode will go more into each personality problem. This one will focus more on stress, depression, and maladaptive coping in the Kleinian tradition.

Melanie Klein did write a lot of abstract theory, but thankfully she left behind many notes and lectures that flesh out the therapeutic process so as to help people notice their painful inner worlds and heal them. Before going into those methods, there also needs to be a disclaimer to define the limits of Psychoanalysis. Many people are debilitated by shame and guilt, sometimes only for only having bad thoughts, but not always. Some have serious misdeeds or crimes that they want to confess. A pathological secret. The reality in the therapeutic world is that there are laws that make mandatory disclosures of serious offenses to law enforcement compulsory for therapists to keep their license. They do have to protect your privacy for anything else, except for those sensitive areas. Many people feel guilty for serious undetected crimes and will not really receive any helpful therapy unless they confess, give themselves up to law enforcement and then start therapy afterwards along with their court sentencing. This is a dicey situation that appears again and again in psychology books where some therapists keep criminal things quiet in old case studies that you know in the modern world, it would not be allowed.

Case Studies: The 'Wolfman' (3/3) - Freud and Beyond: https://rumble.com/v1gulsf-case-studies-the-wolfman-33-freud-and-beyond.html

For example, there was a famous case study from Carl Jung where he had a depressed patient who may have killed her daughter by allowing her to taste impure water where she ended up dying of typhoid fever. The neglect would have been illegal, but Jung held back the information from authorities. "From the association test I had seen that she was a murderess, and I had learned many of the details of her secret. It was at once apparent that this was a sufficient reason for her depression. Essentially it was a psychogenic disturbance and not a case of schizophrenia. I told her everything I had discovered through the association test. It can easily be imagined how difficult it was for me to do this. To accuse a person point-blank of murder is no small matter. And it was tragic for the patient to have to listen to it and accept it. But the result was that in two weeks it proved possible to discharge her, and she was never again institutionalized. There were other reasons that caused me to say nothing to my colleagues about this case. I was afraid of their discussing it and possibly raising legal questions. Nothing could be proved against the patient, of course, and yet such a discussion might have had disastrous consequences for her. Fate had punished her enough! It seemed to me more meaningful that she should return to life in order to atone in life for her crime. When she was discharged, she departed bearing her heavy burden. She had to bear this burden. The loss of the child had been frightful for her, and her expiation had already begun with the depression and her confinement to the institution. In many cases in psychiatry, the patient who comes to us has a story that is not told, and which as a rule no one knows of. To my mind, therapy only really begins after the investigation of that wholly personal story. It is the patient's secret, the rock against which he is shattered." Even if someone hasn't committed murder, a patient should be careful about thoughts about wanting to murder someone. There will be questions about whether the analysand has plans to do that as an adult in therapy. Typically this won't be the case when therapy regresses to earlier levels when the patient was a minor and thinking hostile thoughts that weren't acted on. Admitting hatred for someone is safer territory.

What Happens if a Client Confesses to Murder? | Counselor Limits of Confidentiality - Dr. Todd Grande: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=85IGJLxkqh4

4 Things NOT to Say to Your Therapist - Kati Morton: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H714wnQn2uw

In non-criminal situations, forgiveness and atonement should happen when possible, but in many situations, the offended party will not want to be contacted or the people involved are deceased. What was done in the past cannot be changed and if there are no authority figures involved like the police or courts, patients can't wait to learn lessons from the past, and they will need therapy as soon as possible to focus on what they should do next, or at least decide this for themselves. For example, people who have made a mess of relationships can be helped with therapy as well as innocent victims in other scenarios. Others who took on self-beliefs that are self-destructive, and people with more biologically influenced pathologies will be more welcomed by mental health professionals and mutual sympathy will be easier to develop. But another area where people will likely avoid therapy is when they feel that they are going to be put in a mental health facility. There will be a great desire to avoid being confined outside of the home. This may only delay therapeutic help, until things are so bad that a patient has to leave their home because of a major breakdown.

For those situations that are more accessible to talk therapy, patients and their typical pathological secrets involve some kind of weakness, guilt, shame, victimization, a socially unacceptable lifestyle, or some embarrassing flaw, where a confession will be welcomed by an understanding therapist. For example, Melanie found a common pattern with minors acting out sexually that caused their regular shame. She found that in the Oedipus Complex situation, children would replace the parents they couldn't have access to with other proximate objects. "There is another kind of experience in early childhood which strikes me as typical and exceedingly important. These experiences often follow closely in time upon the observations of coitus and are induced or fostered by the excitations set up thereby. I refer to the sexual relations of little children with one another, between brothers and sisters or playmates, which consist in the most varied acts...They are deeply repressed and have a cathexis of profound feelings of guilt...These feelings are mainly due to the fact that this love-object, chosen under the pressure of the excitation due to the Oedipus conflict, is felt by the child to be a substitute for the father or mother or both. Thus these relations, which seem, so insignificant and which apparently no child under the stimulus of the Oedipus development escapes, take on the character of an Oedipus relation actually realized, and exercise a determining influence upon the formation of the Oedipus complex, the subject's detachment from that complex and upon his later sexual relations. Moreover, an experience of this sort forms an important fixation-point in the development of the super-ego. In consequence of the need for punishment and the repetition-compulsion, these experiences often cause the child to subject himself to sexual traumata. In this connection I would refer you to Abraham (1927), who showed that experiencing sexual traumata is one part of the sexual development of children. The analytic investigation of these experiences, during the analysis of adults as well as of children, to a great extent clears up the Oedipus situation in its connection with early fixations, and is therefore important from the therapeutic point of view." Much of the therapeutic result is for adults to realize that their childhood understanding was limited and under a certain amount of determinism, so their adult self can be free to experiment and make more appropriate object choices and let go of infantile identifications. This includes choosing partners who are not necessarily like their parents or not like past childhood figures related to sexual trauma.

Enigma - Mea Culpa: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b_OZaZ2dUE4

With material that is comparatively easier to confess, the therapist still has a lot of exploratory work to get at, including the person attempting self-analysis. Emotions that are bothersome and require therapy to disentangle usually involve some events that weren't emotionally processed fully. The mind disassociates and distracts to avoid facing something. Unfortunately that material arises again and again looking for association, understanding, and discharge. Problematic content arises as an internal battle that is too uncomfortable to confront and resolve normally. Therefore, the initial stages of therapy involve more free association sessions, and there is a goal at first to collect the bulk of the material necessary to make therapeutic associations. Jumping to conclusions based on theory fails because the inner world of the patient is ignored and the stress related to unconscious conflicts is left unaddressed. "However much we know about [the mind's] workings, we are also well aware of the fact, which should make us sceptical and modest, that it is extremely difficult to know anything definite about another individual’s personality as a whole. If we come to think of it, how much do we know about those nearest to us: our parents, brothers and sisters and other near relatives, and intimate friends? Have we not been taken by surprise at some of their actions and reactions after having known them for many years? Have we not recognised that we have committed grave errors in our judgement of people we thought we knew perfectly well? And, to go a step farther, however much we have learnt to know about ourselves, have we not at times been taken by surprise at some of our own reactions in unexpected situations?"

Moving in the direction of transference reactivity, Melanie could peel back information from the analysand without needing a lot of rapid interpretations. Just let the harsh judgments against the therapist, symbolic content in free associations, and dreams speak for themselves. "The understanding of the transference situation is our 'Open Sesame' and every time we approach the patient’s mind with it the unconscious opens up to us. But then we have also to bear in mind that we must keep to this way to its very end. What counts in analytic work, in my experience, is the unconscious. Analysis is built on the discovery of the unconscious, and all we have learned about the personality as a whole is due to our understanding of the workings of the unconscious." The farther back the maladaptive projections can be traced, the easier it is for a patient to disidentify with those archaic coping mechanisms and achieve a therapeutic result. "These facts in relation to the transference become fully comprehensible only by studying the nature of early object relations. Here I can only summarise our knowledge by saying that from the beginning both love and hate relate to the same object. The mother, and her breast and milk, is the first loved object but also the first hated object when she causes frustration and therefore both love and fears of retaliation are connected with her. We then split this mother who is both desired and loved, and hated and feared, into two mothers, as it were, a good and a bad. But there is also a strong tendency in the mind to bring the two aspects together again and to modify the bad mother by combining her again to some extent with the good mother and creating a compromise. So we go on all through development and even to some extent through life, dividing and combining again. And we do all this first in relation to our primary objects, the real father and mother; partly in relation to our 'internal objects', our pictures of father, mother etc. in our minds, our imagos."

The pathological mind has distorted visions of others and of oneself, but those distorted thoughts constantly look for relief by venting in the proximate environment. "...There is a strong tendency in the individual to externalise some figures and internalise others, as well as to distribute his love, his feelings of guilt, his restitutive tendencies, on to some people, and his hate, his dislike, his anxiety on to others, and to find different representatives for his imagos in the external world, because a constant relief of pressure can thus be obtained. These mechanisms, which are fundamental for the development of object relations, are also at the bottom of transference phenomena."

Case Studies: The 'Ratman' - Freud and Beyond: https://rumble.com/v1gu9qj-case-studies-the-ratman-freud-and-beyond.html

The environment of a psychoanalytic clinic, and the position of the analyst, make them appear like an authority figure which becomes easy for the analysand to project on. All those pathological predictions, based on past abuse, guilt and shame feelings, can demonstrate their distortions on this stranger and analyst, and because analysts are fallible, a negative transference is on its way. "We start with the present, with the transference situation, and find our way back into the past. Whatever the patient has to say, referring to his actual life, or his history, the transference situation is never far away. After all, we must not forget that the patient speaks to the analyst lying on his couch, in his room, with all the associations belonging to the transference situation. Therefore, he can as little dissociate himself from the relation to the analyst as he can from his phantasies and from his unconscious. This is also shown by the fact that however absorbed the patient may be in his subject matter, he will at once detect the slightest lessening of interest on the part of the analyst."

The relief the patient wants is to be closer to the innocence of a child before feelings of guilt could accrue with mistakes and age. For Klein, this guilt starts earlier than Freud, where the child receives the first failure from parents to provide for a need. The child receives enough sustenance from the mother to love the mother while at the same time hate her for any unreliability. The coping mechanisms develop and repeat and then become coping skills, including maladaptive ones, that are used with later intimate partners and in the workplace. Maladaptive responses then create feelings of guilt and may be felt to be a part of the personality after enough time has passed. We don't only love, but we desire to control and exploit what we love. For Klein, influenced by Abraham, the early frustrations with the breast involve an oral-sadism to control the contents of the breast, to drain and exhaust, and can culminate into eating and destruction attitudes after teething. The therapeutic level would be to see how one exploits others, tries to drain them, and the damage it can cause to relationships. If there's more awareness and enough disidentification, then more adult coping methods can be taken on to prevent new relationships from again giving way to guilt and disappointment. Earlier anal-sadistic desires to remove or destroy what is not wanted, in simple evacuation, or to control feces, to be controlling in life, can give signals as to some of the muscle tension operating in daily life unbeknownst to how archaic the influence is. Even if the desire to control can appear hateful, it's because there is something of value underlying that the person wants to control. Nobody tenses up and controls an environment that is emotionally neutral.

Enigma - Return To Innocence: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rk_sAHh9s08

"All feelings of love begin with the libidinal impulses especially the libidinal attachment to the mother (her breast) and from the very beginning of development, hate and aggression are active, as well as the powerful libidinal urges. When the infant is able to perceive and to take in his mother as a whole being, and the libidinal attachment to her breast grown into feelings of love towards her as a person, he becomes prey to the most conflicting feelings. I hold the view that feelings of sorrow, guilt and anxiety are experienced by the infant when he comes to realise to a certain extent that his loved object is the same as the one he hates and has attacked and is going on attacking in his uncontrollable sadism and greed, and that sorrow, guilt and anxiety are part and parcel of the complex relation to objects which we call love...In order to escape from the unbearable burden of sorrow and guilt and anxiety which is being felt in relation to loved and endangered objects, internal and external, the ego tries to turn away and to deflect its love from them, since his sufferings are partly a consequence of his love. One notable way of doing this is by increasing one’s hate and one’s grievances against the objects, that is to say, to reinforce the projection mechanisms. My experience has shown me that we are not in a position to judge either the amount of love or of hate which is present in any person until we have understood the ways in which love can become buried under hate and the reactions which have then again been formed against this hate."

Because there are bodily symptoms related to control, then for Melanie, the Super-ego begins to move beyond a pure parental influence. It's a mixture of parental influences as well as control mechanisms coming from the child to hatefully control what is lovable. "Through better understanding of the structure of the super-ego, we see that its nucleus is formed by images of a very primitive type which are active in the tiny infant’s mind; frightening figures which devour and persecute. But when we went deep enough into the unconscious to discover these, this work also brought to light imagos of contrary kind, helping, gratifying and reassuring figures, which we know under the name of 'good' objects, and which are also active from the beginning of development." This puts to rest any clichés about being a "lover" not a "fighter." If the love is intense enough, one will fight for it at varying levels of ferocity. Eventually, actors in the real world will be labeled as being more or less cooperative, or good or bad objects, often with distorted projections to make some angels and others devils. This includes the therapist. "It has long been known that the analyst can stand for the real father, mother, or other people of the child’s early environment, but that he is also sometimes given the part of the super-ego, and at other times that of the id by the patient." Being forced to play different parts provides an experience of the inner conflict between good and evil felt in the patient.

The Ego and the Id - Sigmund Freud: https://rumble.com/v1gvdo1-the-ego-and-the-id-sigmund-freud.html

Angels and Devils - Echo and the Bunnymen: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xq8k5zNhyOI

Enigma - Sadeness - Part i: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4F9DxYhqmKw

As the analysis continues for weeks, months and years, the analyst will be forced to play many different parts under various levels of control that will provide material for interpretation to understand the patient's inner world. "We see that the analyst may change from one moment to another, from a kindly figure to a dangerous persecutor, from an internal figure to a real person. Looking at the structure of the super-ego in the way I have suggested, we are able to detect in the transference situation very fine distinctions between the roles the analyst is made to take in the patient’s mind, and we can observe the very quick changes from one to another." Which objects are being projected onto the analyst is based on relational profiles coming from descriptions of friends and family of the patient. Without those other people being present, then errors projected onto the analyst can provide clues as to the accuracy of those profiles. Each wrong guess aimed at the therapist provides valuable information for interpretation. "There is so much reality in phantasy and so much phantasy in reality...To what extent reality and phantasy are intermingled is only to be revealed by analysing the transference situation, whereby we are able to discover the past both in its real and in its phantastic aspects."

Like in my review of the consequences of projection in the Fear of Success series, there is an energy waste in projective expectations. Wrong expectations create draining disappointment. The therapeutic result is for emotions and reactivity to react more to real details than just imagined catastrophes, or living in idealized expectations that are guaranteed to disappoint. It has to be seen that important real events provide material for predictions, but those predictions don't often have enough material to predict accurately. Leaving those failures unaddressed leads to bad coping, and with repetition, they turn into "anti-skills" that are maladaptive. The super-ego begins to develop a habit of distorted predictions that assail the ego in its attempt to deal with the real world. "...If we come to understand the phantasies which were confirmed and strengthened by the mother’s unkind behaviour, and the extent to which guilt and anxiety, because of the person’s impulses and phantasies were active in connection with these experiences, then we are able to undo to a greater or lesser extent, the harmful effect of these experiences...Memories of [the mother's] kindness, which had been there as well as her unkindness, come up; and one might even discover that her unkindness had been much exaggerated in the patient’s mind by projection...Another important point to be considered is to what extent the child, wanting punishment and harshness for internal reasons, had influenced his mother’s attitude towards him...I wish now to show that it is often that the effect of analysis is to prove that the terrible mother has not actually been so terrible, or had been much less terrible than the patient imagined, and has also provided trust and kindness which he is grateful for. And in contrast to this, the analysis can also clarify the patient’s image of an idealised mother, and of the denial that went along with this, and show her deficiencies, which had been denied, and the effect these deficiencies had on the child’s mind...The past appears to the patient in a more realistic light."

Object Relations: Fear Of Success Pt. 7: https://rumble.com/v3ub2sa-object-relations-fear-of-success-pt.-7.html

So, if you idealize people you may tolerate their abuse. If you devalue them, you might eliminate potentially good relationships. If you approach people with splitting you deny many of their real characteristics. This is often how toxic relationships are maintained. The abuser gives you some good things but then expects you to tolerate much worse. If patients can see how they overvalued their parents in the Oedipus Complex, and see how they created an inappropriate relationship template for themselves, then they can now see their role in bad relationships and stop desiring people and things with bad tradeoffs. HG Tudor calls this environmental influence Ever Presence. You can scan your life for people, places, and things that offered some "good times," that made you tolerate some kind of disadvantages, and then use disenchantment to remove overestimation from your life. For people stuck in this kind of repetition, it requires a constant reminder of the consequences of staying in those relationships, juxtaposed to the inferior temptations.

The Sinister Core of Love-Bombing Explained... - Kim Saeed: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/4qVr-VVcuXs

7 Preventative Hoovers : Mid Range Narcissist - HG Tudor: https://youtu.be/zNjHn8UBfEQ?si=ZRWNf75uXFYNULpG

Ever Presence - HG Tudor: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tqsq_Dzo60U

Bullying as Art, Abuse as Craftsmanship - Sam Vaknin: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u2ucwtmsz0c

A successful analysis may take a long time because certain confessions of embarrassing details will take a lot of trust on the part of the patient before they will divulge. Both symbolic and dream material will constantly point at a sore spot in the mind that will require some hovering in the analysis. "...In analysis we should get to know as much as possible about the patient’s life. But our attempts to do so are often frustrated for some length of time by the very fact that the same mechanisms and processes which are underlying the transference phenomena are partly responsible for the patient’s temporarily keeping his actual life from us, whilst enabling him to tell us more of his phantasies...In the process of repression, hate is disconnected from the original object, the love feelings towards the object also become impeded...The analyst must, however, keep well in mind the fact that this withholding of material, phantasies or information about real life, is a sign of marked anxiety and that no analysis can be regarded as well advanced until that anxiety is diminished and the patient can tell about all sides of his mental life...What matters in analysing phantasies, at whatever stages of the analysis it may be, is whether or not the analyst is able to find the links between them and the patient’s experiences in the past and present...The patient’s phantasies appear in the transference situation in such a variety of expressions and through such circuitous routes that it requires a corresponding versatility and imagination on the part of the analyst to follow them...If the various phantastic images get projected on to the analyst and thus become analysed in the transference situation the super-ego will gradually become less severe and at the same time the analyst more real to the patient. What I have said applies equally to the phantastically bad and to the phantastically good imagos."

As these transferences get challenged and compared to reality and distortions are discovered, the patient gradually gets to understand his or her inner world. Catharsis and abreaction isn't all dramatic and epic. It can just be bringing up a real memory and feeling the consequences that happened in reality, so that the feeling is not dissociated and ignored. Seeing how little control one had as a child, the weak coping mechanisms and all the behaviors that developed before adulthood, and especially FEELING the memories, increases the learning, fair judgment, balance and disenchantment with archaic influences. When unfair judgments are relinquished, the loving aspects in the hated objects begin to return and there's a desire for reparation with those objects. They are not split into idealized or demonized objects anymore, and because the mind is imitative, the relaxation of the hatred and the increase of love towards others, including the recovered internal good objects, they can also become a support in the mind for self-love and the ability to love, to cooperate once more. If this doesn't happen then there is "...no internal good figure helping [the patient] to put his objects right." The patient has to see "...how the influence of friendly people goes to build up good imagos and to diminish the anxiety of bad ones, while the influence of frustrating or frightening real objects and situations is apt to increase the predominance of the bad internal objects."

When there's success, patients see the good in the distortedly negative objects and then see the good in the therapist, so a more positive transference returns. "Whenever this happens, a strong relief of anxiety is obtained, since reparative tendencies are such an important means of mastering it. Actually one can often observe in child-analysis that when an interpretation is in process of resolving anxiety, that the child turns from burning and destroying things to a constructive play, and becomes peaceful. Then the child has been projecting his loving feelings on to the object, the analyst, the object by this means becoming good also in his mind, and thus the ego introjects the analyst as a good object." The therapeutic effect is a discontinuation of stressful predictive, ruminating, rehearsing thoughts. One looks for real details to prove predictions instead of just jumping to conclusions and good internal objects provide a support when the environment changes and becomes more hostile. This of course can then be a motivator for the patient to want to look for better environments. Seeing clearly what is realistically good also provides opportunities for healthy imitations.

This opportunity to see the internal mind, so that the patient can see their projections in real time, helps to deflate the need to believe those projections or follow them. Like seeing objects in clouds, fire, or physical patterns, they can be real time proof for a person to see how the inner world is coloring the neutral environment. What are the things that your inner world readily recognizes? This is where Rorschach and ink blot tests got their prominence in the 20th century. What people are able to see in these blots tells much about their inner worlds, especially if there are many tests over a period of time. When patients see the destructiveness of their distorted views and their lack of skills, they can catch their preemptive strikes against others, the potential mistakes, and the certain guilt that will be felt if those projections are acted on. There's a motivation now to discontinue these self-sabotaging distortions. "But I myself was also one of the injured objects. We found, namely, that the teacup, which he had wanted to smash in his despair when he had felt that I was going to give him up, stood for me. When, after my interpretation, the patient realised that something destructive he had actually wanted to do was intended to be done to me, strong anxiety and feelings of guilt came up...This feeling that he expressed with great affect in the analysis was a repetition of his early aggressive impulses against his mother...when he wanted her breast and could not have it. The hate and aggression thus aroused made him feel that she would never come back because he had killed her." Analysts can ask themselves "what is the patient's mind trying to do? What is it trying to satisfy? What are the frustrations? How far back do those frustrations go?" to understand the symbolic content, body language, and transferences.

Because the ego in Freudian analysis is more about the reality principle, it's easy to say that treatment success happens when there is an increase in the ego, but because the super-ego is so powerful, and operates automatically in the mind for most people, therapists are constantly having to work on their patient's super-ego, to reduce the wasted energy that distorted predictions make. It's a bit like the therapist is being the ego for the patient until they can operate their ego independently "...The main purpose of the psychoanalytic process [is] towards a mitigation of the severity of the super-ego. That is to say, we have set going certain alterations in processes of the patient’s mind by means of which his anxiety of his frightening imagos has been reduced and the bad imagos in his mind have become less dangerous. In other words, we have initiated a more benign circle in the patient’s mind. Anxiety and, in turn, aggression, have lessened, constructiveness and feelings of love have come more to the fore, and trust and confidence have increased all round. In this connection I want to stress again that to achieve this aim, which is the essence of psychoanalytic work, we are guided by the principle that we should analyse the transference situation in connection with the exploration of the unconscious by means of the unique instrument of interpretation. I do not believe that there is any other way by which the analyst might try to make himself a more real figure to the patient."

Good interpretations usually bring up real memories that don't conform to the projection. Each real memory rebuilds the realistic object, and as defined above, objects are impressions of real people. "Thus the distorted picture of the object may prevail, while the real picture is more or less buried. This understanding of the object as it really is, is bound to reappear in the transference situation. Moreover, and together with this, a growing insight develops in the patient’s mind of his own mental processes and at the same time of the actual feelings and motives of other people." In a way, the patient has to separate out their self-interest to see the true motives of others, who of course have their own self-interests. If one is obsessed with making people behave and conform, they are truly not accepting their independence. By challenging the accuracy of projections and by showing contrary evidence, love is freed up because love is often sympathetic to people who are not deceptive and are just trying their best, even if they make mistakes from time to time. If there's a chance for emotional reciprocity in the old relationships, there is also a chance at reparation.

To get at these therapeutic results, timing is everything. As material is gathered, there are different levels of anxiety that show that one is closer to the mark and the patient is ready for a resonating interpretation. "The interpretation should be timely, which means, it should be given at the time when the analyst detects signs of latent anxiety. It must be specific, that is, it should be directed to that part of the material which is associated with the greatest amount of latent anxiety and of id-impulse. It must connect with the layer of the mind which has been activated at that precise moment. All of this implies that the interpretation should intervene at a point of urgency in the unconscious material, as it emerges in relation to the transference...Where the point of urgency is will be shown by the multiplicity and repetition, often in varied forms, of representation of the same unconscious content, and in some cases also by the intensity of feeling attached to such representations." Then when people abreact to the painful imagoes enough times, those imagoes become progressively more boring. Because the affect has been vented and exhausted, and the insightful interpretation was sufficiently understood, a learning mentality arises. One learns to react with more accuracy to situations and there's a window of opportunity to improve people skills. This leads to a therapeutic result where that material connected with the anxiety arises less often in day to day consciousness. The analysand has learned from the past and is not stuck in unconscious associations. "An interpretation is an action which definitely establishes connections where they have been broken off for unconscious reasons. I believe that even establishing links between the conscious and the pre-conscious always implies connections with the unconscious as well..."

Interpretations are based on smaller links of material that build up "like a mosaic; one has to put each little piece where it fits into the whole picture. Now we can take that simile as an image of linking. The picture gets fuller and fuller, because we link one situation with another, one piece of material with another; because we go back to material which very early on foreshadowed something which has now become more distinct." The need for so much information and linking is to surround the sore spot of the pathological secret or the most difficult reality the patient cannot face. "This brings us to the whole question of integration and the anxiety that it stirs up. Because a great deal of anxiety is raised at the point of integration, so that we sometimes find the patient going off to withdraw entirely at this point, because he cannot bear to face it, it is too painful, too frightening, and may be unbearable. Or we might find that he moves on to talk about something entirely different. Now how do we link that? We have to listen to what we are being told, even if it seems to move away entirely from what has just been said. The patient may strongly contradict it, or it is projected onto some other person, or onto the analyst. But if we bear in mind that the splitting has happened precisely at the moment of integration, we shall know better how to proceed. We shall understand how the patient may only gradually become able to bear integration." Integration happens when the distorted splitting is made to confront reality and readjust its appraisals, and it points to situations, often of trauma, where the maladaptive coping was used in the past.

If they never get to the anxious sore spot, then the analysis has to continue on until the patient is ready to confess something or describe an experience that is normally too painful to communicate to a complete stranger. The mosaic and links will keep bringing the analyst back to the same territory again and again. The analyst may have to ask "what happened there? When this happened was there something else that happened?" Typically there's some abuse content, or there is a guilt feeling based on a shameful desire, or a hatred of a loved object that causes feelings of guilt, for thinking or expressing that hatred or violence. There could be also one or many experiences of devaluation where an incident, or incidents, reduced the status of the patient in a marked way that annihilated the infantile self-esteem, sending them on the wrong track thus forward.

If there are stronger defenses, like found in difficult personality disorders, those defenses may seem actually offensive to the therapist, and their countertransference can be activated. Again, understanding defense mechanisms is a way to prevent shock or surprise. Both the therapist and the patient can use projective identification, but the difference between how the projective identification is used, has to do with motive. Analysts put themselves into the shoes of patients so as to get to know their inner world better, but at the same time they have to avoid manipulating the patient with cookie-cutter interpretations to force an outcome. The interpretation needs to come out independently from the content of the patient. On the other hand, when patients are severely pathological, the motivation of projective identification is because "...the patient violently wants to put himself into the analyst to get mixed up with him and to put all his depression, aggression, violence and so on, into the analyst. I am sure that is the reason why the analysis of schizophrenics is more tiring, even if one has been able to guard oneself against it." Projective identifications can also influence suggestive people to imitate their mistakes. By doing this they can relieve pressure from shame in their minds by normalizing that shame onto the gullible target.

Cluster B types, including Narcissists, can gain a sense of superiority by rattling the therapist. The therapy cannot be derailed and it has to return to the goal of illuminating the inner world of the patient, to the patient, so they can function better with that knowledge. "What motive is projective identification used; that is extremely important. Here we come to the well-known fault of analysts who suddenly become very active on behalf of the patient, because they have become the patient. As you said, they are in his shoes, and there the motivation and the degree of identification is so important. Up to a point I think that this is done to be helpful and to understand the patient, but the question of re-integration is extremely important, to be able to take it back sufficiently to think, 'Now I understand what is going on in the patient' and 'Now I am myself again'...It is not in order to control him that I project myself into him, it is to see what is going on in him, and to be able to understand him. It is not only the degree, it is the motivation which is so important. If it is in order to control him because I am so dissatisfied with him as a person and very much wish to change him and therefore put myself into him, and I’m going to make a nicer person out of him, then I am sure that it has entirely gone wrong." Curiosity instead was a boundary shield for Melanie Klein. "Instead of taking on the state of mind the patient is attempting to create in her, Klein was prepared to say 'No!' to the projection and to continue to observe the patient despite her own disturbance. In her approach to the patient Klein was very influenced by her wish to know, that is, the wish to explore the mind of the patient whatever that mind was like. This is a very important quality for an analyst and although she accepted that it was not always possible, she argued that this kind of narrowing of curiosity to focus on the patient was central to her attitude."

Self-esteem

As described above, Klein found that the therapist's role as a transference object is to be a new role model so that a person with a weak object inner world can slowly develop a new realistically positive object inside that is supportive and a cheerleader for the patient. With poor parenting, that object isn't there and quite likely there are negative objects with poisonous views. Just like Freud's problem with the "Wolf Man," many patients continue to repeat prior scenarios of their lives despite finding some freedom in the analytical space, and these disappointments led Freud to go Beyond The Pleasure Principle, to posit a death drive, where death is seen as the most permanent way to relieve internal struggles, a Nirvana Principle. The pleasure and reality principles were constantly flouted in failed therapies and Freud had to account for the variance. In The Language of Psychoanalysis, the contradiction was defined. "The fact is that when what are clearly unpleasant experiences are repeated, it is hard to see at first glance just what agency of the mind could attain satisfaction by this means. Although these are obviously irresistible forms of behaviour, having that compulsive character which is the mark of all that emanates from the unconscious, it is nonetheless difficult to show anything in them which could be construed—even if it were seen as a compromise—as the fulfilment of a repressed wish."

The Pleasure Principle - Sigmund Freud: https://rumble.com/v1gurqv-the-pleasure-principle-sigmund-freud.html

Beyond the Pleasure Principle - Freud & Beyond - War Pt. (2/3): https://rumble.com/v1gv855-beyond-the-pleasure-principle-freud-and-beyond-war-pt.-23.html

In modern therapy circles, this parenting period that gives children the chance to play and learn about themselves, can be a failure by parents for the patient and it leads to "stagnation or lack of growth in counseling work and in life, such as career choices or relationship patterns. [This] can be an indicator that a client’s self-esteem is out of whack. This can be the case both when an individual is overconfident and when they lack confidence and believe they are not good enough...Clients who struggle with low self-esteem may be stuck in patterns that include staying in jobs or relationships that aren’t fulfilling, healthy or a good fit for them. They generally lack the confidence to seek or picture themselves in a better situation. These clients may have internalized the message 'I’m not good enough.' Patterns of accepting and allowing others to treat them poorly can be a sign that a person has low self-esteem, as can behaviors that indicate they don’t trust themselves, such as asking a lot of questions or constantly seeking advice from others. When low self-esteem copresents with depression, it can manifest as listlessness or hopelessness. These clients simply may not know themselves well and struggle to find things that they enjoy or are good at, from hobbies to job skills."

Self-esteem root and branch by Rachel Bar-Yossef-Dadon: https://ct.counseling.org/2022/04/self-esteem-tending-to-the-roots-and-branches/

From the Freudian standpoint, frustrations and stress in life affect the energy flow, or libido, in the patient. "Freud coined the term 'initial narcissism' and 'secondary narcissism'. The concept 'initial narcissism' defines the basic and natural love of any baby and person of himself, which derives from a sense of omnipotence. During one's development, this sense of omnipotence is necessarily damaged due to the frustrations of reality and therefore the child, in normal development, turns his libido and self-love towards others. If there is a problem in the transfer of energy investment from the self to others, then 'secondary narcissism' develops by which the person is preoccupied with himself as a result of not appreciating himself enough and thus being incapable of investing sufficient love and libido in others." That self-preoccupation can dominate in the adult life as seen in Freud's Mourning and Melancholia. Essentially the patient is wasting their energy in this self-preoccupation and now has no energy left for engaging in healthy relationships. "The patient represents his ego to us as worthless and morally despicable; he reproaches and vilifies himself and expects to be cast out and punished. He abases himself before everyone and commiserates with his own relatives for being connected with someone so unworthy."

These attitudes make a patient a prime candidate for repetition compulsion, because their ego lacks the love and support to captain the mind and direct it independently. The pain requires addictions to numb them and the entire environment has to be changed or avoided for people to exist in it. Other people can also sense the self-preoccupation, which is a healthy warning signal that the person they are with is hiding their self-esteem issues and being inauthentic. Authentic people are capable of being vulnerable in a variety of situations, and the internal love allows them to tolerate criticism or rejection. Of course, one has to be open about those issues and actively combat them with skill development, to slide into a learning mentality, and away from the self-hatred trap. Self-hatred leads to sadomasochistic reactions that can attack oneself or project and attack others, hence the reason why inauthentic, perfectionist, purity believing types have a dangerous severe super-ego that attacks itself and others: Essentially being out of control. This is also a problem for religions. Unless the religion implants a parental replacement inside of the follower with a loving internal object, it will often resort to an all or nothing splitting tendency to attack oneself and others, regardless of the religious denomination. This is why awareness of this often repeated tendency in culture is so important. A good portion of politics, terrorism, war, class strife, identity strife, etc., is a consequence of self-hatred, a lack of self-acceptance, and it always leads to destruction of cultures if it spreads too far and wide. The difficulty is making sure that the patient can accept themselves as they are, just like an ideal parent, while at the same time have them be convinced that they are capable of learning. Clouds of past shame are distorting if they insist that the patient is incapable of learning. When a learning mentality is adopted it doesn't require that one forgets the past, and when the past can be integrated as a lesson, it increases confidence so that action towards life can begin again. The litmus test would be based on marked changes in behavior with a reduction of self-preoccupation.

Both Freud and Jung believed that one has to make things conscious before one can control those contents. Jung said "until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate." This means that you can't analyze your dreams as if they are 100% on your side and helpful to you. They will contain the inner world at the current level that it is, and reflect the kind of people that are influencing you in the environment as described above. Only through seeing the causes and effects of life decisions from the past, when you had a childish lack of skill, while allowing the feelings of loss, consequences, damage, and grief over the ruin of your life, then the mind can begin to process and let go of those maladaptive coping mechanisms that are the anti-thesis of learning. With strong defenses to protect against painful affect, this makes the psychoanalytic therapy process a long one that can last into years, depending on the patient. During this time there can be a lot of relapses into repetition.

To understand these complex inner workings involving relapse, it's good to survey psychoanalytic definitions describing how we take in objects and project them out onto others. When people cannot see how they are playing out relationships between their parents inside of themselves, that playing out will happen without it being seen by the subject. For example, Melanie Klein had a bad marriage with a lack of desire for sex with her husband, but she also noticed that her mother was somewhat frigid with her father in autobiographical accounts. That's an example of how both genetics and imitation work together to provide a coping skill level for the child that follows into adulthood if not made conscious. These objects have relationships in the inner world of the patient and they repeat with a sense of trying to figure out the links. In the Little Hans paper, Freud said of recurring material that "in an analysis, a thing which has not been understood inevitably reappears; like an unlaid ghost, it cannot rest until the mystery has been solved and the spell broken."

The mind is full of past understandings of what was alluring, including those things that create internal conflicts related to consequences. Because the short-term mind can get carried away with one or the other, it has trouble assimilating them into a balance. When one is meditating, it's easy to see many opposites appear into consciousness as thoughts arise and pass away. For Freud, the meditative process is altered to make the unconscious conscious through free association so that one should be able to see projection and introjection via "the original pleasure-ego [wanting] to introject into itself everything that is good and [ejecting] from itself everything that is bad." Projection and introjection involve the outer and inner worlds of influence. With Incorporation, one is identifying good, bad, or inbetween objects, almost like the activity of a food tasting. With Internalization, or Introjection, outer relationships between people become internal relationships, including their conflicts and struggles, as well as their successful behaviors. The outer conflicts turn into inner arguments. Identification overlaps many incorporations and introjections, as well as group identifications. In the end, you can identify in whole or in part, with other people. Contradictions and disharmonies about what is actually good or bad from these disparate influences can reside in the Super-ego side by side and conflict with the Ego's attempts to work with reality. You can literally see the pathway on how to be somebody else and take in all those cultural contradictions and disharmonies, starting with sampling and culminating in habit.

Group Psychology - Freud & Beyond - War Pt. (3/3): https://rumble.com/v1gvcxr-group-psychology-freud-and-beyond-war-pt.-33.html

In Klein's method, one has to clear up the inconsistencies in the Super-ego to allow smoother functioning and a therapeutic result. This can be seen by watching the conflicts play out in analysis. "My experience has confirmed my belief that if I construe the dislike at once as anxiety and negative transference feeling and interpret it as such in connection with the material which the child at the same time produces and then trace it back to its original object, the mother, I can at once observe that the anxiety diminishes. This manifests itself in the beginning of a more positive transference and, with it, of more vigorous play..." The importance of tracing internalizations back in time is to see how habitual they have become. Freud said that "…what is called an 'identification'—that is to say, the assimilation of one ego to another one, as a result of which the first ego behaves like the second in certain respects, imitates it and in a sense takes it up into itself. Identification has been not unsuitably compared with the oral, cannibalistic incorporation of another person. It is a very important form of attachment to someone else, probably the very first, and not the same thing as the choice of an object." In reality, the choice of an object later on is helped by understanding the positive and negative repercussions of the imitated behavior of the earliest days. When reminiscences of the past are colored with emotion, one can ask "where did I learn that? Is it harmful in some way? Is it truly my identity, or just an imitation from culture that is now a habit?" When therapists make conscious a patient's maladaptive reactions going back to when they were first used, there's at least a chance now to convince the patient that the allure of the old attachment to parents, and those archaic coping methods, are not worth repeating. Of course, anything discovered that is maladaptive may have an opposite and that can also provide constructive opportunities to develop something new that is unfamiliar. Even the word familiar, has the root word family in it. One can also work backwards from a desirable end point and seek out the realistic supports that make its manifestation possible. If there are behaviors that you are not doing, and neither did your parents, that's an example right there of making something unconscious conscious.

Regardless of the pathology, it comes down to behaviors or actions. When you do good things for yourself again and again it reinforces healthy identifications and builds the good object in the mind. When bad behaviors repeat, then the worst objects develop instead. This is why constructing better inner worlds can be a long process, especially for inner worlds that are more like hell-scapes. Work done by the therapist can be undone by poor choices. For example, a difficult kind of repeating patient would be that of a pedophile. In the 20th century, Emanuel Hammer described their inner worlds with certain patterns showing up for male pedophiles. "One of the most striking findings in all groups is a pervasive fear of heterosexual contact...showing hostility toward the mature female sex object...What causes this fear of the adult female sex-object?...[There are] unconscious castration fears, feelings of tremendous guilt in sexual areas and anticipation of awful punishment. The castration factors also appear as feelings that they are damaged and that they are not complete units within themselves. Their projective protocols are replete with responses reflecting fears and feelings of genital mutilation and injury, phallic impotency and inadequacy...Almost every one of the subjects exhibited, on the basis of psychological examination and/or psychiatric interview: (1) as a reaction to massive Oedipal entanglements, castration fear or feelings and fear of approaching mature females psychosexually; (2) interpersonal inhibitions of schizoid to schizophrenic proportions; (3) weak ego-strength and lack of adequate control of impulses; and (4) concrete orientation and minimal capacity for sublimation..."

In Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy in the Kleinian Tradition, Jean Arundale describes a more modern inner world for this type. There is a "style of communication in perversions—the disturbances in symbolic functioning leading to concrete thinking, omnipotent autistic domination of the object, and excessive use of projective identification—as often underpinning the severe disturbance in object relationships, together with an interference in thinking and reality testing...[There is] inhibited genital sexuality, inadequate identifications, strong defences against depressive anxiety, and a sadomasochistic narcissistic organization. [There is a] use of the sexual object in the perversion as an 'as-if transitional object' directed against anxiety states in an act of reparation to the self, creating an infant self idolized by the mother...Pedophiles experience the wish for love and intimacy as annihilatory; they fear being taken over totally. It is felt to be too dangerous to make the identifications with parental objects, enabling development of the self structure to take place, because of a fear of invasion and possession. The pedophile, fueled by an inordinate degree of castration anxiety, defends against the catastrophe of fusion or possession by narcissistic withdrawal, self-preservative aggression, and the domination and control of objects such that they are given no independent existence. The pedophilic act bestows upon the child self the love that the pedophile was deprived of, without the necessity for a real relationship."

These case studies are full of repetition compulsion and Jean for example had a patient for eight years before the analysis had to break off due to the patient having to move far away. In her case study, the patient came to her after other failed treatments, including penile electroshock therapy. He "became disillusioned with the treatment and lost hope in it as a means of changing his sexual orientation. Up to this point, his sexual outlet was to masturbate on the weekends while smoking cannabis and having fantasies of boys. Incited by the news of a proposal in Holland to lower the age of consent for homosexuals, he began to hint that he was going to return to the active practice of pedophilia." After five years, the patient brought into therapy some of his dreams, providing a deeper glimpse into his inner world.  One dream involved "terrifying female figures—monster women with tentacles or snakes for breasts, evil, wild-haired women with a missing arm or leg, waiting for him in a cave or at the end of a tunnel." As the therapy continued, his inner world improved very incrementally. Another dream found the patient "reconstructing a house and building new structures on dilapidated buildings." Later on "he dreamt of a child in prison who was being rescued, clearly his own child self becoming freer and making contact." Towards the termination of the therapy he regressed to older hatreds of adult sexuality. He said that "'sexual feeling between adults is perverse', and he had a dream of his parents having violent, disgusting sexual intercourse, smearing shit." This is the test of long therapy to show the limits of how much can change in an inner world that is so damaged.

In Repetitive and Maladaptive Behavior, by Brad Bowins, the author went back to Freud's death drive and reviewed experiences that other psychoanalysts had with repeating thoughts and behavior. "Freud indicated that there exists a demonic aspect derived from id resistance. He viewed the compulsion to repeat as exemplifying the typical resistance of the unconscious...Negative transference itself can be viewed as a specialized form of repetition compulsion. Clearly, from the therapist’s perspective repetition compulsion represents a path of resistance." Freud's instinct conservatism in the death drive was how it made the tension go down to zero and it aimed to do this in all experiences. To develop new skills, it requires some tension, and in some cases, a lot of tension. People have to tolerate criticism, failure, and they need strength in the inner world to persist in development. The nirvana principle does not like this tension. The comfort zone ironically may include many bad behaviors because there's less tension in repetition in these dark inner worlds than there is in acting in new ways. Skills also have a gradient and what is more exciting to the mind is what seems accessible, like finding low hanging fruit, and following the path of least resistance. The life drive has to harness introjection of part-behaviors, make a good object inside the inner world, and to make familiar what is unfamiliar, which is the Uncanny: the border between what is conscious in our development and what is unconscious and undeveloped, and also scary. Narcissists may work backwards from an ego-ideal, simulate the behaviors, display a pristine pure identity to get attention from others, but in all authenticity, there has to be some enjoyment of the results for a true introjection to take place. Identification has to be excited and interested in those good results for their own sake. Hence such a long process.

The therapist's self-esteem By Bethany Bray: https://www.longdom.org/open-access/therapists-sense-of-low-selfesteem-87240.html

The Ego and the Id - Sigmund Freud: https://rumble.com/v1gvdo1-the-ego-and-the-id-sigmund-freud.html

For Klein, there are many ways for repetition compulsion to manifest in the lives of patients. One of the common manifestations for many is to return to past relationships that are toxic, and the motivation is often to master and or repair those situations into health, despite the fact that many of these situations cannot be repaired. Regardless, for some there remains a belief that one can find a way. This is even more doomed when the same pathological methods of relating are repeated. "Primitive reparation leads to further damage of the patient’s internal objects, thus creating a situation where any attempt to restore the object leads to new damage, hurt and guilt. This may be one of the mechanisms fueling the repetition compulsion which in its own right can be seen as a desperate and failing reparative attempt." This would apply to any situation when a poor choice is made coinciding with a lack of skill and development. In the the typical situation of the pathological relationship, it involves the Trojan Horse, where people try to repair the relationship by creating new positive projects to share pleasure in, but then returns the fear of abandonment, needs for power and control, and eventually myriad forms of sabotage begin to manifest. Consequences repeat and the inner object world remains the same. The character of repeating bad scenarios also has an element of punishment as well. It's like a challenge that needs mastery or punishment to satisfy the ego's need for vengeance or atonement. "We see here a repetition-compulsion derived from various causes, but influenced very much by the feeling of guilt demanding punishment."

Like with Freud, Melanie believed that there needed to be a lot of repeating and working through of the oldest material connected with shame for a deeper healing. "I believe that the pressure exerted by the earliest anxiety situations is one of the factors which brings about the repetition compulsion. When persecutory and depressive anxiety and guilt diminish, there is less urge to repeat fundamental experiences over and over again, and therefore early patterns and modes of feelings are maintained with less tenacity. These fundamental changes come about through the consistent analysis of the transference; they are bound up with a deep-reaching revision of the earliest object-relations and are reflected in the patient's current life as well as in the altered attitudes towards the analyst." I also believe that when patients can look at their parents and imagine what they went through in their parenting and all the deficits accrued, there has to be a solace with the understanding that those toxic parents have their own damaged objects and are suffering from the same results in life due to their self-sabotage.

Without the dispelling of the illusion that toxic relationships can be cured with strong love experiences, the temptation pushes the mind to go seeking for these cul-de-sacs of punishment and sabotage. "The impulsion to relieve the fear of internal and external dangers by means of proofs in the external world appears to me to be an essential factor in repetition compulsion. The more neurotic the individual is, the more are these proofs bound up with the need for punishment. The stronger the anxiety of the earliest anxiety-situations and the weaker the hopeful currents of feeling, the less favourable are the conditions with which these counterproofs are bound up. In such cases only severe punishment, or rather unhappy experiences (which are taken as punishment), can replace the dreaded punishment which is anticipated in phantasy." Stanley Rosner in The Self Sabotage Cycle, described how this experience can manifest, which happens especially when people are stuck for options and feel that they can't escape certain relationships, jobs, and cultures. A big part of therapy success happens when patients find better relationships and there are no guarantees that therapists can make in regards to those expectations. At some point the patient has to be able to make good choices for themselves without the need for handholding. It's pathological when "one lives with the fear that the trauma will recur and, therefore, it must be relived in order to gain that illusory sense of mastery and control." For progress to happen, "the intellectual awareness must be translated into changes in feelings, in self-perception, and in behavior for significant restructuring to take place." This is why people can intellectually learn something, but behavior responds to feelings more closely.

This eventually leads the patient to have to develop a certain amount grit and daring to face the wall of anxiety connected with making personal changes in life, and to stick with those changes until they feel familiar and newly comfortable. Betty Joseph explained it in a Kleinian way. "I am suggesting that the anxiety that these patients are struggling against is anxiety associated with dependence; that feelings of dependence and need stimulate intense envy and hatred towards the primary object, and therefore what these patients unconsciously fear is intense ambivalence, guilt, and depression. This they particularly fear since they have an inner conviction that their earliest aggression has reduced their internal object to an extremely perilous or destroyed condition—which they cannot face. Their method of avoiding this depressive anxiety is to avoid the experience of dependence by the use of the splitting, and projective and introjective identification combination of defences. These patients therefore get caught in an insoluble situation; they cannot face ambivalence and guilt and so cannot reach and work through the depressive position; they retreat from it by the use of defences belonging to the paranoid schizoid position, so that they are subsequently faced with manifold persecutions. Their particular method of splitting and fusion with the idealized object protects them from psychosis, but their inability to tolerate ambivalence, conflict, and therefore integration obviates the possibility of normality."

The depressive position comes about here from the feeling of guilt for damaging a good object in the past. The mind goes into a paranoid-schizoid position to see the world as persecutory and therefore it reacts in a schizoid way to stay safe and alone from the dangerous world. Projection happens to make one feel more secure in the world by spreading blame elsewhere, undervaluing people, and by overvaluing role models. People then have trouble advancing because the lack of self-love drains energy that is needed for adventure in relationships and work. The splitting starts at the beginning, with good and bad objects, based on judgments by the infant on the quality of parenting, and then the parents are introjected as proof that one is good or bad in an exaggerated identity. The patient then repeats past behavior, because to venture into the world for growth is to invite new criticism from others, and this can't be tolerated because there is a requirement of self-love to maintain a resilient learning mentality for success. For example, many people have to date scores or even hundreds of people before they find a suitable match for a long-term relationship. That can easily make people retreat into themselves through exhaustion. Difficult divorces, meaningless jobs, and accidents can make people want to run away from the world and from one's emotions, but ultimately, those who are healthy, can feel unpleasant emotions, and keep on with their goals and adjust them where necessary. They don't remain discombobulated for too long before continuing with healthy goals and reality testing. There's an inner core that says to oneself "I love you and believe in you."

An Aspect of the Repetition Compulsion by Betty Joseph: https://pep-web.org/search/document/IJP.040.0213A?page=P0221

Because the sense of self has trouble integrating the good and bad and seeing both a mixture of good and bad in others, there's a difficulty in seeing that mixture in new people. They become exaggeratedly good or bad right off the bat with constant disappointments when reality alternates between good and bad behavior. The Melanie Klein Trust provides a good summary. "Klein considers that both constitutional and environmental factors affect the course of the paranoid-schizoid position. The central constitutional factor is the balance of life and death instincts in the infant. The central environmental factor is the mothering that the infant receives. If development proceeds normally, extreme paranoid anxieties and schizoid defences are largely given up during the early infantile paranoid-schizoid position and during the working through of the depressive position...This 'binary splitting' is essential for healthy development as it enables the infant to take in and hold on to sufficient good experience to provide a central core around which to begin to integrate the contrasting aspects of the self. The establishment of a good internal object is thought by Klein to be a prerequisite for the later working through of the 'depressive position.'" When there isn't enough integration, meaning no core positive self, people end up not knowing their good side and therefore can't make it a core platform for exploring the world. When there are obstacles in the world, people need a platform to return to, to regenerate enough self-love to start again. When that is missing, there's an unrealistic demand for purity of the self, and the shame, mixed with good qualities, can't be accepted for what they are, which are experiences that allow for learning. There's a lack of reality towards human foibles that makes the severe super-ego over active and critical. It leads eventually to relationships that are mainly about mistrust, exploitation, defensiveness, power and control. Healthy relationships can control envy and intimate partners can share and enjoy pleasure together in the pleasure principle, and make common sense adjustments in the real world of obstacles with the reality principle. When choices constantly lead to conflict, it raises the question if the Oedipus Complex is operating again and influencing repetition. In a way, Psychoanalysis is a little like an atheistic version of The Bible. Instead of the Ten Commandments, the Oedipus Complex acts like a heuristic to foretell conflicts related to desires that cannot be shared. The resolution of the Oedipus Complex is to stake a free claim somewhere else, whether it refers to property, relationships, or vocations. To explore and find safe places is to drop the Paranoid-Schizoid position where the world is too dangerous and approach the depressive position. "If the confluence of loved and hated figures can be borne, anxiety begins to centre on the welfare and survival of the other as a whole object, eventually giving rise to remorseful guilt and poignant sadness, linked to the deepening of love. With pining for what has been lost or damaged by hate comes an urge to repair. Ego capacities enlarge and the world is more richly and realistically perceived."

Paranoid-Schizoid Position - Melanie Klein Trust: https://melanie-klein-trust.org.uk/theory/paranoid-schizoid-position/

Depressive Position - Melanie Klein Trust: https://melanie-klein-trust.org.uk/theory/depressive-position/

Brad Bowins provides some suggestions for therapists to help patients with the working-through process to prevent intellectual understanding from decoupling from feelings. Feelings and understanding together help a person to let go of the past:

Indicate to the patient how the repetitive behavior is maladaptive in regards to relationships, general functioning, or emotional states. For example, a woman allows men to repeatedly take advantage of her.

Explain to the patient how he or she is not linking distressing feelings arising from a traumatic occurrence to the cognitive components of the trauma.

To optimize motivation indicate that as a general rule conscious processing of fear and other disturbing emotions diminishes the pain, even though in the very short run the pain might seem worse.

Identify the relevant traumatic occurrences. In the case of the woman in the above example, her father failed to look out for her needs and aggressively criticized her as a child.

Clearly identify re-experiencing of the trauma, including thoughts, images, flashbacks, dreams, emotions, somatic sensations, and behavioral re-enactments. For example, the woman repeatedly perceives that she cannot have an impact on men and responds in a very passive way to any violation.

Identify specific avoidance defenses, such as identification with the aggressor or extreme isolation.

Work cautiously with the specific avoidance defenses as opposed to dismantling them right away. Remember that these defenses are a form of self-protection and must be relinquished gradually in a safe setting.

Help the patient clarify adverse trauma-related emotions. The woman in our example feels sad at the losses encountered in her relationship with her father, and is powerless to change a man’s behavior when it impacts negatively on her.

Focus on emotional suffering even though the patient will initially not understand at a feeling level how the pain is linked to the cognitive components of the traumatic experience. The patient might understand intellectually how this makes sense, but it will take time for the understanding to be felt.

Link these adverse emotions to the cognitive components of the traumatic occurrence. The woman needs to see how the treatment by her father left her feeling sad and powerless, and how these feelings contribute both to her perception that she is ineffectual and her passive response to violations.

Explain the grieving process with it’s various components, such as consciously re-experiencing the loss in terms of thoughts and emotions.

Help the patient identify trauma-related losses. In the woman’s case how she lost out on a close supportive relationship with her father.

Encourage the patient to grieve these losses within the safety of the therapeutic environment.

"When the patient has progressed to the common endpoint of grieving—acceptance—the repetitive maladaptive behavior, whether it take the form of re-experiencing or extreme avoidance defenses, should be significantly diminished or ended. Encouraging patients to immediately process disturbing feelings helps prevent a return of any repetitive maladaptive behavior and will make them less vulnerable to future trauma. Emphasize how grieving traumatic losses while somewhat painful in the present greatly diminishes suffering over time."

Rosner explains what patients have to accept as part of the process of developing when one is now an adult and out of the parenting dynamic. "[Successful therapy] means being able to accept oneself as a real human being with assets and liabilities, strengths and weaknesses. It means one must accept that one no longer needs to pursue grandiose goals, to aggrandize oneself at every turn. But it also means not seeing oneself as an impotent and downtrodden victim, either. It means accepting mortality and limitations...It means being able to make choices and to stand by them. It also means recognizing that they may not work out as we might have wished...It means encouraging the process of growing up and growing away, paving the way for feeling and being accountable...This requires a long-term commitment, frequent sessions which are essential to getting to core issues, dealing with well entrenched defenses and working them out. Intensive work of this type is not popular at the present time for many reasons. But it is a step in the direction of the kind of self-examination that is necessary to break such cycles and to help one to become self-determining, and whole, again. It is a necessary step in learning that life is filled with choices and that our choices need not be based upon repeating the same mistakes over and over again."

Case Studies: The 'Wolfman' (3/3) - Freud and Beyond: https://rumble.com/v1gulsf-case-studies-the-wolfman-33-freud-and-beyond.html

Part of the reason why psychoanalysis was and is so difficult, or even if we are talking about other modalities, is the repetition compulsion. It makes or breaks the therapy. It's the moment of truth. As seen in The 'Wolfman' Pt. 3, the patient goes back out into the pathological world and has to tolerate the same kind of stresses again. It's very easy to regress. Freud found that neurotics don't like reality in anyway shape or form, so the therapist's work is cut out for them as a marketing guru trying to sell reality to patients. That's why analysts want to emphasize feelings connected with intellectual knowledge. A lot of people know right from wrong but they don't do it because of those feelings. This is why analysts focus on creating a positive good object in the mind of the patient to replace the one that never developed with the original caregivers. How it's ideally supposed to work is that an analyst has to clear up mental distortions in the patient so they can assess reality better. Because the analyst is supportive of the patient, and believes in the patient enough to work with them, then the patient begins to believe in themselves. The purpose of focusing on reality is to help the patient's mind assess GOOD and BAD more accurately so they can make feeling choices more accurately, and hopefully with a long-term bent to prevent the addictive short-term brain from acting out. You could say roughly that the short-term brain has to feel the long-term consequences in anticipation, with realistic fervor and zeal, so as to enjoy a more broad and time cognizant reality. Realistic rewards in the real world, coupled with a healed mind, ideally makes a person autonomous to the point that they don't need a therapist and can exchange specialties in the economy with other people. They can learn from mistakes and grow autonomously. This is a huge amount of work if the patient is full of serious cognitive distortions, and on top of the fact that the real world is also full of complexity and that some life circumstances include insurmountable obstacles. Therefore, better environments have to be chosen that allow for people to learn. Totalitarian environments prevent growth into adulthood, and subjects never turn into citizens.

It has to be noted that, modern environments are hardly mastered by these therapists, and many therapists are still patients in much of their compartmentalized lives. In my experience, therapists are also not experts in politics, economics, and business, so many distortions in those arenas have to be cleared up by knowledge and expertise found elsewhere. There is so much work needed after therapy ends, and persistence would be a virtue to help patients find their way in the long-term. The reality is that people are not clairvoyant and they will not know all the steps in any new process or endeavour, so there has to be a tolerance for experimentation, trial, and error, for therapy to be considered a great success.

Because I'm an integrationist, so I love to integrate where possible, I find that meditation practice is a convenient form of self-therapy. Buddhism and Psychoanalysis is like peanut butter and jam for me. Both of them want you to FEEL the libido, or craving, in your body and use the body's awareness and knowledge to manifest change. Somatic knowledge with talking therapy also allows for the patient to make conscious their reactive modes, narrative cul-de-sacs, which include all kinds of tightening and contractions in the body coming from fight or flight responses to control. When you can make those things conscious you can consciously relax your muscles. You can learn how you are doing things to yourself and relax the little destinies. When those old modes are seen to be archaic and cloying, then new ways of being can appear fresh and interesting emotionally.

Regardless, there's always a hunger to see action from the analysand to manifest actual change. Are patients learning new skills? Are they choosing better social networks that are more positive and supporting? Are they reevaluating both undervalued and overvalued people in their lives? Are they finding work that is a good fit? Are healthy intimate relationships struck up? If not, are there healthy sublimations in the direction of hobbies, interests, leisure and pursuits? Some people find this kind of exploration interesting and what makes a real life, but others are pained by the effort. Sometimes action doesn't happen until the illusion of a zero effort life is given up. Even the therapist is putting in mental effort, and possibly introjecting vicarious trauma when walking in the shoes of the patient. As Adyashanti pointed out, there's a little bit of effort in just directing the attention span. So to be able to work somewhere, to make changes, and to learn new skills, there has to be some effort applied, with the knowledge that effort decreases when skills habituate and one enters Flow states. Those who stay stuck wanting an effort free living could be more examples of the death drive. Past generations couldn't survive without making enormous effort from time to time. As coach Heidi Priebe said, "we will never have a day in our life where we have finally wiped our hands clean of all problems, and there's not a single area left in our lives where there is no tension or nothing to resolve, so our absolute best shot at having a life that we actually want to show up to is picking the right types of problems that are aligned with the people we actually are...To have an escapist worldview means to hold tight to the belief that something we could do or figure out in the future will absolve us from pain forever. That's not an option for any of us and it never will be."

You Don't 'Lack Follow Through' - 5 Signs You're Self-Regulating Through Future Fantasies - Heidi Priebe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mvHoF0tOsmM

With an object-memory that believes in you, whether that's Jesus or a therapist, the strength of self-belief can then be measured by how persistent it is when there are setbacks. People with a strong self-belief move from self-preoccupation to a ready state much sooner than others caught in low self-esteem. Eventually with all these efforts and changes, just like a sports team stuck in a slump, small wins provide more encouragement and outside confirmation of competence. Small wins can build and provide a memory framework of what works. When there are setbacks, the past can't be changed so only a learning mentality is syntonic with the life-drive and life expansion.

If there's any closure to the therapeutic process it's to understand in the Girardian way that all the objects and situations we want tend to have social elements to them. If we have artistic hobbies, we would really appreciate that others like our work. If people like to party, they want to have a good time with others. If we like team sports, we want to work well with a team, and even better, have an audience if we perform at peak levels. In the end, we want to have some semblance of family that encourages and believes in us, and wants the best for us, while we cheer on for their best and believe in them.

Lectures on Technique by Melanie Klein: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9781138940109/

Love, Guilt and Reparation: And Works 1921-1945 (The Writings of Melanie Klein, Volume 1) by Melanie Klein: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780743237659/

Envy and Gratitude and Other Works, 1946 - 1963 (2nd Edition) by Melanie Klein: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780743237758/

The New Dictionary of Kleinian Thought by Elizabeth Bott Spillius, Jane E. Milton, Penelope Garvey, Cyril Couve, Deborah Steiner: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780415592598/

The Language of Psychoanalysis by Jean Laplanche, Jean-Bertrand Pontalis: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780367328139/

Memories, Dreams, and Reflections - Carl Jung: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780679723950/

Hammer, E.F., Glueck, B.C. Psychodynamic patterns in sex offenders: A four-factor theory. Psych Quar 31, 325–345 (1957). 

Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy in the Kleinian Tradition by Stanley Ruszczynski  Sue Johnson: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9781855751750/

Psychology: http://psychreviews.org/category/psychology01/

#child psychology #countertransference #depressive position #Ego #Identification #internalization #incorporation #introjection #melanie klein #object relations #paranoid-schizoid position #projection #psychoanalysis #self esteem #sigmund freud #splitting #superego #transference #technique

[psychreviews2]

Object Relations: Melanie Klein Pt. 1

She was an iconoclast who straddled the line between orthodox Freudianism while at the same time adding many new elements from her experience in child psychology. Like most other theorists, she used her own psyche and her environment for material for her theories and analytical practice. Her life was full of struggle and triumph, full of allies and enemies, including within her own family. This is a story of a woman who had to push through towards recognition starting from childhood all the way through her life. This is the story of Melanie Klein.

Forbidden Wishes

Melanie Klein was born in 1882 soon after her family had arrived in Vienna. Typical of most families Melanie was in an environment of siblings where a lot of early attachments were made, as well as defenses put up. Like other psychoanalysts, autobiographical material would factor into her theories and insights, which are mostly found in her writings collection. British Psychoanalyst Roger Money-Kyrle said "it is worth noting that, like Freud himself and many others, she practised self-analysis, so the works she published were almost certainly the result of analytic observations made both on her patients and on herself, cross-checked against each other." Phyllis Grosskurth, in Melanie Klein: Her World and Her Work, was able to put together information that originally was to be Melanie's autobiography, to flesh out some the bones in Melanie's story.

Melanie's interactions with siblings and her parents was a mixed bag, like it is with most families, and there were lasting impressions. She was born into a Jewish family that was secular. Her father Moriz Reizes was on his second marriage with Libbusa Deutsch. No reason survived in the documents as to why he divorced his first wife. It was an unsuccessful marriage that was soon dissolved when he was 37. On a trip to Vienna he met Libbusa, who was from Warbotz Slovakia. Her name is after the mythical founder of Prague. "He immediately fell in love with this 'educated, witty, and interesting' young woman, with her fair complexion, fine features, and expressive eyes." In Melanie's view, Libbusa's family was the side of the family that was the most intellectual and tolerant. Libbusa herself spoke with the air of being a down-to-earth mother grounded with the day to day life of taking care of the household while the husband had to find work where he could in his midlife. "They could not have been so naïve as to harbor any expectation that a middle-aged Jewish doctor of Polish origin could achieve professional success. Dr. Reizes was forced to take on a dental practice (indeed, he seems at first to have been a dentist’s assistant) and to supplement his income by acting as medical consultant to a vaudeville theater...Their difficult financial circumstances made it necessary for Libussa to open a shop—not only in itself a humiliation for a doctor’s wife, but also personally distasteful because in addition to plants she sold reptiles, from which she cringed in horror. Melanie does not speculate on her mother’s choice of a somewhat bizarre type of shop, but notes that such was the power of her mother’s beauty that customers loved to drop in to chat with her. She adds that Libussa’s customers 'understood' that she was a 'lady,' not a common shopkeeper—a rather curious disclaimer for her to feel obliged to make. One of Melanie’s earliest memories was of being taken to visit this place into which her mother disappeared every day. The shop was an integral part of their lives until 1907, when Libussa was finally relieved of this burden." Melanie's Uncle Hermann was of great help and lent money to the family to eventually acquire a house.

Melanie went to school with many other students of a different age than hers, but she was very happy nonetheless and caught the family bug for acquiring knowledge and earned good marks on her report card. Her mother "Libussa and her two sisters were consumed with a passion for learning, and these determined young autodidacts gained knowledge by reading and discussions with their father. Melanie admired the way her mother had taught herself to play the piano. She had a vivid recollection of Libussa pacing up and down the wide veranda of a summer flat they rented in Dornbach, on the outskirts of Vienna, totally absorbed in a book of French idioms she was memorizing. For Klein this was a demonstration of intellectual passion, since opportunities for her mother to put these idioms to practical use were almost nonexistent. There is evidence that as a young woman Libussa did have some respect for learning: she was attracted to her future husband partly because of his command of ten languages. Other relatives recalled Karoline as the clever sister, while Libussa was known as the beauty of the family. In any event, Libussa’s later letters are written in a German that indicates the language did not come easily to her...Certainly Melanie often detected dissatisfaction in her mother—and possibly contempt. 'I have never been able to get to the bottom of this, whether she was simply not passionate or not passionate as far as my father was concerned, but I do believe that occasionally I saw a slight aversion against sexual passion in her, which might have been the expression of her own feeling or upbringing, etc'...Klein could never recall an occasion when her parents went out alone together. She evokes a united Jewish family; while not rigidly orthodox, Melanie’s childhood was steeped in Jewish ceremonial, and she was always deeply aware of her Hebraic background. Both parents maintained a strong feeling for the Jewish people, 'though,' she remarks cryptically, 'I am fully aware of their faults and shortcomings.' She would never have been able to live in Israel, she asserts. At one point her mother tried to keep a kosher household but soon abandoned the attempt, particularly as she was opposed by her strong-minded children. Klein describes the circle in which they grew up in Vienna as 'anti-Orthodox.' Some Jewish observances were made but Klein felt there was no piety behind them." She was clued into this when her mother talked admiringly of a dying student with tuberculosis in her hometown who towards the end didn't believe in any god. She may have loved him. "While always feeling 'Jewish,' [Melanie] was never a Zionist, and her way of life was in no way distinguishable from that of a Gentile. Yet as a Jewish child in Catholic Vienna she must have been acutely conscious that she was an outsider and a member of an often persecuted minority. Psychoanalysis became for many Jews a religion with its own rites, secrets, and demands of unswerving loyalty. Melanie Klein, when she eventually discovered psychoanalysis, embraced it as ardently as any convert to the Catholic Church."

At times she was teased by her brother Emanuel in her early days, but they became closer as they grew up. Her older sister Sidonie with "violet-blue eyes, her black curls, and her angelic face" took pity and helped Melanie with reading and arithmetic early on. Unfortunately she died young from Scrofula. "I have a feeling that I never entirely got over the feeling of grief for her death." Emanuel was aggressive and rebellious because he was told he had heart problems and would die young because of his past scarlet and rheumatic fevers. He helped Melanie with her with Latin and Greek so she could enter an advanced secondary school and expected her to achieve great success. Melanie felt indebted to him and thought he would achieve much in his life if he had better health. "From a very early age I heard the most beautiful piano-playing, because he was deeply musical, and I have seen him sitting at the piano and just composing what came into his mind. He was a self-willed and rebellious child and, I think, not sufficiently understood. He seemed at loggerheads with his teachers at the gymnasium, or contemptuous of them, and there were many controversial talks with my father...My brother was deeply fond of my mother, but gave her a good deal of anxiety."

Melanie Klein Trust: https://melanie-klein-trust.org.uk/timeline/1882-1902/

Melanie's father was an influence, even if at times he was aloof with her. "As a child, Melanie loved hearing about her father’s courage during a cholera epidemic. In answer to an appeal for doctors to go out to the Polish villages, he not only went but, unlike the other doctors who would stand at the windows telling the victims what to do, Moriz Reizes boldly entered the cottages and treated the patients as he would have done if they had been suffering from any other complaint. When he returned, he found a letter from his mother imploring him not to risk his life. Whether this act of heroism actually happened or not is immaterial; Klein believed that it had." Although there were some disappointments when he refused her attention, and when he made clear her sister Emile his favorite. "'I don’t think I sufficiently understood my father, because he had aged so much by this time'...He was an 'old fifty' when she was born. 'I have no memories of his ever playing with me.'" Melanie and Emilie would continue to have a love-hate relationship until the end. Emilie's dreary life compared to her sister's eventual success led to some letters having an "I'm not jealous, but I am" quality to them. "Emilie, too, seems to have been caught up in the family pattern of guilt-inducement. If one of them had good fortune, the other had to pay for it." In one letter, after Melanie published a book, Emile confessed that "even if I have been unapproachable at times, that in secret I have always appreciated and admired your strong will!...[Melanie] had to assert herself in view of the fact that her mother told her that she had been unwanted, Sidonie was the best-looking in the family, her father openly expressed his preference for Emilie, and Emanuel was considered something of a genius..."

As destiny was predicted, Emanuel died young at 25 of heart failure, ending his ambitions of artistic grandeur. He also suffered from tuberculosis and may have used morphine and cocaine to manage the pain. "Emanuel convinced himself that his main motive for abandoning his medical studies and leaving Vienna was his certainty that he was doomed to an early death; he intended to live life to the full in the time left to him. His mother shared his view that the climate of Vienna was detrimental to his health, and she settled a small allowance on him to enable him to seek lands of sun and beauty in the traditional pattern of the dying artist. It was in this role that Emanuel saw himself, and he dramatized the situation to the full. His letters for the next couple of years are full of complaints about the meagerness of his allowance." As he travelled in Italy he exchanged letters with family members and complained of the "out of sight, out of mind" neglect he was feeling. He laid down in a hotel in Genoa one night and died. The hotelkeeper was curt and demanded expenses to be taken care of, considering the cleanup job needed for tuberculosis and superstitions future guests may have. His wife was more empathetic. "Perhaps it will console you a little to hear that your son passed away completely without pain. He was lying in his bed as if he were asleep, death throes can absolutely not have occurred; he had not even stretched himself. He was lying on one side, the eyes closed, the right hand near the face, the left one under the blanket, exactly as one does when one makes oneself comfortable in bed to go to sleep. Had he not been cold and stiff, one would never have believed that anybody could look so peaceful in death. The authorities sent two more doctors round, but all three were agreed that heart failure had brought his life to an end."

Despite struggling to enter the Gymnasium, when Melanie passed the entrance examinations, she had strong motivation. "Not only did she intend to study medicine, she asserted, but she planned to specialize in psychiatry—an extraordinary ambition for a middle-class Jewish girl when one thinks of the vicissitudes Freud was encountering in his profession at that very time in Vienna. About this time, Moriz Reizes’ health began to deterioriate rapidly, and the household was held together by the indomitable Libussa. Melanie seldom had a new dress; the theater or a concert was a rare event; but she felt gloriously alive, infused with that deepest of all the passions, intellectual fervor. Unknown to her mother, she read far into the night—an indication that her mother did not encourage her intellectual interests. Her homework she did on the tram between home and school. Her brother proudly introduced her to his friends, and Melanie blossomed into a vibrant young woman...Family circumstances may have been extremely stringent, but somehow enough money was found for a number of photographs of Melanie to have been taken during this period. She is a voluptuous dark beauty with heavy-lidded eyes, and already fully aware of her striking profile. She was aware, too, of her desirability, as all her brother’s friends seemed to be falling in love with her. When she was only seventeen she met her future husband (then twenty-one), a second cousin on her mother’s side, who was visiting Vienna from his home in what was then the Slovak part of Hungary." Despite her ambitions, Melanie settled quickly on Arthur Klein. She said that at the time she had a "passionate temperament" and "it did not take very long for me to fall in love with him...From that time I was so loyal that I refrained from any entertainment where I might have met other young men and never expressed a feeling that I already had in my mind, that we were not really suited to one another. Both loyalty to my fiancé, with whom I was up to a point in love, and circumstances, prevented me from mentioning this to my mother or my brother." By this time her father Moriz had already passed away of pneumonia and Alzheimer's. Not very much time later both Emilie, who married a lawyer, and Melanie were married with children. Libussa maintained the household and visited both families and helped them get settled, to the envy of Emanuel, who felt abandoned and forgotten towards the end of his life.

Melanie was now in the marriage, even though she knew it was a mistake, probably because she hadn't forgotten her prior professional ambitions. Her situation matched what Helene Deutsch felt about women who went into depression when family and children interfered with career ambitions and hobbies. Both sisters had trouble getting used to motherhood and the painstaking household chores. As household cleaning technologies and methods were developed, standards for cleanliness also increased, so chores became an area that women traditionally fought over. Either the extravagances were too expensive in order to keep up with the Joneses, so to say, or daughters and mothers couldn't agree on the correct or appropriate décor and fought over the details. This could also include servants and fighting with them if they couldn't meet expectations. Fights over parenting styles would be common between parents and spouses. Melanie at this time also fell into many depressions as she continued to have more children. In many cases, she had to escape to other towns and visit friends and family to deal with what her mother called "her nerves...Photographs taken of Klein during this period reveal the paralyzing depression in which she was entrapped. In her Autobiography she describes Arthur as 'difficult.' [He was also suffering from nerve pain, commonly called Neuralgia.] There is hardly a letter from Libussa during this period that does not refer to his 'nerves,' insomnia, and stomach complaints. Often he was too tired, too overworked, or too miserable to write to his wife, and Libussa conveyed messages from one to the other...Late in 1907 Arthur accepted a well-paid job as director of one of Count Henkel-Donnersmarck’s paper mills in upper Silesia. As a result, they had to move to Krappitz, a small, dreary provincial town without a single congenial soul with whom Melanie could converse. Even Rosenberg had seemed unbearably confining...upon her marriage in 1906. At this point Libussa, with little reluctance, was persuaded to come and stay with them. She was only too happy to do so because Arthur was now in a position to pay off Uncle Hermann for his investment in the house, and Libussa could finally give up the shop, which she rented out to a coffeehouse."

Object Relations: Helene Deutsch Pt. 1: https://rumble.com/v2wrvg5-object-relations-helene-deutsch-pt.-1.html

Object Relations: Helene Deutsch Pt. 2: https://rumble.com/v2yepky-object-relations-helene-deutsch-pt.-2.html

Libussa ended up being an interfering grandmother who micromanaged the household, despite being idealized in Melanie's later descriptions of her. "In the two and a half years they lived in Krappitz, Melanie seems to have been away almost as much as she was at home," especially in Abbazia where she underwent "carbonic acid baths and other current remedies for nerves." In one trip she was accompanied by a divorcee Klara Vágó who became a friend. "Every piece of advice [Libussa] gave her reinforced Melanie’s view of herself as a permanent semi-invalid" and she kept the unhappy husband and wife separated for the children's sake. "Libussa closed her eyes to the possibility that these separations were undermining the marriage. Everything had to accord with her conception of a conflict-free family situation...Arthur had to take frequent business trips and had plenty of opportunities for illicit amours if so inclined—and he might have been so inclined, considering that his wife was separated from him for weeks at a time and found sex distasteful even at the best of times. It is doubtful that we will ever know the truth about the marriage."

Even when Melanie returned home she still did not get over her depression. "She was becoming more entrapped than ever in her depressions, especially when her mother was visiting her. By May 1909 her fits of weeping and despair had reached such a point that she went to a sanatorium in Chur, Switzerland, for two and a half months in order to have a complete rest and change of scene...Melanie dreaded pregnancy..." Arthur at this time took the chance to leave the small town and move to Budapest. At this time Melanie's friend Klara was helping her be more assertive with her mother to take back the household and provided a role-model for emancipation. In her 30s she was pregnant again and had Erich, but everyone, including Libussa, were much older now. Libussa fell ill with cancer which was what was thought at the time due to her rapid weight loss. She contracted bronchitis and eventually passed away.

After her mother's death, Melanie wrote some minor works, including poetry and complete narratives. "Both poetry and prose are variations on a single theme: the longing of a woman for a richer and fuller life, particularly for sexual gratification, and the conflict that is stirred up by these forbidden wishes." Her wide reading eventually got her to Freud's works. "'About 1914' she read Freud’s 1901 paper on dreams, and realized immediately that 'that was what I was aiming at, at least during those years when I was so very keen to find what would satisfy me intellectually and emotionally. I entered into analysis with Ferenczi, who was the most outstanding Hungarian analyst.'" When she was with psychoanalyst Sándor Ferenczi, she became interested in learning how to practice psychoanalysis. He ended up influencing her later work in three areas: "the importance of raw and early emotion in the maternal bond, the importance of freedom and authenticity in the analytic relationship, and finally the use of transference and countertransference feelings." "During this analysis with Ferenczi, he drew my attention to my great gift for understanding children and my interest in them, and he very much encouraged my idea of devoting myself to analysis, particularly child-analysis. I had, of course, three children of my own at the time...I had not found…that education…could cover the whole understanding of the personality and therefore have the influence one might wish it to have. I had always the feeling that behind was something with which I could not come to grips."

Dreams - Sigmund Freud: https://rumble.com/v1gtf6j-dreams-sigmund-freud.html

Klein eventually became an assistant to Ferenczi and began observing her children. "Melitta and Hans had been brought up largely under the supervision of Libussa; but once Klein discovered psychoanalysis, [her son] Erich was subjected to the most intense scrutiny from at least the age of three. There is no reference to his infancy, a curious omission in view of her later theories." When her husband moved to Sweden to work and Melanie went back to Rosenberg, Slovakia, the separation led eventually to an official divorce. She eventually moved to Berlin and began a psychoanalysis practice. Melanie was very ambitious and began to publish because this was one of the ways to increase recognition and allow the possibility of freer travel in the future. It also explained the haste she felt to begin analyzing her children before taking on more analysands.

By the time she joined the The Hague Congress, she was in a very competitive attitude, and as expected professional territory was jealously guarded. She "met Hermine Hug-Hellmuth, who had already started analyzing children in Vienna by watching them at play...Klein tried to engage her in discussion, but was given a very cool reception. She later attributed this to Hug-Hellmuth’s view of her as a competitive threat, and any references Klein made to her tended to be extremely condescending." Klein already made her judgement. "Dr. Hug-Hellmuth was doing child analysis at this time in Vienna, but in a very restricted way. She completely avoided interpretations, though she used some play material and drawings, and I could never get an impression of what she was actually doing, nor was she analysing children under six or seven years. I do not think it too conceited to say that I introduced into Berlin the beginnings of child analysis."

Klein was now in a situation where she could attempt to find her place in psychoanalysis, but this is often when rivalry is at it's most intense, when a new system is discovered but it has yet to be exhausted, and there's a gold rush to stake an important claim, as can be seen by the explosion of new talent over the 20th century. "There was intense envy and rivalry among these early psychoanalytic pioneers...Klein’s career belonged in the category of those whose 'creative capacity may begin to show and express itself for the first time.'" Different analysts took a stand on whether child analysis was too dangerous. "Her creative potential, stifled for so many years, was finally unleashed, but she had to fight opposition every step of the way. For the historical record Klein claimed that once she arrived in Berlin, she soon widened her practice, but the fact of the matter is that she aroused misgivings among some of her colleagues. There was unease about the advisability of probing too deeply into a child’s unconscious...Apart from the consideration shown her by Abraham, she was always bitter about the way she was treated by the Berlin Society. Gradually some of her colleagues allowed her to analyze their children in what were known as 'prophylactic analyses.' In later life she complained that the only patients sent to her were children and the deeply disturbed relatives or patients of other analysts. Yet if it had not been for this, she might never have had the opportunity for intense observation of children." Regardless, she was right away aiming at changing parenting practices and cultural influences in schools so children could hopefully live a more liberated life and find their authenticity.

Repression

In The Development of a Child (1921), Melanie was very blunt and appeared to be on a mission to wipe out superstition and poor parenting practices, and in a way, abolish a form of parental abuse related to sexual shaming and ignorance. "The idea of enlightening children in sexual matters is steadily gaining ground. The instruction introduced in many places by the schools aims at protecting children during the age of puberty from the increasing dangers of ignorance, and it is from this point of view that the idea has won most sympathy and support...This ensures that wishes, thoughts and feelings shall not—as happened to us—be partly repressed and partly, in so far as repression fails, endured under a burden of false shame and nervous suffering." In her paper, she believed that developmentally appropriate sexual education allows children to build "...foundations for health and mental balance." Even though she renamed her son Erich to "Fritz," in her analysis of her son, the flimsy disguise was enough to fool many Kleinians. "The child in question is a boy, little Fritz, the son of relations who live in my immediate neighbourhood. This gave me the opportunity to be often in the child's company without any restraint. Further, as his mother follows all my recommendations I am able to exercise a far-reaching influence on the child's upbringing." When questioned with the evidence "one [Kleinian] said that she had always had the impression that 'the mother' in the background left something to be desired. Another said that he didn’t know what name to apply to this kind of analysis, but it had nothing to do with mothering. A third confessed rather poignantly that the revelation would make him reexamine the work he had been doing for thirty years since he now saw in a new light why Melanie Klein had underestimated the role of the mother. Many analysts had heard for years a rumor that she had analyzed her own children, but they had not linked this with actual case histories she had recorded. Elliott Jaques seems to take a sensible view: the exploration of the roots of anxiety could have been conducted initially in the only way open to her, and it is hindsight that queries its value. Pearl King (not a Kleinian) feels that it could have established 'a pathological transference'; but adds, 'to be fair, everyone was doing it at that time.'"

Klein proceeded to explain to young Erich the truth about Easter and Christmas activities and the agnostic worldview. She described a rudimentary explanation for copulation for humans and animals. The child's fantasies and games started turning more violent afterwards. "His games as well as his phantasies showed an extraordinary aggressiveness towards his father and also of course his already clearly indicated passion for his mother...Fritz listened with great interest and said, 'I would so much like to see how a child is made inside like that.' I explain that this is impossible until he is big because it can't be done till then but that then he will do it himself: 'But then I would like to do it to mamma.' 'That can't be, mamma can't be your wife for she is the wife of your papa, and then papa would have no wife.' 'But we could both do it to her.' I say, 'No, that can't be. Every man has only one wife. When you are big your mamma will be old. Then you will marry a beautiful young girl and she will be your wife.' He (nearly in tears and with quivering lips), 'But shan't we live in the same house together with mamma?' 'Certainly, and your mamma will always love you but she can't be your wife.' He then enquired about various details, how the child is 'fed in the maternal body, what the cord is made of how it comes away, he was full of interest and no further resistance was to be noticed. At the end he said, 'But I would just once like to see how the child gets in and out.'"

Melanie felt that this sample of one was already showing a therapeutic response compared to how other children were raised. "I am of the opinion that no upbringing should be without analytic help, because analysis affords such valuable and, from the point of view of prophylaxis, as yet incalculable assistance." The deficits for children she concluded were of a wide variety, including, being anti-social, aloof, apathy, lost self-confidence, and diffidence. "What early analysis can do is to afford protection from severe shocks and to overcome inhibitions. This will assist not only the health of the individual but culture as well, in that the overcoming of inhibitions will open up fresh possibilities of development. In the boy I watched it was striking how greatly his general interest was stimulated subsequent to the satisfying of a part of his unconscious questions, and how greatly his impulse for investigation flagged again because further unconscious questions had arisen and drawn his whole interest upon themselves. It is evident, therefore, that, to go more into detail, the effectiveness of wishes and instinctive impulses can only be weakened by becoming conscious. I can, however, state from my own observations that, just as in the case of the adult, so also with the young child this occurs without any danger...It is easier to control an emotion that is becoming conscious than one that is unconscious. Simultaneously with acknowledging his incest-wishes, however, he is already making attempts to free himself from this passion and to achieve its transference to suitable objects."

For researchers, this was before the later techniques that Melanie developed with play, but she was already seeing that unconscious questions, with realistic, concrete answers, allowed for better actions afterwards for the analysand. "Eric Klein remembers that when they went to Rosenberg in 1919, his mother set aside an hour every night before he went to sleep to analyze him and that she continued to do this after they moved to Berlin in 1920. He remarks dryly that he did not find the experience pleasurable, but he holds no grudge against her for it...It could be argued that Klein was more therapist than mother to Erich. He has no recollection of her playing with him, but she did hug him." In Analyst of the Imagination, Paul Roazen said of Melanie's daughter, "Melitta Schmideberg, would be at the extreme end of the spectrum of those who relished hatred of their mothers but, alas, not alone in her bitterness towards analytic parenting." Melitta did collaborate very closely with Melanie, had many great insights into psychoanalysis, but was clearly asserting her independence and wanting to move into different modalities to distinguish herself from her mother and get out from under her wing.

Even at the time of the paper, Klein did give herself an out because she found that anxiety wasn't only caused by complexes and that different children could face the same situations and react with more or less sensitivity. "For we learn from the analysis of neurotics that only a part of the injuries resulting from repression can be traced to wrong environmental or other prejudicial external conditions. Another and very important part is due to an attitude on the part of the child, present from the very tenderest years. The child frequently develops, on the basis of the repression of a strong sexual curiosity, an unconquerable disinclination to everything sexual that only a thorough analysis can later overcome. It is not always possible to discover from the analyses of adults—especially in a reconstruction—in how far the irksome conditions, in how far the neurotic predisposition, is responsible for the development of the neurosis. In this matter variable, indeterminate quantities are being dealt with. So much, however, is certain: that in strongly neurotic dispositions quite slight rebuffs from the environment often suffice to determine a marked resistance to all sexual enlightenment and a repression excessively burdensome to the mental constitution in general." This also appears in the school environment, especially during puberty when a boy for example is "bombarded by his sexuality, he feels himself at the mercy of wishes and desires which he cannot and may not satisfy." This may lead to a lack of zeal in school work, lack of ambition, and in extreme cases there may be criminality or suicide. "Expertly and correctly conducted, psycho-analysis holds no more danger for children than for adults; much 'successful work' with children convinces me of this. The widely-felt anxiety that analysis diminishes children's spontaneity is disproved in practice. Many children have had their liveliness fully restored by analysis after losing it in the welter of their conflicts. Even very early analysis does not turn children into uncultured and asocial beings. The' reverse is true; freed from inhibitions, they are now able to make full use of emotional and intellectual resources for cultural and social purposes, in the service of their development."

At this time Melanie was recording in her autobiography different stories as to when there was a divorce and it was obvious that she wanted out. "In 1919 Arthur Klein went to live and work in Sweden, and [Melanie] moved back from Budapest to Rosenberg with the children. Hungary was in turmoil; and she could see her own future only in negative terms: as she describes it, there seemed no possibility that she and Arthur could ever get together again." There was eventually a reunification of the family in Dahlem, but Arthur's attempts to regain control of the family led to him bullying Hans. "In addition to Arthur’s renewed tyranny, both his 'emotional attachment' in Sweden and her new career were incentives to attain the independence she had always half-consciously been seeking. She soon realized that a permanent separation was imperative. Yet to walk out on her husband was financially hazardous, and she risked losing custody of Erich. There were ugly quarrels. One day Erich saw a document lying on his father’s desk and could not resist reading it. It appeared that Arthur was going to seek to obtain custody of the boy on the grounds that his mother had used him as a guinea pig for her psychoanalytic experiments. When Erich told his mother about this, she said that Arthur had deliberately put the paper on the table where he knew Erich would see it." Melitta defended her mother against her father, but both mother and daughter were beginning to show envy and jealousy. Melanie was worried that her daughter who was able to pursue her studies earlier than she, was now in a position to surpass her before she could make her mark on history. They eventually collaborated and were able to produce good work together, but Melitta would later on introduce insightful critiques on the limits of psychoanalysis and poke fun at the snobbery, foolishness, and scandals in the psychoanalytical communities, as well as patients who expected a panacea from the method, and eventually found a better fit when she moved more into studying juvenile delinquency. She also entered into analysis with Edward Glover for a time who was mourning the disconnection between the British school and Freud's Orthodoxy. In The War Inside, Michal Shapira said that "initially, Melitta made frequent use of her mother’s ideas. Later, and as she went to analysis with Glover, her criticism of Klein grew. She withdrew from active participation in the BPAS in 1944." Later psychoanalysts viewed Melitta's and Edward's complaints as a form of stuffiness. In reality there was always a new kind of stuffiness replacing an older kind. All therapists tend to react to positive results in their patients as confirmation of efficacy of one method or another and each positive experience would lead therapists to pick their favorite modality, either orthodox, British, or American. Despite the hair splitting, Klein continued her work with children and studied the effects of the Oedipus Complex.

School Castration

Despite all these fearful Freudian terms and symbols, the best way to read and enjoy psychoanalytic descriptions is to understand the underlying viewpoint, which is Darwinian, and therefore it is about territory, power, control, and procreation. Libido is energetic craving, and we have many cravings that aren't overtly sexual. You can crave sunlight if you are indoors for too long, for example. The cravings want to feed physically with food, but there is sexual feeding and emotional feeding of all kinds. The mistake is to take things too literally and think everything is about overt sexuality, when it's more teleological. The child could feel "castrated" at school for example, but is not actually castrated, but instead is humiliated by the teacher in class when providing a stupid answer that is ridiculous and funny. The purpose of school is to have success in the workplace. Success in the workplace makes you more attractive as a provider and you will have more sexual partners to choose from as you gain more wealth, fame, and notoriety. It all connects to sex in that way, so there are many degrees of separation, but these innocuous activities can be the supports that are required before one becomes attractive, if ever. Being castrated is like being turned off, demoralized, like how you would feel when you are sternly rejected on a date or you were dumped after a long attachment or you went through a divorce. You're not likely to be in the mood for some time, whereas someone who achieved success and wants to celebrate, they will more likely be looking for a sexual partner because of their newfound confidence. If a person finds sexual partners an imposition to personal fulfillment in work or hobbies, many will put their love into work, artistic projects or leisure activities.

In The Role of the School in the Libidinal Development of the Child, Melanie pointed out that "...fear of examinations in dreams as in reality, is the fear of castration...[for students]." Boys and girls are afraid of being made fun of and they sometimes have fears related to how masculine or feminine they should appear. Just like adults, the kids can make associations and metaphors out of anything so dreams, daydreaming, and doodling will likely connect with other areas of their life where they are measuring how well they are doing at school, socializing, and with relationships at home. With kids, analyses with Klein showed a lot of Oedipus material, death wishes for parents, fornication with parents, along with jokes about private parts, toilet jokes and early birthing theories. Having trouble completing difficult school tasks is a feeling of impotence, whereas success leads to feelings of potency. "I have endeavoured to show that the fundamental activities exercised at schools are channels for the flow of libido and that by this means the component instincts achieve sublimation under the supremacy of the genitals. This libidinal [emotional investment], however, is carried over from the most elementary studies—reading, writing and arithmetic—to wider efforts and interests based upon these, so that the foundations of later inhibitions—of vocational inhibition as well—are to be found; above all, in the frequently apparently evanescent ones concerned with the earliest studies. The inhibitions of these earliest studies, however, are built upon play-inhibitions, so that in the end—we can see all the later inhibitions, so significant for life and development, evolving from the earliest play-inhibitions." So not being able to play at a rudimentary level for a particular field, like math, or history, means an unsuccessful sublimation of libido. For Klein, it goes back to fear of humiliation. "Castration-fear interferes with ego-activities and interests because, besides other libidinal determinants, they always have fundamentally a genital symbolic, that is to say, a coitus significance...We must refer the establishment of all the inhibitions which affect learning and all further development to the time of the first efflorescence of infantile sexuality which, with the onset of the Oedipus complex, gives its greatest momentum to the castration-fear, that is, to the early period between three and four years of age. It is the consequent repression of the active masculine components in both boys and girls that provides the chief basis for inhibitions of learning...The contribution which the feminine component makes to sublimation will probably always prove to be receptivity and understanding, which are an important part of all activities; the driving executive part, however, which really constitutes the character of any activity, originates in the sublimation of masculine potency." Here we can see a development from Ferenczi, who separated masculine and feminine energies into different tasks and interests, whereas Klein saw that most activities could be done with a mixture and both boys and girls could use femininity or masculinity without it appearing pathological.

Aphex Twin - Come To Daddy (Director's Cut): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TZ827lkktYs

Case Studies: 'Little Hans' - Sigmund Freud: https://rumble.com/v1gu93b-case-studies-little-hans-sigmund-freud.html

Sexuality Pt 2: Infantile Sexuality - Sigmund Freud: https://rumble.com/v1gtort-sexuality-pt-2-infantile-sexuality-sigmund-freud.html

Totem and Taboo - Sigmund Freud: https://rumble.com/v1gsmvn-totem-and-taboo-sigmund-freud.html

Melanie followed the typical Freudian view that creativity is essentially feminine and that both sexes needed to free up that libido as well as the masculine. "I was able repeatedly in analyses of boys and girls to see how important the repression of this feminine attitude through the castration complex might be. As an essential part of every activity, repression of it must contribute largely to the inhibition of any activity. It has also been possible to observe in analysing patients of both sexes how, as a part of the castration complex became conscious and the feminine attitude appeared more freely, there often occurred a powerful onset of artistic and other interests...Part of the inhibitions—and this is the more important for later development—resulting from the repression of genital activity directly affects ego activity and interest as such. Another part of the inhibitions results from the attitude to the teacher." For example, a male teacher could receive transference attitudes from a boy about his father, and since success is connected with sex with the mother figure in the Oedipus Complex, then the fear of fatherly retribution may appear as inhibition to perform well in front of the male teacher. "In girls the inhibition due to the castration complex and affecting all activity is of particular importance. The relationship to a male teacher that can be so burdensome to the boy acts on the girl, if her capabilities are not too inhibited, rather as an incentive. In her relationship to the mistress the anxiety attitude originating in the Oedipus complex is, in general, not nearly so powerful as is its analogue in the boy. That her achievements in life do not usually attain to those of the man is due to the fact that in general she has less masculine activity to employ in sublimation...The teacher can achieve much by sympathetic understanding, for he is able thereby considerably to reduce that part of the inhibition that attaches to the person of the teacher as 'avenger'. At the same time, the wise and kindly teacher offers the homosexual component in the boy and the masculine component of the girl an object for the exercise of their genital activity in a sublimated form, as which, as I suggested, we can recognize the various studies." As much as the teacher can reward both masculine and feminine energies, the children are bringing their complexes to school and would benefit from therapy in the view of Klein. "Where, however, repression of genital activity has affected the occupations and interests themselves, the attitude of the teacher can probably diminish (or intensify) the child's inner conflict, but will not affect anything essential as concerns his attainments. But even the possibility of a good teacher easing the conflict is a very slight one, for limits are set by the child's complex-formations, particularly by his relationship to his father, which determines beforehand his attitude towards school and teacher."

Developing The Self

The opportunities available in childhood to carve out skills, talents, and budding vocations, is a precious time because of how far reaching the impacts are in later life. This especially will echo in many later psychoanalysts when talking about the topic of authenticity. Certainly there can be economic disadvantages during this period and they limit what a child can develop, but finances don't guarantee authenticity if play, trial and error, and discovery is repressed. "We frequently find in psycho-analysis that neurotic inhibitions of talents are determined by repression having overtaken the libidinal ideas associated with these particular activities, and thus at the same time the activities themselves." For Klein, these inhibitions appeared in very typical demotivated states that children often present. "The following characteristics proved in a number of cases and in a typical way to be inhibitions: awkwardness in games and athletics and distaste for them, little or no pleasure in lessons, lack of interest in one particular subject, or, in general, the varying degrees of so-called laziness; very often, too, capacities or interests which were feebler than the ordinary turned out to be 'inhibited'".

You get the sense from psychoanalytic literature that scoring in soccer is like scoring in bed. The symbolism can be made to be overt by making it conscious and then using the lust and love feelings to fuel a sublimated task and derive proximate satisfaction. Even if people have to bring up lustful imagery in their minds transfer it into boring activities, there's a hinted practice in these texts that assume we should have already known this from the beginning in childhood play. Having "libidinal cathexis" is to have an emotional investment in a particular activity, like a sport, meaning simply that you like the sport. There's been so much inhibition throughout childhood, and not all of it is bad in the case of criminal activity, but if someone meditates, takes drugs or alcohol, or even engages in free association practices, which are a little like meditation, when inhibition is released momentarily a zeal can return in an anticipation of engaging in an activity, and possibly other activities that have been repressed. "I came to see that in far the greater number of these inhibitions, whether they were recognizable as such or not, the work of reversing the mechanism was accomplished by way of anxiety, and in particular by the 'dread of castration'; only when this anxiety was resolved was it possible to make any progress in removing the inhibition...By successful removal I do not simply mean that the inhibitions as such should be diminished or removed, but that the analysis should succeed in reinstating the primary pleasure of the activity." A success would then be that a person can see the enjoyment of the repressed activity and it can be engaged in again with appropriateness according to skill. Maybe a person will enjoy watching soccer if they have no facility to play it well enough to enjoy.

Just like with substances that relieve inhibitions, the zeal doesn't always arise first. There are "transitory symptoms" connected to the Castration Complex, where anger and hostility arise. Analysands begin to re-live the people and environments of the past where the intimidation occurred. "These again were principally resolved by way of anxiety. The fact that the removing of these inhibitions and symptoms takes place by way of anxiety surely shows that anxiety is their source." She quoted Franz Alexander who valued the emotional catharsis, or abreaction in the psychoanalytical experience. People needed to express their emotions by reliving the experience, understanding intellectually the impact of the castration and feel the emotions related, as if they were happening during the analysis. "Most of the suggested innovations in psychoanalytic technique involve a one-sided overemphasis on one or the other of two factors, both of which are essential for the curative effect of psychoanalytic therapy. These factors are emotional abreaction and intellectual insight. Emotional abreaction leads only to temporary symptomatic relief (as in the early hysteria analyses of Freud). On the other hand, intellectual insight without emotional experience is of little value. Every correct interpretation, 'serves both purposes,' integrating abreaction and insight into a single act." If at this point an analysand expresses the emotion fully of the castrating incident and discharges through venting, then the intellectual insight would focus on the activity more based on skill rather than just a hatred of the activity. The activity loses its sense of evil and looks more a matter of fact. All activities have easier and more complex parts to them. When in hatred only the complex parts are noticed. In a neutral view, or a positive view, there are easier elements to the skill that begin to show themselves as opportunities for growth.

Regardless of the method, skills will still have to be developed afterwards if the patient has a reason to take up the activity. There's also no guarantee that there won't be more authority figures providing fresh castration that an apprentice has to learn to ignore and focus instead with a learning mentality. The intellectual insight needs to catch authority figures in their jealousy, and to understand that they are afraid of being replaced. In many technical and professional jobs, knowledge that can't be found in books is jealously guarded and castration will be the norm until an authority figure is to move onto better opportunities and has to train an apprentice. At that point, the envy of students and candidates will be expressed as they wonder why they weren't chosen to be trained further. Certainly, the understudy that shows the most promise is sometimes taken on because they are viewed to be unstoppable and capable of changing organizations, make new professional connections, and compete directly with the master. The master then wants to control the trajectory of the prodigy, and also they want to bask in their future success. In other cases, there is nepotism, cronyism, and various other forms of bigotry, because the master wants to make a political statement and reward an inner circle and gain a future ally, if there are to be synergies in their professional work. As many students will attest, the psychology profession is full of patients at various levels of pathology so the envy tends to be directed against healthier psychologists with endless attempts at castration, because the envious feel the pain that they may never be cured completely, and those who are considered more pathetic are made fun of and castrated because they are seen as too incompetent to practice. Those who are more healthy have to decide if they want to join another profession that has a healthier culture, or walk the tightrope and network in the best places possible for development. Those who are more incompetent, and therefore in need of both therapy and training, they either leave the profession for something more appropriate, or they congregate around groups and leaders that require their fawning. Their pathologies, if not too severe, are sometimes considered a badge of honor and hopefully provide a secret knowledge and special empathy for patients that are one step behind them in therapy.

Whether you want to call it a "comfort zone" that protects against the anxiety of growth, or the Default Mode Network, "teleologically considered, the symptoms of illness serve the purpose of satisfying, in a relatively harmless manner, those wishes that are in conflict with the conscious ego, of localizing them to the symptoms, and thereby preventing them from injuring the rest of life...Driven by their instinctual tendencies perpetually to injure themselves in life, [analysands] do not fall ill of a neurosis simply because, by means of their apparently senseless self-injuries, they replace the symbolic overcompensations (self -punishments) of the obsessional neurotic by real ones, and in this way keep their oversensitive consciences clear." The consequences for Alexander in one case study was self-sabotage in a patient's failing business while not being able to earn as much money as he did before in the employment he got afterwards. Finding easier employment may reduce anxiety, but it can also be a regression. What I like about Alexander is how he connects libido to money. Even saving money can be a way of delaying cravings for later consumption. Investing is a way of giving people access to their cravings for either their business spending or current consumption. The saver is delaying gratification so they can earn investment income and have a greater consumption in the future. On the other hand, if things are really financially bad you can be too poor, castrated, and turned off to have intimate relationships and the mental health results are even worse if a patient can't find a suitable sublimation. If it gets to rock bottom, then any money that is received goes into an addiction that further prevents gainful employment and there is a possibility of a vicious cycle of homelessness. In less extremes, people find themselves in divorces and they have to downgrade their expectations and find genital relief with less desirable partners while earning a less desirable wage.

Two Days, One Night Official Trailer - Dr. Lorri Sulpizio: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tb3zBq6gVRk

For those who want to control their mind more, the way to transform libido, or cravings, into sublimation, is to have different cravings, just like how the sense of self is manipulated by advertisers. There's an "I" in the future that is savoring, and it's working when you can FEEL craving to do that particular activity. If the sublimation is strong, the activity is so interesting that you are not thinking about intimate relationships.

Object Relations: Fear Of Success Pt. 6: https://rumble.com/v3mc0jy-object-relations-fear-of-success-pt.-6.html

If you eventually get courageous and try to move out of the comfort zone you can feel out the blockage. "We know that anxiety is one of the primary affects. 'I have said that transformation into anxiety—it would be better to say discharge in the form of anxiety—is the immediate vicissitude of libido which is subjected to repression.' In thus reacting with anxiety the ego repeats the affect which at birth became the prototype—of all anxiety and employs it as 'the universally current coinage for which any affective impulse is or can be exchanged.' The discovery of how the ego tries in the different neuroses to shield itself from the development of anxiety led Freud to conclude that 'It would thus seem not to be wrong in an abstract sense to assert that in general, symptoms are only formed to escape an otherwise unavoidable generating of anxiety." Anxiety of course can go unconscious, when repression is successful. If it's not successful there is visible anxiety. When it's unconscious, it's ready and waiting to produce anxiety but the analysand is outside of the challenging environment and can find another activity that is accessible for sublimation. Then when the patient goes again closer to the repressing situation, anxiety begins to return, like how people behave in a phobia. Psychoanalysts also feel that some patients are better at sublimating than others, for example, some are more creative, have more interesting hobbies, and can maintain well-being. This may be due to a good enough upbringing so that there's enough of a self to play with the environment to prevent feeling always empty inside emotionally. "If we equate the capacity to employ superfluous libido [craving] in a cathexis [emotional investment] of ego-tendencies with the capacity to sublimate, we may probably assume that the person who remains healthy succeeds in doing so on account of his greater capacity for sublimating at a very early stage of his ego-development." This means that some who are not inhibited will be in a healthy intimate relationship, in a job they like, or are good at, and any variations outside of that will be progressively worse outcomes, but some of those outcomes will be healthy because the analysand has vigorous activities they engage in, but those who cannot get into an intimate relationship or sublimate with skill, they will have the worst outcome for loneliness and depression.

Intimidation has also an element of control because it can be used to dominate an environment. Transference from a passive target can then anticipate castrations and avoid adventurism towards libido satisfactions precisely to avoid any other people who radiate the same power to punish. For example, a parent could bully a child and then that child becomes a prime target for future bullies because they continuously send the signal of passivity. "We know that the Oedipus complex brings repression into play with quite peculiar force and at the same time liberates the dread of castration. We may probably also assume that this great 'wave' of anxiety 'is reinforced by anxiety already existing (possibly only as a potential disposition) in consequence of earlier repressions—this latter anxiety may have operated directly as castration-anxiety originating in the 'primal castrations.'"

These castrations can lead to inauthentic desires where what you would like to pursue anticipates punishment and the area of choices provided by society where there are no punishments become the limited choices where one finds replacement satisfactions. This can be good when dealing with criminality, but it becomes a dystopian tyrannical society when rewards are being stripped from the populace to coalesce around a predator. Eventually success, or rewards, can be associated with punishment leading to the inhibitions just stated, which can be a block to self-development and move it into other areas based on self-preservation. Doing things only as a means to an end. A transfer from sexual instincts to self-preservation instincts. "The pleasure-principle allows us to compare two otherwise quite different objects on the basis of a similitude of pleasurable tone, or of interests. But we are probably justified in assuming that on the other hand these objects and activities, not in themselves sources of pleasure, become so through this identification, a sexual pleasure being displaced onto them. Then, when repression begins to operate and the step from identification to symbol-formation is taken, symbol-formation, [for example] libidinal phantasies becoming fixated in sexual-symbolic fashion upon particular objects, activities and interests, it is [symbol-formation] which affords an opportunity for libido to be displaced on to other objects and activities of the self-preservative instincts, not originally possessing a pleasurable tone. Here we arrive at the mechanism of sublimation..." For example, if a person has trouble with sexual symbolism, then connecting with a feeling of satisfaction after eating can be used for finishing projects or tasks. You need to find feelings of love or savoring to connect to the project, which would more normally be seeing oneself, identifying, and imagining savoring a benefit related to finishing that task or project. What's the meaning? What's the benefit? What's the payoff? What is the wish that would be enjoyable to fulfill? What is beautiful? What is precious, cute, endearing or treasured? What should be preserved for the future? In a way, Melanie was studying authenticity in activities and relationships so that those children would be luckier than she was.

The Pleasure Principle - Sigmund Freud: https://rumble.com/v1gurqv-the-pleasure-principle-sigmund-freud.html

Object Relations: Fear Of Success Pt. 1: https://rumble.com/v1gvsvj-object-relations-fear-of-success-pt.-1.html

By 1924, it was clear the marriage wasn't working for the Kleins'. At that time Melanie moved to Berlin and there ensued a custody battle. "There is a widespread belief that Arthur Klein disappeared into Sweden, never to return. In actual fact he continued to live in the Dahlem house until 1937, when he moved to Switzerland, where he died in 1939. He remarried not long after the divorce ('disastrously,' according to Eric Clyne, since he was again divorced within a few years), and there was a daughter by the marriage. According to his son, Arthur Klein was subsequently looked after by a series of housekeepers."

Melanie Klein Trust: https://melanie-klein-trust.org.uk/

Love, Guilt and Reparation: And Works 1921-1945 (The Writings of Melanie Klein, Volume 1) by Melanie Klein: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780743237659/

The New Dictionary of Kleinian Thought by Elizabeth Bott Spillius, Jane E. Milton, Penelope Garvey, Cyril Couve, Deborah Steiner: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780415592598/

Melanie Klein by Penelope Garvey: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9781032105246/

Melanie Klein: Her World and Her Work by Phyllis Grosskurth: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9781568214450/

Analyst of the Imagination by Jenny Pearson: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9781855759046/

The War Inside by Michal Shapira: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9781107035133/

Hernandez-Halton I. Klein, Ferenczi and the clinical diary. Am J Psychoanal. 2015 Mar;75(1):76-85.

Psychology: http://psychreviews.org/category/psychology01/

#abreaction #catharsis #child psychology #divorce #education #femininity #franz alexander #karl abraham #masculinity #melanie klein #object relations #oedipus complex #pedagogy #playpsychology #psychoanalysis #repression #sandor ferenczi #sublimation #teaching

[psychreviews2]

Object Relations: Helene Deutsch Pt. 2

The Actual Conflict

Patterns we can see in the prior episode on feminine psychology can apply overall to humanity and how we face reality. Reality is going to hit you with constraints and resistances, and many of those things can't be avoided. Psychoanalytic vicissitudes lead to defenses which then lead to pathological life choices. The healthier you are, the more doors you can unlock in the maze of life, and therefore find more fulfillment, but there's a progressively reduced accessibility as pathology is increased. Like an escape-room, there are lessons to learn from some locations, and sometimes there are limitations that one accepts and tries to make do with. For a person with constitutional factors that can't be cured by talking therapy, that person is working in a smaller building with limited amenities, warmth or contentment. Psychoanalysis is not like engineering and analysts aren't locksmiths. Those with more talent, skills, and overall mental health, they can experience consistent well-being in a spacious environment, even if they take it for granted. But any changes in the pathological direction, and the walls close in. With this understanding you can see the positives, and also the limitations of Psychoanalysis, especially it's narrow focus on regression. It's true that many people experience open doors at first to only find later a door that is uncooperative, forcing one to walk back to familiar environments, but without a possibility of a complete cure, therapists can only focus on stress related to any one condition.

Blur - St. Charles Square: https://youtu.be/8Iidpm1YLRM

"We might compare a frustration to a wall against which a forward-moving mental force rebounds so that it is compelled to strive backward. This process...we call 'regression,' and this regression continues back to those deserted stations of former developments which exercise a peculiar power of attraction. This persistent power of attraction corresponds to 'fixation.' It is fixation, and neither the actual cause nor frustration, which is responsible for the type of neurosis, and thus it acquires the character of a dispositional factor...Inner neurotic conflicts arise when the libido is deprived of the possibility of finding an ego-syntonic gratification in the outer world, or when intolerable narcissistic injuries have prevented it from making satisfactory sublimations...[When the] other world appears insoluble to the person concerned, the 'external frustration' becomes an internal one, and a vicious circle is set up...The ego disappointed in the outer world finds itself compelled to look for substitute gratifications, and thus enters upon a familiar path of regression...What makes a reality-conditioned actual conflict a neurotic one is its subjective insolubility...[but it] need not necessarily lead to symptom formation...Every civilized person is really in a continuous state of latent conflict, with the real world on one hand, and with his own inner forces on the other, since he has always frustrations to endure and inhibitions to overcome...The latent conflict will become an actual one only when the boundary of endurability for the person in question has been passed."

Sublimation - Sigmund Freud: https://rumble.com/v1gv2fr-sublimation-sigmund-freud.html

Like most religions acknowledge, Helene noticed how the desire that propels us forward, to unlock some of these doors, with successes or regressions, involves the same choice between pursuing the more bumpy road of bliss or the less intense experience of peace, which looks similar to later positive psychology perspectives. The advantage of pursuing bliss is that one can create beautiful memories to bask in later, because memories do release healthy affect. Peace on the other hand has the advantage of reducing risk and it supports the feelings of sobriety, rest and renewal. In reality, most people find that their sense of self is in the bliss, but they need periods of peace to recharge, and therefore a moderate path is usually carved out. On the bliss path, Helene found that no matter what, all desires lead to more or less a feeling of dejection or depression. The way forward is an autotelism where goals are the means and the end, and the repeated solution to the depressing ending of a goal, is to simply choose another goal. People can also use their intelligence and find where predictable conflicts will arise in the pursuit of bliss and find a way to avoid those problems, or just dump those goals altogether. Skills have to increase or goals have to be replaced with ones at the right level of challenge to return to a feeling of zest and aliveness. That brings up the old idiom that "if you're bored, you're boring."

Flow - Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi: https://rumble.com/v1gvked-how-to-gain-flow-in-7-steps.html

The feeling of bliss is going to be challenged from time to time so a deep rest, with enough hours of sleep, and periods of meditation or inactivity, is needed to recharge. For those on the path of peace, rest is just the beginning. There is a search to maintain that peace for longer periods of time throughout the day. This usually involves a letting go of excessive survival alarms, which can feel like a surrender or an acceptance of death, but the wisdom of meditation is that there are many safe places to do this to give that alarm a rest from overwork. On a third path, one can moderate and bring that wisdom to the world of effort and learn to ramp up effort to efficient levels because work isn't so bad when there's better concentration and needless habits to tighten and flinch one's soma weakens over the years. Part of the moderate path is also to notice that we tend to miss things we don't have, and by moderating activity or consumption, many things that were boring, can regain some of that allure. For example, if you drink alcohol, tea, or coffee less often, when you reunite with those things, there's more pleasure, but if you repeat too often, it's taken for granted. This is even easier to do if one has many sublimations that take up the extra time so that one can't be addicted to only one thing. It's an art to use hobbies and interests to regulate your emotions and grief.

The Anapanasati Sutta: 4 stages of meditation: https://rumble.com/v1gon6r-the-anapanasati-sutta-4-stages-of-meditation.html

Grief

That area after bliss, grief, is the wheelhouse of most therapists. Psychoanalysts trace where patients fall from motivation into sadness, and learning about one's childhood coping mechanisms helps to make aware to the adult how those patterns developed. In A Two-year Old boy's First Love Comes to Grief, Helene found examples of grief acceptance already at this early age. Part of creating object solidity in the mind, which are memories of important figures in one's life, is based on the emotional exchange one has with caregivers. Helene referred to an example of a boy, Rudi, who's mother was a hardworking professional that hired a nurse to handle the day to day child rearing. As you would expect, Rudi treated this nurse like a surrogate mother, because she served "all his autoerotic (self-stimulation) needs; it was she who fed him, assisted him with his excretory functions, and fulfilled his wishes." When that nurse finally left him, he went through stages of loss and acceptance.

When a younger replacement nurse arrived, the child oscillated between temporary acceptance of the new situation and a strong resistance. Back and forth he was treating feeding and excretory activities as things that can only happen in this loving bubble created by the prior nurse, or begrudgingly for his biological mother when she was present. "Rudi, now fully toilet trained, now wet and soiled his pants. When attempts were made to 'catch' him and put him on the 'potty,' he would let go a few drops of urine, only to wet his pants a few minutes later. Sometimes he would announce his need to go, but when the nursemaid hastened to help him he would say, 'On no, Rudi goes wee wee only for Mommy'...Rudi had shown great obstinacy in withholding his excretory products. He had clearly enjoyed retaining his always constipated stool and waiting until the last moment to urinate. Now he relinquished his source of pleasure. His feces, found in his bed or in his pants, were now ideally soft, a state of affairs no medical or dietary measures had been able to produce. It is as if he were protesting, 'I have something precious, but it is a gift. It is only for my loved one.'"

As the days went by, Rudi jumped into a mode of giving affection to his dolls, trying to embrace and kiss everyone around him. The autoerotic love was transforming to an alloerotic one looking for external objects. From the Freudian standpoint, cravings look for objects but when those objects are lost, there can be pathological consequences, or in healthier situations, children can move onto new objects. The fear that new objects will abandon them or abuse them can be a transference onto these new people that leads to either some kind of fear and avoidance or aggression to control. In Rudi's case, by the ninth day of separation he was returning to his regular personality but with more of an interest in other people. With more displays of affection and interest in others, he became regular on the toilet.

Psychoanalysts expect certain milestones to be passed at different ages, but when those markers pass without visible development, it's time to find out why. Hinted at in her paper is a suggestion that a healthy attitude is one where people accept losses, discharge grief by expressing it, and move onto new goals, while at the same time one is interested in other people and willing to have relationships where everyone is working together to find joint fulfillment. Pathology would instead be avoidance, phobias, chronic depression, paranoia, mania, etc., as listed in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM). Helene's writings also clue the reader into another one of the ways one can detect pathology, which is to compare normal vs. abnormal losses and vicissitudes. "Our analytic experience has forced us to recognize this 'dispositional factor.' It became abundantly clear that many children were unable to overcome completely normal experiences in a normal way...Even the normal conditions of infantile life make demands which are by no means infrequently beyond the child's psychic powers. And the incapacity to deal with these difficulties can produce various pathological reactions...[A] type of neurosis [can rest] in a constitutional factor, which can be recognized even in earliest infancy."

Awareness increases control

Even with problems related to constitutional factors, the role of talking therapy is to focus on stress, especially stress that is optional, and to reduce it. You want to reduce pain and increase pleasure and satisfaction. Awareness in all these early modalities is about having the patient acknowledge their reactions and see what they are doing to themselves, and ideally an analysand can see the worthlessness of their reactions and lose the attraction to repeat them, because having less pain is good and having more pleasure is better. In psychoanalysis, one of the main ways to see reactivity is to realize that a lot of the reason why people have "locked doors" in their life experience is because they feel that someone has purposefully locked them in. Those bad memories of people trigger defenses that then are mentally rehearsed and transferred to other people in a series of predictions, and some of those reactions are pathological and get in the way of satisfaction, especially in relationships. One way to clarify this is to imagine the life of a person with no trauma. They likely go where they please, speak to who they please, and satisfy their libido without the anticipation of punishment or a fear of loss. On the contrary, a person who has had a traumatic life experience, they will likely have many expectations that anticipate abuse, rejection, neglect, and further loss. This limits adaptive behavior, which is like a self-sabotage, and healthy relationships suffer or are not pursued.

Following Freud, Helene agreed that a therapist has to be willing to be in the role of an authority figure or a reminder of a past caregiver. The reactions of the patient afterwards bring up a lot for awareness to digest, and the best information comes from developing a positive transference first and then seeing how things evolve or devolve from there. "The first aim of the treatment consists in establishing a well-developed rapport, in attaching the patient to the treatment and to the person of the physician. To ensure this one need do nothing but allow him time. If one devotes serious interest to him, clears away carefully the first resistances that arise, and avoids certain mistakes, such an attachment develops in the patient of itself, and the physician becomes linked up with one of the imagoes of those persons from whom he used to receive kindness."

Case Studies: The 'Ratman' - Freud and Beyond: https://rumble.com/v1gu9qj-case-studies-the-ratman-freud-and-beyond.html

For the analyst, a lot of clues appear when they are brought into the mental world of the patient and are treated like a family member. Positive transference is first setup and then afterwards negative transferences begin to appear at the first sign a therapist is being viewed as disappointing, or the patient feels slighted, even if it's only in their mind. While listening to their stories, different pathologies provide different clues. In Helene's example of phobias, patients can have an "inner danger [that] is projected outward and attached to a situation or a particular object." Tracing those reactions to actual incidents in the past helps to bring awareness to the patient that their phobias are a number of degrees away from the current situations they living through, for example, a fear of animals, a fear of large spaces, or in converse, a fear of enclosed spaces. Interrupting false associations allows patients to find safety in the real world and also to accept without delusion the real dangers that do exist. This way reality is not over or underestimated, and the ego can now navigate a more accessible world, and ideally find many forms of satisfaction.

With obsession, the patient has to see the "...unrelenting severity of the super-ego..." and see through the superstitions of obsessive rituals and the inaccurate beliefs that "if you shun the instinct you will escape the punishing authority." Instincts are there for a reason and punishment should only happen when people are encroaching on each other's territory. The obsessive patient has to realize that they have rituals that prevent a normal life from eventuating and the fact that these rituals don't work, or there's no real magic to them, should be a reason to abandon them. The therapeutic results also comes from all the energy saved when rituals are not taken up anymore, and when there's confirmation that the world is essentially the same even when rituals are not followed.

With melancholia, the patient has to see "the cleft between the ego and the superego and the murderous struggle between the two psychic systems which this gives rise to." Again, there can be rituals that are created to appease the superego, but a way to face the reality of life is to balance the expectations of the superego with the ego's understanding of the very real limitations found in life. Melancholiac patients also need to look at their goal systems and de-cathect, or abandon emotional investment, from people and projects that predictably fail or abandon. When there are failures there can be overly strong signals of inferiority from the superego that devalues one's actual skills and strengths in the ego. It's like the superego stops believing in the ego's ability to learn from trial and error. This creates a depressive impasse where no learning is possible, and healthy satisfactions are denied. Reengaging with goals with persistent reality testing, and acknowledging small wins along the way, can help to rehabilitate self-esteem. Again, the talking therapy aims to bring awareness, and as patients progressively abandon useless rituals or perfectionistic beliefs, it should be easier to choose better goals which naturally motivate action towards fulfillment. If there are any pathological resistances left, it is usually some kind of constitutional factor that thwarts well-being.

Why the perception of reality is so important is because what we believe to be true triggers stronger affect than fantasies do. For example, talking therapy doesn't cure Schizophrenia or Bi-polar disorder, but being aware of how internal feelings are projected onto the outside world, like with Schizophrenia, it can help to reduce anxiety when those delusions arise and they are not given the significance of reality. Helene also saw the role of denial, particularly in Bi-polar disorder, and how the superego can blame-shift to the outside world while at the same time deny very real boundaries when acting in the world. With a reduction of boundaries a manic episode can easily arise. A vicious cycle can then develop when out of control impulses invite blame, making the patient depressed, and then when new excuses are found to project blame to the outside world, another bout of mania can arise from the continued lack of boundaries. Being aware of one's denial could introduce more self-reflection so that the peaks and valleys of manic depression can be smoothed out somewhat. But, as Helene later stated, "what we conquer are only parts of psycho-genesis: expressions of conflicts, developmental failures. We do not eliminate the original sources of neurosis; we only help to achieve a better ability to change neurotic frustrations into valid compensations." As a reminder, we need a sense of reality to find places where we can effectively discharge affect and enjoy compensations. If there are serious mental illnesses, then it's still the same situation but the compensations provide only a partial recovery.

The Power of Suggestion and Induced Insanity

One of the ways of getting a grip on reality is to continually assess information that one receives and whether it leans more towards fact or more towards theory. For most people, they don't operate completely in the world of science, but more in the world of suggestion. Suggestions are a way for people to share ideas of how they can find fulfillment in the world, and ideally share those ideas and pursue gratification individually and as a society without the need to go to war with other people and fight over scarcity, or to succumb to deprivations or health issues when following a pathological suggestion. Suggestions can be word of mouth or come via mass advertising, propaganda, or awareness campaigns. Suggestions can be pathological when they point to satisfactions that don't conform to reality and steer a healthy person towards addictions, health problems, or conflict. Regular people can fall into periods of life where pathological suggestions were operating a lot of the decision making. It's true that some suggestions are well-informed and one can see that when suggestions bare fruit, but when there are no "valid compensations" found when following a suggestion, it's time for a reality check.

For most normal people, what Helene calls a "valid compensation," would include a significant part of the economy. A lot of our economy is about temporarily numbing the pain related to stress, and not necessary finding a healthy long-term sublimation or lasting fulfillment. This can be seen in addictions, but these patterns can be also found in normal pursuits and leisure, which fall into the category of a healthy sublimation. She published an early version of Sports Psychology that really could apply to all hobbies and interests. Life can be full of negative feedback and for her the purpose of leisure is to "...compensate for the inferiority feelings in which that complex expressed itself." One of the main complexes is the Castration Complex, starting with parental authority figures criticizing and ridiculing, and through transference, that complex develops an expectation that other authority figures will behave the same way. Unrelenting criticism and demands require a release somewhere, and hobbies can "...[project] a source of anxiety into the outside world and discharge [it]." The way to separate a valid compensation that discharges properly, from an addiction, would be a loose demarcation that highlights some kind of damage sustained or reduced well-being. One could make further distinctions between activities that provide thriving in the real world from entertainments that are solely releases in the imagination, and an even further devaluation for those pleasures that cause physical or psychological damage. Even healthy things like exercise suddenly change if it's excessive and there's injury. Intimate relationships can release a lot of instinctual tension, and provide opportunities for bonding, but if one is sleeping with a toxic person, the opposite is true.

With one example of a patient, Helene was able to define emotional compensation or satisfaction. This person had a phobia who "...ineffectually took to flight, while in games he endeavored effectually to master the situation...The possibility of discharge in an ego-syntonic form lessens the conflict between ego-tendencies and sexual instincts, and the harmonious operation of the two leads to an increase of feelings of power within the ego...The original situation between ego and external world is thus restored; the whole battle is waged no longer between the institutions of the ego, but between the ego and the external world. The social value of sport, too, from the point of view of psychology, lies partly in the fact that, through this process of displacing the battlefield, aggressive tendencies are discharged in a manner consonant with the ego. By the increase in narcissistic gratification the wound inflicted by the castration-complex is assuaged, and, above all, the subject is afforded a possibility of getting rid of part of the dread of castration or the fear of death which is common to all mankind."

The benefit of activity in leisure is that at least there is some reality to it. If you won the game, then that is real too, but there can be further pathologies related to the superego when it takes over the reality checking function of the ego. Via the vehicle of idealism, Helene found in the story of Don Quixote, that one could live in a self-created world and try to operate within it and deny reality in the senses as far as possible.  "With relinquishment of the real object there takes place a [suppression] of all instinctual drives...There is no doubt that in connection with this impoverishment of the ego in the interest of the ego ideal, reality testing likewise undergoes impairment...beyond any adaptation to reality...The demand that these idealists make upon reality—that it shall adjust itself to their narcissistic ego ideal, instead, vice versa, of subordinating the latter to the demands of reality—this is the eternal quixotism of the human spirit. It is in poets, artists, and in fanatics that it is particularly well-developed...[but] those who are adjusted to reality and accept rather than deny their instincts enjoy a pleasing triumph in seeing the ascetic ego ideal robbed of value by its caricature. This devaluation, however, refers equally to the infantile past in which the child believed himself the possessor of every perfection..." Here you could say that being in reality and getting satisfaction that is real is better than fantastical satisfaction because the affect, assuming no constitutional pathologies exist, will be stronger and more satisfying.

As idealistic people persist in ignoring reality, they can become chained to unscrupulous manipulators and other deluded authority figures. This especially happens when people put leaders on a pedestal and expect extraordinary results from them. Both leaders and followers have wishes to be fulfilled and Helene saw the power of suggestion and how it can spread like a virus when whole populations act without reality testing, and the predictable consequences of misery. "...In the form of mass suggestion they can take the form of psychical epidemics such as were especially frequent in the Middle Ages and occurred sporadically in later times; and in the individual they can take the form of the illness known to us under the clinical picture of induced insanity." How the brain feels satisfaction through suggestion is via the ego-ideal, which is the entity individuals want to serve when in this mode. Randomly bumping into a meditation book by Jean Klein, I noticed how Advaita types and Buddhists are very familiar with this particular superego imago and how powerful it is, and possibly dangerous because of how one's idol worshiping can be exploited by others for money and resources. In a way, you are getting lost in thought when you follow a conceptual version of yourself as a hero or villain in a story about one kind of consumption or another to master. "A wealth of second-hand knowledge, [a lot of it via suggestions from others], has given you a certain image and when you say, 'I am this,' you identify yourself with this image. Every time you look at a flower, or you look at a tree or a child, or face a situation in your life, it is the self-image that looks and everything refers to this image that you have of yourself. So, my advice is: Free yourself from the self-image, be nothing."

Now I wouldn't go as far as Jean Klein and I prefer to look at the language itself. In English the superego feels distant like it's a goal post that keeps moving away, especially when you've achieved something. Following a self-image that chases something unreal is definitely a problem. This is called an unreal conditional in English grammar. Eg. "I would like to be," but the Ego under a real conditional opportunity, has reality testing on its side and says "I will be..." The self-image is only a problem when it is disconnected from the real obstacles that exist and has no plan for them, or is pursuing something that isn't going to provide much satisfaction. Whether someone is more or less in reality, it's about living up to the ego-ideal, but as Freud also stated, it's a "rebuilding of the vanished object world." We don't only want new things, but we want lost objects returned to us. This can easily be seen in mass movements, like trends, fads, and political initiatives to restore a golden age.

The danger of replacing reality testing with suggestion is relying on the fallacy of appealing to authority, which is part of the reason why people think they are responding to what is real, and feeling strong emotions in consequence. Leaders throughout history have disappointed people and caused nightmares because they aren't as all knowing as they present themselves to be. "All education, for instance, depends, strictly speaking, on suggestion, for the transfer of ideas and intellectual content owes its strength solely to the suggestive resources at the disposal of the person in authority." When the wish-fulfillment energies get harnessed by the authority figure, which also have their own wish-fulfillments that may not be in your interest, it's very easy to lose control of one's autonomy and one can turn into a puppet. Then the only way out of cult-like influences is a "separating [of] those involved from each other, preventing them from influencing each other, sober refutation of their delusional ideas, and finally confession of deception on the part of the suggesting parties..." Of course the last part is difficult to get out of authority figures who usually gaslight people into more beliefs about the reality of their fake world or move onto the next delusion or willful manipulation.

Mass Formation - Mattias Desmet: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CmloBdLnX3A

As If

The consequences of abandoning the reality one sees in one's own life can be a life long problem with self-disorders that Helene lumped together into her category of "As If" personalities, where satisfaction is only mediated through authority figures and we are in turn controlled by the honor and affection that they can bestow or withdraw from us. She quibbled about the differences readers saw in the character pathologies of her analysands and quick associations they made with narcissistic personality disorder (NPD), but the similarities are striking, and it's not comforting when she states that "...the 'as if' personality is common among leaders and political figures." Yet her examples often involve people who are in fact not leaders, but followers. One could also argue that current leaders were once followers in the past.

"The 'as if' is such a widespread psychological phenomenon that we can almost speak of a 'type' rather than of pathology." Like the puppet on a string analogy, there is a lack of inner guidance. All work and endeavour is permeated with imitation. "They are intellectually intact and gifted and show great understanding in all intellectual matters. When they try to be productive—and efforts in that direction are always present—their work is formally good but totally devoid of originality. It is always a laborious though skillful imitation of a model without the slightest personal trace. Close observation shows that the same applies to their affective relationships. These are generally intense; they bear all the marks, for instance, of friendship, love, and sympathy, [yet]...these relationships lack all trace of warmth and that all their expressions of feeling are such in form only—it is like a performance by a technically well-trained actor who lacks truth to life—and that inner feeling has been totally eliminated. Thus the first characteristic of this human type is that formally they behave as if they possessed a fully felt emotional life. The important point about this behavior is that the patients themselves are not aware that anything is missing in their affective life and that they believe their empty performances to be identical with the feelings and experiences of others."

These pathologies often start young, and when there is a lack of acknowledgement, let alone development, of a self, which is the feeling of love for people and activities, the individual ends up with "...object poverty and its persistence at a narcissistic level..." To simplify, it's like the ego is totally subservient to the ego-ideal which is molded by a series of role models in the outer world and those role models point to some kind of godly example of success we should aim for. Subjective love towards real objects is weak, but the need for love from fantastical authority figures is strong. In a parasitical way, one needs to receive love much more than one can give. Real satisfactions always pale in comparison for the deluded person with promised forms of happiness. The way to notice this, especially when an "as if'' person is a good actor, is to pay attention to how they behave in different environments. They usually change their personality to suit the authority figure at present, even if there are wild swings in ethical values. It's "...mild benevolence that may nevertheless be capable of any kind of evil." This can be dangerous when environments themselves provide bad influences and it's possible that there are "...many criminal acts carried out by previously completely noncriminal personalities..."

As many experts point out about narcissism, there is no cure at the moment because of how early these pathologies arise. It's hard to develop a self when there isn't a childhood foundation. In agreement, Helene also acknowledged that "the result of this defect is the persistence of the earliest ego-identifications, in which the dependency on the object [parents] expressed itself in imitation as a method of adaptation." When you get love only when it's 100% conditional, the only rewarding pleasures available are one-up comparisons with others to prove one's value to parents, and then eventually to authority figures in society, hence the need for early childhood mirroring where parents love their kids as they are. Without that you see a skill being developed in children to play act the emotions they think they need to feel in order to receive affection. For example, Helene described one patient as having "no primary, vital, warm object relations with her parents. These were impoverished from the outset; their role in her fantasy life was narcissistic, in that the objects served only to substitute increased self-feeling for the lack of love."

It also doesn't help that most people have some narcissism and it's very common for people to look to authority figures for inspiration, and narcissists will point that out while not noticing more independent manifestations of libido in personal preferences, and they likely will say that "everyone is like me. Therefore there's nothing's wrong." Like in previous episodes of Psych Reviews, the "as if" imago operates powerfully like an exercised muscle and if people are unaware of what it's like to have an independent love for people and activities, which allows one to use personal experience contra social suggestion, one doesn't know what one is missing. The advertising and the promise of happiness dominates personal experience. It's like being stuck in thoughts and questions about "what do cool people normally like? What should I dislike?" Like a slave, the instincts need an ego-ideal permission slip before acting, and love for someone is based instead on how it affects one's self-image and reputation. Any weaknesses in the person can appear as slights to the ego-ideal and motivate rejection and the need to find another circle of people. This deficiency of self further passes down the generations the same desire to make others into useful tools, and to ignore any inherent human value. If you didn't receive love, can't feel it, then logically you won't be able to impart it to the next generation. As described above, authority figures can then overrule preferences and exploit the 'as if' personality's "...passive readiness to be influenced..." It's very easy to see how a totalitarian society can arise from such a population.

The following are common patterns of the "As If" personality and how it can be seen in the modern world:

Patients experience a depersonalization where there's a lack of affect.

They have incredible abilities to imitate and learn behaviours and skills from role-models, but without any healthy passion, love, warmth, creativity or originality.

One finds abilities to move between perversion and morality with relative ease and swiftness. There are no signs of remorse, but if there are signs, it's just a pantomime to make one appear like others with the exact same goal of getting affection and sympathy from authority figures. If there are any values, it's environmentally dependent. Change the environment and the values change.

He has abilities to change professions quickly in order to launder one's public image.

She has placid emotions that can cover an ill-will underneath.

They obey rules and laws with great exactness in order to get more positive attention from authorities, if they are in such an environment, so as to feed an omnipotent narrative that one is closing the gap between oneself and the role model, which is a primary motivation of these types.

He had parenting that was emotionally cold or excessively spoiling, or a mixture thereof.

She feigns warmth and excitement to solidify a relationship, but partners repeatedly realize that the affect was always simulated. Confrontations about this lead to a quick exit and a chameleon-like transformation to attract another partner.

There can be past sexual interference with parents during a time when role-models are supposed to provide healthy super-ego development for the child.

They live in ego-ideal fantasy worlds that can't be supported by facts or reality.

After undergoing analysis and achieving some success, the patient finds it easier to return to the habitual false self that is so well practiced and effective. This is also supported by a modern society which rewards compliant and subservient behavior, and detests independent people who threaten their power and control.

The Narcissist - Blur: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Gr8Z3rUeJM

The False Self - Various Authors (Narcissism 2 of 4): https://rumble.com/v1gth6h-the-false-self-various-authors-narcissism-2-of-4.html

Like other composite illnesses of these early days of Psychoanalysis, the 'As if' personality could cover a range of Cluster B Personality disorders and has Schizoid features of depersonalization that many clinicians have since separated out into their own categories with different treatments for each. It has also been noticed that Helene herself had 'As if' tendencies, based on content in her memoirs. For example when Helene didn't feel satisfied with her relationships, or partners disappointed her ego-ideal in some way, she thought about replacing them. Her parenting also involved abuse and neglect while Helene vied for her father's attention to be the most beautiful and smart child. Lisa Appignanesi suspected that Freud's early termination of Helene's analysis was because "he was refusing Helene’s tendency to love by identifying herself with the object, then experiencing that love as betrayed and running to the next object. It was a tendency she herself explored in her various studies on the ‘as if’ personality. Indeed, her memoir sometimes fills one with the sense that she experienced her own existence to be an ‘as if’ - living her life first ‘as if’ a socialist in her identification with Lieberman; ‘as if’ a conventional wife with Felix; ‘as if’ a mother in her identification with her saintly friend; then ‘as if’ a psychoanalyst in the identification with Freud." Regardless of how Helene expressed her personal experiences along with that of her case studies, or making herself into a case study, she moved to the United States in the 1930s when politics was becoming more extreme, and managed to pull off many successful seminars on psychoanalysis that helped to popularize the method. She also hosted Saturday night card games with students who wanted to learn more, and in turn influenced new generations of analysts, including "the Hartmann's, the Hoffers, the Krises, the Waelders, and the Bibrings."

Helene Deutsch: A Psychoanalyst's Life by Paul Roazen: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780385197465/

Confrontations with Myself: An Epilogue by Helene Deutsch: https://isbns.net/isbn/9780393336412/

The Therapeutic Process, the Self, and Female Psychology by Paul Roazen, Helene Deutsch: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780887384295/

The Psychoanalysis of Sexual Functions of Women by Helene Deutsch, Paul Roazen: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780946439959/

Neuroses and Character Types: Clinical Psychoanalytic Studies by Helene Deutsch: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780823635603/

Freud's Women by Lisa Appignanesi: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780465025633/

Beyond Knowledge - Jean Klein: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780955176289/

Psychology: http://psychreviews.org/category/psychology01/

#anxiety #agoraphobia #As if #avoidance #bipolar disorder #depression #distraction #ego ideal #happiness #imitation #manic depression #melancholia #narcissism #obsession #obsessive compulsive disorder #OCD #suggestibility #suggestion

[psychreviews2]

Object Relations: Helene Deutsch Pt. 1

Rebellion and Revolution

Born October 9, 1884 in Poland, Helene Deutsch entered the scene at a time when the country was partitioned. She lived with her family in the Austrian side of Poland in Przemyśl, also in an environment of partitioned languages. Her mother spoke German but the children spoke Polish out of allegiance. Helene was a loyalist and still dreamed in Polish decades later. She had memories of the old fortress town near the Carpathian Mountains and the San River with fiery sunsets and a ghostly moon. Quoting Proust, she felt that in writing a memoir helped to prevent forgetfulness. "...My experiences do not fade, they grow vivid, more beautiful or more ugly, but above all, more significant." René Girard pointed out that much of this nostalgia was because certain memories were taken for granted as being too peaceful, but became precious precisely because of that peace devoid of rivalry. Helene also noticed that even those difficult memories could return because of "the waning of the punitive force of the Super-ego. One is old, the limitations on one's existence grow greater, and the nearness of death must be accepted as one more biological cruelty. The inner mechanisms geared to the future must be given up, and this further clears the way for the return of the past." There is also a distorted desire to embellish the past, to "find at least some comfort in a glorious 'I was.'" Even with those distortions early memories can betray how suggestible people are, especially children. For example, Helene once went to a doctor as a child to cure a stomach ache. "He pressed my stomach here and there, and when I cried out at an especially painful squeeze, he exclaimed, using a popular expression: 'Aha! So that's where the dog's hiding!' For many years the belief lived on in my unconscious that I had a dog in my belly. Only now have I learned to see the humourous side of my childish conviction. But I can still recognize it in very distinct dreams and I am aware of its psychic meaning. The dog appeared again in a dream I had after my son was born, that time as a danger to the newborn child." As you will see later, this is one of many examples of psychoanalytic content that people can recover from childhood and see how it animates thoughts, emotions and actions in an adult that doesn't believe in dogs hiding in stomachs.

Object Relations: Fear Of Success Pt. 2: https://rumble.com/v1gvuql-object-relations-fear-of-success-pt.-2.html

Being Jewish, Helene didn't quite fit in this Catholic country, but both the Poles and the Jews at that time shared the same feeling of oppression. Helene's father Wilhelm Rosenbach was a self-taught lawyer and for a time Helene wanted to follow in his footsteps but the Law profession was barred to women. She saw a respected man in her father, but he appeared weak in comparison with her mother. Helene felt she had an Oedipal relationship to her parents with a hatred for her mother Regina and a love for her father. She recalled regular beatings and her mother was against Helene getting a higher education. Helene in her own mind thought her mother hated her because she wanted a son instead. To her, Regina had delusions of grandeur, was a snob that wanted to be invited to the homes of Polish aristocracy. Regina was fastidious with cleanliness and "ruled the model household like a despot." Her devaluation of her mother eventually caused her to have a sympathy with other women who had similar difficulties with their mothers, including prominent women in early socialist movements.

When it came to her siblings, Helene was fond of her older sister Malvina who was a protector. Malvina lived a hard life and three of her four children predeceased her. She had a phobia of dirt and excessively washed her hands and blew on her fingertips from time to time to clean them. Her favorite son Ludwig died from an altercation on his way home from WWI. Ukrainians and Poles were fighting their own civil war at the time. He was wounded by a Ruthenian soldier and the small wound developed into the tetanus that killed him. Helene's other sister Gizela was described as a sweet person who seldom went out. "Gizela was unquestionably my mother’s favorite. She resembled a citizen living in a despotically ruled country to whom it never occurs to revolt because he is not bothered in his personal life." She eventually married a doctor and died later in Australia leaving behind her surviving daughter Irene. Helene's brother Emil did poorly at school and had very little prospects as a Jew. Disappointing to his father, Emil was allowed to be baptized. He changed his name to a Polish one and married into Polish aristocracy. The family lost track of his whereabouts after some time. In analysis later with Sigmund Freud, Helene was able to reconstruct Emil's sexual seductions going back to the age of four. Helene attributed her imaginative creativity as a way to escape the reality. She also idealized her father and felt her mother was jealous of the attention she got from him, especially when Regina accused Wilhelm of infidelity while on his business trips. Helene had some jealously of her own when she was very young and when the rest of the family left her behind on a trip. Over time she developed a belief that she was the Cinderella character in the family. In response to being left behind she competitively tagged along with her father on outings, partially to get away from her mother beating her, but also to eliminate any favoritism that the other siblings may have enjoyed in the past.

Helene had difficulty in discovering her talents and possible vocation while in school, but she had aunts who influenced her to take up writing. One aunt was a distant relative to Joseph Conrad, and another aunt read Schopenhauer. Between Schopenhauer's outward philosophical pessimism and Conrad's internal impressionism, one could see how Helene could be interested in Psychoanalysis. As Helene criticized her family and rebelled into adolescence and adulthood, she would find out later that one doesn't move on from their family and sometimes one recreates a similar dynamic with others.

Like many other women who rejected the family dynamic, she became interested in socialism and communism, which was very new when she was young. The promise of relief from inequality, poverty, and injustice was alluring, and it also allowed one to hit back at parents. "I had learned of the exploitation of the peasants as a little girl in my father’s carriage; and I hated my mother’s bourgeois materialism...My generation’s interest in socialism and in the worker’s movement was sparked by news of the social revolution spreading through Russia, especially by its romantic aspects—the danger, the heroic self-sacrifice. There were of course other elements in socialism that were devoid of the revolutionary spirit and limited to party politics and short-term improvement of the workers’ lot. This was not the form of socialism to which I, during my prolonged adolescence, subscribed. Let me add that revolutionism can never be defined simply through its social application; it is an attribute of individuals who are drawn to everything that is newly formed, newly won, newly achieved."

When joining a new socialist tribe Helene could see the difference between dreams and reality, and saw some of her psychological patterning appearing in her new relationships. "I realize that there were years during my adolescence when my father virtually disappeared from my sphere of interests. I see clearly now that my love relationship (perhaps premature) with the Socialist leader Herman Lieberman, a man much older than I, was so much a father-transference that my love for Father was weakened. During this time my father was totally wrapped up in his work, and his interests were no longer in harmony with my sublimation of energies into politics and medical school."

Like many in her generation, socialism was beginning to show a disconnection from the internal human life, with all the objects that talk in the mind and aim at individual goals outside of the collective politics. "Yet although my mind was ready to surrender to socialist ideals, my self-esteem needed something more. The 'old Rosenbach' quality had stayed with me, in the form of a narcissistic ego-ideal not easy to gratify in the humble role of a party soldier. I had to find some further outlet." Of course she wasn't the only one. Almost all healthy humans have an ego-ideal, which is the kernel of the Super-ego that demands personal growth regardless of party principles. This is in evidence when looking closely at politicians who demand outsized rewards commensurate with their social standing. "I suffered the inevitable youthful disillusionment over the integrity of politicians, in connection with the actions of a local labor leader." And when self-interest clashes with politics, hypocrisy is predictable. Like in any political or social movements, the members of that movement are made of the same cultural background as the people they are fighting against. For example, left-wing support for "free love" only applied when one benefited. If one was at the wrong end of a love triangle, "...even the progressive socialist worker retained his conservative outlook on domestic matters and looked very critically on overt marital infidelity."

The Ego and the Id - Sigmund Freud: https://rumble.com/v1gvdo1-the-ego-and-the-id-sigmund-freud.html

Yet, the hope springs eternal for new role models and Helene turned to two women in particular. "In all the crowd of women representing their different groups at the Congress, I found two who corresponded to the ego-ideal I needed. They were Rosa Luxemburg and Angelica Balabanoff. In this gathering that swarmed with famous men, both of these women were treated with significant respect, and their speeches had a strong, often decisive influence on the proceedings. I heard these speeches with awe...However, I learned soon enough that the world of socialism I had so idealized was torn by internal feuds, intrigues, splinterings. I wasn’t well-versed enough in theory to comprehend the factional disputes; they aroused in me a sense of inferiority, and I humbly deferred to the arguments of those great men that I believed in. I recall that the Polish party, whose ideology I shared, was divided into a right and a left, and I felt a natural affinity for the left."

Rosa Luxemburg trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xM81dcVEJ6A

The Rosa Luxemburg reader: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9781583671030/

My Life as a Rebel - Angelica Balabanoff: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780253154859/

Even though both of these women were ultimately disillusioned with Bolshevism and consumed by the monster of party politics, Helene found a strength in these women that she felt would be necessary so women could defend their boundaries and argue for their rights. She maintained a balance in herself while still preserving her femininity. It also gave her an individual strength when not only party politics disappointed but also the intimate relationships that were connected. "I realized at last that my socialist zeal was fatally amalgamated with my love for the socialist leader. This realization cast a shadow on both my love and my social idealism. In my early adolescence I had longed for great experiences transcending the helpless dependence of love for one man."

Helene's next love was Felix Deutsch and she was relieved to marry him and settle things with her parents. Unfortunately, it started rocky and turned into a psychoanalytic imbroglio. On paper, the marriage looked like a good fit because Felix was a doctor with a good bedside manner, who also cared about a patient's mental well-being, and he was already interested in psychoanalysis. As they grew together they could share knowledge with each other so that both a patient's mind and body were given consideration. Later when Helene was travelling between Europe and America, she was getting intertwined with other psychoanalysts. There was the fear that as she got analyzed that the "new" Helene would be unacceptable. Because Felix was more of a feminine type, and sometimes more than Helene, she was finding him disappointing in bed. Author Paul Roazen hints at the problem of premature ejaculation, something that Helene's mentor Karl Abraham studied, and Karl had to stop analyzing her because he "had too much positive feeling for her." Abraham also got a letter from Freud that he showed to Helene to not allow the analysis to end the marriage, which made her feel that the analysis would be limited.

Later Helene would have a brief affair with the famous Hungarian analyst Sandor Rado, and this led, partially through guilt, to her analyzing herself. She wrote down notes looking at her past behavior. She felt inadequacy with her father, then she ran away with Liberman, and then she married Felix. "Helene's reasoning to herself was in accord with the accepted analytic theory of her time. She was betraying Felix with Rado as she had once betrayed her father with Liberman, in both cases because of a failure in her father/husband. In the end Rado was not a suitable replacement. "Rado was not just one of the most learned and intelligent of the post-World War I analytic generation (he had a photographic memory), but he was also, as Helene later put it, a 'seducer' of women. According to her version, he got gratification from conquering women, and even took pleasure in breaking up marriages; she claimed he liked to torture women by making them jealous and betraying them with others. Although he was not physically attractive, one of Rado's appeals to women, which mobilized their sexuality, was the intensity of his desire; although Helene could be level-headed about almost every area of her life, she—like others in their choice of love partners—was misled by her instincts and lacked sound judgment about men. Rado loved good food, had style and flourish, and other women besides Helene were enchanted by him."

Beyond Helene's self-analysis, was how this marriage was affecting her son. "One of the considerations holding her back was her appreciation of the affectionate tie between Felix [and her son] Martin. 'The child is still from you—what speaks most of all for this is his great love for you, as well as the purity of his soul and the sweetness of his temperament.'" As revolutionary as Helene was, she seemed to be pulled in two different directions. "Helene had made clear that it was a life with Felix she had chosen, as opposed to a compromise for the sake of Martin. Outsiders to their marriage continued to see signs of conflict between them; on the whole, it looked, even to Martin, as though Helene willfully mistreated Felix. Some of her closest students did not even think the marriage was an exceptionally intimate one." Roazen also suggests that "Felix [in Vienna became involved for a time with Dr. Dora Hartmann, an analyst...Yet Helene and Felix continued to live together until his death in 1964; few people detected the exceptional kinds of emotional support they gave each other."

As Roazen termed it, "a strange marriage," you can see exactly that in the ambivalent description Helene gave of Felix and her past loves, influences. "Psychoanalysis was my last and most deeply experienced revolution; and Freud, who was rightly considered a conservative on social and political issues, became for me the greatest revolutionary of the century. Looking back, I see three distinct upheavals in my life: liberation from the tyranny of my mother; the revelation of socialism; and my release from the chains of the unconscious through psychoanalysis. In each of these revolutions I was inspired and aided by a man—my father, Herman Lieberman, and lastly Freud. My husband had his own unique place in my heart and my existence."

These brief biographies show how much personal issues creep up into analysis like people are becoming analysts, analyzing themselves, and trying to experience their own freedom and develop theories based on that. Again, a lot of these theories originated in Freud and were adjusted as more varieties of patients were encountering the method. At first, Helene's connection with Freud started slowly. She had read a lot of his works already before meeting him and was able to see lectures. She called herself a "devoted disciple...My personal relationship with Freud began in August 1918. I had begun to feel restless at the clinic, and when I learned from a woman colleague that Freud had accepted her for analysis, I made an appointment to inquire about the possibility of a didactic analysis for myself...In the course of my first interview with Freud, he asked me, 'What would you do if I sent you to someone else?' to which I naturally replied, 'I would not go.' Freud accepted me as a patient, but with the warning that it would certainly bring me into conflict with the Wagner-Jauregg Clinic because of Wagner-Jauregg’s notorious opposition to psychoanalysis. And a conflict it was indeed. Leaving the clinic meant giving up numerous advantages as a staff member, not to mention practically giving up all contact with mentally ill patients. But I did it!...At the outset my analysis with Freud was not dramatic. I must admit that it is difficult to develop a normal transference neurosis with an analyst who already occupies an important position in one’s psychic world...Naturally I have the typical amnesic gaps that often develop after treatment, whether or not the analysis has been successful. Only isolated incidents have survived in my memory. I can recall one of the dreams I had during this period, in which I have a masculine and a feminine organ. Only later did I find out its full significance. Freud told me only that it indicated my desire to be both a boy and a girl. It was only after my analysis that it became clear to me how much my whole personality was determined by the childhood wish to be simultaneously my father’s prettiest daughter and cleverest son."

When Helene reviewed her analysis, she found both the Oedipus complex, including a positive transference towards Freud, and the female castration complex. "My analysis ended rather abruptly about a year later, when Freud said to me with absolute candor that he needed my hour for the 'Wolf-Man,' who, after an interruption, had come back to continue his analysis. Freud told me, 'You do not need any more; you are not neurotic.' I knew of this patient and realized that he was the source of important discoveries for psychoanalysis. I considered myself mature enough then to react to the situation objectively, without bringing my transference problems to bear on it. Certainly it would have been irrational for me to expect Freud to give up for my sake the time he needed for his creative work...Freud's assurance that I had no neurosis was very encouraging...He said 'you will now be my assistant.'"

The Unconscious and Relationships

As a psychoanalyst, Helene's career covered a lot of ground and helped to flesh out the female experience more thoroughly compared to Freud. Her environment is still in the Darwinian atheistic mode and the way forward through all the analytical complexity is to remember that humans are animals going through evolution on a complex planet. Not everything works like clockwork and as can be seen in nature, some parts of it thrive and mutate. Other areas decay or go through pathology. Animals eat each other and fight over limited resources. The pathway for humans from gestation to maturation is a very long one which can house a complex series of traumatic memories, disappointments, and constitutional biological factors that are difficult to tease apart from the analytical content. Then when you compound the human desire for novelty and exploration, each individual stakes a claim in the world against everyone else, and the challenge for each person is to find a place where they can stand on a secure platform and trade libido, energy, and work with each other in relative peace. It goes without saying that peace is constantly disturbed in human existence.

In Helene's epoch after the enlightenment the concern is still around human freedom, but analyzed through masculinity and femininity. She viewed both men and women as striving for their platforms in society where they can find a modicum of fulfillment and wellbeing. In her analyses one finds psychoanalysis stretched to the breaking point because there are sometimes deficits of desire that are like a blackhole and explosions of libido and activity that aren't explainable by tracing trauma and repression back in time. Some children have a fully formed attitude early on that can only be attributed to biological constitution. In other areas, it's easier to see how a loose castration complex, or intimidation, or a loose Oedipus complex, envy and rivalry, can lead to conflict and traumatic outcomes. Helene added to Freud's theories by emphasizing the early relationship between mother and child before these complexes became established. Those early pleasure-traumas and roleplaying templates can be stages to fall back to when there are disappointments in adolescent or adult relationships. Compounded on that is the natural drive to explore all avenues to avoid the fear of missing out, or as it's commonly shortened down to: FOMO. It's quite common for people to need a lot of personal exploration to find out what they want in life. This is often done by finding out what you don't want, which are all those things that are advertised but have hidden drawbacks. It's easier to appreciate what you already have and go in more authentic directions where there are less drawbacks or they are acceptable.

Each child is able to find pleasure in different ways and those are often modeled and suggested by parents, older siblings, media, and children at school. Successful experiences of satisfaction, no matter how strange or countercultural, condition skills to attain those pleasures again in the future. As children grow up and try to develop more relationship skills, leading to the usual pleasures of heterosexual marriage with a male provider and a female nurturer, there are inevitably some conflicts, rejections, and unconscious impulses erupting in embarrassing ways. Socially prescribed templates fail regularly. Then when you add new technology that makes workers obsolete from time to time and pushes them to be flexible and move into other areas they are not used to, including the need to move to faraway places, like Helene and Felix experienced, or when you factor in passionless intimate relationships where neither partner can give what each other wants, or when people get what they want and get spoiled and have to look for ever new highs that are beyond their partner's current capabilities, it's easy for people to break apart. It's not guaranteed people will find lasting satisfaction in their lifetime. People need to know themselves before they can accurately predict what would satisfy them and that isn't always found by the age of 20. Sexual, financial, moral, and dysfunctions related to power and control, lead people to search for solutions.

For example, with female frigidity, Helene summarized that "its most frequent cause is a protest against the assumption of the passive feminine role—in other words, the masculinity complex." Why do some women relish a passive role and others find it frightening? It's not always clear, and people may make marriage contracts before any of this is figured out. Sometimes people can't feel sexual excitement and at other times sex can manifest without a feeling of satisfaction. Both the desire to be a mother and the sexual response are often diminished at the same time, yet sometimes women are more interested in sex than motherhood and vice versa. Helene talks about extremes of being a woman living as a prostitute, turning tricks with zeal, or a childless midwife helping scores of women get through childbirth as a replacement for her own lack of children. There can also be a compartmentalization where sex is just a means to have a child and once the child is born the father is to be discarded. Helene also finds examples of people that she labels as asexual in their fantasies. They have the dream that they can create a child and do all the raising themselves and other partners are just an imposition. There can also be a sublimation with work where the role of mother is seen as a supervisor and the staff are children. "They transfer their maternal feelings to objects other than their own children—to other women's children or to adults to whom they extend their maternal protection. Many choose a profession or work with others as an outlet for their maternal feelings."

Helene also hints that there may be unconscious influences from ancestors that add further complexity. "The causal connection between sexual intercourse and fertilization and pregnancy probably was not grasped by primitive intelligence for a very long time. During highly civilized periods the idea of parthenogenesis has been recalled in myths and religions. Many mythical individuals were thought to be sons of virgins; among the deeply emotional elements of Christianity, the precept of Mary's immaculate conception represents another recurrence of the idea of parthenogenesis. In modern women we often find the fantasy of the parthenogenetic child, born of the masculine wish in woman for power over her own and complete independence of man..."

The nutshell of sexual attraction, when it does happen, is how it connects to power differentials and there is an unsaid requirement to be paid in kind with sexual gratification in reality or in a sublimated form, like in the prior examples where projects and workplaces receive the libido. The feeling between men and women, and also between men and men or women and women, is "I want to take care of you," in a masculine or feminine way, and relationships can alternate polarities to satisfy the desire for exploration, but again it's difficult to trace one inclination or preference to only early experiences, especially if those preferences were nascently there in the beginning, like the chicken and egg debate on which came first. Certainly, conditioning, grooming, advertising, and propaganda can provide pleasure experiences at differing levels of intensity that lie and wait in memory as a skill to be accessed in the future. Some people can explore ever more elevated feelings and others accept lower levels or even a deep emptiness as their personal norm. Without a variety of pleasures and drawbacks to compare to it's hard to know what you are missing apart from word of mouth advertising. Many people feel that their bag of tricks are the only ones they can be good at, and sometimes the bag only has a valueless plastic bauble or nothing at all.

Helene did find that certain early influences could be counted on to have some affect, including the Oedipus and a castration complexes, and also experiences that predated them. These include the child modeling the role of mother or father, often with dolls and toys at the beginning. Some children see their parents being labeled in good or bad ways in the home environment that lead the child to identify with an accuser or victim. The later adult can also use those parental templates for their future relationships. The goal is evolution and development towards peaceful and loving relationships, but pathological relationships can continue unscathed when people regress to old templates of pleasure, because it's the only ones they have in their bag. Marriages are often based on false contracts where people unconsciously want different terms than they agreed to, and they can't explain it to themselves let alone their confused partner who also may not know what they want. In many scenarios you can't blame them if they weren't able to learn about themselves during their childhood. When people are adults and they lack the required skills and it can be difficult to catchup because adults with more skills in love making, peace making, and zest for life, have higher expectations and they can't wait for people to develop, if they ever develop at all. Rejection rates increase because of this and many people feel they can't move beyond their regressed templates since no one else will tolerate them for any period of time. Libido isn't just sexual craving in psychoanalysis but also the energy to sublimate into activities. A mismatch in energy can happen between partners where active partners feel held back by their passive partners and passive partners feel rushed and pressured to keep moving. Sometimes they can't close the gap.

Masculine and Feminine Engrams

A lot of the Freudian psychoanalytic summaries of childhood sexual development were originally male centered with some descriptions of what girls experience, but a lot of Freud's female disciples and women influenced by him, took up the mantle. Helene was one of the more orthodox followers, but she provided more detail on Freud's penis envy. In psychoanalysis, the strange descriptions are based on how libido or craving moves through the body and imprints conditioned memories to repeat in the future. The older the sexual impressions, the more archaic the influence is as one grows into an adult with modern knowledge of biology. The imprints still operate in those older modes and unconsciously people can regress to older attitudes without realizing it. When there are adult frustrations towards pleasure, the libido doesn't go away but instead moves to replace lost objects with new ones. The libido craving feelings can pull back into the unconscious, and then after a new object is selected, it generates another conscious bout of craving. Both males and females have their own castration complexes, which for males is a fear of being passive and being made into a woman. For women, it's finding the clitoris wanting in comparison to the penis, from the child's point of view of sex education, and the feeling of being treated as unequal to men. This includes childhood theories of babies coming from the anus, treating a column of feces as a metaphor for penis activity and birthing. The mouth can be sexual and treat the penis like a breast and the vagina can be treated like a mouth as well, feeding on a penis-breast-replacement. All these ideas create conditioned feelings, in what Freud called component instincts, where there can be fixation at lower levels of development, and it is to be noted that his theoretical system is a heteronormative one with the Darwinian goal of procreation of the species. The pleasure in sex is part of the bonding process and we can bond in different ways and some of them are treated as perverse in this theoretical system because those activities or fetishes don't align with Darwinian procreation. Because humans develop for such a long time compared to other animals there are many opportunities to get off the bus before one is successfully married with children.

In psychoanalysis, the Oedipus complex leads the male to rival for the mother by taking the father as an ego-ideal, which as described above, is the kernel of the Super-ego, an automatic imitation function that provides a lot of the later mental noise in the mind when there's inward or outward criticism. That ego-ideal becomes the sexual model a child moves into, whether hetero or homosexual. The ego-ideal is partially established by role models who display different forms of masculine or feminine savoring that signals that there is pleasure connected with the role. It becomes an ideal when the savoring is especially noteworthy but it can also be limited by feelings of inadequacy and roles are pursued more because they are good enough. The girl has to accept she will not get a penis and prefer to receive the penis via the man through intercourse. Freud tends to leave it at that, but Helene wanted to add more depth and value to a woman's role in producing the next generation. In addition to the Oedipus complex, "she has to renounce the masculinity attaching to the clitoris in her transition from the 'phallic' to the 'vaginal' phase [where] she has to discover a new genital organ...The man attains his final stage of development when he discovers the vagina in the world outside himself and possesses himself of it sadistically. In this his guide is his own genital organ, with which he is already familiar and which impels him to the act of possession. The woman has to discover this new sexual organ in her own person, a discovery which she makes through being masochistically subjugated by the penis, the latter thus becoming the guide to this fresh source of pleasure. The final phase of attaining to a definitively feminine attitude is not gratification through the sexual act of the infantile desire for a penis, but full realization of the vagina as an organ of pleasure—an exchange of the desire for a penis for the real and equally valuable possession of a vagina. This newly discovered organ must become for the woman 'the whole ego in miniature,' a 'duplication of the ego' as Ferenczi terms it when speaking of the value of the penis to the man."

The Oedipus theory gains a lot of complexity when going as far back as possible in time in analysis. Both males and females are in a primal bliss savoring on their mother's breast. Girls develop a penis envy because their clitoris doesn't increase in size, and boys are afraid of being too intimidated and passive in a castration complex. Envy and rivalry show up in a tangled web among parents and siblings, leading to victories over and losses of objects. In Psychoanalysis, there are bisexual dispositions in all people with an emphasis of being more one way or another plus a childhood development arc. That development isn't guaranteed to lead to a heterosexual outcome. In psychoanalysis, masturbation is a basic form of homosexuality and if one is good with one's own equipment then one can imagine getting pleasure using the same equipment with other people. In a raw psychoanalytic narrative, male homosexuality involves a celebration of the love of the mother with penises treated as breast replacements that can also be drained in a similar way. There's giving and receiving, passivity and activity where one is being the "mother" or suckling on the "mother" with a narcissistic love choice to love the same sex as oneself. One is not looking for what one does not have in the woman to make a baby. With women, there is also the bliss of breastfeeding at the beginning, and on the way to being feminine, the daughter has to accept that she will only get a penis in collaboration with a man and a desire for the father arises at an early age. Passivity or activity becomes a traditional yin and yang for heterosexual couples but many women have active sides to themselves including having Tomboy phases in their development and there's a strong pressure to repress those active sides to collaborate with men who have their own repression of their passive side so they can specialize in being more active. Buried in Helene's works is the aggressive tendency in some females that is too difficult to repress and then can then appear chummy with the father and want to replace the father, to be like him, but when the father rejects, or doesn't recognize the femininity in the daughter, and naturally rewards that, like they are buddies, the daughter is left a highly developed active side that is appealing to more feminine women who want to partner with that energy, and they also find it easier to enjoy familiar equipment. Part of the feeling of limerence and attraction is connected with those earlier feelings and can go unconscious and be revived in adulthood.

Helene provides a humorous example of lesbian desires with secretaries working on a project and trading active and passive roles. Sublimated activity always has the potential of reviving a sexual exchange, especially if there were earlier imprints with childhood experimentation, masturbation, and or constitutional influences. Those in the active mode feeling the mildly sadistic masculine "I would like to help you" feeling, a homosexual desire can erupt.  The passive mode can bring up a feeling of "help me" that can create a mildly masochistic desire to be wanted, touched, and taken care of. Of course, in a workplace, matches lead to office romances and mismatches into lawsuits. These eruptions can also happen more often when people haven't masturbated recently or are not in an intimate relationship, or it's a sexless marriage. Freud also talked about people who go through periods of life, even surprising people in old age, where their libido is still very powerful and they look for partners that are too young for them. Because of this there can be bigotry from married people against single people who they think will erupt in inappropriate places. Of course if they masturbate and sublimate, they may have better behavior than a married person who erupts at a weak point in their life, as can be seen in common extramarital affairs. Eruptions can also aim at any object available and this criticism has been aimed at religious leaders who abuse their position and target impressionable minors and even to the point of seducing or raping adults. There are endless scandals in religion and it's part of the reason why people become atheist after these experiences. Long developed concentration, meditation, or prayer skills can be humiliated easily by conditioning and it proves that lapses in meditation, basically when you use any habituated skills or allow any conditioned instincts to arise, which is all day for most people, a Freudian eruption isn't far away. Unless libido is exhausted in other areas or there is strong disgust or strong suppression skills, the brain can't always trust itself. The next predictable Freudian behavior is displacement when people have to cover up their guilt, like a domesticated cat that looks guilty for staring at a bird. Expect universal hypocrisy. "I don't erupt. Only bad people do that."

Dalai Lama "Suck my tongue." https://youtu.be/J1xSK3mPZ9k

The Psychopathology of Everyday Life - Sigmund Freud: https://rumble.com/v1gtl55-the-psychopathology-of-everyday-life-sigmund-freud.html

By the time children have grown up and paired with others, the heterosexual couple is a fragile institution. Activity and passivity scenarios that arise in real life can disappoint partners when they don't match the most fervent and intense fantasies or expectations advertised in wider society. Everyone has an ego-ideal and they also have cultural ideals they want to partner with. This leads to mismatches and rejections. Relationships can also fall apart when people are predominantly pursuing inauthentic goals and everyone in this theory is partially inauthentic. The hole in these theories is the bridge between biology and conditioning experiences that are not mastered in the science, even today. Certainly there are people who look so fantastically feminine or masculine that a homosexual role is the only likely option because the sexual attention from others will repeat the same way again and again. They are not attracting the opposite sex and are being rewarded by the same sex, partially due to the fact that grooming and makeup can only achieve so much. Some people will instead get bisexual attentions, and then there are individuals who manage hobbies, interests, and vocations that are so interesting to them that their love gets sublimated into external projects. Those projects are so interesting that sexual relationships look like a drag or something that will sabotage those projects. Alternatively, others pursue sex like a hobby and want to explore sexual pleasure to the fullest and jobs are only a way to attract active or passive attention. Some of the other ways hobbies can connect with sexual attention is going to the gym and working out to build more desirable bodies. All these barriers and flexibilities are what psychoanalysts call vicissitudes that alter the biological disposition towards more hetero or homosexual object choices.

So our ego ideals can be conditioned by the role that you believably can play. This is one of the reasons why things like conversion therapy can only find success with people who have a bisexual craving, meaning they still have some heterosexual craving to build through purposeful habituation, but many others will have barriers of disgust to heterosexuality, mismatches in expectations and consistent bombardment of homosexual attention that makes one feel at home in that role. The external environment can reward and punish efforts to find one partner or another, and being open to experimentation can help people find what is authentic for them. One can also find social demands that want to change the reward and punishment system of society, through different kinds of newly introduced castration complexes to push more acceptance of non-heteronormative orientations, and the counter-revolution with the typical pressure from conservative groups that see marriage as an important foundation for generational replacement, and their argument about how fragile that institution is and how it can destabilize a society through a declining population. Anybody paying attention to modern cultures should see this as a timely subject that requires incredible knowledge and nuanced debating to find balances that allow a place for everyone and allows for children to go through puberty without bullying so they can make their final decisions based on pleasure that is accessible to them and allows regular sexual release without excessive repression.

There is still the ongoing concern that started in Western enlightenment about individual freedom and the value put into the individual to allow them to make their own choices. Individual happiness partially involves the freedom to ask oneself and to listen to one's own body to discover what is the most fulfilling option for oneself. There is a fear of exploitation from authority figures who provide suggestions that are more about their agendas. In a modern society, it's becoming more uncommon for people to consult themselves and much more common to be narcissistic and have an ill developed sense of self where we only look to authority figures to tell us what to do 24/7. Helene described this very presciently in her descriptions of the "As-If" personality. Today, with modern media, people are bombarded to follow suggestions all the time while not listening to their own cravings and in many cases the cravings are created from those outside influences and it's hard to say what is authentic. Some sexual identities are rashly accepted and developed without enough quiet for people to judge for themselves what their body actually likes, and many people don't have enough experience with sexuality to even have a library of comparisons to decide what is the most fulfilling for them. Then when you add the usual pattern of advertising where desire is talked about in great detail but consequences are abstract or not explored at all, you get lots of buyer remorse with misfit relationships, STIs, toxic relationships, and the emptiness of not knowing what one really wants. What's not talked about is the value of mental peace in decision making. It's like an inverse desire that's counterintuitive and often only arises in maturity when people have made so many mistakes and finally realized, like in meditation, that restful inactivity is often better. The remainder of feelings of attraction come from matching lifestyles together. Whether people want to work more or less, raise more or less children, or have no children, and pursue leisure in compatible ways, these further reflections can increase the desire to be with one partner over another.

Female Sexuality and Motherhood

What Helene stressed on the feminine side on how to be compatible with a man was to develop her femininity through sexual pleasure and to champion intuition. Even though she dabbled in socialism and feminism, she decried militant feminists who she felt were caricatures of the movement. Because women biologically have the option to carry a baby to term the old fashioned way, she felt that women should use their aggression for self-defense instead, and not throw her psyche out of balance so that she loses touch with femininity and motherhood. Here those terms are less abstract. She's talking about feelings of femininity, sexuality, and also the bliss of motherhood. These aren't supposed to be dry academic principles to follow but instead feelings to arouse and to enjoy.

"The feminine woman, who is characterized by her struggle for a harmonious accord between the narcissistic forces of self-love and the masochistic forces of dangerous and painful giving, celebrates her greatest triumphs in her sexual functioning. In the sexual act her partner's elemental desire gratifies her self-love and helps her to accept masochistic pleasure without damaging her ego, while the psychologic promise of a child creates a satisfying future prospect for both tendencies..."

"The 'modern' young girl's sober, purposeful intellectualism and her excessive valuation of efficiency can make her an excellent mother, who dutifully applies all the precepts of modern pedagogy; but real motherliness will probably remain alien to her forever. Whenever a young girl exchanges a rich emotional life for scientific thinking, it is to be expected that later in her life sterility will take the place of motherliness even if she has given birth to many children..."

"The real motherly type...shows an emotional disposition to subordinate the instinct of self-preservation to altruistic feelings...When all the elementary emotions of jealousy, competition, and desire for pleasure, in whatever form they may manifest themselves, are ready to yield in favor of another being, when even the instinct of self-preservation loses its predominance and the fears connected with it are overcome, we can speak of 'pure motherliness.' One type is a woman who awakens to a new life through her child without having the feeling of a loss. Such a woman develops her charm and beauty fully only after her first child is born. The other type is a woman who from the first feels a kind of depersonalization in relation to her child. Usually such a woman has spent her affectivity on other values (eroticism, art, or masculine aspirations) or this affectivity was too poor or ambivalent originally and cannot stand a new emotional burden. The first expands her ego through the child, the second feels restricted and impoverished..."

"All those to whom the ideals of freedom and equality are not empty words sincerely desire that woman should be socially equal to man. The post war generation will play its part in hastening this process. However, woman's achievement full of social equality will be beneficent to her and to mankind as a whole only if at the same time she achieves ample opportunity to develop her femininity and motherliness."

Female Masochism

Because sadism and masochism are associated with more extreme sexual interests, Helene endeavored to show the more subtle elements in psychical life, especially that of feminine masochism in the woman. Tracing from adulthood to childhood, Helene found evidence of early childhood sexual theories. The penis-envy that is criticized in modern therapy is more closely connected with those childhood theories. As attitudes and reactions build from childhood to adolescence, their influences can remain in the unconscious and transfer reactively in adult areas of life. We may think we know ourselves but it's in unconscious reactivity and acting out, and our reflections on those habits and behaviors, where we really learn how we are. "Penis-envy would never acquire its great significance were it not that sensations in the organs, with all their elemental power, direct the child's interest to these regions of the body. It is this which first produces the narcissistic reactions of envy in little girls. It seems that they arrive only very gradually and slowly at the final conclusion of their investigations: the recognition of the anatomical difference between themselves and boys. So long as [masturbation] affords female children an equivalent pleasure they deny that they lack a penis, or console themselves with hopes that in the future the deficiency will be made good...Owing to the memory-traces of this active function of the clitoris, it is subsequently deemed to have had in the past the actual value of an organ equivalent to the penis. The erroneous conclusion is then drawn: 'I once did possess a penis.'"

In many cases, girls blame the mother and a compensation can happen through desire to have a baby with the father. Helene associates rape fantasies with early beliefs in the sexual act as being sadism by the man and masochism by the woman. Girls fantasize about having a baby and both the pain associated with being raped by the father and giving birth are connected with masochism because there's a possibility of pleasure to outweigh the pain in having a child. The transition between clitoral stimulation to vaginal pleasure is repeated by Helene again and again and is to her an important transition that can be interrupted. "I think the most difficult factor in the 'anatomical destiny' of a woman is the fact that at a time when the libido is unstable, immature, and incapable of sublimation, it seems condemned to abandon a pleasure-zone (the clitoris as a phallic organ) without discovering the possibility of a new [emotional investment]. The narcissistic estimation of the nonexistent organ passes smoothly (to use a phrase of Freud's) 'along the symbolic equation: penis = child, which is mapped out for it."

There are different areas of regression that can happen next. The clitoris can be relied upon again leading to future relationships where it is the only place left for satisfaction. Wishes of "I want to be castrated by my father," can lead to: toxic relationships where women associate abuse as normal, masculine relationships where the clitoris is used in a sadistic masculine way, frigidity where sex is not pleasurable enough to take intimate relationships beyond maternal friendship or sterile mother son connections, and sexual relations where sex is treated as an activity that is mainly for men and to be endured by women. Sometimes the masochism associated with the feminine role scares girls away from femininity. "Escape into identification with the father is at the same time a flight from the masochistically determined identification with the mother."

Sexuality Pt 4: Masochism - Sigmund Freud & Beyond: https://rumble.com/v1gtrq1-sexuality-pt-4-masochism-sigmund-freud-and-beyond.html

The sedimentary quality of early reactivity provides the work for the therapist to uncover what happened and to make clear the goal, which is to bring pleasure back into the sexual act and lead the way for motherhood, for those women who desire it, or some kind of sublimation that is more acceptable to the patient. For example, a patient may have hobbies and interests of such a nature that there is regular fulfillment and passion and the desire for sex becomes less necessary to regulate emotions and thereby finding a modicum of happiness. "The analyst's most important task is, of course, the abolition of the sexual inhibition in his patients, and the attainment of instinctual gratification...The instinctual life of the individual strives towards the ultimate goal, amidst conflicts and strange vicissitudes, of attainment of pleasure...But sometimes, when the patient's instincts are so unfortunately fixed and yet there are good capacities for sublimation, the analyst must have the courage to smooth the path in the so-called 'masculine' direction and thus make it easier for the patient to renounce sexual gratification." The attainment of vaginal pleasure and the bliss of motherhood makes it easier to tolerate the social constrictions of motherhood for Helene. Even further, raising children can also be like a hobby or project when treated with that loving attitude. "Women would never have suffered themselves throughout the epochs of history to have been withheld by social ordinances on the one hand from possibilities of sublimation, and on the other from sexual gratifications, were it not that in the function of reproduction they have found magnificent satisfaction for both urges." Helene then made a prediction that modern women would use liberation as a way to increase sublimation in the direction of work and "will give birth to children only on the condition of freedom from pain."

Homosexuality in Women

Not everyone moves into a heterosexual orientation, and Helene was aware of this. She still analyzed homosexual women with the understanding that they were not feeling accepted in society and that heterosexual relationships with men were rarely passionate. She offers disclaimers that the women studied were more bisexual and not overtly masculine, and many of them appeared very feminine. Some of these analysands were also very aware of how different they were, and to match-make with other women was a secretive business. Even when feelings were mutual, a friendship orientation was expected, especially around other people. "The patient was perfectly aware that her capacity for love and her sexual fantasies were confined to her sex; she also experienced quite unmistakable sexual excitations when embracing and kissing certain women with whom she was in love. Her attitude to them was faithful, but at the same time only platonic, even when she knew of a similar perverse inclination in the women in question..." The pretense also went into intimate relationships with men and marriages. "She was by no means hostile to men; she had many men friends and did not object to being admired and courted by men. Feelings of sympathy had led her to marry a man who in appearance was markedly 'masculine' and she had had several children, for whom her feeling was not passionate, but yet maternal."

Helene's paper on female homosexuality found certain patterns in the analyses. Sometimes there was disappointments in father figures and girls would try to fill the role of the father themselves, which is like Freud's To Be or To Have. Some women had inhibitions to their homosexuality based on social retaliation. They were raised straight and at puberty they became attracted to female teachers and authority figures. One example involved abuse where the patient hated her severe cold mother who punished her for masturbating. "...Not knowing what else to do, [the mother] resorted to the following plan: she tied the child's hands and feet, strapped her to the cot, stood beside it and said, 'Now, go on with your games!'" It lead to furious anger mixed with violent sexual excitement in her emotional complex, as found in the analysis. In that situation the father was a passive witness and did nothing. Her hatred of her mother led to guilt feelings and self-hatred, which is a common pattern from more active women who feel bad about their energetic anger and lashing out. In another example, there was a patient that was rejected by the father and the daughter's thoughts swirled around the thinking that "if my father does not want me and such a blow is dealt to my self-love, who will love me now if not my mother?" Also similar to Freud's view of ambivalence, there can be a bisexual oscillation between parental role models based on rejection and interest towards what seems accessible, whether it's authentic or not. "The chances of wish fulfillment represent the attraction by one pole, while frustration, anxiety, and the mobilization of the sense of guilt represent repulsion by the other pole..."

Psychoanalysis - Sigmund Freud and Beyond: https://rumble.com/v1gvgq7-psychoanalysis-sigmund-freud-and-beyond.html

Patients also had dreams that explored repressed desires, including repressed sadism. Dream analysis in one patient involved womb dreams "of dark holes and openings into which the patient crept, dreams of cosy dark places which seemed to her known and familiar and where she lingered with a sense of rest and deliverance." Another dream was of "penis envy...so overwhelming that it even manifested itself in her relation to her little sons, whose penises she cut off in her dreams and fantasies." In Helene's practice other patients sought help for depression and suicidal thoughts. Sometimes there were mismatches in partnerships where a woman has a natural sadistic constitution that is too hard to repress to fit in with relationships to men. Similarly, some women were very active like a typical man and married with men that couldn't keep up with the energy.

The castration complex for females is more involved than the one with boys, but Helene repeatedly found "...that the most ardent, most feminine wish for a child occurs precisely in those women whose psychic struggles over their castration complex or penis envy have been the most severe." With clitoral masturbation, the clitoris is a past pleasure and hope for a penis that can be regressed to, and when there is fear of becoming like the mother and thereby adopting her female-masochism, the regression brings her back to a more masculine way of relieving sexual tension. This is also exacerbated if the father is ruled out as a partner that will provide a baby. "In these great perils the libido turns back, as I have said, to its former object, and naturally the readiness and eagerness with which it turns are in proportion to the strength of the earlier ties...As a rule, the phallic tendencies are the most pressing and they cause the subject's relation to other women to assume a masculine form, implying a denial of her lack of a penis. They may even dominate the whole homosexual picture and produce a definite—in fact the most striking—homosexual type. Women of this type deny their lack of a penis and make their female love object confirm their masculinity and endorse their phallic masturbation in the sense indicated above. It is now of minor importance whether the intention be to stress the femininity of the other woman or whether the affirmation of the penis be meant to apply to both subject and object, the latter assuming alternately the masculine and the feminine role. These are two subspecies of the same basic type."

Sexuality Pt 3: Homosexuality - Sigmund Freud & Beyond: https://rumble.com/v1gtqk5-sexuality-pt-3-homosexuality-sigmund-freud-and-beyond.html

With all these tensions looking for release, as expected for a psychoanalyst, Helene was more focused on providing relief arming the analysand with that knowledge so she could understand herself better and make decisions that would engender satisfaction, either in the form of sublimation, or actual instinctual gratification. For example, in one patient, a lot of her anxiety and stress decreased when Helene met her on the street. She was radiant and without depression when the inhibitions were released. She was very conscious of the mother-child relation with her partner and they alternated roles. "What made the situation so happy was precisely the possibility of playing both parts." Helene found that "all the women in question stood in a mother-and-child relation to their homosexual love object and more or less consciously recognized this fact. Here again the double role of each partner must be stressed." In another example Helene described how "one would be a little girl, quite young and helpless, who assumed the part of the child, while the other would be some older, very active and authoritative woman, in relation to whom the patient herself played the part of the helpless girl."

The conclusions for a modern analyst would be that we should look at energy and the direction it is taking in the form of an ego-ideal. The super-ego automatically imitates in the environment and aids the search for new objects. The energy gets blocked in many areas and then unconsciously moves for accessible avenues for release, which may appear as roleplaying and identification. It has to be asked what opportunities were missed or sabotaged? What affordances were available or absent? What skills in order to attain pleasure were never developed? These skill deficits limit opportunities for instinctual gratification or sublimation. A lack of skills also prevents actualization of possibilities when they do present themselves. It's seeking skills to develop which are aimed at pleasure that propel the analysand forward, and ideally they are propelled out of therapy permanently. Whether it's in a modern lesbian relationship or through sublimation, there has to be enough satisfaction to quiet the anxiety, otherwise there is no therapeutic result. Underneath all the analyses there is still the biological factor that could very well be pushing this active energetic style, which may be out of scope for psychoanalysis. A perfect example to bring up that doesn't fit into the female homosexual template are women who are masculine and still are a heterosexual in a reverse way by being attracted to more feminine men.

Reverse Heterosexuality

Being an early feminist and socialist, Helene was very interested in women who blazed a trail for female emancipation, but at the same time she always wanted femininity to be connected with strength and not a tradeoff. Like Freud, she dabbled in literary psychoanalysis and in particular, she focused on the famous George Sand, or Aurore her real name. Similar to Carl Jung's exploration on different thinking styles, Helene championed the intuitive side of life that exists in both men and women. In a drôle response to Freud's view of women being mysterious she answers based on the more ultimate mystery of consciousness. "...The real reason why [women do not reveal their secret] is that they do not know it; the mysterious thing about them is that their real self is unconscious and is unknown to them." She attributed this meditative intuition, which men of course have, to the practiced ability to let things passively be, and long enough for intuitive thoughts to arise naturally. In the case of George Sand, the unconscious becomes a famous writer when in the right hands. "The sharp distinction that is made between the ideas of masculine and feminine is perhaps never completely achieved in any single individual. Masculine and feminine evolved out of a primordial original unity that survives as a bisexual constitution in everyone. In the course of development they have grown more and more differentiated without ever becoming totally distinct. Thus there are always male components in women and female components in men. The extent of the residue of the opposite sex varies in every individual, of course." Inner and outer conflict naturally arise when the masculine and feminine balance is reversed against social roles, and part of George Sand's allure was her being a role model for the many misfit women who didn't fit that social template. A lot people have to find satisfaction somewhere in the world and a lot of social change happens precisely because the world crowds out people who don't conform to social norms and it can threaten their survival if they can't find complementary relationships and vocations that allow them to get by, if they also are unable to find a way to thrive.

When complimentary roles are filled it is often to a great extent between women and men in a form of reverse heterosexuality, and her example is that of George Sand and the sensitive composer Frédéric Chopin. Reverse heterosexuality isn't talked about as much but it does happen often. For example a man can be feminine in many ways but celebrate femininity by enjoying a woman's presence and also desire sexual relations with her. This can also be seen of artists who write, perform, and direct content that is based predominantly on women's lives. The difficulty of such relationships though is if there's not enough femininity in the woman, or masculinity in a man, to bring sexual pleasure that is satisfying to both partners. Those relationships usually end. In the case of George Sand, her masculinity-complex bothered so many men, in the assessment of Helene, because it was like the Freudian problem of the pious non-sexual maternal love of a mother and son vs., the sexually tempting lure of the erotic slut or prostitute. Helene quoted a letter from George Sand's former lover de Musset who described exactly this. "You thought you were my lover? But you were only my mother...Heaven created us for each other, but our embraces were incestuous."

Maurizio Pollini - Chopin - Prelude Op. 28 No. 15 in D Flat. Sostenuto (Raindrop): https://youtu.be/BczgDb9-ctQ

Helene laid the blame on the family dynamic where the young Aurore wasn't able to find a suitable ego-ideal and introjected a more masculine Grandmother who took on a traditional feminine character but was more politically active in the family to the point of masculinity. In a complex web of family insecurity, tragedy and break up, the young Aurore was more controlled by the grandmother and she only could reliably develop masculine skills under that influence. The difficulty of masculinity and femininity in psychoanalysis is being able to create enough pleasure in one direction or another so that the addictive habit can emotionally invest in a role that matches the genitals and genital pleasure in a biologically satisfying way, but with so many examples of narcissism in parenting, one's pleasure is constantly blocked due to one form of envy or pathological control by a guardian. Those imprints need to be laid down early enough so that sterility and frigidity don't take hold. It's also to help avoid future mismatches in libido and guarantee a possibility of a happy marriage. Helene theorized that much of her upbringing was brought out of her feminine intuition down on the pages of her masterpieces and she could only live out vibrant femininity through her characters. The masculinity of George Sand was such a noise that "she called her male second self ['an abominable melancholic beast,'] and held it responsible for her suffering."

Helene Deutsch: A Psychoanalyst's Life by Paul Roazen: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780385197465/

Confrontations with Myself: An Epilogue by Helene Deutsch: https://isbns.net/isbn/9780393336412/

The Therapeutic Process, the Self, and Female Psychology by Paul Roazen, Helene Deutsch: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780887384295/

The Psychoanalysis of Sexual Functions of Women by Helene Deutsch, Paul Roazen: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780946439959/

Neuroses and Character Types: Clinical Psychoanalytic Studies by Helene Deutsch: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780823635603/

Psychology: http://psychreviews.org/category/psychology01/

#Helene deutsch #angelica balabanoff #castrationcomplex #communism #feminism #homosexuality #masochism #oedipus complex #developmental psychology #psychoanalysis #rosa luxemburg #sadism #sigmund freud #socialism

[psychreviews2]

Object Relations: Harry Stack Sullivan

There won't be a video for this post because of it's graphic nature, but I hope you find something interesting nonetheless.

In The Closet

As Object Relations moved forward, researchers and theoreticians began to take the original elements of projection and transference, and moved them into the realm of purpose, and what this mental output was hinting at about the human psyche. Because humans have desires, and desires are political, meaning they want cooperation from others, it creates a need for readers to learn about psychologists and their personal psychological makeup to see what is inferred in their writings. Psychoanalyst Harry Stack Sullivan was a perfect example for having this core of personal desire and needing society to change and make accommodations for all the different ways of being and lifestyles that humans live in. In Private Practices, by Naoko Wake, she outlined the difficulty, especially in the 1920s, for psychiatric hospitals to decide whether patients needed treatments or if society itself was in need of reform. In this more conservative environment of early psychoanalysis, "these scientists artfully separated what they argued in public from who they were in private. For instance, Sullivan and his colleagues continued to describe heterosexuality and homosexuality in dualistic terms—'healthy versus sick,' 'virile versus effeminate,' and 'mature versus immature'—in their published writings. Following the precepts of Sigmund Freud, these psychiatrists did not think of homosexuality itself as an illness unless it caused a person distress, a belief that was in sharp contrast with the mainstream medical notion that sexual 'perversion' constituted a clinical entity. Nevertheless, their position most often expressed in public was that, given the prevailing homophobia, homosexual persons tended to be mentally and socially unstable, constituting a risk group that often required medical attention...Sullivan as a gay psychiatrist pursued a fuller depathologization of homosexuality in his treatment of psychiatrically disturbed homosexual men, even as he defined them as 'immature' individuals in his published writings."

Sexuality Pt 3: Homosexuality - Sigmund Freud & Beyond: https://rumble.com/v1gtqk5-sexuality-pt-3-homosexuality-sigmund-freud-and-beyond.html

Case Studies: Dora and Freud: https://rumble.com/v1gu2dt-case-studies-dora-and-freud.html

This need for a double life professionally also mirrored the double life that homosexual scientists lived. With scandals waiting to be discovered, the only way to live on the edge was to harbor a desire for a new world of acceptance and to incrementally move the current world forward one step at a time. For people who were homosexual or bisexual, and were more comfortable in their lifestyles, they could network together, along with researchers, and create a haven of tolerance, much like religious refugees hiding in a church for safety. In a pluralistic society, there was a developing live and let live co-existence, but if people crossed the line from one person's haven to another with different values, the hostility would begin to rise. This would be a difficulty as soon as a person looks for a job and is forced to encounter people with completely different viewpoints. Of course, the sensible attitude is that when you are doing commerce with others you are not engaging in moral inventories, but so many people, even today, don't have the boundary skills for that. They require mandatory cooperation and alignment of values from the economic to the social and political spheres, with the usual cancel culture, escalations, petitions, and protests. Because humans can imitate suggestions of savoring and different ways of doing it, it requires a lot of awareness and control of the mimetic capacity to imitate people in the environment, which can easily be seen when people imitate cultures and accents unconsciously while going on in their lives. When different ways and suggestions appear, that are culturally prohibited, a conflict is brewing unconsciously and ready to bubble up to consciousness, and lead people to adapt by making their personal lives into a pathological secret. For example, [Sullivan's partner James Inscoe believed that Sullivan] "'had experienced hostility from a great many people' throughout his life; hence he must be defended against 'nasty rumor' that might rise out of releasing any aspects of his personal life."

Penetrating through sensitive boundaries wasn't only on the conservative side and psychoanalytic theories began to experiment. When you work with people on the outskirts of society, because they have to exchange everyone else in the economy, you are already being revolutionary, even if your activities are compartmentalized. Sullivan's controversial relationship with James Inscoe, a minor at age 15, had to be covered up with the usual economic disguises. James was treated as a hired assistant so that he could leave his parents, who were struggling financially, and move into this avant-garde circle. Sullivan also hired hospital employees and aides that would follow his instructions and allow some of his controversial experiments, while shielding his methods from scrutiny in his published papers and interviews. "Sullivan obliquely criticized homophobia at an academic conference, using insights arising from his far more straightforward one-on-one discussions with his patients in clinical settings." These case studies and discussions illustrated repression, from society, and suppression from the patients themselves. For Sullivan, his goal was to have more and more patients release their inhibitions and to learn to accept their homosexual sides. This included negotiation with patients to allow aides to kiss and touch to increase self-acceptance. There was also a certain sense of snobbery and pride that existed in homophile cultures as well as in parallel academic situations that allowed these kinds of professional risks. "Just as small outposts of psychiatric care would help improve an entire community’s mental health, a homophile climate that 'sophisticated' individuals created in their small circle would eventually work against homophobia in the public...Oftentimes this secrecy supported the belief that members of the protected, 'therapeutic' community were the most 'civilized' and 'sophisticated' in sexual matters." Sullivan was also interested in taking the Freudian case study method and to make it more prominent than pure theorizing. "Sullivan seldom discussed the Freudian idea of repression in his clinical practice, although it would have been a crucial concept for examining sexual conflicts were he an orthodox Freudian. Sullivan’s approach was more oriented to acts and experiences than to theories and interpretations. He tried to get facts, or at least get patients to talk about what they considered to be facts, so that they could have something concrete in front of them to work with. In Sullivan’s view, such immediacy and direct connection to patients’ real-life situations were highly effective. Within a few years this approach was precisely what would bring medical doctors together with social scientists who were interested in an individual’s life history."

Many theories that criticized homosexuality essentially allowed it, with the promise that treatment would allow further development. In Sullivan's environment he was careful not to apply labels to individuals but instead to homosexual acts. This allowed for more bisexual patients the ability to accept themselves but also not to rule out heterosexuality, especially with children who were sexually abused before they could actively assert one kind of orientation or another. Within the pool of patients there was a wide variety of behavior that was not exclusively homosexual. There were many stories of adults, including fathers, abusing children and then children acting out the same behavior with their little brothers, often asleep at night, so for some patients mimetics was at play, but they were also capable of interest in the opposite sex. Others also felt guilty in engaging in mutual masturbation. Though, many patients were very panicked about their homosexual behavior, and sometimes even thoughts alone caused a panic. "For many men it was not easy to admit homosexual experiences. Homophobia apparently had found its way into the minds of many patients, and some were not shy about expressing it straightforwardly. A patient who had confessed his sense of guilt over masturbation and a relationship with a prostitute, but nothing of a homosexual nature, still noted that he did not want Sullivan 'to have the idea that [when] all doors were closed...I was a cock sucker.'" Fellatio at that time was considered the lowest form of male homosexuality because of the connotation with weakness and subservience. Some patients were in homosexual situations but they didn't really like it, especially the aspect of being the object of sexual attraction, like a heterosexual woman, as opposed to being the stronger masculine seeker for an object. "Homosexual experiences in youth often involved exploitation by older persons. One patient recalled his older brother 'going into my rear' when they were sleeping in the same bed. The patient 'couldn’t understand it.' He related, 'I said I wanted a separate bed,' and claimed that mutual masturbation with the brother, as well as anal sex with him, was 'revolting.' This was, the patient said, because he did not want to 'think of [himself] as the sexual object of a man...' [Another patient was afraid of] fellatio, and 'fairies—people who use their mouths,' [who] represented to him what was fearful about homosexuality...Given the feminine attributes of fairies, femininity—and the succumbing of masculinity to it—was what ignited in this patient the worst fear of homosexuality." There were also early examples of transsexual feelings in these case studies. "One patient, for instance, told doctors that he had had 'many homosexual...experiences' and that he had a constant 'craving...[in] my throat [for fellatio].' Indeed, he believed 'he was really a woman, and wishe[d] an operation to remove his genital."

The Irishman - A fairy named Ferrie: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yvAahGbIWXk

Queer Connections in the 1920s: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yRb4eQUTnUs

Because psychoanalysis was at an early stage, so many categories were lumped together. Like in Freud's analysis of Daniel Paul Schreber's book, many schizophrenic patients had concerns about their sexual orientation along with the typical hallucinations. Sullivan's work was able to divide the greater category into subcategories, but always with an understanding that having a grip on reality along with healthy interpersonal relations was the ultimate sign of health, not necessarily a heterosexual outcome. Typical of new clinicians, they eventually specialize in areas that they are good at and patients with the same problems started to group around Sullivan. "As a scientist, he became an expert in the definition of schizophrenia as a socially and culturally constructed illness...He did not seem either skilled or interested in treating female patients. In his comments during interviews with them he was often tense, frustrated, and disagreeable, more frequently so than when he was with male patients. Sullivan’s gift as a psychiatric interviewer shined when he talked to young men with sexual concerns, not with their female counterparts." Sullivan was skilled at breaking down stigma surrounding sex acts. "I have received a great number of people who are terribly concerned lest they are homosexual...If one says, 'To hell with everything, I am going to perform fellatio,' the chances are all his training which is directed against immoral practices...will come in conflict with his impulses...Sullivan was aware of the uncanny effect of fellatio. During a one-on-one interview with another patient, he argued that fellatio could 'expose an area of weakness to another person.' He did not mention the gendered nature of such weakness, while he surely thought that fellatio should not cause weakness in anyone. In the same interview, he said that he had 'had a theory for a long time that fellatio was avoided by a large number of people...for the effect that it would have on their prestige.' If there were no fear of disgrace, there would be no stigmatization of fellatio. Thus Sullivan encouraged the patient to see the sexual act as something that just 'is,' not something entangled with social preconceptions."

Case Studies: Daniel Paul Schreber - Freud and Beyond: https://rumble.com/v1gu84v-case-studies-daniel-paul-schreber-freud-and-beyond.html

Sullivan's inner convictions and private practices continually conflicted with his outer theories. For instance, he felt that "if there were no social prohibition of same-sex intimacy, people would grow healthily into 'mature' sexuality. But given the current prevalence of homophobia, homosexual experience was inevitably an episode that preceded and even produced the illness." Because schizophrenia is largely treated with medications today, the kernel of Sullivan's practice was to connect stigma, social panic, and self-hatred to illness. When treating patients with both homosexual phobias and delusions, the same treatments would lead to a variety of outcomes depending on the differences in each patient. In terms of homosexuality, the fight was against the patient's feeling that they were different and that there was something wrong with them. "If a homosexual person did not have enough awareness of the 'contrary' nature of his or her sexuality, even a single episode of homosexual contact could cause a schizophrenic breakdown. Some might not act on their homosexual desires, but would still develop a so-called homosexual panic because the mere presence of such desire could shake a person’s sense of security. This is unfortunate, Sullivan argued, particularly because the homosexual mode of adjustment came right before the heterosexual stage, in his theory of human psychosexual development."

It was predictable that Sullivan would be called out on his personal life, because he certainly wasn't an example of someone who moved into a "mature" relationship with an adult woman, and the authentic treatment was really in the end a normalization of homosexuality. Practicing with men to get better at sex with women didn't always lead to sex with women, and for some people it never would. To be living without stigma would mean living a life where a person would not feel stress or a sense of being different or excluded if they lived their life fully in the world and in public with their homosexual partner. This would also expand as far as possible with other sexual acts to diffuse shame before it started.

PATIENT: Do you mean that a person who had no mental tension and no concern about it—that he could masturbate as often as he cared without injuring himself? SULLIVAN: I think if one had...no notion of the evil of masturbation, he perhaps would do himself a wee bit of good.

"[Sullivan] prefers what he called a 'primitive state' of human relations, which was not bound to current social norms and institutions. Thus he would suggest a vision of a therapeutic colony or community where people who did not make heterosexual adjustments were encouraged to construct homosexual relationships without being stigmatized." This stigma towards homosexuality put homosexuals in a mental health risk area for Sullivan, because the unacceptability of it in the wider culture meant that there would be men not staying in long-term relationships and there would be shocks from time to time when partners would marry a woman to gain more acceptance. "The homosexual love object all too frequently fails to 'stay put,' causing homosexual men 'one disappointment after another.'" Sullivan also found problems in the heterosexual marriage and it's effect on children and their possibility of experimenting with homosexuality to relieve sexual tensions. If marriages were cold in the marital bed, and there were fights related to infidelity, this could turn children off of the idea of marriage altogether. "One such 'disastrous' consequence is the boy’s attempt to avoid all things sexual, because of what he sees as their inevitable consequence: a dysfunctional marriage, just like his parents'. But soon, the child would find it impossible to eliminate his sexual desire, and either masturbation or a homosexual contact would follow. Both of them require, as Sullivan put it ironically, 'an infinity of rationalizations...in our so called advanced society,' meaning that it is in fact unconscionable for many. They would ruin the boy’s budding sense of manhood, leading him to a mental breakdown...[Sullivan]...considered...outdated social expectations for both men and women—as the ultimate problem behind illness."

Even though were are talking about sexuality in the first half of the 20th century, many of the topics are now current with debates today. With normalization, and in fact a stigma against homophobic attitudes, there is a rush to normalize other orientations like pedophilia, and in Sullivan's case, people engaging in hebephilia, which are those who are attracted to adolescents as opposed to children. This updates the conflict between stigma, including why it's there, and Sullivan's "primitive" societies, which are primitive in the sense that they look at the desire and the satisfaction as it is without moral qualms. In modern papers like Hebephilia as Mental Disorder?, stigma is deconstructed into what is considered a mental disorder vs. a crime. The irony is that what is considered a progressive left-wing topic can conflict with other ones. The argument on one side is that many people can have problematic thought patterns and still be considered normal, for example, seeing details of what is sexually attractive in minors without a compulsion to act on those thoughts, vs. people who act and identify with the activity, which in many modern societies is a crime. The same legal arguments continue in which each person has freedom until it interferes with the freedom of another person. Modern egalitarian arguments against sex with minors, because of undue influence, who cite the economic and power dependencies that a minor is involved in, can be a form of exploitation. This way a person who sees the adult qualities of a minor, that's already in puberty, can avoid self-hatred for the thoughts, because if there's no intention to make those thoughts into an active lifestyle, the self-stigma should be reduced, while at the same time, someone like Sullivan would be considered a criminal in today's sensitivities over his actions, but not mentally disordered. The simple understanding of the modern way, where if a minor has less mental development, experience, and resources in a relationship, it would be similar to the example of a mentally intelligent adult having a sexual relationship with a mentally-handicapped person. When you are using a person as a piece of meat for gratification, this is an obvious form of exploitation. Pedophilia would be considered a mental disorder because there's absolutely no Darwinian adaptation argument for sex with prepubescents, but for Hebephilia it would be considered a crime, but not a disorder, because human cultures throughout history have had young marriages that produced healthy children, and also passed on a genetic trait for this attraction. Currently in Canada the age of 16 is the floor for marriages. The guardrails for stigma would be based on power differentials and undue influence, with the modern understanding of crime. A person can self-police their actions if there's enough empathy to see how their short-term desires would be detrimental to others, like using powerless people for sexual gratification. The lack of empathy, meaning acting on those thoughts, would constitute a crime and the mental disorder side of it would be judged based on biological adaptation, being no advantage with pedophilia. The modern ideal of a good intimate relationship is one where people have commensurate intellectual levels or a complementariness that allows for advantageous exchanges involving love and care. Using individuals for sexual gratification while neglecting everything a good relationship needs, is a hallmark of abuse. As these values become clarified, the mental health industry has to provide enough awareness through social work and therapy to guide people in the love and care direction, to avoid needless incarceration, and avoid needless moral panics over disturbing thoughts that may lead to other pathologies, as well as getting help for those that are truly mentally disordered.

Schizophrenia

In the early days of psychology, so many mental disorders were still being defined and teased apart. Sullivan was one of the early researchers that was able to help hospitals understand Schizophrenia much better. Typically these patients were considered hopeless and their "word-salad" was unintelligible for analysis. This resulted in limited treatments and a lot of neglect in psychiatric hospitals. "A great many of the people who get involved in schizophrenic disturbance proceed through it to one of two very unfortunate outcomes. One we call the paranoid maladjustment, in which sundry elements of blame and guilt in the personality are attached to other people round about, with such disastrous effects on the possibility of intimacy and simple relation with anybody in the environment that there is no way back. In the other outcome, people literally disintegrate so much under the force of horror in this schizophrenic business that they become examples of something scarcely noticed in the developmental years—namely, relatively satisfactory preoccupation with the simple pleasures of the zones of interaction provoked by one's own manipulations, which seems to be about the essence of what we call the hebephrenic [disorganized] change, or the hebephrenic dilapidation of personality. These illnesses are not to be regarded, according to my light, as part of schizophrenia, but as very unfortunate outcomes of schizophrenic episodes. [It] is not always the case; some people make stable paranoid maladjustments which are singularly free from schizophrenic processes, which actually insure them from occasions where they will have schizophrenic processes. And I am sure that some people dilapidate in such a fashion that they are very little troubled by schizophrenic processes. But a great many of the people who have undergone these very unfortunate developments have not solved life to the point where they can be happy though psychotic."

Simple Schizophrenia: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PcMJ98sNZOk

The Disordered Mind: Paranoid Schizophrenia: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rw0PdXYf4Yo

Catatonic Schizophrenia: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gYwGmWWxY48

Teenager with Hebephrenic-Catatonic Schizophrenia: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LWDAkJDUlXM

Psychiatric teaching interview with Gay Teenager: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AvciA2PD3tI

Case Studies: Daniel Paul Schreber - Sigmund Freud: https://rumble.com/v1gu84v-case-studies-daniel-paul-schreber-freud-and-beyond.html

Case Studies: The Wolf Man (1/3) - Freud and Beyond: https://rumble.com/v1gucp1-case-studies-the-wolf-man-13-freud-and-beyond.html

Sullivan was influenced by William Alanson White, who was famous in psychology circles for getting therapists to "determine what the patient is trying to do." He then focused more interpersonal relations to understand symptoms and his patient's difficulties in living. "The attainment of satisfactions and security are seen to be the goals, the end-states, of human behavior, interpersonal processes. In popular language, they explain in general terms what one is after in any situation with other persons, real or fantastic, or a blend of both. From a slightly different point of view, they are 'integrating tendencies.' They explain why any situation in which two or more people are involved becomes an inter-personal situation. Furthermore, it is because of these needs that one cannot live and be human except in communal existence with others."

In the modern world, despite the introduction of many popular anti-psychotic drugs, there's still a talking therapy discipline that is built off of the interpersonal relations theory. Much of what Sullivan developed helped to merge Social Work with Psychology to focus on needs. Mark L. Ruffalo MSW described the change therapists had towards Schizophrenic symptoms. "At the heart of the psychodynamic approach to schizophrenia is the idea that psychotic symptoms are not random or meaningless phenomena, but rather rich, symbolic expressions of the patient’s inner world. Hallucinations and delusions are concrete representations of abstract ideas, wishes, and conflicts...In psychodynamic terms, patients with schizophrenia engage in concretization and perceptualization. The latter term refers to the process of transforming abstract concepts into specific sensory perceptions. For instance, patients who think poorly of themselves may smell a foul odor emanating from their body; the rotten self-perception becomes the rotten body that smells. In the absence of sensory perceptions (eg, in patients who experience delusions without hallucinations), concretization is used. This refers to patients who project onto the outside world their self-condemnation and come to believe that others are targeting them. Perceptualization can be considered the most advanced level of concretization."

Michael Garrett MD, talks about the importance of meaning in some schizophrenic systems. "Psychotic persons use figurative language in idiosyncratic ways. Driven by intense, unbearable affects, they construct concrete metaphors and fanciful delusional identities that are meaningful expressions of their emotional lives. These constructions are regarded by others as alien and incomprehensible because the associational links in the psychotic person’s figurative language are not readily accessible to the average person. A central aim of psychodynamic work in psychotherapy is to help patients reconstruct the emotional meaning of their psychotic symptoms in the protective holding environment of the therapeutic relationship."

In the time of Sullivan, there were examples of more or less recovered patients. "A socially recovered schizophrenic is often still psychotic, but is certainly less schizophrenic than is a patient requiring active institutional supervision...The non-schizophrenic individual, in his interaction with other persons, behaves and thinks in complete consonance with their mutual cultural make-up. Then, to the extent that one's behavior and thought dealing with another diverges from the mutual culture—traditions, conventions, fashions—to that extent he would be schizophrenic...If the 'contact' with external reality is wholly unintelligible per se to the presumably fairly sane observer, then the subject-individual manifests a content indistinguishable from a dream, and is either in a state of serious disorder of the integrating systems, or is schizophrenic...How does it happen that most of us are able to sort out our dreams and our waking experience with a very high degree of success, while the schizophrenic fails in this?...In the writer's opinion, the restoration of balance in favor of the dissociating system is achieved by some adjustment of interpersonal relations...A persisting dream-state represents a failure of interpersonal adjustment, such that the tendency system previously dissociated is now as powerful in integrating interpersonal situations as is the previously successful dissociating system...A degree of consciousness may vary, but conflict and a consciously perceived threat of eruption of the dissociated system is sustained." When there is difficulty in integrating with others, the typical response for the patient is to self-isolate to reduce distressing experiences.

When the therapist arrives on the scene, the resulting situation they are in is to investigate and find out what those failed interpersonal relationships were before the breakdown via transference from the patient onto the therapist. "There seems to the writer to be nothing other than the purpose of the interpersonal situation which distinguishes the psychoanalytic transference relation from other situations of interpersonal intimacy. In other words, it seems to be a special case of interpersonal adaptation, distinguished chiefly by the role of subordination to an enlightened physician skilled in penetrating the self-deceptions to which man is uniquely susceptible, with a mutually accepted purpose of securing the patient an increased skill in living."

When there is a breakdown and a need for psychiatric isolation, there is a limited time frame to try and get as much information as possible from the patient to piece together the daily failures that occurred beforehand. "The procedure of treatment begins with removing the patient from the situation in which he is encouraged to renew efforts at adjustment with others. This might well be elsewhere than to an institution dealing with a cross-section of the psychotic population; certainly it should not be a large ward of mental patients of all sorts of ages. The sub-professional must...be aware of the...extreme sensitivity underlying whatever camouflage the patient may use. They must be activated by a well-integrated purpose of helping in the re-development or the development of self-esteem as an individual attractive to others." The well people, the physicians, are communicated to the patient as being there to give the patient "a chance to get well. From the start, he is treated as a person among persons...Every disappointment is another obstacle to his recovery."

As the early part of the treatment begins, the sensitivity to the patient's self-esteem must be vigilant. "Everyone is to regard the outpouring of thought or the doing of acts as at least valid for the patient, and to be considered seriously as something that at least he should understand. The individualism of the patient's performances is neither to be discouraged nor encouraged, but instead, when they seem clearly morbid, to be noted and perhaps questioned. The questioning must not arise from ethical grounds, but from a desire to center the patient's attention on the discovery of the factors concerned. If there is violence, it has to be discouraged, unemotionally, and in the clearly expressed interest of the general or special good...A considerable proportion of these patients proceed in this really human environment to the degree of social recovery that permits analysis, without much contact with the supervising physician. Moreover, in the process, they become aware of their need for insight into their previous difficulties, and somewhat cognizant of the nature of the procedures to be used to that end. They become not only ready but prepared for treatment."

So much of what happens in therapy is an investigation because the reality behind the hallucinations is what needs to be understood and reintegrated with the patient. "Energy is expended chiefly in reconstructing the actual chronology of the psychosis...[The] free associational technique is introduced at intervals to fill in 'failures of memory.' The role of significant persons and their doings is emphasized, the patient being constantly under the influence of the formulation above set forth—viz., that however mysteriously the phenomena originated, everything that has befallen him is related to his actual living among a relatively small number of significant people, in a relatively simple course of events. Psychotic phenomena recalled from more disturbed periods are subjected to study as to their relation to these people. Dreams are studied under this guide...Interpretations are never to be forced on him, and preferably none are offered excepting as statistical findings. In other words, if the patient's actual insight seems to be progressing at a considerable pace, it can occasionally be offered that thus-and-so has, in some patients, been found to be the result of this-and-that, with a request for his associations to this comment."

Even though psychopharmacology to control dopamine levels has taken over much of the treatment, these psychodynamic methods have some therapeutic value, even if it takes some time to show efficacy. Mark had a patient that was able to explain their internal experience of improvement. "The work didn’t click for me until years in. Every psychotic experience was always preceded by a split-second shift in my emotional state. Over time, I was able to feel this window open up… and my experiences slowly dissipated. I still experience psychotic symptoms but at a much less frequent rate. Every session, a new layer of what has happened to me is unraveled through therapy. Almost every time a link has been discovered, I subsequently experience [fewer] symptoms."

Schizophrenia from the Psychodynamic perspective - Mark L. Ruffalo, MSW, DPsa: https://www.psychiatrictimes.com/view/schizophrenia-from-the-psychodynamic-perspective

For those who managed to improve with treatment the goal was always to provide vocational rehabilitation and social skills training. By the 1950s anti-psychotic drugs made an entrance. There currently is no cure, but with lifelong treatment, a normal life can be carved out for many patients, with an emphasis on early diagnoses and treatment. For Sullivan, "the psychiatrist has to compromise with the ideal of cure and proceed along the line of amelioration...One achieves mental health to the extent that one becomes aware of one’s interpersonal relations; this is the general statement that is always expressed to the patient...Progressively...there goes an expanding of the self to such final effect that the patient as known to himself is much the same person as the patient behaving with others. This is psychiatric cure. There may remain a need for a great deal of experience and education before the psychiatric cure is a social cure, implying a more abundant life in the community. It may be impractical to achieve this more abundant life, the collaborative participation with others, in that particular community. A change of social setting may be mandatory but impractical, in which case adequate mediate relationships and clearly understood reformulations of some of one’s interpersonal goals must fill the gaps. The possibility of achieving a social cure arises solely from the fact of psychiatric cure. The probability of its achievement is a matter of circumstances, limited chiefly by factors inhering in the culture-complex and selectively reflected in all the people available for interpersonal relations. Be social cure achieved or not, however, the person who knows himself has mental health. He is content with his utilization of the opportunities that come to him. He values himself as his conduct merits. He knows and mostly obtains the satisfactions that he needs, and he is greatly secure."

Interpersonal Theory

Harry Stack Sullivan, like many other psychoanalysts after Freud, understood that there were more avenues of research beyond the usual theorizing and uncovering of internal conflicts or the expressing of repressed emotions, as important as those techniques are. Depending on the kinds of patients, psychoanalysis was forced to experiment and try new things. With things like transference, projection and countertransference, there is an underlying relationship going on with other people. Even in the initial consultation, the words chosen, the tone, and body language is communicating how one is feeling to the patient and all these things can help or hinder the treatment. Each patient has more or less knowledge about the therapeutic process but one mustn't assume. "Do not assume you know what the patient is talking about. You don't know until you find out by engaging in an active dialogue in which you test each hypothesis and check each fact." Because this process is about collecting patient experiences and organizing them, it was best not to overlay a theory too soon. This gave flexibility to the process so the case could take hairpin turns if needed and the resonances for the patient ended up being more authentic.

In The Interpersonal Theory of Psychiatry, Sullivan made an early breakdown of different types of patients, and at this point you can see a pattern with psychoanalysts that like to describe psychology types they have encountered, which were usually limited to a certain specialty, but also there was often a cross-section of other patients who benefited from one type of talking therapy or another. In Sullivan's case, he grouped many different types into paranoia and self-esteem. "...Failure to achieve late adolescence is the last blow to a great many warped, inadequately developed personalities with low self-esteem. And the usual solution in chronological maturity is to cover over one's chronic defect in self-esteem by disparaging others—a solution which is used by all of us in varying degrees." Different people had different reactions to the social environment which led to different coping mechanisms. "With the beginning of the emphasis on cooperation, the child undergoes the experience of fear when he does not live up to the required behavior, and the complex anxiety derivatives of shame and guilt are inculcated. Thus the child is presumed to deserve or require punishment at times, and this punishment takes the form of the infliction of pain, which may be accompanied by anxiety. As a result, the child often has to make complex discriminations of authority situations, so that the ability to conceal things from the authoritative figures and to deceive them becomes a necessity which is implemented by the authority-carrying figures themselves. As a part of this comes the development of precautionary techniques and propitiatory activities such as verbal 'excusing,' often with the evolution of techniques for the maintenance of 'social distance.' A great many children learn that anger will aggravate the situation and they develop instead resentment..."

For Sullivan, self-esteem has to be based on normal needs that a person has and skillful ways of meeting them with other people. The typical pathological response is to make endless comparisons with other people. There were also philosophical questions about how much choice we could make use of at different times in the past. A typical stuck area is for people to ignore their dependent situation as a child, or adolescent, and to assume that adult choices should have been made across the board. Even in adulthood there is a difficulty in shedding old influences, but it is easier than in childhood. As a child you needed parents to take care of you and you had to accommodate them to avoid rejection and that always leads children to adopted habits along the way in the form of narrowed choices. As children develop there's a fear of ostracism as those who are better looking, more adaptable, more intelligent with relationships, or intelligent with power, tend to dominate a hierarchy and make life hard for the rest. Shame, guilt, and the need to tear down others can eat away at a personality if one is not careful. The same therapeutic methods are required for all these personality problems where lessons can be learned to improve future responses in interpersonal relationships. The failure to learn and adapt keeps the patient stuck in the same situations. "Even though there may be many actual opportunities, various security operations interfere with observation and analysis, and thus prevent the profit one might gain from experience."

Coping mechanisms described in the book include: pretending to be someone better than one is, pretending the world is different from the actual facts, moving attention away to the most interesting or exciting distractions all the time, getting eaten up with envy and jealousy, and being addicted to fantasies where there is wish-fulfillment but no actual manifestation in real life. "Many of the people who have...low self-esteem minimize their anxiety by the use of sundry concealments, one extreme of which is actual social isolation." In response to low self-esteem, one can exploit others by dominating them and enslaving them. One could also become a hangers-on and use the pity of others to gain sympathy or other rewards in return. Some turn to obsessive rituals, including hypochondria, where various medicines are applied unscientifically to behaviors, locations, and situations that tend to inflame the self-esteem. There are also preoccupations with body shape and size. All these concerns are brought into the clinic or hospital and require a teasing apart with emphasis on the relationships. In The treatment techniques of Harry Stack Sullivan by Arthur Harry Chapman, these problems can be found out, and more importantly when employing Sullivan's angle, the environment of the patient is also illuminated.

The therapist has to maintain professional distance while at the same time not be too aloof and uninterested. The questions under Sullivan's method are a little different than regular interviews. If there is a behavior in a person, the recognition just doesn't stay as "I'm too passive. I'm too masochistic." Questions elucidate which relationships are involved. If you are too passive, which interpersonal relationships is this relevant? If people in the interpersonal relations are described with an adjective, like they are "hostile," more questions to put together the scenarios and some of the dialogue may paint a different picture. Since the therapist can easily speculate, and the patient is also speculating, because they wouldn't see a therapist if they truly knew their situation clearly, more detail has to be brought out. The questioning of course is not like a tense interrogation but done with a countenance of someone who wants to understand the situation better. If there are obvious delusional elements and contents in the answer, the therapist can use the word that, like "what do you mean by that?" This allows the therapist to be skeptical while still being open to hear more detail.

At some point, if a patient is needing to see a therapist, there is usually a wounding of some kind that has caused a bout of low self-esteem. Therapists can start with the current emotions. "Now tell me, what did you ever do that causes you to have such a low opinion of yourself?" If there's any distorted, purity seeking, perfectionistic, rigid thoughts, then any corrections to have the patient follow something more human and flexible, could open up a possibility for healing. This can involve normalization, to point out how common their experiences are with the general population. If parents have worldviews, those views could be challenged, especially if they are pathological, perfectionistic and inhuman. Another method to increase insight is to investigate with the patient the things that are going right in their relationships so that the problem is not catastrophized. This is especially important if people want to repair a relationship and not just give up after every disappointment. When a person is triggered with anxiety or shame, they are not usually taking in as much information and have left behind the common place reality happening in the present moment. "Anxiety hinders the perception and understanding of experience." The memory is filled with time distortions, hiatuses, gaps and incongruities. The trick is to avoid adding to a patient's worthlessness with the practiced line of questioning. Questions are also detailed and they should look for specific answers in events instead of generalities with adjectives for nouns, like "I am bad." It's better for a question to elicit an answer like, "when I did this thing, I felt bad." The therapist can also communicate that they need more information and detail to understand better, to project a countenance of someone who listens well, as opposed to someone criticizing the patient's communication skills. It's less about judgment and more about clarity. "You do not tell a patient what is wrong with him, but with him jointly explore what his trouble is." By seeing what has happened in more realistic detail the "assimilated experience [can be drawn upon] in later interpersonal relationships."

Because interpersonal theory is about human insecurity and relieving the stress of self-criticism, it's always better to look at behaviors and choices as opposed to a global label that doesn't allow variety, learning, and the chance for people to change their points of view. As therapists gather information, they are likely to jump to conclusions of how a patient got stuck in a pathological thought vortex with toxic labels, so it's good to ask confirmation questions so that with a yes or a no, the client can correct the therapists intuitions to keep the therapist from forcing a theory on them. "Was your mother afraid of arousing irritability in other people? Was she timid in approaching people whom she did not know well?" These kinds of questions help to flesh out the interpersonal relationship so that the therapist learns more about them as well. As one gets closer to embarrassing topics, the indirect questions ask about what events happened one step at a time so that the patient gets closer to a voluntary confession. Asking direction questions like "did you and Bob have any homosexual activities?" may end the therapy sessions altogether. It's best if the patient offers up that information. When there's a confession of one kind or another, the therapist can then explore thoughts and beliefs that make one feel bad to understand the impacts better. If the feelings are authentic and reasonable, the expression of the emotion connected with the event can be cathartic. If there are distorted views that make the patient feel uniquely bad, they have to be explored and dismantled until something more human and flexible can arise. Therapists also have to avoid loaded questions that judge events, like asking "why did you do that hostile thing?" You want to find out how the patient felt and not interject how you personally judge the patient's behavior.

Because therapy is about taking what is vast in the unconscious and processing it in an awake sober manner in a reasonably short time span, only so much information can be processed at one time and insights should be processed one at a time. The summaries and paraphrases of what was learned, need to illuminate each individual important interpersonal relationship so that the patient is now beginning to learn how their environment has been affecting them, as well as their introjected beliefs, because this "remedies a good deal of the often illusory, usually morbid, feeling of being different, which is such a striking part of rationalizations of insecurity in later life." The reason why this method can be so potent is that "things going on between people in interpersonal relationships can be directly observed." Sticking with the reality and trying to understand it better from different angles can improve learning for the patient. Learning then facilitates new strategies and behaviors so interpersonal relationships can change, evolve, or part ways. Ideally, if enough good changes are made, the patient is making more sense of their life and purpose. The more observable, well-founded those facts, the easier it is to see what changes need to be made. Theories can also be developed much more independently this way so older theories can be developed upon.

Sullivan's investigation of a patient's self-system builds up an insightful inventory of symptoms and behaviors. Those reactions include addictive responses, a pattern of ending relationships too soon, a dissociation that prevents learning from experience, and these are opportunities for people to develop healthier responses in the future. Healthier responses allow the patient to regulate their emotions without needing maladaptive coping methods. Because each person is very different, and exists in very different environments, it's important to see how people behave in those specific situations. Eventually, the therapist can really get to know the patient. This is where psychotherapy trumps a lot of life coaching, because if the coaching can't get at these environmental details that are hindering self-development, any future life coaching goals will fall under self-sabotage.

As important as it is to see how the Freudian Super-ego and Ego are relating internally, Sullivan's method can help to clear up the Super-ego's distortions while coming up with realistic prescriptions the Ego can act on in this very particular individual self-system. One doesn't even have to define these Freudian terms to the patient and still get the same result. The Ego feels better because it knows what to do and has realistic goals, and the Super-ego adjusts expectations to be more realistic to return to a more flow-like state of well-being that may have existed before the the onset of a recent breakdown. The more realistic options there are for this very particular patient, the more successful the therapy sessions will be. Patients will ideally leave with less anxiety about themselves, feel less odd, weird, alone, and worthless, while at the same time have some concrete goals to manage life better. Managing life better means responding to interpersonal relationships more skillfully, which calms insecurity, while ensuring regular satisfactions. People have biological functions that yearn to be satisfied, including the necessities of life, positive emotions, and sexual gratification or sublimations. Because of projection, how people view themselves can spill over into self-confidence and see their interpersonal relationships in a different light with positive possibilities. "If there is a valid and real attitude toward the self, that attitude will manifest as valid and real toward others. It is not that as ye judge so shall ye be judged, but as you judge yourself so shall you judge others; strange but [this is] true so far as I know, and with no exception."

This is crucial because many can be brainwashed with low self-esteem with all the habitual efforts of unconscious people in society to disparage others for their own self-esteem project. An emotional parasitical paradigm. You want to be self-generating, by acknowledging human needs, and integrate them with societal exchanges. To get to this point is to get to the point where one can have new experiences, but if the world of paranoid projection is allowed to influence the patient further, there will be no development. "Our awareness of our performances, and our awareness of the performances of others are permanently restricted to a part of all that goes on and the structure and character of that part is determined by our early training; its limitation is maintained year after year by our experiencing anxiety whenever we tend to overstep the margin." This is why a good upbringing with flexible views, optimistic attitudes, focuses the individual on what to do next and what the next best action is.

Those who had a negative upbringing, who introjected a negative worldview, they will seek to see the negative in the main and become resigned and passive. "When there is anxiety, it tends to exclude the situation that provoked it from awareness, and so the person made anxious by the mathematical problem tends to overlook certain commonplace, obvious aspects of the problem that are well within his grasp. The tendency is to move away from, rather than simply to grasp, the factors making up the situation presented to him...As a generality, that healthy development of personality is inversely proportionate to the amount, to the number, of tendencies which have come to exist in dissociation. Put in another way, if there is nothing dissociated, then whether one be a genius or an imbecile, it is quite certain that he will be mentally healthy..." This constitutes self-development for Sullivan: To make conscious unsatisfied needs and then to satisfy those desires in harmony with others.

The minefield of course is matching values where people can share positive experiences with joint activities or work together in complimentary ways. "But when somebody else begins to matter as much as I do, then what this other person values must receive some careful consideration from me." Like an event planner, people are negotiating preferences and discharges of satisfaction in complex ways. "'One achieves mental health to the extent that one becomes aware of one’s interpersonal relations....' He learns to understand what he is doing. 'Most patients have for years been acting out conflicts, substitutions, and compromises; the benefits of treatment come in large part from their learning to notice what they are doing, and this is greatly expedited by carefully validated verbal statements as to what seems to be going on.' There is 'an expanding of the self to such final effect that the patient as known to himself is much the same person as the patient behaving with others.' But it takes a good deal of education and experience effectively to grasp the meaning and significance of uncomplicated interpersonal relations, to realize the full benefits of a more abundant life. Increasing knowledge and insight make possible a less complicated, richer experience. New experience in turn makes possible still greater insight. This process does not stop with the end of treatment. Theoretically, at any rate, it continues throughout life." To summarize, the complexity of the analysis leads to a clear understanding of needs and skill deficits so that patients find clear goals and simple social exchanges that can be negotiated without endless analysis paralysis. If a person needs an intimate partner, they can learn through trial and error and persist in dating environments because they clearly know what they want and if candidates can communicate what they want, social exchanges are easier to make.

The way of boundaries based on knowing what you want is similar to the Law of Attraction, but it's more closely understood by how people imitate in ways that can conflict or harmonize based on their self-esteem vibration. People who are incompatible will part ways unless one member of the interpersonal relation adjusts to match the other person's vibration, which would be detrimental if it's a low vibration. "A loving person, however free of self-distortion, cannot love a hateful person, because the latter is incapable of responding in a loving way. A situation having the qualities categorized as love cannot be integrated because opposites do not unite. There can only be conflict or withdrawal. In the latter case, the situation is disintegrated. If an interpersonal integration occurs and persists, it can only be on the basis of hostility, because a hateful person cannot love, but a loving person, under appropriate circumstances, can be hostile, if only for his own defence..."

Before this synergy can manifest, the patient has to undergo a personal investigation to find what is still dissociated. Dissociation can be defined as "selective inattention, in which one simply doesn't happen to notice an infinite series of more-or-less meaningful details of one's living...Selective inattention is, more than any other of the inappropriate and inadequate performances of life, the classic means by which we do not profit from experience which falls within the areas of our particular handicap. We don't have the experience from which we might profit—that is, although it occurs, we never notice what it might mean; in fact we never notice that a good deal of it has occurred at all..." Sullivan's dissociation is similar to Freud's displacement, where an "all-paralyzing anxiety" is connected to situations or behaviors that are awful, dreadful, that one is loathe to experience, or is a horror. There can be a failure to learn and adapt, partially because one views these situations as a "not-me," or I would say a "I want it to be not-me" versus more conscious attitudes of a "good-me" that is more easily shown to the world. The mind can go into dissociation and unconsciously operate within the not-me, to reduce anxiety at the same time it is "concealing, or excusing...unsatisfactory and undesirable attributes...Whenever dissociated systems of motives are involved, we find a relative suspension of awareness as to any effects that these motives have." These "automatisms" betray a lack of meaning and the denial that certain behaviors have happened, whereas a person who reacts with some emotion to the behavior, with an understanding, they at least have a chance to integrate that knowledge. This is assuming that there is enough memory, skill, and enough energy to develop new responses. When people integrate what is unpleasant they develop skills and routines that deal with the not-me problematic behaviors and cease to project it onto others as a defense, and cease to ignore the lessons that are readily available. Skills of course are a way of automating newer behaviors and managing energy so as to habituate behaviors into effortlessness. The mind goes into a learning mentality and avoids being stuck in dissociation and repetition. Usually if there's regression it's because energy and motivation is lacking, or there's too much unpleasantness while the new habit is not engrained enough to compensate for that stress. People freeze, avoid, try to numb the pain with other activities, or just neglect unpleasant details and move on to another activity.

The most difficult dissociations to remedy are those that are "founded in early life," and "occur in the preadolescent and adolescent phases of development." Sullivan's descriptions of integration are a little sketchy, but the two ways he mentions involve experimentation, and a figuring out a solution while being inattentive vs., a dramatic roleplaying where a person takes on a new role and "people [it] fight out, with tremendous expenditures of energy...A few people have had experiences in their developmental years of meeting situations actually characterized by these extremely disquieting extraordinary repelling uncanny emotions, in which for a while, they acted as if they were one of the demigods or the demidevils or what not, and got through it, and so from then on knew more about life on the far side of it." Regardless, a person has to repeatedly do a new behavior long enough so as to create a new habit or skill, and a certain amount of resistance and energy is going to be expended in doing what one normally avoids until it begins to feel familiar. This is a process that affects everyone more or less, including the therapist, so there isn't a long enough lifespan for most people to truly master all areas of life, and part of the reason for social life is to trade specialties with others in the libido-economy to balance out what is missing in one's life.

What comes up again and again in psychoanalysis are particular self-identities that become rigid and resist learning, and these identities involve pleasure and stress, and a combination of them related to consequences. Sullivan brought up homosexual experiences, because in his time, it was one of the most horrible identities one could ascribe to that would create a pathological panic, and possibly a schizophrenic episode of projection, avoidance, and self-hatred. The example he provided could be applied to many identities. The term grooming that is used today, can also be expanded beyond a sexual seduction, and include behaviors like a smoker offering a cigarette to a non-smoker, etc. Anything that involves a sadistic desire to be violent in one manner or another, to enjoy base desires in an addictive and unhelpful way, like a drug addiction, all can be integrated in a learning mentality, but if there's a striving to be a solid identity with an all or nothing attitude about purity and impurity, an incongruous moment of pleasure seeking behavior that wasn't previously aligned with a past identity, can cause intense stress with an internal warfare that prevents normal goal orientation and a purposeful action. This is especially so if a new craving arises that one isn't prepared for. There are also ghettoized experiences where people receive the same kind of attention from an environment over and over again so they feel that new experiences or competitive pleasures can't arise, then those pleasures habituate into a world-as-it-is. Yet if you pay attention, there are people who put enormous energy into changing their environments, including radical changes like becoming a vegetarian, or learning a new language. What was unfamiliar becomes commonplace and this is easier if there's an increased pleasure or more peace found in the newly integrated activities. Cravings compete with each other and advance to newer ones or regress to older ones depending on how stuck a person is with an identity. In some environments, people will find that they can't escape and the current pleasure template is all that can be found, whether in leisure activities, processes, certain relationship ruts, addictions to substances, or sexual experiences.

Sullivan provides an example of "abhorrent cravings...The entrance into personal awareness of increasingly-intense-because-unsatisfied, longings to engage in something which is abhorrent—that is, the picturing of engaging in it is attended by uncanny emotion such as horror, dread, loathing, or the like. The classic instance of this eruption of cravings is the eruption of 'homosexual' desires—desires to participate in what the patient feels, classically and outstandingly, to be homosexual performances. I think I can illustrate this, perhaps without misleading you too badly, by mentioning one of my patients, an only boy with five sisters, who had led as sheltered a life as that situation would permit. Shortly after getting into uniform in World War II he was prowling around Washington, and was gathered up by a very well-dressed and charming dentist, who took him to his office and performed what is called fellatio on this boy. The boy felt, I presume, a mild adjustment to the uncanny, and went his way, perhaps in some fashion rewarded. But the next day he quite absentmindedly walked back to the immediate proximity of the dentist's office—whereupon, finding himself so very near what had happened the day before, he was no longer able to exclude from awareness the fact that he would like to continue to undergo these experiences. This is a classical instance of an abhorrent craving in that it was entirely intolerable to him. The day before it had been a kind of new experience, but when it burst upon him in this way, it was attended by all sorts of revulsions and a feeling that it would be infrahuman, and what not, to have such interests. And he arrived at the hospital shortly afterward in what is called schizophrenic disturbance."

Now there are a variety of responses to these experiences. Many people won't go into schizophrenic responses and just go into self-hatred, with thoughts of "I'm not pure" and then hate "groomers" who introduced gay sex, or alcohol, drugs, or whatever the subject matter is, and then rail at the world. A healthier response would be to view one's pleasure template and challenge it with new experiences to really etch out the boundaries, the rejections, the need for more skill, the bodily imperfections that can't change, the exercises that can change the body or mind, and new neighborhoods to explore, philosophies, meditations and religions that one could experience. The way that young man wanted a repetition of fellatio after an initial introduction, could also be a craving to repeat a different experience after it was just introduced. Most therapy of any value is getting people to look at their impure lives and use adult reasoning to move into new experiences that are more optimal. In some cases, a homosexual relationship is optimal for that person. Even a person who is tired of dating the same kind of people, they often will experiment in looking for different personality types while at the same time learn what they like in a partner and try to develop into that so as to make a better match, especially if the changes to ones life, to become more attractive for example, are healthy and involve newly integrating better skills. There are also some who have made a lot of changes and found that they only attract the personality disordered and realize that sublimating by engaging in good friendships while developing hobbies, is a much saner way of living, especially when energy is depleted with repeated disappointments. Eventually a mode of life is happened upon that one is at ease with as a minimum or one is excited and wants to expand further. One doesn't get fixated on temporary identities and carves out a more authentic way of life where one can see oneself repeatedly engaging in optimal pleasure with a clearer conscience.

Sullivan's influences were international and spread wide as a form of 20th century liberalism that sought to look at the psychological impacts coming directly from society and the responding psychological prescriptions that included social programs for society to take on. As always, there were scandals in these influences related to politics and just bad therapy. One of them was an obsession with self-esteem that influenced a general narcissism in the culture. Even though Sullivan didn't want an outsized fake self-esteem to develop in people, many therapists and bureaucrats took his advice in that simplistic way and dumbed down the practice leading to some the negative results we see now. Self-esteem is very important and it has been studied in many newer modalities and can't be separated from human well-being, but it's not an entitlement to self-esteem decoupled from behavior. On exaggerations in more extreme socialist movements, like in the worse cases of communism, which was like a mental hospital concentration camp, along with a deprogramming curriculum, most western countries adopted a more balanced middle road so that a maximum amount of freedoms were balanced with needed psychiatric interventions. Regardless of one's politics, most conservatives today would want these institutions to remain, even if they have to be reformed from time to time according to new discoveries, and when situations of homelessness and addiction, sometimes supported by psychopharmacology, rear their ugly head, as well as scandals with pharmaceutical companies that make money sometimes with medications that are ineffective or dangerous.

Private Practices: Harry Stack Sullivan, the Science of Homosexuality, and American Liberalism by Prof. Naoko Wake: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780813549583/

Conceptions in Modern Psychiatry - Harry Stack Sullivan: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9781258850692/

Schizophrenia as a Human Process - Harry Stack Sullivan: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780393007213/

The Interpersonal Theory of Psychiatry - Harry Stack Sullivan: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780415510943/

The treatment techniques of Harry Stack Sullivan by Chapman, Arthur Harry: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9781568216737/

Rind B, Yuill R. Hebephilia as mental disorder? A historical, cross-cultural, sociological, cross-species, non-clinical empirical, and evolutionary review. Arch Sex Behav. 2012 Aug;41(4):797-829.

Psychology: http://psychreviews.org/category/psychology01/

#object relations #harry stack sullivan #anxiety #castration anxiety #homosexuality #interpersonal relationships #psychoanalysis #self esteem #social work #schizophrenia

[psychreviews2]

Object Relations: Fear Of Success Pt. 7-5

Artificial Intelligence

As jarring as the quickly expanding abilities of artificial intelligence (A.I.) are, one consistent thread is how economics and economic theory has changed along with technology. Libertarianism for example was very thoughtful for a time when machines failed to take over in the Jetsons cartoon style as predicted in the 1950s, but now with more advanced A.I. to be released in 2024, technology is moving faster than ethical human thought can get a grip on. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, as well as many other speakers, talked to the U.S. Congress about the 2024 ChatGPT and provided mixed testimony full of unknowns, but also lots of positive predictions. "There will be a significant impact on jobs, what that impact looks like is very difficult to predict...I believe that there will be far greater jobs on the other side of this and the jobs of today will get better." The new 2024 A.I. is "good at doing tasks, not jobs, and so I see already people using GPT 4 to do their job much more efficiently, by helping them with tasks. GPT 4 will, I think, entirely automate away some jobs, and it will create new ones we believe will be much better...There will be an impact on jobs. We try to be very clear about that and I think it will require partnership between industry and government, but mostly action by government to figure out how we want to mitigate that but I'm very optimistic about how great the jobs of the future will be."

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pn-W41hC764

AI eliminated nearly 4,000 jobs in May, report says - CBS: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/ai-job-losses-artificial-intelligence-challenger-report/

AI anxiety as computers get super smart - RTL: https://today.rtl.lu/news/world/a/2132837.html

One of the ways that will trigger needs for government intervention is how the distribution of wealth changes with each job displacement. In an article on RTL, it was ironic that "computer coders and writers [critiqued] AI creators for 'training' software on their work, enabling it to replicate their styles or skills without permission or compensation." When A.I. replaces a wage completely, or even partially, a lot of that labor cost is now rewarding computer engineers and suppliers of the materials for the computers, robots, and A.I. software PLUS the ownership. Each displacement requires a new inventory on what transferrable skills are still relevant for that candidate. As stated in the U.S. congress, there are already plans for retraining services, which will also require a lot of resources. Without a tax to transfer the profit of that labor to a human being who lost their job, it can't be ignored that consumers today need to be producers in order earn currency to access consumption. What is also often not talked about is the complexity of these new jobs. I remember talking to a Japanese A.I. expert about this and he was generally irritated with my line of questioning. "I think people will have to move to more complex jobs...Let's change the subject." I later was in a restaurant and bumped into the Alberta provincial New Democratic Party, which is the name for the main socialist party in Canada. The leader was there head-bobbing and chin-wagging with party members and supporters. I took the advantage to talk to some of them and found an economics expert in the bunch. He said for some reason "I am biased," which ultimately everyone is, but he showed that because we are a conservative province the NDP has been steadily moving to the right and has already replaced the Liberal party to appear as the moderate choice on the left side of the political spectrum. This is so much so that they could get former conservatives to vote for them. I asked him if manufacturing jobs could return. He responded that "we are not setup well for that...We can instead develop higher technological value-added jobs." Continuing with the prior thread, his solution still leaves out the high school diploma worker, part-time artist, and hobbyists. Also falling through the cracks would be people who have chosen the wrong field for their personality type and are struggling to make a career change. Where many researchers and economists feel those types of individuals will end up is on a Universal Basic Income.

Already people are getting nostalgic for the times before the pandemic and after the roll out of technocratic control during COVID lockdowns. That nostalgia is key into understanding human emotion. The problem with social engineers in bureaucratic and corporate environments is that they are essentially unelected. When they foist new technology onto the population, governments are always scrambling to understand the consequences. The consequences usually have to happen first so that the complaints can help to create a regulatory response, much like a beta software. This is assuming that there is enough freedom of association and a galvanized population to bring about changes to government policy. The worry is always about people lacking power, being helpless, dehumanized, while working longer hours in low paying jobs alongside a lack of insurance from the government. Joe Allen from Dark Aeon, worries that the Golden rule "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you," will devolve and "worldly powers will do to us what they would never have done to them." If people are gradually sent to a Universal Basic Income their leverage in the workforce will disappear and worldly powers will now have control over the resources for their survival. People cannot go on strike if they have no job. Then if you compound the desire that oligarchs have to use Climate Change as a tool to ration resources, meaning REWARDS, a very constrained two-tier system will clarify things where those leaders will predictably have enormous freedom to do what they want, to reward themselves, while they at the same time repress everyone else with a false sense of morality. I already argued this when the pandemic was starting in the episode on Narcissistic Supply and how one can be addicted to a downward comparison with others and despite what many leaders say, in practice they are not interested in the equality of outcomes. This can be seen with pop stars who live a high lifestyle while supporting rationing systems for their audience. It can be seen with climate activists using fossil fuels on tap while shaming everyone else. The ultimate conclusion of a system like this is to emulate the Chinese 15-minute city where a person is supposed to live within a 15 min walking distance and not go beyond it. If this is implemented in a harsh way it would mean living in a technological version of the parochial medieval town.

Narcissistic Supply - Freud and Beyond - WNAAD: https://rumble.com/v1gveop-narcissistic-supply-freud-and-beyond-wnaad.html

Life Circle Construction in China under the Idea of Collaborative Governance: https://www.jstage.jst.go.jp/article/geogrevjapanb/90/1/90_900103/_article

Klaus Schwab: Whoever Masters AI Will Rule the World: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dvkRj80H96s

Massive Protest in Oxford Against 15-Minute Cities - Rebel News UK: https://rumble.com/v2a6oy4-massive-protest-in-oxford-against-15-minute-cities.html

MEP Christine Anderson Issues Wake-Up Call: “You Cannot Comply Your Way Out of a Tyranny”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=93qGEqJnBwo

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi pointed out the dangers for psychic entropy, when there is too much regulatory control, and this is what would happen on a mass scale if you have a class of dependent people with no leverage in society. For those unaware of this blog, because it's the most common topic, Flow is the ability to gain pleasure by exercising your sense of self on the environment to master a skill, some form of leisure, or endeavor. "In a research on the effects of 'flow deprivation' we have asked subjects to go through their normal daily routines, but to stop doing anything that was not necessary, any act or thought that was done for its own sake. After only 48h of this regime subjects reported severe changes in their psychic functioning. They felt more impatient, irritable, careless, depressed...Performance on creativity tests dropped significantly. [A common] reason for the ill effects of deprivation by the subjects was 'the act of stopping myself from doing what I wanted to do.' Apparently the experimental interference with the freedom of attention may have been one of the causes for the near-pathological disruption of behavior and experience."

If there's an area that requires massive improvement it would have to be in the area of socialism, because that has been the catch-all solution in politics for so long. That problem is that any kind of dependencies can be exploited or over-regulated. This new socialism would have to be super-decentralized so that corruption would be close to impossible. Since that doesn't exist yet, there's a lot of work for the left to do. Good examples were provided by the apostate of the U.S. left, Naomi Wolf, who was shunned after criticizing the COVID19 vaccine rollout and mandates. In an interview with Peter McIlvenna of Hearts of Oak, she recounted her experience of Britain and Europe and some of the dangers of dependency she found there. "...People get so many benefits from the state, in Europe and in Britain, and that's messaged AS benefits and it's very tempting. I have this free this and free that, and I love it and I used to be thoroughly on board with free healthcare and free universities and everything, why not? The dark side is the discourse of individualism, and individual rights becomes very theoretical. Once they give you all these good things, then when they say 'but you can't drive your car from here to here,' it's very hard to realize that that was a poisoned gift." Naomi's struggle is similar to Zhao Ziyang's, as described above, on how to balance human freedoms with leverage, power and responsibility. You can almost imagine some mediation system that is bogged down in committees, or a punishment system that punishes for every small infraction. The reality is that what most western countries have, is already much better than ill-thought-out abstract theories coming from the powerful today. Peter: "It is subtle. [15 minute cities are] for our good, for our health, for our convenience. Convenience comes up often...Often you can point out these issues, '15 minute cities, being local is good.' No it's about restriction or controlling you. Despite what's happened in the last 3 years, they cannot see past the government propaganda." Naomi: "[15 minute cities] may seem 'convenient' or 'green' but it's really going to enslave you and your children forever."

Hearts of Oak - Naomi Wolf - Facing the Beast: Courage, Faith and Resistance in a New Dark Age: https://rumble.com/v3tbcwj-hearts-of-oak-naomi-wolf-facing-the-beast-courage-faith-and-resistance-in-a.html

Star Trek TNG -- Crime and Punishment: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G7XqGiwfUyI

A vast area of study like A.I. can be confusing and distracting, but the nostalgia that people have for the past often has to do with the freedom they had to pursue their interests, especially those pristine experiences where there was a lack of conflict with others. It can be a way to cut through the noise and complexity. Certainly the past shouldn't be treated like a golden age, but it will if attention spans get ever more controlled and rewards are progressively removed. A peaceful exertion of creativity on the environment without endless coercion has to be the litmus test. If A.I. is to truly succeed people will have to feel less fear, and enjoy more peace. There must be as much freedom of choice as in the past, if not more, and very importantly, there must be access to REWARDS. People don't just want to exist. They want to thrive.

Ikigai: https://rumble.com/v1gvo41-ikigai.html

Object Relations: Fear Of Success Pt. 2: https://rumble.com/v1gvuql-object-relations-fear-of-success-pt.-2.html

Patterson, N., Richter, D., Gnerre, S. et al. Genetic evidence for complex speciation of humans and chimpanzees. Nature 441, 1103–1108 (2006).

Moorjani P, Amorim CE, Arndt PF, Przeworski M. Variation in the molecular clock of primates. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2016 Sep 20;113(38):10607-12.

Domínguez-Rodrigo, M., Baquedano, E., Organista, E. et al. Early Pleistocene faunivorous hominins were not kleptoparasitic, and this impacted the evolution of human anatomy and socio-ecology. Sci Rep 11, 16135 (2021).

Lahr, M. M., Rivera, F., Power, R. K., Mounier, A., Copsey, B., Crivellaro, F., … Foley, R. A. (2016). Inter-group violence among early Holocene hunter-gatherers of West Turkana, Kenya. Nature, 529(7586), 394–398.

Violence and the Sacred by René Girard: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780801822186/

Evolution of the Human Diet: The Known, the Unknown, and the Unknowable by Peter S. Ungar: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780195183474/

General History of Africa - Vol. 1 by Joseph Ki-Zerbo, Unesco Staff, Mokhtar: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780520039124/

Projection and Personality Development via the Eight-function Model by Carol Shumate: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780367341381/

Transference And Projection by Jan Grant, Jim Crawley: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780335203147/

Projection and re-collection in Jungian psychology by Marie Louise von Franz: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780875484174/

Newman, Leonard & Duff, Kimberly & Baumeister, Roy. (1997). A new look at defensive projection: Thought suppression, accessibility, and biased person perception. Journal of personality and social psychology. 72. 980-1001.

Identity and Identification by Ken Arnold, James Peto, Mick Gordon, Chris Wilkinson, Hugh Aldersey-Williams, The Wellcome Trust: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9781906155865/

Brodey WM. On the dynamics of narcissism. I. Externalization and early ego development. Psychoanal Study Child. 1965;20:165-93.

Marcus, Kenneth L., Accusation in a Mirror (2012). Loyola University Chicago Law Journal, Vol. 43, No. 2, pp. 357 - 393, 2012

Atrocity Speech Law by Gregory S. Gordon, Benjamin Ferencz: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780190612689/

A World Transformed by George Bush, Brent Scowcroft: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780679752592/

No Trade Is Free - Robert Lighthizer: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780063282131/

The People's Republic of Amnesia: Tiananmen Revisited by Louisa Lim: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780199347704/

Prisoner of the State - Zhao Ziyang: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9781439149393/

Dark Aeon : Transhumanism and the War Against Humanity by Joe Allen: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9781648210105/

HOU Lulu, LIU Yungang, Life Circle Construction in China under the Idea of Collaborative Governance: A Comparative Study of Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou, Geographical review of Japan series B, 2017, Volume 90, Issue 1, Pages 2-16

Psychology: http://psychreviews.org/category/psychology01/

Fear of Success Pt. 1: https://psychreviews.org/fear-of-success/

Fear of Success Pt. 2: https://psychreviews.org/object-relations-fear-of-success-pt-2/

Fear of Success Pt. 3: https://psychreviews.org/object-relations-fear-of-success-pt-3/

Fear of Success Pt. 4: https://psychreviews.org/object-relations-fear-of-success-pt-4/

Fear of Success Pt. 5: https://psychreviews.org/object-relations-fear-of-success-pt-5/

Fear of Success Pt. 6: https://psychreviews.org/object-relations-fear-of-success-pt-6/

#artificial intelligence #object relations #fear of success

[psychreviews2]

Object Relations: Fear Of Success Pt. 7-4

For Lighthizer, there has to be trade negotiations that think of trade balance and mutual advantages so that there isn't a carte blanche situation. If results on the ground show unfair trade practices, like dumping, currency manipulation, or a lack of access, there has to be a reassessment of any trade deal. "All the great economies were built behind a wall of protection and often with government money. The British industrial revolution was aided by a wall of tariffs. Likewise, the late-nineteenth-century explosion of American industry was the product of protectionism and often subsidies. Can anyone imagine the great American railroads being built without the grant of free land per mile? Similarly, the manufacturing countries of Japan, Germany, and now China all benefited during their development from tariffs, other barriers, and subsidies of one kind or another. It is important to remember that no country became great by consuming. They became great by producing...Our trade deficit grew by a factor of fourteen, while our GDP grew by a factor of four. The win-win situation promised by advocates of free trade has never materialized...It is not my position that all trade deficits are harmful. Clearly, if a country runs a deficit one year and a surplus the next, no harm is done. The surplus will offset the deficit, and all is good. Likewise, for one country to run a bilateral trade deficit with a second country and a surplus with a third is fine. They offset each other. Indeed, all three countries could benefit by increasing efficiency and maximizing the allocation of resources among them. What concerns me is running huge trade deficits with the entire world year after year for decades...The second exception to the principle that bilateral deficits don’t matter is that running up gigantic trade deficits with one’s geopolitical adversary is particularly stupid. In our case, the United States ships hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of our wealth to China every year. This helps them build up their economy, build up their military, and have leverage over the political situation in the United States. It makes them more powerful in the eyes of all world leaders. I’m not sure there’s an example in world history in which two rivals—indeed, some would say enemies—have had such a lopsided economic relationship. It is fair to say China is challenging us because we gave them the money to do it. Clearly, during the Cold War with the Soviet Union, we never transferred such money. Had we done so, we might have lost to them...Tariffs don’t necessarily prompt trade wars, and removing tariffs often does little to prevent actual war."

There is also "...negative compounding. The people in the foreign country who buy our assets own those assets forever, with the obvious effect that they get the profit from those assets year after year. That profit compounds, and the effects of even one year’s trade deficit multiply over time as profits continue. Added to this is the fact that we have seen huge $500 billion to $1 trillion trade deficits year after year, so we have both an accumulation of trade deficits and a compounding negative multiplier on each trade deficit." Theory then assumed that it would still balance out because "...if a country that ran large trade deficits for a few years [they] would find less demand for their currency and their currency’s value would drop. This would then make it very difficult for that country to import and easy for it to export in terms of its domestic currency. Therefore, the weak currency would help correct the trade imbalance. Indeed, we see this occurring regularly around the world." Lighthizer then found that this didn't work for the U.S. because of the currency's demand in the world as a reserve currency, and the devaluation that other trade partners had done with their currencies. With a threat of a new BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa) currency with developing countries dropping the dollar, there would then be a reduction of demand for the U.S. dollar, but this may be a long way off. According to Reuters "the [U.S.] dollar still dominates global trade. It is on one side of almost 90% of global forex transactions, according to Bank of International Settlements Data." The danger would be the mounting U.S. debt because you need people to buy your debt and if there's a sell off, there may not be enough buyers to avoid the U.S. government from having to print excess money to buy back the investments. The increased inflation would be damaging to U.S. dollar purchasing power, even if domestic manufacturing could restart from the high import cost environment.

Economist Sounds Alarm on US Dollar Losing Reserve Currency Status: https://news.bitcoin.com/economist-sounds-alarm-on-us-dollar-losing-reserve-currency-status/

The Path To Hyperinflation with EJ Antoni - TFTC: https://rumble.com/v3r7vlp-456-the-path-to-hyperinflation-with-ej-antoni.html

A lot of these unfair trade practices were also ignored for fear of stoking a trade war. "Trade liberalization came to be seen not just as a tool of economic policy but also as a path to perpetual peace." Lighthizer's book does come after COVID19, but the origin of the pandemic has yet to be investigated with enough thoroughness to prove that it was a lab accident only. Many people still feel intuitively that the release of COVID19 was intentional and a form of escalation in response to Trump's tariffs on China. It certainly doesn't help that China declared a People's War in 2019 before the pandemic. Chinese state media said that, "the Chinese side is fighting back to protect its legitimate interests. The trade war in the US is the creation of one person and one administration, but it affects that country’s entire population...In China, the entire country and all its people are being threatened. For us, this is a real 'people’s war.'" In the Strong Country blog one poster said "[The U.S. is] sucking the blood of the Chinese..." Another comment on the site said, "Why are Chinese people bullied? Because our hearts are too soft!" This would be an argument for peace advocates in the United States to allow mercantilism to continue in China, but Lighthizer would counter that not all wars are stopped by liberal trade policies. "Economic ties between the North and the South did not prevent the Civil War...It would be hard to argue that the rise of Germany as a major exporter in the late nineteenth century helped pacify that country in the first half of the twentieth. Japan’s dependence on raw materials from the United States motivated its attack on Pearl Harbor...China’s accession to the WTO in 2001—which was supposed to make the country a model global citizen—was followed by massive investments in its military capabilities and territorial expansion in the South China Sea. And certainly the great trade between Ukraine and Russia did not stop Putin’s invasion in 2022." Deep down, military situations are more accurately predicted based on the weakness of a target. The easier it is to attack a target, the more enticing it is to do so, like in the pattern of scapegoating described above. Attacking a strong target means that one has to assess casualties and ponder what a loss would look like to one's own sovereignty. A deterrence. Initial attacks are usually on weak targets or on military that are unprepared for the kind of attack planned. Even further, the new slave wage system became a draw down on wages for all world markets so sooner or later the same system would knock on every door and demand entry into all countries.

Chinese state media calls for ‘people’s war’ as US trade conflict escalates: https://nypost.com/2019/05/14/chinese-state-media-calls-for-peoples-war-as-us-trade-conflict-escalates/

China declares a ‘people’s war’ after Trump’s latest tariff hikes: https://thechinaproject.com/2019/05/15/china-declares-a-peoples-war-after-trumps-latest-tariff-hikes/

Chinese scientists discover EIGHT never-before-seen viruses... and now they plan to experiment with them: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-12665249/Chinas-discovered-EIGHT-never-seen-viruses-plan-experiment-them.html

REP. ROSENDALE REACTS TO REPORTS THAT WUHAN LAB SHIPPED CORONAVIRUS TO FAUCI-RUN LAB IN HAMILTON PRIOR TO PANDEMIC: https://rosendale.house.gov/news/documentsingle.aspx?DocumentID=691

Increasingly, there have been complaints from populist political commentators worldwide, and a shift between the typical left and right has created strange alliances where now it has become a political a divide between oligarchs and the workers who feel exploited by them. Ex-democrats like Donald Trump, Kari Lake, and Steven Bannon are now in the Republican camp. Big business leaders and big government Marxists have now allied on the side of China and want a continuing of the current mercantilist policies. Populists compare the China One Belt One Road initiative to that of being not a partner with China but a colony with a negative trade balance to match. Part of being a colony means importing the empire politics which then influences local politicians. The original expectation after the fall of the Soviet Union was the countries like China would reform into a representative government like in the west, but in the end it went in the opposite direction.

'Let Me Finish!' Johnny Rotten Makes His Views on Donald Trump Heard | Good Morning Britain: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v1uOwz_UrQ0

China Girl - David Bowie: https://youtu.be/imSPZt77sKo?si=GqTBSUfKxb5HlCIt

When the money goes from the exporters to the importers, it takes a foreign turn. Your home is where the money is and with globalism, the borders vanish, and as reported above, national values related to constitutions, and human rights are disregarded if the mercantilist country doesn't cherish them. It's just about naked money and power. The O'Keefe Media Group (OMG), for example, got an inside scoop on the giant investment group BlackRock and it became clear the view that people have when they have this much concentrated power.

"All of these financial institutions, they buy politicians."

"How do they run the world?"

"You acquire stuff. You diversify, you acquire, you keep acquiring. You spend whatever you make in acquiring more and at a certain point your risk level is super low...You own a little bit of everything and that little bit everything gives you so much money on a yearly basis, that you can take this big fuck-ton of money, and then you can start to buy people...We have a system in place. First there's the senators. These guys are fucking cheap. You got ten grand? You can buy a senator. It doesn't matter who wins. They're in my pocket at this point."

"Does everybody do that? Does BlackRock do that?"

"Everybody does that."

OMG Blackrock exposé: https://rumble.com/v2vg7ie-blackrock.html

More exposés from Steve Bannon showed the power of lobbyists in the same vein as the HR guy above described during the recent fight for a new GOP speaker. Typically in a representative government it matters who wins and different parties provide a check and balance to each other, but if there's an angle to win personally at the expense of a country then the balance begins to vanish. While watching politics for some time recently since the 2020 election, a certain narcissistic tactic was starting to appear again and again that I recognized by terms like "love bombing" which is a euphemism for the Trojan Horse. Like in the ancient Greek story, it's all about using niceties to bring down the defenses of an enemy and then you attack them at a weak spot. This is used everywhere and there's a long list in politics that never ends. In this context of corrupt politicians it works like this: The politician tells an electorate that wants reform whatever it wants to hear. Then when they are in power they look to lobbyists for directions in order to get more financial rewards. Typically, this leads to retribution at the polls when the politician is grilled on their bad voting record and primaried by another candidate from the same party. The problem is that they've found out how to win even when they lose. Lobbyists can provide job offers and lucrative media contracts so that if they have to leave being a politician they are forgotten about, regain their anonymity, and have increased their prospects. During the fight for a new speaker, because Kevin McCarthy didn't achieve any objectives he agreed to after the election with Rep. Matt Gaetz and other holdouts, Bannon talked about how you "never give the apparatus a second to collect themselves, because they are going to come up and they're going to be spreading money around and cutting deals and bring in more people to their cause. Right? That's where the K-Street lobbyists come in...but I have spies everywhere...The lobbyists were literally walking around cutting deals with people at the tables...to vote against [Jim] Jordan."

Jenny Beth Martin: "Honestly Steve, do you think they are worried if they lose their seat? They're going to have a job lined up with one of those firms. They're going to get some book deal. They'll get a gig on CNN or MSNBC or wherever else they can go to bash all of us, so they know either way they will at least get to keep power and keep access to money and that's what they care about." The divide in the GOP between globalism and populism became very clear with the boos and the criticism of Rep. Matt Gaetz for taking small donations from the general public. "When it comes to how those raise money, I take no lecture on asking patriotic Americans to weigh in and contribute in this fight from those who would grovel and bend for the lobbyists and special interests who own our leadership. Oh boo all  you want! Who have hollowed out this town and borrowed against the future of our future generations. I'll be happy to fund my political operation through the work of hardworking Americans, $10 and $20 and $30 dollars at a time and you all keep showing up at the lobbyist fundraisers and see how that goes for you."

Martin Explains The Establishment's Radical Resolution To Install McHenry As The Speaker Permanently: https://rumble.com/v3q5f4v-martin-explains-the-establishments-radical-resolution-to-install-mchenry-as.html

Bannon: "This is the early morning hours of 2016 all over again": https://rumble.com/v3ms086-bannon-this-is-the-early-morning-hours-of-2016-all-over-again.html

The Faux-Right Infiltrating The Republican Party, Destroying Our Nation - Jack Posobiec: https://rumble.com/v3todsd-jack-posobiec-the-faux-right-infiltrating-the-republican-party-destroying-o.html

Many of these lobbyists are all a part of the importing lobby and closely connected with China. Another exposé, this time by Tucker Carlson, unearthed a video from a Chinese economics professor that openly talks about CCP influence in the U.S., what political commentators call Elite Capture, or Pay For Play, where the strategy is to corrupt those who have power and leverage so that even if the population is aware of what's going on, they don't have enough power to do anything about it. The professor explained to an amused audience about how China and the U.S. were able to resolve problems quickly before Trump, it was "because we have people at the top. At the top of America's core inner circle of power & influence."

Tucker Carlson: Our elites' collusion with China is real and widespread: https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/tucker-carlson-elites-china-collusion-di-dongsheng

Of course lobbyists will use all kinds of arguments in their favor and the value of their businesses and what contributions they make to society but usually with important information about their personal interests left out because owners can't really feel the same feelings that workers feel, and they are not likely to drop their contracts and fortunes if they suddenly feel a pang of shame. If ineligible organizations can make social policy without the say so of voters, then the conversion to a one-party state is complete, even if it isn't expressed openly. This also means that the psychological impacts resulting from these policies will continue on because they can't be addressed without upsetting the power balance. Lighthizer connected the emotional component of self-esteem, a recurring theme, that is crucial in all understanding of economics beyond abstraction. "A big part of the elites’ misunderstanding of the situation is that they have no appreciation for the social component of work. Those obsessed with efficiency tend to see employment simply as a means of allocating resources and ensuring production. In so doing, they greatly undervalue the personal dignity that individuals derive from meaningful work. Commentators from Pope Leo XIII in the nineteenth century to Arthur Brooks and Oren Cass today have written eloquently about the central role of work in a well-ordered society. Doing honest work for a decent wage instills feelings of self-worth that come from being needed and contributing to society. Stable, remunerative employment reinforces good habits and discourages bad ones. That makes human beings into better spouses, parents, neighbors, and citizens. By contrast, the loss of personal dignity that comes from the absence of stable, well-paying employment is not something that can be compensated for either by increased consumption of low-cost imported goods or by welfare checks."

Counter arguments from the globalization side would put onus on workers to find retraining and enter more lucrative areas of the free market. "Those that claim that the benefits of interdependence or efficiency justify the costs free trade places on the American working class often argue this negative impact can be offset by retraining that helps workers move into new service sector or technology jobs. In theory, retraining may sound attractive, but this phenomenon has failed to materialize. Compared with those who lost their jobs in earlier periods of economic change, displaced workers in modern, developed economies typically have fewer and less attractive options. Historically speaking, this was not always the case. In the United Kingdom in the nineteenth century, for example, the repeal of the protectionist Corn Laws prompted agricultural workers to flee the countryside for industrializing urban areas where factory jobs were waiting. By contrast, the American factory workers who were displaced beginning in the 1990s either had nowhere to go or ended up working in low-skill, low-paying service jobs...The technology sector, for all its virtues, is not a source of high-paying jobs for working people. Over half of the United States’ roughly 250 million adults lack a college diploma. Historically, manufacturing jobs have been the best source of stable, well-paying employment for this cohort. Perhaps with massive new investments in education, former autoworkers could be taught to code. Even so, there probably wouldn’t be enough jobs to employ them all. Apple, Facebook, Google, and Netflix collectively employ just over 300,000 people—less than half the number that General Motors alone employed in the 1960s...Moreover, the service and technology jobs most accessible to working people, such as data entry and call center jobs, are themselves vulnerable to offshoring. Economists have estimated that nearly forty million service sector jobs in the United States could eventually be sent overseas. That’s more than three times the number of current manufacturing jobs in the country. People without college degrees face increasingly steep obstacles to obtaining stable, well-paying jobs. In sum, the United States has not taken adequate measures to put its own workers first...No great economy in the world has ever given up on manufacturing. To the contrary, they are all for the most part based on it. The vast majority of international trade is in manufactured goods and agriculture. The best jobs for high school graduates are in manufacturing. Most innovation in our economy is in this area. A prosperous, successful future needs a flourishing manufacturing sector...Losing manufacturing jobs, the United States also 'broke the chain of experience that is so important in technological evolution. As happened with batteries, abandoning today’s ‘commodity’ manufacturing can lock you out of tomorrow’s emerging industry.' In every economy, a great deal of innovation comes from manufacturing, and this innovation usually takes place very close to the place of manufacturing. The engineers on the ground are the ones who incorporate much of what we call productivity gains."

For Lighthizer, the response to mercantilist policies is to use tariff leverage to open up markets. "...We should just go to the countries keeping our competitive products out and demand more access. This was our approach in the Trump administration. Countries with enormous trade surpluses with the United States have a lot more to lose from our taking concessions away. We have leverage and should use it...We [also] need to create value to buy things from importers. Of course, some services are exportable, such as banking or professional services, but most are not (think food services or health care)."

The consequences of leaving those without advanced degrees behind is one of an inability to make ends meet, save money, and enter the ownership economy, which allows for more independent political views. If wages are made to be as low as possible then those workers will be unable to invest and the profits earned from lowering wages will just coalesce with a smaller group of owners. Victor Davis Hanson reminds the reader that "we need [the Middle Class] to be present, because without this present, you do not have these independent voices...Unfortunately in our generation it's eroding and we can see it erode in a variety of contexts. The first is, for ten years average wages of the middle class did not rise. Fifty-percent of the country dies with less than $10,000 in aggregate wealth. Over half of Americans die with credit card debt. Their buying options are limited and their choices on how they live are limited. Their chances of home ownership decline simply because they owe a lot of debt. Nowhere is this more dramatic than in student loans. When the student graduates, the average loan is somewhere between $30,000 and $40,000. We have an entire generation of students that are graduating, often with therapeutic degrees and are not able to find jobs that would allow them to pay off this enormous debt. If we came from Mars and looked at the situation, we would just simply say 'you have tens of thousands of serfs or indentured servants. If they are not beholden to their credit card, they are beholden to the federal government and the universities."

The Middle Class and Why Its Disappearing | Victor Davis Hanson: https://youtu.be/r8GeHGQK6fU?si=63QxelPH_gp0yfTt

The sensitive topic of illegal immigration also factors in big when it comes to whether people have a chance to enter the middle class. Labor, like anything in the market, falls under the forces of supply and demand. Wages are dear when employers have to compete for skilled labor that is scarce. Now that the U.S. southern border since 2021 has been opened to millions of illegal immigrants in the United States the pressure is always to renegotiate wages down, including those illegal immigrants who ironically have to compete with each other in the same bottleneck, keeping all of them out of a savings and ownership economy. The divide between the America First and George W. Bush influenced GOP became clear. Since retiring, Bush Jr. has been painting, including portraits of immigrants, and he provided his critique. "It's a beautiful country we have and yet it's not beautiful when we condemn and call people names and scare people about immigration. It's an easy issue to frighten some of the electorate, and I'm trying to have a different kind of voice. I would describe [the current Republican party] as isolationist, protectionist, and to a certain extent nativist." Nativist being a euphemism for racist. One can infer that there's a self-hatred going along with this line of reasoning, but it also ignores the parallel development in psychology to counter co-dependency, where it's common to hear healthcare workers admonished to take care of themselves better, say no, and have boundaries because you can't help others if you can't help yourself. One wonders when politicians around the world will catch on. Bush's view on immigration isn't a completely open border but it should be "pro-enforcement with a compassionate touch." He hinted a bit that he may also be out of touch in the Today interview when he conceded that "[the current Republican view] is not exactly my vision, but I'm just an old guy they put out to pasture, just a simple painter."

George W. Bush: Immigration System 'Needs To Be Reformed' | TODAY: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tqJDPSPUZ44

Former President George W. Bush releases new book about America's immigrants: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2y1L-ZGDTuk

The quiet comfortable interview unfortunately blurred details and was also dated since the new administration has allowed unprecedented numbers of illegal immigrants undocumented into the country, including in the years up to now. Bush's idea of having more courts and a new vetting system is just another thing that is imaginary but not actually a reality, like his ownership society, which ended up being a debtor society. Lower wages means slave wages, but all politicians would raise their hand if asked if they were against slavery. The topic of having people of different ethnic backgrounds working for cheap is hardly an image to advertise for immigrants who also want to be in the middle class. Bush's view goes back to the old story that certain jobs won't be filled because the wages are too low. "We need to change the work visas. There's a lot of jobs that are empty, and there's a lot of jobs that need to be filled, and there are people willing to work hard to do so." The plight of the middle class is ignored. Biden whispering "pay them more" is not going to magically raise the wages, especially when he opened the border wide open. The negative trade balance was also ignored in this interview. Illegal voting with easy-t0-get driver's licenses was not broached, including changes done in 2019 before the 2020 election. Illegal immigration, especially in the U.S. led to an increase in drug and human trafficking. There are also worries now after the war for Israel has begun that there maybe terrorists that have crossed the open border, which evaporated the entire purpose of Bush's Homeland Security initiatives. The Biden Administration even went further with a trial balloon to just merge the former NAFTA countries into an E.U. style regional government showing how settled their globalist view is.

Biden on Work Shortages, Tells Employers to Pay Workers More: https://youtu.be/h9wANPpPL98?si=5AvnKKKdCWzjRBf9

Governor Josh Shapiro announces switch to Automatic Voter Registration: https://twitter.com/GovernorShapiro/status/1704095982193877181

Lara Logan claims migrants are part of a globalist plot for a unified North American government: https://www.mediamatters.org/one-america-news-network/oan-lara-logan-claims-migrants-are-part-globalist-plan-unified-government

Trial Balloon Merger With Canada Mexico and the U.S - Tucker Carlson: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2jy1pIrWP44

Donald Trump upset this current establishment which responded with their fear of what reform meant for them and projected it onto the population, except for the fact the establishment didn't have, and still doesn't have, anything the general public would find exciting from them. Who wants debt slavery? Who wants stagflation? Who wants endless wars? In an emotional false-start resignation letter, General Milley made an assumption that Trump was "ruining the international order..." which he misinterpreted as being connected to the Greatest Generation in WWII, which I think would have a bone to pick with this current international order. I'm sure some did support the U.N., the Marshall Plan, etc., but I'm sure that many, if not most, were fighting for their country, and their children, not some nebulous and shifting international order with faceless bureaucrats that resist reforms. Regardless of political labels, this craven behavior should now be expected in any situation where there is a power differential and there's a threat of reform, meaning that people will lose their money and position with said reforms. Each side that reforms another side has a hatred of the people who are gumming up the works and wants them gone. Those who are to be fired feel castrated and mortified. The success or failure of any reform will have to rest with how many people it frees up and helps to thrive while at the same time removes obvious corruption, which always requires vigilance because for many people, corruption is a way of life and it seems unconscionable that enough money can be made with goods and services alone.

‘Your husband is the worst president. You owe us gas money’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SQv5cMSFkdE

Dick Cheney calls Trump a coward "He Lost. He Knows It": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H6Nq9SpGzic 

😂 Posobiec: I present to you, my dramatic reading of the General Milley resignation letter: https://rumble.com/v1fmezx--posobiec-i-present-to-you-my-dramatic-reading-of-the-general-milley-resign.html

Gen Mark Milley: I Had My Resignation Letter Ready for Trump: https://rumble.com/v3ih4ck-gen-mark-milley-i-had-my-resignation-letter-ready-for-trump.html

When you have a weak population that is like a colony, under taxation without representation, what would it look like? We already covered what it looks like now, which is very compromised, but what would it look like if all dissident reformers are put in jail? The world got a taste of that when the former President of the PRC Hu Jintao was escorted out in a way that looked disconcerting and humiliating to western audiences. Chinese media stated that "When [Hu] was not feeling well during the session, his staff, for his health, accompanied him to a room next to the meeting venue for a rest. Now, he is much better." Some commentators joked that his aids told him "death is a serious condition if you're not careful." Other commentators felt it was more of a middle ground. "What we just saw was the making of an All Xi's Men team, the breaking of decade-long rules, and the birth of an unlimited supreme leader...He is now a truly modern emperor." Hu Jintao did make another appearance later at Jiang Zemin's funeral with Xi Jinping in Dec 2022 showing that at least he wasn't dead. I talked to one Chinese woman who immigrated to Canada about it and she said "we [were] not allowed to talk about that." She found it surprising in Canada when looking at Twitter and all the aggressive back and forth between debaters of different political stripes and how it was possible to criticize top leaders with unlimited sarcasm and derision. This would be a hint that complete freedom of speech would have to end in order to consolidate power to one political aim. Dissent would have to be hidden and kept in closed door meetings and each prospective leader would have to be subservient and then make power grabs at all the right times before ascending to leadership, usually when the prior dictator has gotten too old. Any missteps could lead to expulsion, house arrest or execution.

For example, Zhao Ziyang, the leader who was more favorable to the students at the Tiananmen, lived under house arrest and was allowed some freedoms while being watched intently. His views on Communism grew more towards freedom as time passed. "We needed to establish multiple channels for dialogue—with various social factions, forces, and interests. Decisions on major issues should be made with ongoing consultation and dialogue with various social groups, not just within the Communist Party, and not only after merely consulting once with key figures of other political parties...We had to permit social groups to exist; otherwise, how could dialogue be conducted? Most important, we needed to change the situation in which all social groups—including workers’ unions, youth organizations, women’s organizations, chambers of commerce, and others—were all in monotonous unity with the Communist Party. They should not be treated like the Party’s royal instruments. They have to be able to truly represent the people they are meant to represent. Only dialogue conducted with groups of this kind would carry any real meaning. In other words, their function as intermediate organizations should be fully developed. The Communist Party should not take control of everything or interfere so much in their affairs, and should give them room for independent activities...We must establish laws that guarantee the protection of specific aspects, for example, freedom of association, assembly, demonstrations, petitions, and strikes. All these should be protected by specific laws." Of course these reforms never came to pass. His son Zhao Wujun said that "Zhao lived to see the consequences of rapid, unfettered economic growth in the absence of checks on government powers–rampant corruption, crony capitalism, one of the widest wealth gaps in the world and widespread social discontent...The things he wanted to do were abandoned…more than a decade of his sweat and blood was ruined in an instant...We have missed a huge historical opportunity to transform society. I don’t know if history will give us another chance."

Hu Jintao's Removal - CCP 20th National Congress: https://archive.ph/20221022153634/https://twitter.com/XHNews/status/1583829797297598465

Xi Jinping and Hu Jintao were on hand to bid farewell to Jiang Zemin: https://www.zaobao.com.sg/realtime/china/story20221205-1340592

Son of purged reformer Zhao Ziyang tells of China's 'shame', 25 years after Tiananmen: https://chinadigitaltimes.net/2014/05/son-purged-zhao-ziyang-tells-chinas-shame/

AI WEIWEI: NEVER SORRY - Official Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0MYFOzP6Xns

Getting centralized control to give up power is one of the most difficult knots to untie for any reformers in any country, and this was not lost on presidential candidate Javier Milei who described leftist politics in his country as being seduced by Antonio Gramsci. Tucker in a couple of episodes also interviewed an Argentine economist and a business owner about what the economy is like in Argentina, before getting Javier's take on the situation. "We are 47 million people, out of which 11 million people have what you call a job. Slightly under 3.5 million people work for government, and 7 million people work in the private sector. So 10 to 11 million people out of 47, 25% of the people, [if you take out government workers], 1/7th of the population will have a private job...7 million people are working to support the other 40 million people. 60% of the children are poor...In Argentina the incentives now are so perversely inverted that many people decide that it's not worth working. They can make more money sitting home idle." To a restaurant owner this was due to high taxes and expensive union dues. The psychological impact of this kind of system was described by Javier like the typical Cycle of Abuse and The Battered Wife, where "politicians are kind of sociopaths. They want to believe that we are mentally disabled, disabled in every way, because we cannot live without them. In fact, they are the ones who cannot live without us." One of the ideas he warned Tucker about was "the idea that where there is a need there is a right. It's a problem because there can be infinite needs but someone always has to pay for those rights, and the resources for that are finite. That sparks a conflict between infinite needs and finite resources...Under my administration...they should have no reason to complain. There won't be any layoffs in the first round of reforms, and when the second round of reforms takes place, they will be able to leave behind their public sector jobs, because they will have an incentive to do so, and they will be paid better." Considering that Bolsonaro in Brazil and Donald Trump in the U.S. are currently under lawfare by their opponents, I think Javier will have to put on his seatbelt if he thinks the opposition will make it easy for him to just walk in and make changes.

Argentina's economy - Tucker Carlson: https://twitter.com/TuckerCarlson/status/1702079713622299100

Javier Milei. Who is he? - Tucker Carlson: https://twitter.com/TuckerCarlson/status/1702442099814342725

Bolsonaro Again Ruled Ineligible to Hold Public Office by Brazil Electoral Court: https://news.yahoo.com/bolsonaro-again-ruled-ineligible-hold-232806102.html

Trump’s presidential ballot eligibility on trial in Colorado and Minnesota: https://www.axios.com/2023/10/31/trump-14th-amendment-trials-colorado-minnesota

Prosecutor files case against Argentina’s frontrunner Javier Milei days before presidential election: https://apnews.com/article/milei-picardi-peso-fernandez-argentina-02db52be25b493ca0f1d10fec9d6f017

It's best not to forget that when you trade with people, or if you are involved with people in friendships or intimate relationships, you are receiving strong signals from people who need repeated confirmations that they are respected. Many others need confirmations that they are special and superior. China expert Jack Posobiec worked in China and remembered how focused the Chinese were in wanting to turn the tables on the U.S. "I'll never forget this one. These are people I worked with by the way, and they weren't saying this in a hateful way or an angry way. They were just saying it matter of fact. They said 'we want to see a world where Chinese parents are one day adopting American babies.'" It's safe to assume that when you deal with people there are always hidden concerns in the background about power, self-esteem, envy, jealousy, and resentment.

China is going to eat our lunch - Jack Posobiec: https://rumble.com/v2r7ocg-jack-posobiec-chinas-going-to-eat-our-lunch..html

Even if reforms seem clear that there should be more work and production, with a reducing of some government spending, along with a reduction of interest rates, and how that will resurrect an economy, some of these economic principles are going to be challenged by the incoming developments of Artificial Intelligence (A.I). If the technology develops as quickly as developers contend it will, you'll have a situation of overproduction when the newly unemployed can't buy any products produced by the A.I. that replaced them. If there's a minimum income introduced, and if taxes are implemented to replace all the wages lost, what will life be like? Will a universal basic income allow the same human freedoms as before? What would psychology look like if one just pursued hobbies and didn't have to go to work? Would the lack of power when there are no wages or labor to negotiate with lead to another form of slavery?

#robert lighthizer #trade war #trade deficit #rust belt #economics #trade balance #donald trump #object relations #fear of success

[psychreviews2]

Object Relations: Fear Of Success Pt. 7-3

Accusation In A Mirror

The most relevant example of projection in politics was covered in the paper Accusation in a Mirror, by Kenneth L. Marcus, and he explained the conscious awareness of these tactics, the strategies involved, and their aims. "Accusation In A Mirror (AiM) is a rhetorical practice in which one falsely accuses one’s enemies of conducting, plotting, or desiring to commit precisely the same transgressions that one plans to commit against them...AiM has historically been an almost invariable harbinger of genocide. [It] has been commonly used in atrocities committed by Nazis, Serbs, and Hutus, among others. This is a peculiar feature, not of genocide, but of AiM since non-genocidal forms of AiM have also been ubiquitous with respect to other forms of persecution."

For many people, they can see a projection of this enormity if they pay attention to politics and watch news stories unfold with continuity, but what about people who aren't political junkies and are busy with their lives? Marcus described this odd strategy and how it can work with people who are unconscious of the motives. They all steer a population into a fear state where the only response is to be pre-emptive, which is ultimately an incitement for one side and a chilling effect on the targets. The goals are "...to shock, to silence, to threaten, to insulate, and, finally, to motivate or incite...[and] do unto others as they would do unto you..."

Leon Mugesera sentenced to life for 'inciting' genocide in Rwanda: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ABrVyinrD8s

The stigma surrounding Christine Anderson - True North: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ETB-y_FKds

Hillary Clinton Says Trump Poses Danger to America's Democracy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NJ-N0dHJAaE

Clinton calls for ‘deprogramming’ of MAGA ‘cult members’: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/DH3SgIY7S5A

Tucker Carlson - "Always trust your gut." - https://twitter.com/TuckerCarlson/status/1727090631850492257

Brace Yourself For What's Coming in 2024 - Victor Davis Hanson: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2V6jH-6F6K0&t=630s

When AiM is first used the first effect that is intended is to shock. "No one tells Holocaust survivors—or a nation of Holocaust survivors and their children—that they are Nazis without expecting to shock. The same can be said of the inversive accusations leveled at Bosnians, Tutsis, and Copts." As mentioned on prior episodes where Social Psychologist Susan Fiske was quoted, there's an inherent trust in accusations in that people believe that they must be true, otherwise why would they lie? The target then is afraid that there will be a confirmation of guilt if there's a strong response to the unjust accusation, meaning the strength of the response becomes a confirmation of the accusation. Silence follows because the targets are "...afraid of seeming too powerful." The freezing of any response to the outrage is also a threat of being disciplined. "...Ascription of guilt carries with it the threat of punishment." As the freezing continues, the outrage of the false accusation can insulate because it is treated as a legitimate accusation. Kenneth described how "holocaust inversion has been protected from normal anti-discrimination enforcement by its ability to replicate or mimic the tropes of a dissident political discourse." AiM at this point can swirl around without too much violence until the perpetrators are able to legitimize their arguments. The difficulty is to be able to manufacture a danger to the population that Aim needs for incitement. False flags need to operate where people who are on the side of AiM dress up as the targets and they say and approve those shocking comments to bring reality to the false pretenses. "With such a tactic, propagandists can persuade listeners and 'honest people' that they are being attacked and are justified in taking whatever measures are necessary 'for legitimate self-defense.'" Something that is not in the paper, but could be easily inferred is the use of mentally ill people who can be incited much easier. If they can say those shocking things with ease, and even more, if they commit an act of violence, it can catch a population unawares and goad them towards pre-emptive attacks that are worse. "AiM is motivating or inciting. That is to say, AiM not only provides a reason or justification for aggression, as other less effective forms of incitement also do; more insidiously, it also communicates to the listener that it is necessary to attack another group in order to avoid having the same fate visited upon one’s own community...Other rhetorical techniques such as demonization can make mass-murder seem acceptable, but AiM makes it appear necessary."

Biden delivers address outside Independence Hall on 'extremist threat to democracy': https://www.youtube.com/live/XC-k-lhml4o?si=a96yknsZ44SGxhZF

Naomi Wolf: Joe Biden Demonized Almost Half Of The American Nation With Speech Meant For Unity: https://rumble.com/v1iklcj-naomi-wolf-joe-biden-demonized-almost-half-of-the-american-nation-with-spee.html

Laura Loomer uncovers Massive Conspiracy: Nazi Terrorists being Protected by FBI & CIA - InfoWars: https://rumble.com/v3gp88q-laura-loomer-uncovers-massive-conspiracy-nazi-terrorists-being-protected-by.html

Joe Rogan's Opinion On Patriot Front: "You Ever Seen Anything That Looks More Like Feds?": https://rumble.com/v188ksx-joe-rogans-opinion-on-patriot-front-you-ever-seen-anything-that-looks-more-.html

A New Development in the Gretchen Whitmer Kidnapping Trial: https://rumble.com/v3hzmfa-a-new-development-in-the-gretchen-whitmer-kidnapping-trial.html

Why politicians, the military, governments, businesses, or even gangsters want to use any of these techniques is because they all want a monopoly of one kind or another, which is their idea of success. All the manipulation and bullying that one finds in school extends into the adult world. Corrupt people are always looking for an angle, and the unaware, the distracted, or the busy, don't know what's happening until their dreams start to shatter. Now that we have moved from the ancient past to recent history it's time to face modern politics of power and money to see how it can chase you down, even when you are living life inconspicuously.

Psycho-Political-Economics

"It's Friday and I'm mad as fuck...When was America ever great? Did you all forget that underneath my President Donald Trump we were the biggest producer of crude oil in the fucking world and now we ain't got no gas four months later are y'all serious?

Anybody else need their fucking Trump back? When was America ever great? We had gas. We had electricity. We had jobs. We had food. Now we sitting at home with no gas, some people no electricity, no jobs, waiting for a stimulus check, waiting on the goddamn extra food stamps. What's going on?

We wasn't going through this shit for the last four years. We were winning, winning, winning, winning and all ya'll sitting home being quiet and shit. Now somebody say something. Tell me why the fuck you support Joe Biden. Right now! Everybody want to get rid of fucking President Trump. What's up?

Look at this goofy ass shit. People ain't got shit to say no more, just sitting around like sheep, goofy ass sheep. All they can do is wait. All they can do is wait. All they can do is fucking wait. The Democrats tell us that they got a Green New Deal for 2030. You ain't got no fucking plans for everything to run off electricity in 10 years. You DO got a plan to fuck up everything within the next 10  years.

I want my goddamn Trump back...Everybody had a lot to say when Trump was in the White House. Ain't anybody got shit to say with this fucking old ass bum in there. Fucking about fucking country fucking up the economy. These motherfuckers projected that we gonna have a million new jobs, two hundred thousand new jobs, and where the fuck are they at? Probably two hundred thousand illegal immigrants that you motherfuckers proud about the border got new jobs, but we don't. We hurting in America!

Everybody quiet as shit! Where the fuck are the Joe Biden supporters? I can tell ya'll why I support Trump. Tell me why ya'll support this motherfucker? Ain't doing shit but fucking us up everyday, fucking us up...

When was America ever great? I guarantee you motherfuckers could wish you could go back to the day that Donald Trump won. That was a good fucking day. You might was mad in your fucking mind but I bet your ass was on the way to work. I bet you was on your fucking way to work. I bet you weren't standing at a fucking gas station looking for gas. I bet you wasn't waiting for a fucking stimulus check. I bet you weren't waiting for an extra $300 on your fucking food stamps. I bet you!

I'm pissed! The people walking around anybody saying shit. Everybody had a lot of fucking energy when Trump was the fucking president, a lot of fucking energy. It was never their plan for Trump to win. For four years they've been brainwashing ya'll to get rid of Trump so they could do what the fuck they want to do...

We right back to where we was four years ago! What part ya'll don't get? You made a mistake! You made a fucking mistake! 'Get rid of Trump,' stop Trump for what? We right back to where we was four years ago, drawing lines in the sand, people with motherfucking Russia, bombing the fucking Middle East. All types of kids coming across our fucking borders, all this shit to we're trying to stop.

Can't tell me shit better for you. You can't tell me nothing is better for you underneath your body. Not nothing is better for you. You sitting at home waiting for more fucking money on your food stamps. You had $300 worth of food stamps and now you got $800 worth of stamps that the Democrats want your ass depended upon them. I want to go the fuck to work, well I'm at work, but I want my motherfucking peoples to go to work! This is fucking stupid!"

SemoreViews "I Want My Trump Back!": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VdqxwWXqRkA

In the modern world, as in the past, conflicts don't just appear out of nowhere. They come from people pursuing their self-interests and the interests of their family and friends. For example, in the micro you might witness nepotism and cronyism in your workplace. This can expand into alliances and cultures throughout governments and businesses and then spill over internationally. Summarizing from the René Girard chapter above, if you are in a weak position where you can't retaliate in anyway or fight back, you tend to be scapegoated and any aggression can vent itself on those individuals or groups through scapegoating. Boring contract disputes can suddenly be not so boring when the consequences are different groups turning to resentment when left behind. In economics, money is a form of power that allows one to access resources and relieve the tension of poverty for extended periods of time. If tensions cannot be released and if emotions can't be regulated, pathological behaviors ensue. Some people commit crimes, others turn to court systems, and if there are no laws that protect individuals, then gangsterism moves into the forefront, with politics being a legalized form of gangsterism. If all those avenues fail, especially if there is a violent incitement, war typically breaks out until a negotiation for peace can be arranged.

In the 21st century, economically there is still a 20th century hangover from the period after WWII, the rise of the United States, and then trade with Asia. Throughout this thread psychologically there is always one common denominator: People don't like being disrespected. The area that is not so common is for people to give respect to others at the same level they demand for themselves. This all relates to power and as the tables turn, the actor parts may change, but the complaints don't and are based on the same power differentials.

These cycles have been with us since the beginning of human awareness, as can be seen in the prior chapter on human ancestry. You can either produce what you need to consume, trade what you produced with others, or steal what you don't have through violent means. In the modern world, violence and theft has typically been denounced and trade has been considered the adult way of distributing resources. You can imagine the complexity of Freudian psychoanalysis and how everyone is trading with everyone else to satisfy libido, or cravings, which is essentially an energy exchange. Cravings always return but the ability to produce for oneself may not always be reliable, with the predictable mental health results.

As these cycles have returned again and again, along with war and strife, many theories arose on how to deal with conflicts. Almost all the theories involve some satiation that has to happen in the mind. When I'm hungry and I eat, I am satisfied for a few hours, until the hunger returns. If there's abundance there's a risk for addiction, and when there's poverty there can be a scarcity mindset and an escalating hostility. This is a tenuous balance where a people in an environment without social supports will want to save a lot of money, but then in order to earn a return they need to invest it in others, incurring a risk. As economies developed into the 20th century, tax and social support structures were developed from Marxist ideas as well as other older socialist ideas. Some countries went further with more centralized systems, but the fear of corruption has always hounded any centralized power scenario. The west settled for a solution where the government and the private sector negotiated repeatedly the different areas where it appeared that one side or another was best situated. Leaders in the private sector showed a distain for anything not related to the bottom line and they liked the simplicity of paying taxes so that others could deal with the homelessness, poverty, core social programs for education and healthcare, with cultural differences in each western country.

With the industrial revolution and the abundance that was offered for those who worked hard, some countries outperformed others. Some of this had to do with borders, domestic resources, and intellectual capital. Governments learned that if they didn't kill the goose that laid the golden egg they could get more tax revenue from less than 50% taxes rather than greater than or 100% government ownership. Humans are generally reward oriented and rationing systems tend to be jealous and miserly. In environments like the latter, motivation to work reduces, and since money is simply a medium of exchange, to decrease the limitations inherent in a barter system, less production = less wealth. This was a big problem for the Soviet Union, and as it collapsed, there were many triumphant theories on how the way of the West would influence the rest of the developing world.

The main Communist country that avoided that fate was China. Being very close to a similar fate as the Soviets, as seen after the Tiananmen Square riots, the U.S. went in the direction of working with the government, much to the chagrin of freedom protestors in China who complained about government corruption. The students protesting the government had sympathy from leaders like Zhao Ziyang who was the most supportive of liberal reforms and a successor to Hu Yaobang who was also in favor of market reforms. Unfortunately Deng Xiaoping and other party members felt threatened by the power shift. Deng determined that "'the entire imperialist Western world plans to make all socialist countries discard the socialist road and then bring them under the control of international monopoly capital and onto the capitalist road'; he stated further that if China did not up hold socialism then it would be turned into an appendage of the capitalist countries." The protest crackdown led to thousands of casualties, but the total number of dead has been an ongoing controversy. In A World Transformed, Deng was explicitly admitting the desire to punish when he told the U.S. that "China will persist in punishing those instigators of the rebellion and its behind-the-scenes boss in accordance with Chinese laws. China will by no means waver in its resolution of this kind. Otherwise how can the PRC continue to exist?" The protest never got the support it needed to overthrow the Communist regime, and the rest is history.

When Globalism was born - Jack Posobiec: https://twitter.com/JackPosobiec/status/1608528342843592706

From George H.W. Bush, through Clinton and the younger Bush, China did liberalize the economy but not without protections for the political class. By the time China entered the World Trade Organization, they were given most-favored-nation status by the U.S. which allowed them to setup a mercantilist system where they were able to protect their markets while having access to western markets under a system of slave labor that tempted corporations and owners of capital to take advantage of the increased profits. The loss in jobs in the west was dubbed the China Trade Shock.

China Trade Shock: https://chinashock.info/

Since that time, many trade experts could not avoid noticing the changes, including former trade advisor to President Donald Trump, Robert Lighthizer. He grew up in an affluent manufacturing area in Ohio, but then saw the devastation since the North American Free Trade Agreement and China's WTO inclusion. "We had lost millions of jobs and thousands of factories while wages had stagnated." Despite the obvious destruction that was happening, there was not enough of a push to reverse what happened. "The political establishments of both the Republican and Democratic parties, under the influence of multinational corporations and importers, were unwilling or unable to recognize their mistakes. Instead, they remained convinced that rather than protect American workers and manufacturers, government policy had to put them at risk amid a quest to maximize corporate profits and economic efficiency while minimizing consumer prices."

The difficulty of course is that cheap prices only matter when you have a good paying job. If you are displaced and have to renegotiate wages to a lower level, the result is that nothing is cheap. "While corporate profits soared for a select group of importers and retailers, many of America’s manufacturing companies were hollowed out—forced either into bankruptcy or into moving their factories abroad. And what about ordinary Americans? Though prices for some products declined, wage growth in this country has utterly stagnated since the 1980s—driven in large part by the decline of manufacturing sector employment. As a result, increasingly, working-class families must rely on two full-time incomes in lower-end service sector jobs to maintain the same quality of life one manufacturing sector income once provided. It is no exaggeration to say that American leaders traded the health of the US industrial base and the good-paying manufacturing jobs it supported for current consumption and little more."

Lighthizer was a trade lawyer and he felt that a more nuanced view was required that looked at how skills are developed and the variety of jobs available. People have different personality types, different levels of skill and intelligence. The new model always relied on cheap products from Asia while workers without a super value-added education in the area of high tech could only try to get reeducated or work more hours in service jobs. The manufacturing gap was neglected and in many ways it still is. "When all citizens—including those without college degrees—have a chance to be productive, it’s good for the country...International trade, like all economic policy, is beneficial only if it contributes to the well-being of most of our citizens, if it makes families stronger, and if it makes our communities better...I feel strongly that the course we set for trade policy must rest on a more complete and nuanced understanding of the effects of international trade in the United States—and throughout the world—than can be captured by the question of how much we pay for televisions and toys."

For many Gen-Xers and later generations, they found that when they left school that finding a job that matched their education was exceedingly difficult compared to what baby boomers experienced. They found little sympathy from economists and politicians of any stripe. "Advocates for free trade seemed to accept the growing distress in so many manufacturing-centered communities with the easy assurance of those whose understanding of the calamity was wholly theoretical. It was also hard to dismiss the sense that the proponents of free trade whose voices were heard the most were not trying very hard to see the reality of those costs in the context of the people and families whose lives were affected. Impersonal, inexorable market forces provided an acceptable fig leaf for the turn to globalization that was always the preferred course regardless." Since increased profits from lower wages, and wages being the largest expense on an income statement for most companies, owners didn't have a vested interest in changing their good fortunes. Profits are either given to owners in dividends or reinvested. "New jobs would develop in new industries that would grow. Workers would move to new locations. Government job training would fix any remaining problems. Everything will work out, they said and continue to say. By the time that it became apparent that everything was not working out and that there were devastating costs to many communities, most people in DC didn’t worry very much, because it was all happening someplace far away to people they didn’t know. Nothing useful could be done to hold back the tides of inexorable market forces. This was all aided, of course, by the fact that many in the Washington business trade associations had become far more concerned with the interests of importers than those of US manufacturers. The lobbying money was on the side of free trade."

Even more, popular presidents like Ronald Reagan were quoted all the time and used as a baton to bash critics of free trade, but "President Reagan distinguished between free trade in theory and free trade in practice. He imposed quotas on imported steel, protected Harley-Davidson from Japanese competition, restrained imports of semiconductors and automobiles, took on the overvalued dollar, and pursued similar steps to keep American industry strong during the 1980s. Indeed, after he left office, one group of rabid libertarian free traders said that he was the most protectionist president since Herbert Hoover. I can’t hide the fact that I always took that as a compliment...The costs and benefits of trade liberalization were calibrated relative to national interests and changing political circumstances. No one would have argued for free trade and economic interdependence with the Soviet Union."

Donald Trump Teases a President Bid During a 1988 Oprah Show | The Oprah Winfrey Show | OWN: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SEPs17_AkTI

In glib news reports of Chinese trade practices, many in the world ignored what was going on and focused on cheaper prices. The access to world markets for China was much larger than what China allowed on their turf for the rest of the world. "The reality is that it is a mercantilist nation that wants to impose its system on the world. It is opposed to the liberal democratic order and wants to put an end to American hegemony...The post–World War II strategy of reducing barriers to imports in return for the hope of new exports seriously went off the rails in the 1990s. The United States placed an all-or-nothing bet on free trade in the form of three consecutive deals. Since that time, we have seen the loss of millions of jobs and exploding trade deficits. The United States needs to insist on fair trade in our market and reciprocal access in foreign markets. Decades of poor trade deals have produced neither. We need a policy that assures balanced trade. We cannot afford to continue to transfer our wealth to foreign countries in return for consumer products. These are the realities...Extensive state ownership, enormous state subsidies, a closed home market, currency manipulation, rampant government-sponsored theft of intellectual property, and every other mercantilist practice. Trade deficits skyrocketed to unprecedented levels. We were allowing China, a foreign adversary, to use all forms of state-sponsored, government-organized unfair trade to run up a more than $270 billion trade surplus with us and to take US jobs in the process...The 'China shock...was so severe that even the usual advocates for trade started to get a little nervous."

Conservative critic of modern schooling and abstract economic theories, Charlie Kirk, had to renounce his old opinions because reality couldn't be ignored. "If I had to indict philosophical libertarianism, of which I used to believe a lot of this stuff, because it's young. It's compelling. You read Ayn Rand. You read Hayek, and some of it's interesting, and some of it I still agree with, but a lot of it is nonsense because it's an indifference to the result." The results of course affect the psychology of the displaced, which moves out of scope for so many globalist economists. "Between 2000 and 2016, the United States lost nearly five million manufacturing jobs. Median household income stagnated. And in the places that prosperity left behind, the fabric of society frayed. Since the mid-1990s, the United States has faced an epidemic of what the economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton have termed 'deaths of despair.' They have found that among white middle-aged adults who lack a college education—a demographic that has borne much of the brunt of offshoring—deaths from cirrhosis of the liver increased by 50 percent between 1999 and 2013, suicides increased by 78 percent, and drug and alcohol overdoses increased by 323 percent. From 2014 to 2017, the increase in deaths of despair led to the first decrease in life expectancy in the United States over a three-year period since the 1918 flu pandemic." For those who ignored those results, often by blaming the people for being morally inferior, there were other arguments about the benefits of currying favor with enemies to change their tune, but like in situation with Deng Xiaoping, the trade negotiations changed the West much more. "One hears about the need for America to use its economic prowess to gain friends and to influence events. We need to trade more—read: import more—so that other countries will like us instead of, say, China. For others, trade is really about obtaining the cheapest products for our consumers. For these people, if the result is the loss of manufacturing and related jobs, that is a fair exchange. Cheap televisions trump American factories." There was also an argument based on fears related to trade protectionism before the U.S. entrance into WWII. "Anything other than full-throated support for free trade was regarded as a throwback to protectionism and isolationism, as well as an invitation to trade wars."

Charlie Kirk: The CATO Institute Deserves No Seat In The Conservative Movement: https://rumble.com/v1n00vo-charlie-kirk-the-cato-institute-deserves-no-seat-in-the-conservative-moveme.html

Adam Posen and displaced workers: https://humanevents.com/2022/10/09/posobiec-ultra-capitalist-adam-posen-admits-he-wants-your-family-to-suffer-so-elites-and-ccp-can-get-richer

Gen Z chicks are finding out that their college degrees are totally worthless - Benny Johnson: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/vT6FMnIj3C4

#object relations #fear of success #15 minute city #accusation in a mirror #anthony hopkins #argentina #artificial intelligence #blackrock #capitalism #carl jung #charlie kirk #communism #control #corruption #Donald Trump #economics #envy #flowpsychology #free trade #Mark Milley #george w bush #hu jintao #illegal immigration #jack posobiec #james o'keefe #javier milei #joe biden #marie louise von franz #mercantilism #mihaly csikszentmihalyi

[psychreviews2]

Object Relations: Fear Of Success Pt. 7-2

Projection

Psychological projection is a very complex topic that is often badly explained because it's a catch-all term for many different phenomenon. If you are a successful person or are trying to rise in a social hierarchy, it's impossible to do that without experiencing the projections of others. A lot of the common projections you find in politics today involves a normalization of corruption and moral inventories. If enough people are so corrupt, it's easy to accuse others of what you're guilty of, because you may be right. Some of the projection is more unconscious and has been studied in dreams in Psychoanalysis and Analytical Psychology. Marie Von Franz saw more globally that "wherever known reality stops, where we touch the unknown, there we project an archetypal image." That image could be a good guy or bad guy. Typically, the bad guy is always the one who interferes with our goals, even if we are the criminal and the police are trying to stop us. The good guy is often an idol to be inspired by and given outsized expectations. Through moral inventories, our weaknesses, mistakes, and faults can be well known to us and become the material we use to accuse others, especially if we have a cynical worldview that assumes everyone is the same way. Carl Jung was also aware of how this could happen in therapy when the unknown for a patient has the blanks filled in by the therapist. When extended outside of therapy the example could be an "assumption that what the [onlooker] perceives or thinks is equally perceived or thought by the [recognized.]" Projection can also happen where there is a lack of understanding for real personal human struggles, through a lack of experience, and people mistakenly assume who they are judging are more unique that they actually are. The typical hypocrisy, as pointed in the Bible by Jesus, is when one is looking at a speck of dirt in another's eye while ignoring the plank of wood in their own. When one wants to do a moral inventory against someone else, most therapists agree that it's best to start with oneself before moving forward.

In the view of Jung's Shadow, which is the collection of all the weak parts of our personalities, that territory is often tender when there is a humiliating comparison with people who are better than us in these exact areas. There is a threat that they can be critical of us at any moment and we may lose our status and resources. They often appear like the bad guy, trigger defenses motivated to start moral inventories, and because the accused is more skilled or intelligent, and therefore hard to understand, we make assumptions based on what we know, which is all about us and our weaknesses. There's also a danger of annihilation because critical people who threaten resources, also threaten the well-being of the self. It's like a psychological murder attempt. You feel unconsciously like they are trying to kill you and you unconsciously harbor feelings for their demise. This means a reformer of a system will look extreme and scary, because one doesn't know where one will find another angle for survival. Like anyone looking for a new job, it's a stressful process.

Dreams also can provide symbols that can be interpreted outwardly towards predictions of the future, or they can be a displacement of internal struggles that are now symbolically appearing externally. The unconscious can be confusing in this way because thoughts in a meditation, or dreams in sleep, can just appear out of a nothing and they can already be fully formed projections and unrecognized as being so. For example, a person dying of a terminal disease starts to predict the end of the world, which is really a projection of the ending of their world. Jung felt that politics was an area where projection was common. "If people observe their own unconscious tendencies in other people, this is called a 'projection.'" Politics is full of individual ambitions tied to the ambitions of political groups and leaders. Threats of reform, revolution, and counter-revolution can easily spark a wave of projection.  The confusion happens when we don't ask the questions about our own dreams and symbols that appear in sleep or meditation. You can illuminate the situation by asking "are these symbols or ideas about the conflicts in my life? Would I feel better if others were proven guilty as I predicted? Does it feel better because those who I accuse are now seen as broken as I am?" When there is a lot of blame to go around, one way to escape the projections is to face all the problems of one's life truthfully and go through the process of self-correction. Once the self-correction is complete, is the blame for others still there? Is there more forgiveness? In some cases, the blame is justified because the evidence is glaring, but when the evidence is not there and there's no searching for evidence, it is likely a projection from a culture bound understanding of the world or a playing out of internal conflicts.

With projective identification, it goes even further where a person has an agenda with a narrative that will make themselves feel better and they have opportunities to brainwash a suggestible person who is open to introject, imitate, and identify with the new view. Connecting the psychology of victimhood and Girard's scapegoating, you can see examples in children or powerless people, who need resources from the powerful and they introject blame as a way to maintain survival along with other behaviors as found in Stockholm Syndrome, where there is real guilt taken on with the identification. You may stay alive longer in a kidnapping if you help the kidnapper for a period of time, but the cost of that is when you survive, you survive with guilt because you helped them. Other examples are when people adopt a worldview that others want them to have, to serve their agendas. This can be from a personal intimate point of view in a seduction, all the way up to religious or political agendas. Everyone on Earth more or less projects some of the time because it's tiring to do reality tests, or we are totally convinced of our point of view in one subject or another.

The need to blame to improve self-esteem is a clear demarcation between an honest prediction and an agenda. Blaming because there is an external reality and responsibility required, is less of a projection precisely because of the facts and reality involved. Also we sometimes criticize others because we are conscious of our mistakes and learned a lesson but can see that many other people are stuck where we were. Where it starts looking like an unconscious projection is when there's a holier-than-thou attitude to feel superior to elevate self-esteem. Why was there a low self-esteem in the first place that needed such a boost? A search for content in the mind that is creating feelings of low self-esteem can be a key to a projection that was unconscious. If there's wounding because others are superior in one arena of life or another, and if their downfall would make us feel better, it can numb the pain of having to face unpleasant facts about ourselves and the changes we need to make. Those projections also stay unconscious as long as the person avoids facing self-development. Projections can be recognized and forgotten because it's more comfortable to avoid change.

Milli Vanilli - Blame It On the Rain: https://youtu.be/BI5IA8assfk?si=DVkSZh8UeClQcQHT

How a Botched Bank Heist Created ‘Stockholm Syndrome’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MYsGbvrmr68

From the point of view of Carl Jung and Analytical Psychology, projection is an unconscious process of "...projecting our own psychology into our fellow human beings. In this way everyone creates for himself a series of more or less imaginary relationships based essentially on projection...In these imaginary relationships the other person becomes an image or a carrier of symbols." Marie Louise Von Franz used an example of childhood play and how children playing with dolls are making associations that don't belong to the inanimate object. This primitive layer continues on into adulthood unconsciously, but for her it's only when projections have become problematic do we have something worth investigating. "The archaic identity of subject and object, which is the basis of the phenomenon of projection, persists subliminally, even in highly cultivated men and women. In the unconscious the inner world and the outer world are not differentiated. Only that which has become a content of consciousness is described as an inner or outer phenomenon, that is, either than an introspectively perceived condition, like a welling up of an emotion, or as an 'outer' event or object. Everything else, of which we are not conscious, remains, as before, an undifferentiated part of the occurrences of life." When there is finally an investigation this is "...only when we gain enough insight to see that they are imagos of peculiarities that are part of our own makeup; otherwise we are naïvely convinced that these peculiarities belong to the object." Because dreams and thoughts appear out of the unconscious fully formed, it's the lack of questioning that leads to the projection being undetected. When people are walking around with their worldview, the gaps in knowledge provide an opening for the "...archaic identity of subject and object...Whenever it prevails, the unconscious is merged with the outer world." Through awareness and meditation of mental content there can be a "...complete and final detachment...when the imago that mirrored itself in the object is restored, together with its meaning, to the subject. This restoration is achieved through conscious recognition of the projected content, that is, by acknowledging the 'symbolic value' of the object." The gap in knowledge is one way to catch a projection but also when there is a distorted label applied to the world. "Exaggeration indicates, in most cases, an interpretation on the subjective level."

Because projection is an "...involuntary process..." full of "...dreams, waking fantasies, and mythological traditions," energy is wasted on error and judgment. "An inner mental image, the object-imago, must be recognized as an inner factor; this is the only way in which the value or the energy invested in the image can flow back to the individual, who has need of [this energy] for his development...The presence or absence of an exaggeration, however, can often be determined only through a feeling evaluation, which in dream interpretation demands a high degree of sensitivity to nuance and atmosphere. It is, moreover, important to differentiate, as Jung emphasizes, between a quality or property that is really present in the object and the value or meaning this object possesses for the dreamer, that is, for the energy invested in the assessment." Energy of course is wasted when there is a negative criticism connected with the anger and stress. If one is interested in real success in the world, a projection-meditation can be a way to save energy for self-development. One can ask "Why was the judgment inaccurate? Does it have to do with my self-development? Are there any wishes embedded related to self-esteem and comparison? Is there an agenda I want to force on the object?" The energetic body language and countenance sets off a countertransference in the person being judged with a back and forth between two or more projecting people. This understanding can also help therapists who don't have the routine of questioning their symbols, or they don't have a regular therapist of their own.

Jung's method was always about self-development and he saw how both negative and positive projections could suppress areas of the personality in most need of development. "...Everyone tends to project their less-preferred functions onto others. Unconscious dislike of a [skill] often leads to conflict with those for whom the [skill] is prominent in the personality. Negative projections are a way of denying our own deficits, and thus they keep us blind to ourselves and others, but idealizing projections may be even worse, since they externalize positive attributes, deluding us into thinking we do not have the assets that others have...Our judgments against others’ personalities suppress parts of our own minds. These 'inner conflicts' always erupt in disturbances of our inner peace." Carol Shumate of Projection and Personality Development via the Eight-Function Model, concurs. "The goal of Jung’s system was to help individuals avoid becoming self-fulfilling prophecies based on their early preferences." Another question is to look at those we idolize and see if there are any inferior feelings when we look at their abilities. We should ask if it's really true that we can't develop skills in the same direction. Certainly the therapeutic effect would arise if weak skills were successfully developed. The concern would evaporate as people get used to operating at a higher level.

From the psychoanalytic point of view, there's also a question of weakened ego boundaries where children were not able to develop a sense of inside and outside, much like the above examples of conscious boundaries and unconscious boundarylessness. There's a "...tendency to search for an outside cause rather than an internal one..." There's a selective focus based on a worldview and then a desire for relief. Freud surmised that "whenever an internal change occurs, we can choose whether we shall attribute it to an internal or external cause. If something deters us from accepting an internal origin, we naturally seize upon an external one." There are several theories as to why, including a desire for purity in the ideal self. If we feel that any of our own behavior tarnishes the ideal self-image, or ego-ideal, that feeling can manifest as a form of self-hatred that looks for an influence to blame, to find relief from the tension. Again, this can be accurate if you were young and copied bad behaviors from parents or culture, and now as an adult you have rejected those influences, but there can be a hunting mentality to attack societal influences, and again there can be scapegoats if the perpetrator from long ago is inaccessible. If there's enough unconsciousness, what Freud called a pre-conscious, a person could also partially forget their past purity-tainting behavior but still make a mistake in their guess of another person, because the content was conscious enough to be a form of knowledge to draw upon, but not conscious enough to be a form of self-reflection.

It's common for people to find internal conflicts that they struggle with and assume others are in the same situation. Many examples include anything related to identity, like sexual orientation, political affiliations, ethnic values, and internal religious conflicts. For example, a bisexual could hate their homosexual self and start attacking others for being openly homosexual. You could then apply this to struggles over deep seeded values. Another example would be a person who is now unsure of what they believe, in terms of having adopted a toxic worldview in the past, and then they could look for social influences to blame. This gets more pernicious when you look at pleasure. Many points of view, identities, and values, all contain pleasure at different levels of intensity and they can violate boundaries of others with varying levels of damage. The anger at bad influences increases as people fail to accept the the dark side of their personality. Drawbacks to pleasures don't change the fact that one CAN get pleasure in many different ways that can hurt oneself or others. When someone realizes that their pleasure can be replaced by subjectively "better" pleasures, a therapeutic method can be to ACCEPT that one can have lower pleasures and one has simply developed into something more peaceful or longer-lasting. These identities relating to anything addictive can be a mire to be stuck in when there's an obsession over purity.

The problem is time and identity. If you were impure in the past that means you can't ever be pure no matter what you do. You can blame other people. You can attack yourself, but you're still a person with potentials for being impure. This projective exaggeration is called splitting in psychoanalysis and one can do that to oneself if one can only love oneself if one is pure. To accept impurity can be moral if people are also accepting of drawbacks to desires and are moving on to better pastures. It becomes pathological if people feel they can ONLY experience pleasure in certain situations. It takes a lot of mistakes, that many don't want to experience for practical reasons, to learn about the limits of one's pleasure template, and unfortunately many take their childhood history and solidify it into a self-belief that prevents new healthier experiences of pleasure. Carl Jung said this about about how to deal with counter-transference when patients are judged harshly by their professionals that "if the doctor wishes to help a human being, he must be able to accept him as he is, and he can do this in reality only when he has already seen and accepted himself as he is." The advantage of acknowledging your dark side is that what is conscious can be targeted for control. People who say they are pure may not actually know themselves that well and may act on the slightest temptation to the surprise of everyone around them including themselves. Learning for many people requires a lot of feeling and experience. Abstract knowledge may be accurate but it may also be sterile and not provide enough of a deterrence for bad behavior because of the possibility that one can get intense pleasure from something damaging. Any attempts to teach younger people may require more admission that something bad, like a drug habit, can include incredible pleasure along with the risks of wrong doses and adulterations. There needs to be an impure identity, which matches common humanity, so that exploring improved behaviors becomes possible. Rigid identities lead to hypocrisy and they can demotivate change as a way to defend the all-or-nothing identity.

Carl Jung - Ending Your Inner Civil War (read by Alan Watts): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=15pjQRA80bs

90s Ravers Gurning On Ecstasy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yfWBd9Eg3rI

Discotheque - U2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TpvF7Qq9svk

It's been a perennial criticism of psychoanalysis in how it is hard to test for projection, but some tests have been done on how obsessive thinking can lead to projection. Deep wounds, shameful mistakes, and past addictions can be chewed on in the mind for long periods of time, swallowed with suppression, but then regurgitated when there are reminders in the environment. In A new look at defense projection, researchers found that "people dislike certain traits and are particularly loath to believe that they themselves have such traits. It is also clear that they seek to deny some of their faults and to suppress thoughts about evidence that paints them in certain dark colors...Cognitive suppression of unwanted self-knowledge may have an unintended side effect: It may lead thoughts about the problematic personality trait to rebound and become chronically accessible...The level of discrepancy between the undesired self and one's actual self-concept can be an important predictor of life satisfaction."

Almost all life choices involve some compromise and when weighing choices it's usually not so black and white. One of the modern illnesses is attributing too much to identity, but when one looks closely, identity is shifting all the time according to priority. If your priority is to send an e-mail, you're an e-mailer right now, but as soon as the priority changes on the list you're something else. In Identity and Identification, a case study illuminated the variety one finds and all the trial and error searches people engage in when they have to adapt to the economy and changes in the world. Identity is compartmentalized. Different lifestyles and ways of living, especially if you live in a multi-cultural society, can broaden horizons of what's possible and allow people to experiment and change lifestyles. To the question Who Are You?, Mark Walport responded: "It depends on the circumstances. That's what's very interesting about identity. So, talking to you now, I'm the Director of the Wellcome Trust, but at home I'm a husband and father. On Flickr, I'm someone else, and so on. In all sorts of different circumstances, we're slightly different people." Then when you add age and experience, complexity accrues in the character of the person. After a lot of trial and error, certain preferences become more solid and many others may have fallen away due to obsolescence, boredom, or an acute awareness of drawbacks. Keeping a flexible attitude of learning and development weakens rigid judgments about purity of character. The safety one finds in boundaries is enjoying a life where the enjoyments already include those healthy boundaries. The need for purity can rest.

Case Studies: The 'Wolfman' (3/3) - Freud and Beyond: https://rumble.com/v1gulsf-case-studies-the-wolfman-33-freud-and-beyond.html

Unfortunately, so many people will not read psychology with any real depth and they are going to be stuck with inflexible thoughts and they will project on the environment with an intense need to control. With projective identification people as well as the environment are manipulated to conform to the personal worldview that allows for relief. There's a "...manipulation of the external object in order to make it comply with what the subject is attempting to externalize." This makes the job of a therapist dealing with these ego disordered patients more difficult. Warren Brodey in, The Dynamics of Narcissism, described that selection process. "Projection is combined with the manipulation of reality selected for the purpose of verifying the projection. Reality that cannot be used to verify the projection is not perceived [because it's about the selection]. Information known by the externalizing person but beyond the perception of the others [in the family] is not transmitted to these others except as it is useful to train or manipulate them into validating what will then become the realization of the projection...The identity that the patient sees may be unknown to the therapist (although it holds a kernel of truth, which is usually disturbing to the therapist). The therapist's active denial of the patient's presumption may serve as confirmation of the as-if identity, particularly because the patient, constricted to his own externalized image, does not perceive the context of the other characteristics." Truth is used in projection, as Von Franz quoted Jung, who spoke of "a 'hook' in the object on which one hangs a projection as one hangs a coat on a coat hook." Therapists are treated like a coat hanger and all the realistic details about their life can be a form of brainwashing if not careful.

Brodey then expanded on the Narcissus parable and the lack of separation between the subject and the reflection in the water due to pathological parenting, with the distorted rewards and punishments, that didn't allow for boundaries between self and other for the child. A narcissist in therapy could easily take personal any perceived slights coming from the therapist as a form of self-injury while at the same time project one's content into the therapist. No boundaries. "Consider again Narcissus and his reflection: the not-self that is set at a distance for relationship exists only as a relocation of a part of 'I.' The reflected image of Narcissus has no separate existence. It is perceived outside of the self but is continuous with the self; it owes its existence to the primary self image rather than to the transfer of energy to the perception (or misperception) of an existent other. The existent child is not libidinized. He is responded to by his mother as an as-if child—that is, responded to only when he validates his mother’s projection." This tethering of the sense of self to authoritative people is a developmental trap that predicts a de-centering of the personality in the child preventing further independence. Brodey quoted Deutsch: "When a distanced self-reflection is [emotionally invested in] as an existent other, this is delusion." Like a puppet the child is stuck in a limited world partially separated from reality. "The image in the pool, having no separate existence, is wholly governed by expectation and can never be spontaneous. It can give nothing...This makes the work with ego-disordered children technically more difficult. The child patterned to the mother's expectations will not easily relate to a therapist who rejects these...The pseudo ego is that organization which validates the parental projection. It is [emotionally invested in] energy that aims to prevent abandonment and the threat of its own dissolution...The child's reality and his mode of organizing reality are altered. An identity grows that is unsupported from within."

As the child grows older and looks to find gratification in the adult world, the desperation to find objects to be pseudo-parents and objects to challenge for domination leads to bewildered victims. Anthony Hopkins in an interview described the feeling of talking with someone who could manipulate your attention span. "I met a madman who was on the loose in London, and that's pretty scary. I had coffee with him one day. I realized how nuts he was. He never blinked. He kept asking me questions and before you could answer he would ask me another one and another one. In the end it made you feel so that you were in a different reality."

Anthony Hopkins Reveals Why He Didn't Blink While Playing Hannibal | The Dick Cavett Show: https://youtu.be/rkh-bOujn40?si=D3KA9GF5fHPHVb2C

Going further than psychology patients, many psychoanalytic books talk about projection being common in the world of politics, but the reality is that so many people who use these tactics are not entirely unconscious of their effect. They find political rewards in the real world and those rewards guide them to be more strategic with their messaging. This is especially true for those who want to destabilize societies. They have a conscious agenda that is unpopular and it will only work if it is unconscious in their targets.

Patterson, N., Richter, D., Gnerre, S. et al. Genetic evidence for complex speciation of humans and chimpanzees. Nature 441, 1103–1108 (2006).

Moorjani P, Amorim CE, Arndt PF, Przeworski M. Variation in the molecular clock of primates. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2016 Sep 20;113(38):10607-12.

Domínguez-Rodrigo, M., Baquedano, E., Organista, E. et al. Early Pleistocene faunivorous hominins were not kleptoparasitic, and this impacted the evolution of human anatomy and socio-ecology. Sci Rep 11, 16135 (2021).

Lahr, M. M., Rivera, F., Power, R. K., Mounier, A., Copsey, B., Crivellaro, F., … Foley, R. A. (2016). Inter-group violence among early Holocene hunter-gatherers of West Turkana, Kenya. Nature, 529(7586), 394–398.

Violence and the Sacred by René Girard: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780801822186/

Evolution of the Human Diet: The Known, the Unknown, and the Unknowable by Peter S. Ungar: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780195183474/

General History of Africa - Vol. 1 by Joseph Ki-Zerbo, Unesco Staff, Mokhtar: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780520039124/

Projection and Personality Development via the Eight-function Model by Carol Shumate: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780367341381/

Transference And Projection by Jan Grant, Jim Crawley: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780335203147/

Projection and re-collection in Jungian psychology by Marie Louise von Franz: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780875484174/

Newman, Leonard & Duff, Kimberly & Baumeister, Roy. (1997). A new look at defensive projection: Thought suppression, accessibility, and biased person perception. Journal of personality and social psychology. 72. 980-1001.

Identity and Identification by Ken Arnold, James Peto, Mick Gordon, Chris Wilkinson, Hugh Aldersey-Williams, The Wellcome Trust: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9781906155865/

Brodey WM. On the dynamics of narcissism. I. Externalization and early ego development. Psychoanal Study Child. 1965;20:165-93.

Marcus, Kenneth L., Accusation in a Mirror (2012). Loyola University Chicago Law Journal, Vol. 43, No. 2, pp. 357 - 393, 2012

Atrocity Speech Law by Gregory S. Gordon, Benjamin Ferencz: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780190612689/

A World Transformed by George Bush, Brent Scowcroft: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780679752592/

No Trade Is Free - Robert Lighthizer: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780063282131/

The People's Republic of Amnesia: Tiananmen Revisited by Louisa Lim: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780199347704/

Prisoner of the State - Zhao Ziyang: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9781439149393/

Dark Aeon : Transhumanism and the War Against Humanity by Joe Allen: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9781648210105/

HOU Lulu, LIU Yungang, Life Circle Construction in China under the Idea of Collaborative Governance: A Comparative Study of Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou, Geographical review of Japan series B, 2017, Volume 90, Issue 1, Pages 2-16

Psychology: http://psychreviews.org/category/psychology01/

Fear of Success Pt. 1: https://psychreviews.org/fear-of-success/

Fear of Success Pt. 2: https://psychreviews.org/object-relations-fear-of-success-pt-2/

Fear of Success Pt. 3: https://psychreviews.org/object-relations-fear-of-success-pt-3/

Fear of Success Pt. 4: https://psychreviews.org/object-relations-fear-of-success-pt-4/

Fear of Success Pt. 5: https://psychreviews.org/object-relations-fear-of-success-pt-5/

Fear of Success Pt. 6: https://psychreviews.org/object-relations-fear-of-success-pt-6/

#15 minute city #accusation in a mirror #anthony hopkins #Argentina #artificial intelligence #blackrock #capitalism #carl jung #charlie kirk #communism #control #corruption #donald trump #economics #envy #flowpsychology #free trade #mark miley #george w bush #hu jintao #illegal immigration #international trade #jack posobiec #james o'keefe #javier milei #joe biden #marie louise von franz #mercantilism #mihaly csikszentmihalyi #naomi wolf

[psychreviews2]

Object Relations: Fear Of Success Pt. 7-1

Power, Control, and Fear

To look at success for human beings, it follows that a review of our ancestors and what success meant for them should be included. Whether we are talking about animals, or the human animal, you have a consciousness that needs to feed, feels craving, and searches the landscape for sustenance. Through trial and error, different strategies were developed over many eons. There would have been a mixture of cooperation and conflict. From the evolutionary point of view, humans were connected to early primates. DNA analyses includes a wide variety of dates when human ancestors diverged from the other primates. Because of long time spans in the millions of years, it stands to reason that genetic mutations would have made small changes over time and human ancestors would have mated with other primates for some time before the divergence was permanent. In Genetic evidence for complex speciation of humans and chimpanzees, researchers found that "...Chromosome X [showed] an extremely young genetic divergence time, close to the genome minimum along nearly its entire length. These unexpected features would be explained if the human and chimpanzee lineages initially diverged, then later exchanged genes before separating permanently."

Part of the divergence could be explained by developments to endlessly improve to master the environment. In the case of humans, it was always to advance technology one level further. Learning to master fire and using primitive stone tools were some of the earliest impactful developments our ancestors achieved. You can find a good example from some of the oldest archeological evidence of pre-historical ancestors that was found in the Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania. The gorge was tested and found to be wetter and cooler than it is today. The location provides a look at the transition from bite marks to cut marks made from stone tools. The advent of stone tools, through evidence of stone cutting on animal bones, allowed for some of the earliest forms of technological power. Because evidence is still sparse on how stone tools related to human development, it is reasonable to assume that stone tools could have been made to process carcasses for meat, used as weapons, or to make other tools. There are also theories on how difficult and dangerous it would be to make these stone tools without cutting oneself and that there may have been an earlier period when appropriate shapes were sought out before being made more generally.

Because life was short during the Stone Age, with life expectancies in the 30s, it's conceivable that there would have been fights over scarcity amongst other humans and primates, just like we see with wild animals today. Success would often be more than just finding resources but also successfully protecting oneself from violence and theft or succeeding to steal or kill without consequence.  René Girard theorized about early human conflicts and how myths and religions may have came out of early forms of gaslighting to maintain power and control to support the victors in any conflict. Certainly, animals show fights over scarcity with every battle over a carcass, but the earliest evidences of human to human violence can only be found much later in Nataruk. Robin Seemangal summarized those important findings. "About 10,000 years ago in eastern Africa, a resource-rich, fertile lagoon known as Nataruk was the setting for humanity’s earliest known violent conflict which resulted in the brutal killing of over two dozen prehistoric men, women and children...'The Nataruk massacre may have resulted from an attempt to seize resources–territory, women, children, food stored in pots–whose value was similar to those of later food-producing agricultural societies, among whom violent attacks on settlements became part of life,' said Cambridge’s Dr Marta Mirazon Lahr, who led the Nataruk study, published in the journal Nature...They concluded that the conflict that left at least 27 dead, occurred sometime between 9,500 to 10,500 years ago in the early years following the last Ice Age—known as the Holocene epoch. Sometimes referred to as the 'Age of Man,' this era accounts for last 11,700 years of humanity’s recorded history...Nataruk is thought to have been a habitat rich with marsh and surrounded by a forest—indicating that it was an ideal home for a large population of hunter-gatherers. The inhabitants and subsequent victims of the conflict that ensued, are thought to be members of an extended family that lived there together..."

Seven Samurai - Akira Kurosawa: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8V4dEWPJKNk

"Researchers have not come to a consensus on the matter of how violence became a part of human civilization but theorize that we either carried it with us from 'deep in our evolutionary history' or it appeared along with the construct of land settlement and ownership...Antagonistic rivalry among later hunter-gatherer groups usually resulted in violence that left the males of the opposing sides dead while females and children were often assimilated into the triumphant group. The varying remains at Nataruk indicate that this probably was not the case. It’s also important to note that certain earmarks of rivalry-driven conflict like dismemberment or trophy-taking were not found at Nataruk. 21 adults that included eight males, eight females and five unknown were found along with the remains of six children. These young victims were all under the age of six except for one whose dental analysis placed them between 12-15 years old. 12 of the skeletons were found intact and 10 of those paint a vivid picture of the massacre. The victims suffered from blunt-force trauma to the head, broken bones throughout their bodies, and fatal injuries caused by projectile weapons. One of the males had a sharpened blade fabricated with obsidian lodged in his head but not fully puncturing the bone. Another injury on the same skeleton indicates that a secondary weapon was used to crush the victim’s head and face. 'The man appears to have been hit in the head by at least two projectiles and in the knees by a blunt instrument, falling face down into the lagoon’s shallow water,' said Dr. Mirazon Lahr. A few of the skeletons were found face down and some in positions that illustrate bounding or imprisonment by their attackers. One of these victims was a female in the final months of pregnancy as evident by the fetal bones discovered within her abdominal cavity."

The Earliest Evidence of Violent Human Conflict Has Been Discovered - Robin Seemangal: https://observer.com/2016/01/the-earliest-evidence-of-violent-human-conflict-has-been-discovered/

Discoveries at Nataruk: http://in-africa.org/discoveries-at-nataruk/

Male lions at top speed: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/xsMUp58apXk

Nataruk: Evidence of a prehistoric massacre: https://youtu.be/05jK_-YThxY?si=NhZ3MZdgpTBfuhJt

Even with gaps in evidence, there are plenty of historical documents and anthropological studies that show curious rituals that Girard found were all the precursors to modern religions and the social response to uncontrollable violence that could at any moment erupt and destroy a civilization, and any forms of social success along with them. Girard was critical of both psychoanalysis and anthropology for either ridiculing ancestors for superstition without seeing deeper meanings in those early taboos and ancient attempts at social control. René was still thankful for the efforts of psychoanalysis and anthropology for recording case studies and allowing more avenues of interpretation. For Girard, evidence of scapegoating is all over the material, and "...for the Freudian notion of transference, inadequate as it is in some respects, should at least have alerted us that something vital is missing from the picture." Sir James Frazer provided his own description of projection, transference, and scapegoating despite looking at it as an archaic way of thinking, which in the end a modern readership would find contemporary nonetheless.

"The notion that we can transfer our guilt and sufferings to some other being who will bear them for us is familiar to the savage mind. It arises from a very obvious confusion between the physical and the mental, between the material and the immaterial. Because it is possible to shift a load of wood, stones, or what not, from our own back to the back of another, the savage fancies that it is equally possible to shift the burden of his pains and sorrows to another, who will suffer them in his stead. Upon this idea he acts, and the result is an endless number of very unamiable devices for palming off upon some one else the trouble which a man shrinks from bearing himself. In short, the principle of vicarious suffering is commonly understood and practised by races who stand on a low level of social and intellectual culture."

Despite the pompous superiority complex modern humans have, there's no doubt that there is always a pecking order in any modern society and political activity belongs as much to us modern "savages." Humans have battled with each other to include ever more people into suffrage and political franchise so policy wasn't only left for property owning males that controlled everything, yet the modern world is still ensnared by money, power, control, and the role of ownership continues to confer political power. Modern politics is rife with criticisms of lobbyists who have outsized political influence correlating to their wealth. The franchise has less and less power as one owns less and less property. Those who have outsized power also can avoid consequences of their mistakes whereas the powerless have little to no resources to defend themselves. For example, people with less resources are not likely to be able to afford the best legal defense. The world of work and production is ideally about reciprocity, but evidence of blame shifting is quite easy to see, as well as examples of scapegoating, and double-standards. Pure accountability is an abstract ideal.

With simple implements and early attempts at farming, there already was evidence of unfairness including marauding, cannibalism, raping, and pillaging. For our ancestors, power and control started over animals and territory. Craving led our ancestors to become both greedy and envious. With each injustice, there were attempts to get a grip on understanding what had happened. Was there a God involved? Was there a Karma or spiritual punishment for what happened? Was there going to be punishment through reprisal from other villages or was it all combined with a sorcery aiming at revenge? The need for ritual to appease an angry deity required some kind of cost, but for the one who has power, and can fight back, there was no incentive or pressure that could get people to police themselves. The cost had to come from the usefulness of what was under control, including slaves, servants, and what could be sacrificed in animal husbandry. That cost is allowed for the powerful perpetrator to survive, provide atonement, and appease the aggrieved, without the accountability to fall on their shoulders alone. "The sacrificial animals were always those most prized for their usefulness: the gentlest, most innocent creatures, whose habits and instincts brought them most closely into harmony with man...From the animal realm were chosen as victims those who were, if we might use the phrase, the most human in nature...Society is seeking to deflect upon a relatively indifferent victim, a 'sacrificeable' victim, the violence that would otherwise be vented on its own members, the people it most desires to protect...In a general study of sacrifice there is little reason to differentiate between human and animal victims. When the principle of the substitution is physical resemblance between the vicarious victim and its prototypes, the mere fact that both victims are human beings seems to suffice. Thus, it is hardly surprising that in some societies whole categories of human beings are systematically reserved for sacrificial purposes in order to protect other categories...This dividing of sacrifice into two categories, human and animal, has itself a sacrificial character, in a strictly ritualistic sense. The division is based in effect on a value judgement: on the preconception that one category of victim—the human being—is quite unsuitable for sacrificial purposes, while another category—the animal—is eminently sacrificeable." When animal sacrifices are not considered enough, humans will do, and it was especially the least powerfully connected humans in ancient society, and Girard included outsiders, and outliers who were given power for a time to guide the village, until a revolution was necessary to dislodge them in a crisis. "It includes prisoners of war, slaves, small children, unmarried adolescents, and the handicapped; it ranges from the very dregs of society, such as the Greek pharmakos, to the king himself."

The Wicker Man (1973) sacrifice scene: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GRKaAiBy-Go

The Pharmakos was a Greek form of purification for a community or a city where targets were exiled or killed when a disaster occurred, such as a famine, invasion, or plague. "In Athens, for example, a man and a woman who were considered ugly were selected as scapegoats each year. At the festival of the Thargelia in May or June, they were feasted, led round the town, beaten with green twigs, and driven out or killed with stones. The practice in Colophon, on the coast of Asia Minor (the part of modern Turkey that lies in Asia) was described by the 6th-century-BC poet Hipponax (fragments 5–11). An especially ugly man was honoured by the community with a feast of figs, barley soup, and cheese. Then he was whipped with fig branches, with care that he was hit seven times on his phallus, before being driven out of town. (Medieval sources said that the Colophonian pharmākos was burned and his ashes scattered in the sea.) The custom was meant to rid the place annually of ill luck." Even more famous for the Greeks was Socrates who led a poor life, to the anger of his wife, and was accused of being a bad influence on the youth of Athens. His sentence was to drink hemlock, which he did to keep philosophical consistency.

Pharmakos - Encyclopedia Britannica: https://www.britannica.com/topic/pharmakos

When there is blame for a poor harvest or some other incompetence, as long as people are powerful enough to retaliate, they become less of a target. Those who are not considered "essential" to the economy are prime targets, to borrow from Schindler's List. Girard used Euripides' Medea, as an example of social power coalescing on a scapegoat through mutual interest. The desperate need to vent speeds up the process of scapegoating because of the immediate pain and desire to feel relief as soon as possible. "'I am sure her anger will not subside until it has found a victim. Let us pray that the victim is at least one of our enemies!'...The classic literature of China explicitly acknowledges the propitiatory function of sacrificial rites. Such practices 'pacify the country and make the people settled...It is through the sacrifices that the unity of the people is strengthened.' The Book of Rites affirms that sacrificial ceremonies, music, punishments, and laws have one and the same end: to unite society and establish order...The role of sacrifice is to stem this rising tide of indiscriminate substitutions and redirect violence into 'proper' channels'...What we are dealing with, therefore, are exterior or marginal individuals, incapable of establishing or sharing the social bonds that link the rest of the inhabitants. Their status as foreigners or enemies, their servile condition, or simply their age prevents these future victims from fully integrating themselves into the community."

Essential Workers - Schindler's List: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TDo6eHyeI8E

NY Gov. Cuomo: 'You want to go to work? Go take a job as an essential worker.' | ABC News: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=biorRAQJhH8

Through myth-making and gaslighting, narratives are used to placate the populace or to distract them. "Sacrificial substitution implies a degree of misunderstanding. Its vitality as an institution depends on its ability to conceal the displacement upon which the rite is based. It must never lose sight entirely, however, of the original object, or cease to be aware of the act of transference from that object to the surrogate victim; without that awareness no substitution can take place and the sacrifice loses all efficacy...The theological basis of the sacrifice has a crucial role in fostering this misunderstanding. It is the god who supposedly demands the victims; he alone, in principle, who savors the smoke from the altars and requisitions the slaughtered flesh. It is to appease his anger that the killing goes on, that the victims multiply...Godfrey Lienhardt (in Divinity and Experience) and Victor Turner (in a number of works, especially The Drums of Affliction), drawing from fieldwork, portray sacrifice as practiced among the Dinka and the Ndembu as a deliberate act of collective substitution performed at the expense of the victim and absorbing all the internal tensions, feuds, and rivalries pent up within the community...The sacrifice serves to protect the entire community from its own violence; it prompts the entire community to choose victims outside itself. The elements of dissension scattered throughout the community are drawn to the person of the sacrificial victim and eliminated, at least temporarily, by its sacrifice...This common denominator is internal violence—all the dissensions, rivalries, jealousies, and quarrels within the community that the sacrifices are designed to suppress. The purpose of the sacrifice is to restore harmony to the community, to reinforce the social fabric...But what about the king? Is he not at the very heart of the community? Undoubtedly—but it is precisely his position at the center that serves to isolate him from his fellow men, to render him casteless. He escapes from society, so to speak, via the roof, just as the pharmakos escapes through the cellar. The king has a sort of foil, however, in the person of his fool. The fool shares his master's status as an outsider—an isolation whose literal truth is often of greater significance than the easily reversible svmbolic values often attributed to it. From every point of view the fool is eminently 'sacrificeable,' and the king can use him to vent his own anger. But it sometimes happens that the king himself is sacrificed..." A good example of rulers being scapegoated is the ancient Chinese Mandate of Heaven when poverty or natural disasters lead to an overthrow.

These internal struggles involve the usual blame for incompetence and powerful jockeying to exact punishment with deflected results. "When men no longer live in harmony with one another, the sun still shines and the rain falls, to be sure, but the fields are less well tended, the harvests less abundant." We get idioms like "don't kill the messenger" that communicate that fear of becoming a scapegoat, because "all our sacrificial victims, whether chosen from one of the human categories enumerated above or, a fortiori, from the animal realm, are invariably distinguishable from the non-sacrificeable beings by one essential characteristic: between these victims and the community a crucial social link is missing, so they can be exposed to violence without fear of reprisal. Their death does not automatically entail an act of vengeance...The desire to commit an act of violence on those near us cannot be suppressed without a conflict; we must divert that impulse, therefore, toward the sacrificial victim, the creature we can strike down without fear of reprisal, since he lacks a champion." This sends a telepathic message to all people to seek power precisely to avoid this calamity. All these ideas of stability in modern political structures are all about evaluating if there are enough checks and balances in a society to maintain an equal application of the rule of law. Maxims like "peace through strength" also illuminate the reality that if you want peace you have to be able to defend it. By appearing strong to others, attempts at criminality tend to evaporate before they start. Weakness invites scapegoating.

With inaccurate forms of revenge, through adventurism, perpetrating, and scapegoating, it can turn into the criticism against the "eye for an eye" maxim, even though that maxim hints that truly guilty people should pay for their actions in one form or another. The problem is when justice is inaccurate. "Why does the spirit of revenge, wherever it breaks out, constitute such an intolerable menace? Perhaps because the only satisfactory revenge for spilt blood is spilling the blood of the killer; and in the blood feud there is no clear distinction between the act for which the killer is being punished and the punishment itself. Vengeance professes to be an act of reprisal, and every reprisal calls for another reprisal. The crime to which the act of vengeance addresses itself is almost never an unprecedented offense; in almost every case it has been committed in revenge for some prior crime." As long as one side claims an entitlement for its adventurism, for example birthrights, rights conferred from God, cultural values of importance, etc., the ball gets rolling and those who are victims will make a claim based on victimhood and then a series of reprisals continue ad infinitum. A society with a weak justice system simply reverts to these messy scenarios of trials by combat, religious sacrifices, blame-shifting, and endless rounds of innocent people baring the brunt for the powerful and their scandals. "To make a victim out of the guilty party is to play vengeance's role, to submit to the demands of violence. By killing, not the murderer himself, but someone close to him, an act of perfect reciprocity is avoided and the necessity for revenge by-passed. If the counterviolence were inflicted on the aggressor himself, it would by this very act participate in, and become indistinguishable from, the original act of violence. In short, it would become an act of pure vengeance, requiring yet another act of vengeance and transforming itself into the very thing it was designed to prevent...Only violence can put an end to violence, and that is why violence is self-propagating. Everyone wants to strike the last blow, and reprisal can thus follow reprisal without any true conclusion ever being reached." Scapegoating provides a way to accept a cost by killing an innocent person, which is the same as the original killing of an innocent person in historical record. It also acknowledges that the true killer is still dangerous and their strength is a deterrent for accurate justice. When the violence ceases for a period of time, after an efficacious scapegoating, that peace is revered and made into myth-making as well as a posthumous appreciation for the scapegoat that provided that peace.

Topsy-Turvy - The Mikado - Timothy Spall: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KbE0wZaXiLI

"We owe our good fortune to one of our social institutions above all: our judicial system, which serves to deflect the menace of vengeance. The system does not suppress vengeance; rather, it effectively limits it to a single act of reprisal, enacted by a sovereign authority specializing in this particular function. The decisions of the judiciary are invariably presented as the final word on vengeance." If you add confusion onto who is responsible, like seen in crowds and mobs, it becomes easier and easier to see how one can hide culpability in a group and deflect accurate justice, because there are no processes for investigation and discovery. "Collective responsibility never specifically excludes the true culprit, and that is precisely what is being done here. Even if this exclusion is not clearly spelled out, there is sufficient evidence for us to assume that in many instances the true culprit is systematically spared. As a cultural attitude, this certainly demands attention...There is no universal rule for quelling violence, no principle of guaranteed effectiveness. At times all the remedies, harsh as well as gentle, seem efficacious; at other times, every measure seems to heighten the fever it is striving to abate." This strikes home the very importance of an impartial judicial system. When it is corrupted, the old system begins it's return. There are "...those that possess a 'central authority,' and those that do not...This group [in authority] confronts the other group in the same way that a sovereign state confronts the outside world. There can be no true 'administering of justice,' no judicial system without a superior tribunal capable of arbitrating between even the most powerful groups. Only that superior tribunal can remove the possibility of blood feud or perpetual vendetta...As long as there exists no sovereign and independent body capable of taking the place of the injured party and taking upon itself the responsibility for revenge, the danger of interminable escalation remains." This is key in that those who are in the powerless category must have access to a powerful defense to prevent rampant scapegoating.

Many examples of how scapegoating can arise are described in the law profession and law publications:

Anonymous accusations with no ability to corroborate the claims. Eg. Anonymous media leaks. Gossip.

Conflation of individuals who are in a group or category to predict behavior, and to also label a social movement as wholly evil based on a few bad apples.

Accusing innocent people to avoid punishment, which is made easier if the scapegoat has been guilty of other things in the past. Eg. Attributing murders to an already convicted murderer. This can also be done in the reverse depending on the actual evidence. A murderer could take their undetected crimes and blame them on someone else.

Using incidents that resemble a current social issue of victimhood, but when a closer look is taken, it's found to not be the case. These incidents can be used to advance a social political agenda.

Revenge scapegoating in response to prior scapegoating.

Associating different lifestyles as deviant as a way to claim more resources and opportunities for oneself. Eg. The entitlement of a "pillar of the community" or political leader.

Using dubious measures of self-sacrifice as a way to claim more resources and opportunities for oneself.

Passing off personal expenses onto corporations, shareholders, or taxpayers.

The Temptations of Scapegoating - Daniel B. Yeager: https://www.law.georgetown.edu/american-criminal-law-review/wp-content/uploads/sites/15/2019/06/56-4-The-temptations-of-scapegoating.pdf

How these substitutions are successfully achieved are often through skilled gaslighting, as described above, and or undetected projection.

Patterson, N., Richter, D., Gnerre, S. et al. Genetic evidence for complex speciation of humans and chimpanzees. Nature 441, 1103–1108 (2006).

Moorjani P, Amorim CE, Arndt PF, Przeworski M. Variation in the molecular clock of primates. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2016 Sep 20;113(38):10607-12.

Domínguez-Rodrigo, M., Baquedano, E., Organista, E. et al. Early Pleistocene faunivorous hominins were not kleptoparasitic, and this impacted the evolution of human anatomy and socio-ecology. Sci Rep 11, 16135 (2021).

Lahr, M. M., Rivera, F., Power, R. K., Mounier, A., Copsey, B., Crivellaro, F., … Foley, R. A. (2016). Inter-group violence among early Holocene hunter-gatherers of West Turkana, Kenya. Nature, 529(7586), 394–398.

Violence and the Sacred by René Girard: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780801822186/

Evolution of the Human Diet: The Known, the Unknown, and the Unknowable by Peter S. Ungar: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780195183474/

General History of Africa - Vol. 1 by Joseph Ki-Zerbo, Unesco Staff, Mokhtar: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780520039124/

Projection and Personality Development via the Eight-function Model by Carol Shumate: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780367341381/

Transference And Projection by Jan Grant, Jim Crawley: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780335203147/

Projection and re-collection in Jungian psychology by Marie Louise von Franz: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780875484174/

Newman, Leonard & Duff, Kimberly & Baumeister, Roy. (1997). A new look at defensive projection: Thought suppression, accessibility, and biased person perception. Journal of personality and social psychology. 72. 980-1001.

Identity and Identification by Ken Arnold, James Peto, Mick Gordon, Chris Wilkinson, Hugh Aldersey-Williams, The Wellcome Trust: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9781906155865/

Brodey WM. On the dynamics of narcissism. I. Externalization and early ego development. Psychoanal Study Child. 1965;20:165-93.

Marcus, Kenneth L., Accusation in a Mirror (2012). Loyola University Chicago Law Journal, Vol. 43, No. 2, pp. 357 - 393, 2012

Atrocity Speech Law by Gregory S. Gordon, Benjamin Ferencz: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780190612689/

A World Transformed by George Bush, Brent Scowcroft: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780679752592/

No Trade Is Free - Robert Lighthizer: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780063282131/

The People's Republic of Amnesia: Tiananmen Revisited by Louisa Lim: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780199347704/

Prisoner of the State - Zhao Ziyang: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9781439149393/

Dark Aeon : Transhumanism and the War Against Humanity by Joe Allen: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9781648210105/

HOU Lulu, LIU Yungang, Life Circle Construction in China under the Idea of Collaborative Governance: A Comparative Study of Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou, Geographical review of Japan series B, 2017, Volume 90, Issue 1, Pages 2-16

Psychology: http://psychreviews.org/category/psychology01/

Fear of Success Pt. 1: https://psychreviews.org/fear-of-success/

Fear of Success Pt. 2: https://psychreviews.org/object-relations-fear-of-success-pt-2/

Fear of Success Pt. 3: https://psychreviews.org/object-relations-fear-of-success-pt-3/

Fear of Success Pt. 4: https://psychreviews.org/object-relations-fear-of-success-pt-4/

Fear of Success Pt. 5: https://psychreviews.org/object-relations-fear-of-success-pt-5/

Fear of Success Pt. 6: https://psychreviews.org/object-relations-fear-of-success-pt-6/

#fear of success #object relations #oedipus complex #castration anxiety #castrationcomplex #artificial intelligence #accusation in a mirror #blackrock #capitalism #15 minute city #argentina #carl jung #charlie kirk #naomi wolf #communism #projection #scapegoating #george w bush #hu jintao #javier milei #xi jinping #robert lighthizer #nataruk #steve bannon #jack posobiec #narcissism #wef #tiananmen square #ccp #Politics

[psychreviews2]

Object Relations: Fear Of Success Pt. 6

Playing and Control

Many people want success, but they are not sure about the work involved. In some cases it's wise to just start, but momentum is hard to build and it's easy to quit. There are also questions about what is authentic when one has been on a wrong path with a goal or they feel that they are simply making another person's dreams real but not their own. The reality in psychology is that it all starts with a basic autonomy of a self that can make authentic choices, and no matter what, there will always be some exploration, trial and error, before finding a sliver of authenticity. That sliver involves some feeling in the body that a person likes or dislikes, and is not covered over by a disguise.

At some point an exploration has to begin with an initial exploratory movement. The psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott in particular focused on the "spontaneous gesture" where theoretically a child is able to first begin and develop their true self. There is a playful quality to sensing the boundaries of one's body, being alive, feeling real, and learning about oneself through the activity of exploration. Exploration also feels like a combination of playing and experimentation. In fact, for all articles on psychology, or meditation for that matter, there needs to be some action on the part of the subject and an honest account of the feelings and sensations in the body, for learning to happen. Without that, there is no aliveness, playing, or exploration. Winnicott found this beginning to play, and the continuation of playing, to be the most reliable sign of health, and so much so that he also believed that "if a child is playing there is room for a symptom or two, and if a child is able to enjoy play, both alone and with other children, there is no very serious trouble afoot. If in this play is employed a rich imagination, and if, also, pleasure is got from games that depend on exact perception or external reality, then you can be fairly happy, even if the child in question is wetting the bed, stammering, displaying temper tantrums, or repeatedly suffering from bilious attacks or depression."

Play often involves some exertion of control on the environment and for Winnicott there's a basic sense of survival mixed in with play. The child recognizes this when "...the child values finding that hate or aggressive urges can be expressed in a known environment, without the return of hate and violence from the environment to the child. A good environment, the child would feel, should be able to tolerate aggressive feelings if they are expressed in more or less acceptable form." Mastering an environment also reduces anxiety, but if the environment cannot be controlled then the anxiety leads to searches for addictive consumption, and manifests as a regression towards familiar habits that are easier to access. There is a hunting mind in each human that looks for a catch, an animal skin, a treasure, etc., and if it can't find it in one place, it won't wait and will be quite happy to find it somewhere more familiar and comfortable. Play can be pathological when it's "...compulsive, excited, anxiety driven, and more sense-exploiting than happy."

Some of this can go in dangerous sadistic territory that Freud talked about in Beyond The Pleasure Principle. He used an example of a child being hurt by circumstances in an environment, and then using those circumstances to learn about power and to trade places with the circumstances to put oneself in the power position. Unfortunately, this is usually done to someone who is not in a power position, so an easy target is scapegoated in order to regulate emotions. "If a doctor examines a child‘s throat, or performs a small operation on him, the alarming experience will quite certainly be made the subject of the next game, but in this the pleasure gain from another source is not to be overlooked. In passing from the passivity of experience to the activity of play the child applies to his playfellow the unpleasant occurrence that befell himself and so avenges himself on the person of this proxy."

War Pt. 2: Beyond The Pleasure Principle: https://rumble.com/v1gv855-beyond-the-pleasure-principle-freud-and-beyond-war-pt.-23.html

This desire to control the environment is often how underhanded methods of control spread throughout society. This can easily be seen in bosses who repeat bad behaviors with underlings, because they went through the same when they were powerless. It's the feeling of reciprocity like it's their turn now to exert control. Then when you add the fact that these methods may be the only methods they know that work, and in a desperately competitive environment, the tools of power and control spread throughout society via imitation of what works, which fosters tyranny. Tyranny is very clever at understanding the emotions of others, and through many experiences of exerting control, a tyrannical person can use your likes and dislikes against you, through the manipulation of leverage, and your negative emotions become connected to their feelings of security and emotional regulation. When you feel bad, they feel good. When you lose energy, they gain energy. Yet when we are playing in a blameless way, it's blameless because the control on the environment we apply provides a satisfaction that doesn't drain others, or it follows some socially agreed upon exchanges, rewards, and punishments, that appear to be fair.

As we feel out the environment, through trial and error, partial success leads to partial feelings of satisfaction with an uneasiness that motivates one to complete a task before quitting. Breaking down hard parts of a problem and inching towards success can make a difference in the amplification of the reward. There's a tradeoff when choosing to do something hard with an anticipation of a larger reward emotionally, and also larger rewards in the outer world. On the other hand, controlling what can't be controlled leads to stress if the challenge is too difficult at the current level of skill. The more difficult the task the more persistence and mindfulness is required to get to the finish line. There is an undeniable fact that mental rewards are higher when people complete difficult tasks, such as winning an Olympic gold medal. Pleasure comes from the ego matching the ego-ideal for a time, and there's also a secondary relief in putting down the burden of always needing to practice and prepare, because the big event is now over. The effort can now relax.

The False Self - Various Authors (Narcissism 2 of 4): https://rumble.com/v1gth6h-the-false-self-various-authors-narcissism-2-of-4.html

Regardless of the obstacles, there are many benefits that come with the risks associated with playful exploration. "It is play that is the universal, and that belongs to health: playing facilitates growth and therefore health; playing leads into group relationships; playing can be a form of communication in psychotherapy; and, lastly, psychoanalysis has been developed as a highly specialized form of playing in the service of communication with oneself and others." Therapy becomes a play area that allows the stuck patient to return to a playful learning mentality so they can develop new momentum with renewed action, ideally coming mainly from one's own ideas. "The significant moment is that at which the child surprises himself or herself. It is not the moment of my clever interpretation that is significant...Interpretation outside the ripeness of the material is indoctrination and produces compliance...This playing has to be spontaneous, and not compliant or acquiescent, if psychotherapy is to be done."

The Ego and the Id - Sigmund Freud: https://rumble.com/v1gvdo1-the-ego-and-the-id-sigmund-freud.html

With the spread of modern meditation practices there are certainly options now for people to do it themselves and for them to succeed at staying in the present moment, playing, experimenting, and possibly approaching something Olympic in difficulty. Alan Watts provided an example of this in the kitchen. "In our culture we make a strictly rigid division between work and play...The art of washing dishes is that you only have to wash one at a time. If you're doing it day after day, you have it in your mind's eye an enormous stack of filthy dishes which you have washed up in years past and an enormous stack of filthy dishes which you will wash up in years future, but if you bring in your mind to the state of reality which is only now, you only have to wash one dish. Instead of thinking 'have I got it really clean' as my mother taught me with an angry voice, that I have to get every little scrap off it, instead you turn the cleaning movement into a dance, and you're not under compulsion all the time."

Work as Play - Alan Watts: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2yWx7cqiSJI

The Power of Concentrated Action - Eckhart Tolle: https://youtu.be/c8lRV0rqYd4?si=p2JZiuynNkqKM_4M

Of course, this is correct in that one has to have concentration, but part of anticipatory pleasure comes from imagining small parts of a future task that one can do right away and then moving through each part to experience consecutive spells of satisfaction, as Watts describes. Winnicott also hinted that there needs to be some vision. Imagination of the task and the mysterious encounter with reality. "Playing is always exciting because it deals with the existence of a precarious borderline between the subjective and that which can be objectively perceived." The great thing about play is that unless there is action to encounter reality, there isn't really an attempt at play, and this forces many out of magical thinking, complacence, and procrastination. Watching players play soccer from the bench is being a spectator, not playing. Some initial forcing and effort to control has to be present to start a back and forth communication between the participant and the environment. Slowing down to reflect on feedback is a way to regulate emotions away from instant reactivity and rash judgments. Like in a soccer game, strategies have to be adjusted to confirm lessons learned so performance can improve in the next half: A playful control of reality.

Shame

It's important to control expectations with promises of what psychology can offer because environments in the real world are not always accommodating. There are micro-managers who are sending waves of shame and contempt the employee's way, regardless of their sense of presence with a stack of dishes. There is also a requirement to imagine longer time periods for the actual work itself. Many people do jobs much more complicated than washing dishes and have to ruminate far in advance. There are also customers and clients who require ever higher standards and it's easy to fall short from time to time. Bullies also eliminate a sense of control by shaming at every opportunity and blocking important growth, and accordingly, any access to future pleasure from work in that particular environment. In the imperfect world, jobs will change with regularity as politics, obsolescence, and health issues arise. Any situations of emotional pain will require those tools talked about in my past meditation posts, and especially the Otto Rank installment that suggests that one should balance mindfulness with a normal expression of emotion. Many will also need to process anger in legal ways, and if bullying from employers is so egregious, then legal action, joining a union, or looking for another job may be necessary. There also has to be a fair self-assessment of one's own quality of work when criticism is accurate. It has to be accepted that work will never completely match up with pure play. Healthy expressions of anger involve present moment defenses against real threats, but anger related to past victimization has to be met with mindfulness in the body, because of how historical impulses can erupt with unfortunate timing. When met with mindfulness, the source of the anger has to be traced to what needs to be learned from in the past so that the brain doesn't have to make endless predictions, preparations, and ruminations about how to control the future. The endless rumination comes from denial of those problems and avoiding the development of those needed skills to solve or cope with said problems.

In my experience, those who had anger over bullies and bossy sadists in the workplace usually had to get really good with money as a solution, because the anger is connected with fear of losing one's home, relationships, and addictive pursuits. The typical story is of a person who tolerated years of derision at work to finally be able to retire and "flip the bird," to their old company or department. Those who were angry about past intimate relationship failures dealt with that by learning about what they truly wanted as a lifestyle and chose partners based on a mutual support of each other's pursuits, so that their goals wouldn't cancel each other's out. If something was really repressed deep down, then longer meditations mixed with deep therapy, can bring out some of those buried causes and effects from the past.

A good test I tried was recently going for a mindful walk in the city center. This meant that I was relaxing thinking and scanned my entire body to find tensions to relax. Loud sirens, loud people talking, harsh speech, harsh body language from others, really pushes you to react if you're sensitive. It's easy to detect that feeling of anger and boundary violation and see how rapidly it effects you. Usually I would feel a quick response to want to retaliate to maintain some control. Good mindfulness though, gives you that pause that you need as an adult so that you can choose your response better or to just acknowledge the emotion while letting it decay naturally as you get on with you errands. It's when there's a stimulus and you're not mindful where old repressed templates explode. This is why it's a hard practice to regulate emotions, because mindfulness is needed to see emotions from a distance. If there's no distance then the expression of the emotion will have all the momentum. Mindfulness also has a benefit in that it already acknowledges the feelings because they are being listened to at the moment of contact. Once they are listened to, understood in the context of whether it came from the past or the present, mindfulness of the body provides enough space for a more considered response. Long periods of mindfulness will also clearly illuminate any dents, fractures, or cavities in one's self-esteem or shine a light on any long standing feelings of shame.

Object Relations: Otto Rank Pt 2: https://rumble.com/v1gvsf5-object-relations-otto-rank-pt-2.html

How to express anger - Gabor Mate: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ljtNq7uDPaM

Feelings of shame can originate outside of the workplace, and they can can readily destroy beliefs that one can learn and improve in any environment. Not believing that one can learn is self-sabotaging and a self-fulfilling prophecy because inaction is already failure. Part of the problem of stigmatized identities that go along with the feeling of shame is the rush of stress that rises up when a shame-prone individual tries to learn something new. There is also an infantile wish to quit and have an authority figure provide relief by stepping in and taking control. Shame really extinguishes attempts at willpower. It's easier to go into regression and familiar territory than to feel those feelings and persist with new experiences. For example, a 2008 study looked at the effect of rumination induced with "..negative autobiographical recall," on already nascent "dysfunctional cognitions." One amplifies the other so the dysfunctional thoughts about incompetence continue to influence. Exploited by an unscrupulous bully, much damage can be done to those who lack knowledge in psychology and don't already have a flexible learning mentality. All a bully has to do is the typical narcissistic dog whistling, by guessing at possible weaknesses, sins of the past, or deficits of intelligence, that are quite common and familiar to so many, to set off a reaction of one kind or another in the victim. Even worse, all people have some weaknesses or imperfections which make this kind of abuse effective on almost all people.

By reminding targets of their past dysfunctional behaviors it reinforces a toxic identity. A wave of the past rises up and nothing new is learned. Probably the worst thing a narcissist can do to someone is to make them believe that they can't develop or improve, and they can potentially be the biggest influence on self-sabotaging voices in a victim's mind. Sam Vaknin has a good summary in the links below, and it will be familiar to what many know about the Super-ego if they've read Freud and other psychoanalysts. The brain copies all forms of pleasure automatically in the mimetic/imitative side of the brain. Pleasures can be of a higher level, which includes more peace and well-being, and of a lower level with intense pleasure disguising very real wear and tear on the body and mind. The supposedly "cool" aspects of any pleasure can be picked up on and turned into a voice in the mind or an image of oneself taking part in the "coolness." The self-sabotage of course is hidden in the desire's drawbacks. Many trip over themselves even when all they are trying to do is have a good time.

Sam helpfully explained his condition of narcissism and the absence of a true self, where the Ego is not operating fully, and one is living through the Super-ego and Ego-ideal. It's like watching yourself as another person while at the same time still being in the body. Like a movie reel, or a role playing video game, the sense of being a self in the actual world is dormant. The Super-ego false self is powerful and can operate experience like an automaton, so any knowledge of narcissism and the condition doesn't provide an instant cure through catharsis because the felt sense of being a self-in-the-world is so underdeveloped. The muscle of the Ego-ideal is so strong that it speaks mental scripts automatically in the foreground of consciousness and daydreams the narcissist back to automated behaviors.

Because of Sam's childhood abuse, the pain of going into the remnants of his self-in-presence was too painful of a process and if there was a choice to survey all the vicissitudes he went through, it has instead been more comfortable to rest in goals and ideals. Sam then informed his viewers that the narcissists in their life are trying to bring that object-relational world they have into their minds so as to complete their process of separation-individuation, which is a childhood process of separating from the mother to become psychologically independent, but according to Sam, it's a repeated failure.

Whether the metaphor René Girard used, about how a narcissist wants to be god-like, to worship idols, or from an atheistic perspective, they want to be an autonomous self that they see others are able to embody, the pathological consequences are the same. There's an envy directed at people who have an Ego that can savor independently from social control, motivating narcissists to one-up a victim for a thrill of superiority and mastery, to come up to the victim's level and get a taste of that bliss of self-sufficiency. Unfortunately, no ego skills are developed with this tactic, because it's still about gaining a Girardian "look" from victims and feeding on it. It's not an autonomous pleasure like engaging in a harmless hobby. At the other end of the abuse, the victim is left with an overactive shaming super-ego self-critic program that follows a deconstruction code against their ego-reality structure: A draining inner conflict much like what a narcissist experiences regularly. Like a computer virus, it has to be faced and rooted out for a victim, that still has some remaining sense of self to develop, to feel like they did before the abuse. They have to reconnect with their autonomous ego that acts in the real present moment. Ideally, one embraces a comprehensive connection with reality, or one finds that one can learn to love reality as it is. The super-ego then begins to look ridiculous to the ego because of how unrealistic it is, as Helene Deutsch pointed out. The super-ego deflates and the mind quiets down.

Deprogram the Narcissist in Your Mind - Sam Vaknin: https://youtu.be/bCKm2lywhZg?si=Ag_E58A2z1hR5QCe

Narcissistic Abuse Recovery: First Separate, Individuate - Sam Vaknin: https://youtu.be/95QBUV9CR_4?si=HZAhpxuV_HCopcba

Hijacked by Narcissist’s Serpent Voice? - Sam Vaknin: https://youtu.be/fT7pQ35LYlU?si=uxZnWEq6Cp13E3t8

Get Parasite Narcissist Out of Your Colonized Mind - Sam Vaknin: https://youtu.be/mVxzztuv96Y?si=eRFv2ZNxtitmY1gw

Love Yourself: Here’s How - or, The Four Pillars of Self-love - Sam Vaknin: https://youtu.be/2vzBf9QvClo?si=xlBWf6eypk6S5ZYK

How I Experience My Narcissism: Aware, Not Healed - Sam Vaknin: https://youtu.be/pIOKzEM1ijI?si=VrhRTpTYA8Zt8LmZ

Object Relations: Helene Deutsch Pt. 2: https://rumble.com/v2yepky-object-relations-helene-deutsch-pt.-2.html

I also agree with Sam that there are lots of gurus and self-help people that are implanting a similar magical thinking super-ego headspace in a client's mind like the narcissistic shared fantasy, in order to get them addicted to unrealistic dreams in their ego-ideals like a fish hook, so they cough up their hard earned money made in the world of reality. For example, with past life regression therapists, there is a danger of implanting false memories based on auto-generated imagery in meditation or hypnosis, and also imagery suggested from some therapists, by accident or on purpose. This magical thinking process will be discussed later. The problem of losing the Ego is losing all the emotions related to reality so the juiciness of present moment aliveness is tragically dried up. It's also a good question as to whether the memory and history of the realistic ego is damaged in some way. Is it possible anymore to feel a Proustian wistfulness for beautiful times gone by, when all one is thinking about is an inaccessible future self? It ties up neatly with Buddhist values towards equanimity, Upekkhā. Equanimity is not as boring as the translation sounds like. It relaxes reactivity long enough to allow the sense of wonder that anything exists at all, which also connects with Heidegger's philosophy on the value of wonder and appreciation.

Object Relations: Fear Of Success Pt. 2: https://rumble.com/v1gvuql-object-relations-fear-of-success-pt.-2.html

Self-help leaders and psychology popularizers regularly over-generalize dense scientific material so their suggestions and advice only sometimes apply to your particular life. It also makes it easier for these professional speakers to make more money because they can attract larger audiences. That's why videos of people like Jordan Peterson in front of a big crowd seem so general, but look much more specific when he's talking to patients one on one. Each patient is walking on general paths some of the time but they are also hacking out paths in dense jungle in other areas of their lives. Solutions for one person will always look more or less different than what is good for another. Even these posts, which are still quite dense, are just pointers for people to help them find their own way. For example, self-esteem problems related to shame can manifest in different ways for different people in different circumstances. General information is a good starting place, but for many, therapeutic results will more likely happen when they encounter something specific that works for them. This is why many people like psychology books with specific examples. If a reader is lucky, they may find an example that mirrors closely their situation.

7 Phases of Shared Fantasy: Why Narcissist Needs YOU - Sam Vaknin: https://youtu.be/Kp3YFC0OQfU?si=t5ReCtoMXaQrQFvF

Object Relations: Fear Of Success Pt. 2: https://rumble.com/v1gvuql-object-relations-fear-of-success-pt.-2.html

Equanimity - Rob Burbea: https://dharmaseed.org/talks/12307/

Parmenides: https://rumble.com/v1gsvkl-the-presocratics-parmenides.html

Mira Kelley (and HER abundance with YOUR money in a jar!): https://youtu.be/oDmSJF_EKyQ?si=BURycfjHjZeaSy7U

Self-help grifters unite to "Change the World" - Keyas World: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M9Bu5H9dVSM

How To Find a Therapist - Jordan Peterson: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lH4FNW0TqZE

If you explore enough psychology books, you will find that they are rife with examples of childhood and adolescent shame that make up these waves of narcissistic injury and self-sabotage. Many examples in these books are of childhood and adolescent rape, caregivers raping, parents raping, and the garden variety ingestion of drugs or imitation of violent behavior leading to catastrophic escalations and criminal mistakes. In childhood many are taking in shame narratives from authority figures and voices are operating automatically in their minds, coaxing them to repeat bad behaviors through identification. The identification comes in when there is an agreement with those voices to the point that the identification feels authentic as a stand alone thought, but usually all that's needed is a cursory investigation of this advice to uncover distorted voices that support self-sabotage, which means authenticity can be ruled out. Some common examples of mimetic contagion found in modern society are suicidal contagion, addictions, violent copycatting, etc. Even worse, older generations can successfully pass on their pleasure templates with the same feelings of shame and self-limitation. For example, if someone had a difficult period in their life where they behaved shamefully, it's easy for them to assume they are not worthy of future redemption and they may give up on themselves. Needless to say, a success template that includes moral perfection is not possible or realistic after reading a certain quantity of psychology. Most people have to wrestle with some impostor syndrome or they may get mired in shame narratives as they attempt to put closure on their past to clear their conscience for future projects.

Talk To Me trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aLAKJu9aJys

Transcanine Model banned from OnlyFans: https://www.ibtimes.sg/knottyfairy-self-proclaimed-transcanine-model-fired-job-banned-onlyfans-posting-sex-acts-68539

The reality is that people who are successful are hardly perfect people, but they are almost always successful at the disguise. Therapists have their work cut out for them to be the one person that believes in their patient's ability to drop imitations of old patterns and to support clients in their transformation to become more independent. Usually the first step is to recognize what was imitated, to not solely take all the blame for the invention of addiction, or the initial discovery of the sex act, or the simple realization that anger can be destructive, etc. The next step is to look at boundaries, and through the power of visualization, a power which advertising has long distorted to break through customer boundaries, to visualize those rarely advertised drawbacks that go along with many pleasures. Old templates of pleasure potentially have at one time or another violated another person's autonomy, at different degrees of severity, so some shame is healthy, but it can easily solidify into a limited recognition of identities where people double-down on behaviors because they believe "it's who I am. I'm bad." Therapists have to be that person that understands the mistakes people make and foster that all important learning mentality and to heal the all-or-nothing splitting that happens when a patient is stuck in perfectionism. Many of the goals of therapy are about teasing out persistent inner conflicts to resolve them and free up energy. When the mind is more quiescent in a patient, a path forward is easier to commit to.

One area that requires some looking into is the notion of forgiveness. So many speakers tell people to forgive, even when it goes against the grain. Desires for revenge can drain energy and often disguise an unconscious need to be satisfied through the abuser. Like Rupert Spira says about forgiveness, awareness has already forgiven so there isn't a need to do anything dualistic. Even trying to effort "forgiveness" is just another push and pull from the same aggressive side of the mind. Cutting ties with people, so they aren't needed, and seeing the already present peace residing in basic awareness, can also free up energy that is needed for getting on with life. The final stage of making a therapeutic change is when a person can do what the therapist does for themselves.

Mystics & Masters: A Course in Miracles meets Rupert Spira, Part 2: https://youtu.be/_m_IHnlPNEA?si=n0XKuPppW3fO-2M9

The next path is how to emotionally regulate so that satisfaction can be found in daily life. Emotional regulation is a long lasting journey with endless goals. As soon as things are fixed in one area of life, like at work, many people will find goals popping up, like changing a diet and introducing exercise, for example. On top of that, there are a myriad of relationship goals causing overwhelm. Development has to be taken in one step at a time. There's only so much daydreaming and acting-on that can be completed in a day before you're exhausted. Combating old impulses and identities requires more than presence and mindfulness, but also a positive mood to lubricate activity to keep it from rusting. In a study on different kinds of meditation, a positive method called Twin Hearts, was compared with classic mindfulness to see which was faster at regulating emotion. "Participants were constantly instructed to desire good things for the Earth and for all humanity, invited to imagine the Earth in front of him, to place his hands toward her and then to repeat positive words and phrases to himself. In this meditation, attention is directed toward this exercise of gratitude...[In the Mindfulness practice, participants aimed their attention] to the observation of [their] own thoughts, perceiving their arrival and letting them go....without reacting or being affected by them. Throughout the meditation, the participant was invited to keep attention in this focus, returning whenever...distracted." Their results found positive meditation more effective because "it seems that the content of the thoughts during the meditation matters, i.e., a positive emotional-based meditation can be used as an efficient tool to produce immediate effect in the emotional modulation."

Twin Hearts Meditation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N884jNJJpGc

Jordan Peterson - fixing small life problems one by one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uOJxcLyg3-Q

From personal experience, I would add that regular mindfulness does take time to work but it's not really content free. There is content in the mind all the time and as the person becomes more relaxed the content can at times unexpectedly release repressed negative emotion, but by continuing to acknowledge negative emotions, and let them go there can be a deeper rest. When that peace permeates experience, the content that arises becomes more positive, often leading to "a-ha" and "eureka" moments about positive things to plan and act on in the future. It makes sense that if one purposefully puts positive content in the mind then the positive effects would happen faster than waiting for positive content to arrive naturally. Though, one could then make an argument about authenticity and being willing to wait for a sense of rest to manifest those positive ideas when the faculty is ready. Of course, in this fast paced world, there has to be a balance between expediency and authenticity.

Despite all this sifting, there's still a lot of potential for working with the negativity that bubbles up. Options to express emotion, discharge into catharsis, and opportunities to gain an understanding of the causes and effects of the past, can all be used for the good. A simple way to create new goals from that negativity is to look what past behaviors were disliked and create goals that are in the opposite direction. Knowing what is a mistake illuminates the opposite. When coupled with repeated positivity, the psyche can develop a buffer against depression when goals fail or there are disappointments along the way. A strong buffer means that a person will pick themselves up from a failure and return to goal orientation much sooner than someone who ruminates endlessly for every setback.

For those who hate positive affirmations, it's possibly because so many of them ignore boundaries and the skills needed to hold oneself accountable as well as others. Life is full of demands for reciprocity and responsibility, not just unconditional love for the planet and all the flora and fauna, including flora and fauna that engage in conflict naturally. Alternative content for a creative person making their own affirmations would be to include more cognitive therapy principles, especially throughout the day. The following list of CBT reflections can smooth out some of those contradictions during a non-dual meditation or even in daily life:

Asking if the thought and image is true.

Practicing reality testing. Confirm and validate opinions and suggestions.

Following images of a feared future beyond the worst point until a realistic stable point is reached.

Changing future actions in an automatically generated fear-image with realistic better choices that you will more likely do.

Imagining using coping skills that one is already aware of. Many of us have tools but we are not using them.

Practicing coping techniques so that one is prepared when one really needs to be.

To counter catastrophizing one can ask oneself what realistically will happen.

The Work by Byron Katie: https://thework.com/instruction-the-work-byron-katie/

Approach and Avoidance Goals

Content streams in the mind can also be monitored by investigating their goals and what they are trying to achieve. Goals informed by psychology are more effective because they reduce self-sabotage and are pro-social. In a nutshell, there are two large categories in the psychology of goals with subtypes: Approach goals and Avoidance goals. They have two general motivations: The Need For Achievement or Thriving, and the Fear of Failure. The Handbook of Approach and Avoidance Motivation, has an exhaustive review of these different types of goals, and they all can land differently in emotional experience. "Avoidance goals are concerned with survival, and approach goals with thriving. Or to state it another way, if one doesn’t reproduce or seize an opportunity today, one can try again tomorrow; but if one doesn’t survive today, there will be no further opportunities." All goals involve some risk and to find a balance between approach and avoidance goals is necessary because they are often mixed in the same overall goal. This is one of the ways one can choose goals that create that feeling of Flow and well-being when skills match with challenges. Approach goals are more exciting, but avoidance goals provide a counter-pleasure related to mental peace. Everything involves survival, but the emphasis is more on thriving and abundance vs. achieving only a minimal survival.

Flow psychology: https://rumble.com/v1gvked-how-to-gain-flow-in-7-steps.html

From the point of view of researchers in the text "greater well-being results from experiencing more frequent pleasant and less frequent unpleasant affect and from having personally meaningful experiences in life." Since both approach and avoidance goals connect with overall well-being in different ways, one has to ask, "what are the promised thriving benefits of this goal? What are the risks, dangers, and preparations required to achieve this goal?" Down to the nitty gritty details is the optimum balance which may have to be adjusted more heavily to avoidance goals when the task is very dangerous as well as difficult. Avoidance goals can save lives when there is a big delta between skills and perils. "Which goals are most likely to promote well-being? A combination of both approach and avoidance goals is important for adaptive functioning. We have argued that the extent to which individuals should pursue more approach than avoidance goals is influenced by the desirability and feasibility of these goals for a given individual. Individuals for whom approach goals are desirable or feasible may experience greater well-being if their goal pursuits are heavily skewed toward approach goals. This, however, is not the case for individuals for whom avoidance goals are desirable or feasible. Such individuals may not necessarily benefit from pursuing approach goals and may even benefit in certain ways from pursuing avoidance goals...No single mix of approach and avoidance goals is optimal for the well-being of all individuals. Instead, to maximize well-being, individuals may need to find the mix that fits them best."

Subtype goals include different aims that have important emotional consequences to consider. "Mastery goals are focused on the development of competence or the attainment of task mastery; performance-approach goals are focused on outperforming others; and performance-avoidance goals are focused on not performing worse than others." Typically, mastery goals are about practice and learning and involve the "try and try again if at first you don't succeed" attitude that reduces stress. They are also motivated by the Need for Achievement, which focuses on well-being for the mind and body. One cannot stand still because the body has to be fed and taken care of and there are many culturally prescribed goals that tantalize one with very real possibilities and lifestyles. Regardless, all goals involve stress and effort, but some goals increase the sense of alarm. Fear of failure more closely associates with a performance-avoidance goal. Being realistic, most of the world of work and money is highly measured and steers people towards performance and threatens the withdrawal of rewards if there's failure, so the feeling of wear and tear from work involves the stress of doing the work as well as stressful rumination on the consequences of failure: Extrinsic motivation. Mastery goals are more associated with internal motivation where failure is just a learning opportunity. This is why preparation is so important for goals because it can support that sense of confidence that reduces stress when one is inevitably found caught in an avoidance reaction. As people become more confident with their skills, because they are more automatic, and require less effort, they find graded performance less threatening. There is also a benefit in saving money and investing, because it can buffer that fear of rejection because one has enough financial freedom and time to look for something more appropriate.

The problem with all these studies is how abstract much of the research is, even though there are emotional consequences being measured. That is why meditation is so important for people so they can assess for themselves how things feel in their phenomenological experience. A biological baseline of sensitivity and reactivity will vary from person to person and each goal involves a different balance between thriving and safety. To bridge that gap between a mastery orientation, like in a hobby, with that of a performance orientation in running a business, requires, as Elon Musk stated, a "high pain threshold." All the main meditation practices require a surrender, which isn't usually achieved in regular meditation, due to it resembling a safe hobby, and that surrender when it is engaged in is often described as a feeling that is like letting go of survival-defenses. It's scary. Sooner or later, a meditator has to realize that their meditation benefits are only working in one area of life and compartmentalized in the hobby category. As soon as the chips are down, when there's an emotional investment, only a devil-may-care attitude of surrender, mixed with a scientific learning mentality on what works, can manifest as an actual experience of letting-go in difficult times. Many mastery goals are different from performance goals because a "back to the drawing board" quality of pursuing skill development is pervasive. Avoidance-performance goals have an all or nothing attitude and spur on feelings of having to quit to save face or induce a strong desire to escape. Pride and a learning mentality are on opposite poles. Regardless, both types of goals require some measurement so as to at least know what "mastery" is supposed to look like, and in turn allow consciousness the chance to assess if there is any progress. Through trial and error, an assessment of one's level, and further training, real experiences in consciousness can create enough feedback to inform the original self-belief and bring it back to a realistic foundation.

The Anapanasati Sutta: 4 stages of meditation: https://rumble.com/v1gon6r-the-anapanasati-sutta-4-stages-of-meditation.html

The Pain Threshold: Elon Musk: https://youtu.be/H3GVC2RObuk

In a competitive environment, a mastery oriented person has to take in criticism and measurement as something to learn from and to apply what was learned with renewed attempts, regardless of any contempt coming from others, and regardless of any unfairness that pops up from time to time. And even further, the question can be asked as to whether external criticism is always reliable? This is why some people have to test unfavorable opinions like a scientific experiment if they want to move independent of authority figures and excessive compliance. Critics should be included in the mastery goals because they are just another indicator that provides information and feedback. There is also the phenomenon of Freudian prestige and the aura that surrounds these so called experts, who can be misleading from time to time. A great deal of people don't deserve the gravitas of being considered an "expert," and a little reality testing is often all that is needed to prove that. Experiences of vindication also make one more independent minded because truth is found in a search for facts, and trusting experts will only expand horizons to their level. Important events and facts that go beyond compliance and regulation can point to newer horizons. If there is a stripping away of all external critics and fame, what is still left of this independence at work, or with loved ones, is what many would find a pathway towards intrinsic motivation. For researchers like Edward Deci, that means acknowledging the needs you feel in your body, and having the freedom to pursue that satisfaction with the skills required, and belonging with important others and loved ones. To begin to include rules and regulations from others that you find reasonable is to look at the WHY of the task which helps to match self-interests between the individual and the group, so as to harmonize social goals.

Group Psychology - Freud and Beyond: https://rumble.com/v1gvcxr-group-psychology-freud-and-beyond-war-pt.-33.html

Jordan Peterson - Why can't you let go of unfair treatment?: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xaN9F1q-Fn0

Self-Determination Theory - Edward Deci: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m6fm1gt5YAM

Self-regulation and Magical Thinking

Like most psychology subjects related to motivation, it's full of assumptions that the reader can self-regulate in a world full of technological diversions: social media, gaming, texting, e-mailing, etc., and a myriad of addictions and magical thinking traps. The modern world is not like that of an ancient farmer. Farming would have been for survival and it also would be more interesting in a world where there was not much else to do. Normally, there is some form of pleasure arising when there is a challenge that is at the appropriate level for a person's skills, and then after besting that challenge, the brain releases mental rewards followed by some rest. On the other hand, many others are faced with something that is too challenging, so their experiences would be different, full of ruminating in a fight or flight mode. In Self-Regulation as the Interface of Emotional and Cognitive Development, researchers defined self-regulation as "...a process through which one system or domain of psychological functioning modulates the level of another in order to maintain an adaptive balance or equilibrium in response to internal or external stimulation...[It's] an adaptive process whereby system set points are modified over time in order to meet anticipated or expected demands. When expected demands are well within the range of systems’ capacities to respond to them, these systems are healthy and function at optimum set points; they are able to react in response to stress and then return to basal levels once the challenge has been met. Through repeated adjustment in high stress environments, however, adaptive set points are thought to reach basal levels that are not optimal for stress responding and that are ultimately injurious to the organism, resulting in physical and mental disease due to the toll, or wear and tear, they exact on the body’s various systems."

When people are desperate and reactive, the acting out and decisions made afterwards tend to be more pathological and self-destructive. To self-regulate a person has to be able to pause in the midst of reactivity to relax and choose to use the skills that were learned for the purpose, or choose to learn new skills if necessary. In very challenging situations, it may be necessary to change goals to more skill-appropriate ones. Either way, challenges are endless and much of what needs to be done is simply to choose which challenges are the best ones at the right level of understanding. To learn new skills, there has to be a realistic expectation of how long it will take. Some skills will take considerable time and many will need to abandon personal goals to make room for a new priority. This is also true when changing careers, which always requires new entry-level training. It's hard to develop rarefied skills from scratch, maintain them, and replace them if they go obsolete, which is why difficult jobs command such high wages. Without extrinsic rewards like high pay and generous benefits, people will typically avoid those challenges. High paying jobs usually demand huge cognitive resources, reliable behaviors to be demonstrated by the candidate, responsible attitudes, and an acceptance of accountability, which can be full of conflict in a modern workplace where blame regularly is aimed at everyone by everyone.

Part of the reason why people like the idea of a virtual world is because the challenges are easier to modulate. In a video game for example, a gamer can identify as a king with treasure chests full of gold coins. The book Getting Gamers, posits that "'self-determination theory' offers a framework for understanding why people are motivated to keep playing games. We do it to satisfy needs for 'competence, autonomy, and relatedness.'" The virtual world has difficult tasks but they are adjusted to become more addictive so that a full life can be achieved in 100 hours. Real life is much more difficult, so virtual worlds are tempting to regress into, which I think many self-determination researchers would point to as a reason not to choose video games as a replacement for life. It's at best a pastime. There's also the fact that video games involve less risk because if players die in the game they can just try again. In the real world there is evil, unfairness, and many do not get second chances. In the comfort of home, gamers can:

go to work, save money, and buy a house in a short period of time.

decorate a house.

express socially unacceptable sadism with no consequences.

have intimate relationships with non-player characters (NPCs) that are better looking than many deserve.

adopt children if a player is really lonely.

save the world.

resurrect if the player dies in the game.

5 Creepy Ways Video Games Are Trying To Get You Addicted: https://www.cracked.com/article_18461_5-creepy-ways-video-games-are-trying-to-get-you-addicted.html

When people feel they are in a trap of regulating emotions in the wrong places, they usually go into meditation or other spiritual practices, only to find it can be the same thing when there's avoidance, or spiritual bypassing. Many of the online meditation popularizers remind people that presence can be recognized with eyes open in the midst of people and the instruction then is to take that "holy" spiritual practice, that avoids dirty things like relationships, work and money, and to include those things in spiritual practice, to not compartmentalize the benefits of meditation. The disadvantage is that regulating emotions with something hard takes much more persistence and patience. The advantage is that hard goals usually provide more rewards, and emotions tend to be stronger when it's believed that something real and important happened. This is why reality is not as boring as some people make it out to be. To achieve things in reality is to take it out of magical thinking and to build a real story of a real self in the real world. A thriving person would likely have a balance of goals actuating in the real world, including the pursuit of face-to-face social rewards, and they would feel alive in more areas of their day to day living. There would also be less procrastination, because forcing oneself to just start is often like how one begins a concentration meditation. A little effort at the beginning goes a long way, and with the Zeigarnik effect, there is now a bothersome desire to finish what one has started. Over time people can get a taste for the real and naturally abandon fantasy rewards. Usually the answer to most questions about what to do is repeated concentration, relaxation, combined with conscientiousness.

Spiritual Bypassing and Inner Bonding: https://rumble.com/v1gpm57-spiritual-bypassing-and-inner-bonding.html

The Zeigarnick effect: https://www.thoughtco.com/zeigarnik-effect-4771725

In psychology, no one is acting outside of object relations. One is also dealing with an internal ego-ideal full of role models to imitate in an imaginative world-scape. René Girard talked about one of the consequences of magical thinking, which was hating the distance between oneself, which is the Ego in reality, the presence that is working with things in reality, and the Super-ego which is full of abstract future fantasies. That hating for Girard starts off as a self-hatred, he called a being-disease, which was also dramatized by Dostoyevsky in Notes from Underground. The distance between Ego and Ego-ideal causes masochistic self-hatred, in the form of various self-sabotaging actions as described above. In extremes it can lead to suicidal ideation or actual suicide. If it doesn't go in that direction, or when one is sufficiently bored with self-sabotage, then sadism begins a campaign against society through politics and scapegoating.

Girardian Underground: https://theopolisinstitute.com/leithart_post/girardian-underground/

Notes from Underground - Dostoyevsky: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780679734529/

The advantage of regulating emotions by balancing the Super-ego and the Ego is that the Super-ego can now rest in the backseat and instead provide "a-ha" intuitive interpretations for the ongoing action, and learn from feedback loops full of the real obstacles everyone faces in Ego-reality. Without the action, the Super-ego commentary is more like a movie with satisfying moments of emotional regulation in fantasy, but nothing concrete has happened. Audience members were just sitting down and eating popcorn while time passed. It's important to realize that there are ways to find satisfaction in fantasy, and the proof of that is in all those movies, video games, and novels that are enjoyed by many. It's a contrived world consumers want to live in and in fact many producers in the world of entertainment make a litmus test for success by measuring how interesting the world is, in a script for example, and decide if it's enough to make profit in movie houses.

This is the difference between a good and bad coach, a good or bad psychologist, or motivational speaker, and can be measured by seeing how much truth and reality is allowed in a coaching session. The ever present hammering of The Law of Attraction, which is mimetics mixed daydreaming, can exacerbate narcissism in any potentially healthy population. It's true that the Super-ego can provide a conscience and intuitive guidance, when there are healthy scripts in the mind, but most people in a modern digital dungeon don't have a weak Super-ego. What is refreshing is development in the world of reality and the energy expenditure there. Reality is painful when one wants to avoid it, but it can be more enjoyable if there is a learning mentality. Reality can be a foundation so that people can find real goals and develop real skills that fit their real circumstances. If a patient is stuck in a hole, at least they can stop digging as a start.

Magical thinking in contrast taps into those B.F. Skinner type studies of timed rewards with pigeons that influence those birds to create strange rites and rituals in their effort to magically manifest more food. Freud also associated this behavior to obsessive compulsive patients. It uncomfortably digs into any prayers for abundance and success many have made in the past. Many can be stuck in that mode until the ritual finally registers as ineffective, which is what behavioral psychologists call Extinction. By then there may be debt from an expensive university with a degree that provides little value, for example. Extinction commonly happens when people are burnt by following bad advice from authority figures. In many situations, an expert was never needed. Many people know what to do but their problem is that they are not motivated to do it.

Totem and Taboo - Sigmund Freud: https://rumble.com/v1gsmvn-totem-and-taboo-sigmund-freud.html

The imaginary world created in the mind provides psychological rewards more quickly than engaging an uncertain long-term goals. Imaginary worlds also remove as many real obstacles as possible, or imagine skills many don't have, in order to artificially intensify the satisfaction of the mental movie. This isn't to say that all magical thinking is useless. Some of the magical thinking can reduce stress, like in a meditation, because at least rumination is being interrupted by a pleasant fantasy, and some forms of prayer, like asking for help from angels, can improve intentionality and concentration, but only if there is an effective action following. The confusion is believing that the Law of Attraction, or some other new age theory, requires no effort on the part of the subject. At least some playful minimal control is required to start, with an even stronger effort to repeatedly approach goals until success.

In the end, the Law of Attraction is really just advertising mimetics, and the helpful magical universe that the theory talks about is a stand-in for the economy, especially when you provide loving service or passionate work that is attractive, hence attraction. Magical thinking can also lead to inventions if there is a bridge built between fantastical dreams and reality. Viewing from another angle, magical thinking could also include the activity of play as a healthy form of it, if it leads to reality testing, attempts to start a project, and renewed attempts to develop the momentum usually required for something challenging and difficult. If there is a useful takeaway from the The Law of Attraction, is that one should focus not on the goal as a means to an end, but on the emotion that one will repeatedly enjoy in each completion of a sub-goal of the overall goal. This allows you to be open to what feels good and to look at opposites that you learn about when something inevitably feels bad. What is bad has an opposite and one can make goals out of them all the time. If there's a need for preparation or responsibility, it's better to look at the feeling of preparedness, peace, or confidence, than treating those goals as different forms of drudgery that have to be forced into submission.

Stage Play Scene - Beau Is Afraid: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K3mdT6lXChY

5 Signs You're Self-Regulating Through Future Fantasies - Heidi Priebe: https://youtu.be/mvHoF0tOsmM?si

Jessie Ware - Begin Again: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yd3C69lVU5w

Practice the Pause - The Holistic Psychologist: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/m1cl5ZV6GaU

Case Studies: The 'Ratman' - Freud and Beyond: https://rumble.com/v1gu9qj-case-studies-the-ratman-freud-and-beyond.html

Developing a growth mindset - Carol Dweck: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hiiEeMN7vbQ

Abraham Hicks - 'Feel' into love; not the Object of Wonder: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CLlLiad8_JY

On the other hand, T.H. Ogden, in his On Three Forms of Thinking described the worst aspects of magical thinking. "...Instead of generating genuine psychic change, [Magical Thinking] subverts thinking and psychological growth by substituting invented reality for disturbing external reality. The omnipotent fantasying that underlies magical thinking is solipsistic in nature and contributes not only to preserving the current structure of the unconscious internal object world, but also to limiting the possibility of learning from one’s experience with real external objects."

Even more difficult is how to take in new behaviors, the same way old ones were acquired. If it were only so easy. Otto Kernberg's definition of introjection is very technical but it provides a clue. "Introjection is the reproduction and fixation of an interaction with the environment by means of an organized cluster of memory traces implying at least three [memory] components: (i) the image of an object, (ii) the image of the self in interaction with the object, and (iii) the affective coloring of both the object-image and the self-image." The affective coloring is whether something is likeable or unlikeable. This affects motivation. Even further I would say that the image of the person has to look believably skilled enough to attain this object or goal and that is why there have to be many approach goals, attempts to play, and real time experiences to make the new self-image feel more skilled and familiar. The improved skills and familiarity can now increase confidence and provide energy for challenges that are increasingly under control. There has to be a lot of directed repetition of this kind of imagery mixed with actual experiences, and progressively improved skills, as can be seen in sports psychology research.

Repetition Compulsion

At some point, there has to be a separation between the people who managed to make big changes in their lives from those who didn't. Theory has to be informed by the actual results. The reality is that all these ideas have already been explored by various researchers, authors, and communicated from experiences people have had, yet so many do not change. Some of this has to do with acts of God, uncontrollable environments, or rigid pathologies, and some of it is just common ignorance of how the brain works in actual experience. People are easily distracted and there are habits that bend the mind back to what is familiar. Like any addiction or pathological "safe" homeostasis, the mind causes uncomfortable feelings to arise for long periods of time to get patients to return to old familiar ways. Some of the structure of the brain is universal, and Jordan Peterson accurately describes this difficulty of persistence in goal orientation. There's only so much food that can be chewed at one time. "The basic schema consists, first, of perceptions of point a—the undesired beginning-state—and point b—the desired end-state; and second, of motor actions designed to bring about the transformation of the former to the latter. Individuals perceive objects and events relevant to the current schema; those assumed irrelevant fade into nonexistence. Human beings are low-capacity processors, with an apprehension capacity of fewer than seven objects. Our perceptions, tuned by our motivational systems, are limited by our working memory: A good goal thus requires consideration of no more things than we can track. Perhaps it is in this manner that we determine when to deconstruct a task into subgoals—all goals are motivated; all reasonable goals are perceptually and cognitively manageable."

Some warnings from Theravada Buddhist Thanissaro Bhikkhu seem to connect with this. When allure is in the mind there's not much room left to pay attention to drawbacks. The short-term brain can be filled up with desire in chunks of mental processing and be carried away. If the brain capacity equivalent of a 7-digit phone number is filled with advertising, suggestions, influences, etc., it's believable how a person could find themselves in a state of regression. Furthermore, something new in experience is not mapped out totally and there's much risk and uncertainty. Past hobbies, interests, or addictions, are easily understood and there is euphoria to put down a current burden, and return to those smooth reliable paths. That deep understanding of how a familiar pleasure operates can demolish any new goals. That is the gold standard for motivation because it's readily apparent to anyone that people don't need to schedule time to engage in their favorite activities. They just get up and do it. Yet many avoid good diets, exercise, or smart decisions, because the habitual short-term worlds are easier to understand and derive gratification from. New big goals have to be broken down into small bite sized ones to tap into new motivation. It's persistence in developing enough familiarity with a new skill, so that there's increasing habitual control over results, that potentially moves a new skill into an area where pleasure is finally experienced. If there are big enough rewards in this new path, the short-term brain can start to bend in that direction for some people and a sense of purpose can return. When coupled with a practice to put the mind on drawbacks on purpose, the mood, atmosphere, and motivation can reduce excitement for those less healthy goals. Because of an affinity for freedom, many people will instead accept that they will die of one thing or another, so they may be at peace with their addictions by saying something like in the Elbow song Lunette, "I'll still want a bottle of good Irish whiskey and a bundle of smokes in my grave."

Limitless (movie) - You're not one of those kind of guys, are you Eddie? We lose you if there's a screen in the room?: https://m.imdb.com/title/tt1219289/quotes/?item=qt2494127

The Allure of Sensuality - Thanissaro Bhikkhu: https://www.dhammatalks.org/Archive/y2018/180719_The_Allure_of_Sensuality.mp3

Fly Boy Blue / Lunette - Elbow: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sLxqGar-lxA

Peterson differs from Buddhists in that the drawbacks can also be a way to learn new skills and master something, not just something to avoid and stay resting in repose. "When chaos threatens, confront it, as quickly as possible, eyes open, voluntarily. Activate the neural circuitry underlying active exploration, inhibiting confusion, fear, and the generation of damaging stress responses, and not the circuitry of freezing and escape. Cut the unknown into pieces; take it apart with hands, thumbs, and mind, and formulate or reformulate the world. Free the valuable gold from the dragon of chaos, transform leaden inertia into gilded action, enhance our status, and gain the virgin maiden—just like the first of our tree-dwelling ancestors, who struck a predatory snake with a stick, chased it away, and earned the eternal gratitude of mother and group." That circuitry of freezing and escape, or a sense of being daunted, also occurs when there is exclusive focus on drawbacks, or obstacles, for too long, or a dwelling on the entire scope of the long-term goal to the point of being depressed or demotivated. New goals won't stick that way. When challenging a difficult hike, it's better to look at the overall trail only from time to time, but when attempting it, it's more comfortable to focus on the next change in the trail, for example, and in my experience this was especially true when I was exhausted and depleted and I could only muster one step at a time.

Concentration is also important when there are many distractions in a busy environment. Being interrupted when concentrating on a goal creates frustration and allows an opening to that burnout that happens when there's major organizational changes. Focusing on one part at a time will move one closer to a goal than being frozen in stress with nothing getting done. Opportunists also pounce during these times of chaos with divide and conquer tactics to make themselves look like the one who will restore order to the organization, further adding competitive stress. Values also have an element of specialization in that an individual human life has a limited span and it's hard to accumulate all the wisdom of the world in a short period of time. There's going to be a trial and error period before one gets older and assimilates lessons that are relevant for oneself. Stress and avoidance is also another area that prevents people from growing into a more well-rounded personality.

One of the main theories of repetition compulsion comes from patients who experienced trauma some time in their life. Part of how something becomes unconscious is because a trauma is unpleasant to think about. That content then gets buried in the background of the mind, but those traumatic frights will bubble up again. Reminders and triggers of the past bring up a myriad of escapism methods that were conditioned with prior attempts at coping. For example, Alcoholics Anonymous has an acronym HALT (Hungry, Angry, Lonely, Tired), and I would add another T for Traumatized, which are common triggers to get people to drink again. The T for Tired could also include boredom for those people who have lost a sense of purpose. In treatment, some patients benefit from the awareness of these mechanisms driving their behavior, but not everyone. When it does work it's usually because the patient went deep enough into the past trauma, understood the causes and effects, didn't attribute an adult responsibility to the child that they were in the situation, and dis-identified through understanding. A simple meditation practice I have been reviewing from Pema Chödrön's books is to simply scan the body and notice how thoughts feel in the body and usually the awareness of the pain is enough for the short-term brain to realize it's hurting itself, and it willingly discontinues the resistance. This may be too close to the surface, but a longer meditation that is intent on uprooting and dis-identifying these painful thoughts can provide much of the same material to work with.

Freud did later posit that many patients had pathological desires, starting with the Oedipus Complex in childhood, unconscious wishes found in dreams, and other conflicts with authority figures that prevented satisfaction. Transferences can arise in therapy onto new people who appear to be similar obstacles, including the psychologist. Treatment here is similar but one now needs to look at downsides to those wishes and desires and try to aim at more realistic goals that provide enough love, purpose, and satisfaction. If those new goals fail at providing fulfillment, there's a risk of regression to more infantile templates and repetition. The literature is filled with examples of old fetishes, addictions, and superstitious rituals that resurface again and again.

Another view of repetition relates to trauma that motivates the desire for mastery over the unpleasant stimulus. Transferences can be a form of rehearsal and practice in order to deal with similar dangerous people or situations in the future. The mind in the world of survival could match up with Peterson's description of using chaos as a challenge to develop oneself with. Whether there is a revenge motive or there's a desire to improve skills, the patient may return to traumatizing environments to get used to them and master them, but the problem here is that the patient may never truly master a toxic environment and getting used to an environment like this means that healthier environments may feel more uncomfortable than they should. The treatment for this is to see what things are like when the patient is out of that environment and to make sure that there are enough rewards and peaceful rest so that the new situation is preferred. This can be complicated by patients with low self-esteem who feel they don't deserve a better environment and a complex web of self-hatred has to be teased out to eliminate any illogical self-defeating beliefs. When out of a traumatic environment, that place is still powerfully wired into the mind and follows the patient wherever they go. When a person has healed many of their past traumas, there should be enough calm to allow in more goals and activity away from repetition.

The Default Mode Network and Psychedelics

One area that is more universal to human kind is what most people call the comfort zone. The loud voices in the mind, the music, the advertising, the suggestions, the personal labels that many give each other, etc., don't just vanish and leave the mind in peace. The imitative part of the mind, the Super-ego is not going to take a backseat to the Ego so easily. For those with weakened egos, they may have to work with every tool in the box to start moving in the right direction. This may include experiences of withdrawal symptoms, anger, resistance, low expectations, fear of obstacles, and counterintuitively this can happen even when people are making changes that are healthy. It's more comfortable to live in the same place than to go through the stress of a big move, even if it's for the better. Many as a last resort turn to psychedelic substances mixed with spiritual practices to tap into undeveloped areas of the mind that are so hard to access through the layers of trauma and noise.

This activity that is automatic, even when at rest, is often associated with the Default Mode Network (DMN). So much of psychoanalysis, analytical psychology, and many other modalities, aim to sneak past the DMN to extract new self-knowledge and to activate different behaviors. For most competitive people, sports psychology is one of the substance free modalities that are frequently used. Some popular sport psychology book recommendations include, The Champion's Mind, Endure, and Relentless. Much like the study above on positive content, athletes find that positive self-talk is as important as training the body. A mind and body approach is always needed. A weak body won't perform no matter how positive someone is, and a trained body will choke on game day without a good mindset. When in training, sports psychologists also like precise self-talk that mentions the precise movements the body is supposed to perform in a particular way. This may also include imagining people you admire and harnessing them as a symbol of the correct performance to enact. All emotions are used, including anger, to behave in a constructive manner.

Because competition is very distracting, sport psychologists also recommend intrinsic motivation via competition with oneself whenever possible to keep performance high. "In competition, rather than worrying about what will get recorded on the score sheet, emphasize your mental game stats, such as attitude and hustle. Doing so will keep your motivation at a higher level and lead to more in-the-zone experiences. Always compete. Always battle. Never settle in the quest for your personal best, and outer success will soon follow you." Anybody who has watched their favorite team play an away game around a hostile crowd know that there has to be an internal compass that is independent from the need to manipulate reactions from the audience. Even some players relish the opportunity to silence the home crowd, but in the end the individual performance has to be compared to one's personal best. The benefit of this kind of competition with oneself is that feelings related to actions taken, can be used as guideposts for intrinsic motivation. All the reading and writing, or the mental talk, can't replace the real felt experience. The felt experience also connects with limitations in reality and there has to be an acceptance of those limitations with realistic attempts to move beyond obstacles, or to change goals.

One of the main realizations is that one has to make some effort just to start. "Motivation will always fluctuate, but it is irrelevant at the moment of truth, when you actually act. So act as if you are motivated—that is, increase your 'motive-action'—to keep your feet moving forward and defeat any potential resistance, whether that resistance is mental or physical. You’ll discover that full motivation usually shows up during a good workout, not beforehand." Positive self-talk plus some effort leads to momentum and a chance to get into Flow states. There's also a need to be in the present moment to avoid that overload that Jordan Peterson was pointing out. "Practice is not about going through the motions with our body while our mind and spirit reside elsewhere. Rather, practice is about focused effort with our entire being. This engrains habit and skill into our unconscious self. The goal of being in the now during practice is to create an unconscious competence within our mind, body, and spirit...A great tool I use for bringing back presence is to imagine a teacher, a coach, or a monk standing over my shoulder. When I start thinking about or connecting with anything other than the task at hand, my guide shouts at me, 'Be here now!' Then I get back to the task at hand with my full being...The obvious goal of athletic competition is to win. However, I find that focusing too hard on attaining the win weakens our ability to perform. It is comparable to finding the perfect man or woman, or filling your bank account with cash. If you only focus on the result, you stay single and poor. Instead, we must focus on the higher goal: uncovering our authentic, best self...Competition exposes the core of our emotional, spiritual, and psychological being. Rivals act as an extreme, external motivation that helps us go deeper to find our best and worst qualities. In competition and challenge, we find our inner truth. How hard are you willing to work on competition day? How skilled are you? How well did you prepare for the day? What stops you from displaying your best self? What does it feel like when your best self shows up? Observe your behaviors and take note. Noting your reactions to outside inputs will give you the important questions needed for improvement. Then ask your coach, sports psychologist, or spiritual mentor. Exploring these questions will give you more strength for practice, your next competition, and life after sport...If you search for your authentic, best self during competition, you will find it. Victory often comes along for the ride as a pleasurable side effect...[For example,] I expected the Olympics to be bigger than life and my nerves to be supersize. Instead, the games were surprisingly close to normal. They felt like just other races. Initially, my familiarity and comfort felt weird; then it scared me. To cope, I needed to remove judgment of my reaction and trust that my body has a wisdom that is greater than the intelligence of my analytical brain."

When starting from scratch, skills are nowhere near where they need to be, so a humble attitude is required to let in the learning through trial and error, especially when there's uncomfortable criticism from others. "...No matter how experienced at the sport I became, I remained coachable. Those around me contributed greatly to my success." Again, the external motivation can return and a competition with oneself has to be reinstated. "I didn’t set out to beat the world; I just set out to do my absolute best." With that in mind, many people can work backwards from the present moment activities that are needed and realize that just starting is often the best option for finding motivation rather than overthinking leading to procrastination. Some of the authenticity can return when this forced start has a scientific curiosity to see how the current performance compares to before. "Trust yourself. Decide. Every minute, every hour, every day that you sit around trying to figure out what to do, someone else is already doing it. While you’re trying to choose whether to go left or right, this way or that way, someone else is already there. While you’re paralyzed from overthinking and overanalyzing your next move, someone else went with his gut and beat you to it. Make a choice, or a choice will be made for you." Taking action can help to find out which voices are present and their effects on motivation. "It’s time to stop listening to what everyone else says about you, telling you what to do, how to act, how you should feel. Let them judge you by your results, and nothing else; it’s none of their business how you get where you’re going."

Even with these common sense tips, many people will not find this is enough. The wounding in the mind is so deep, so unconscious, and the low self-esteem is so habituated, the DMN pulls one back into regression and repetition. The fact that people need to create a momentum in the first place and then work to maintain it means that peak performance is something that is hard to habituate and easy to lose. When compounded with rigid voices in the mind, the personality can harden with age, and change seems impossible. When people hit a brick wall like this, often in middle age, there's a desire to slow down life and take extended periods of time off to complete a personal inventory. A lost job, a divorce, a bout of depression, etc., leads to literal soul searching. When talking therapy, positive affirmations, etc., fail to produce long lasting results, testimonials from people who have experimented with psychedelics, like Ayahuasca for example, tempt people to try a new avenue.

I find the book, Psychedelics and Psychotherapy, strikes a good balance between what substances can do, but it also informs the reader of their limitations. Like any other modality, there can be a lot of hype and false promises to hook you. "Plant medicines and other psychedelic treatments can reveal the psychological baggage that you have carried all your life, and when you acknowledge this baggage, you realize it is not an inevitable and inextricable part of yourself. You can finally put it down. All the pain and all the meanings that you have created from that pain, all the ways you see yourself, and all the interpretations you have made of the world because of early experience can drop away, and you can just be in the present. That’s very powerful. Psychedelic experiences may also reveal, or at least allow you to glimpse, your full potential as a loving and connected human being. Having a deep experience of your true self can be tremendously healing, so it’s not surprising that some people working with these medicines come to realizations through these experiences that go deeper than their usual consciousness permits. When we find a way to reach shut down parts of ourselves, when we recognize our deep sources of suffering and what we are running away from, or when we realize ourselves as a meaningful and genuine part of a larger unity that is unshakeable no matter what, we have connected to a core self. In the right context this is a very deep experience...Underneath that fear, there’s the connected self who knows no fear. What is there to be afraid of when you are connected to everything?"

Typically when people are running away, it's usually into one form of addiction or another. Being able to trace the addiction to an uncomfortable feeling, and to feel it fully and understand what the fear is pointing to, can reveal important information, even outside of deep states of meditation. There are many experiences that people want to avoid, and that can be a window of opportunity to choose a different behavior that isn't part of the DMN. For many, there are benefits from long meditation retreats where the feeling of missing out (FOMO), on one activity or another, can be felt repeatedly, and let go of, so the practitioner can consciously follow the panic and sense it slide gradually into release and relief. It's not the end of the world if one doesn't act. With momentum, there's a reconnection. "In addictions we use the word recovery, which means finding something that you have lost. Whatever you find couldn’t have been destroyed, and it must have been there all along otherwise you couldn’t have found it. What people recover when they recover from addictions is themselves. How do we lose ourselves, why is it so difficult to reconnect, and how do these plant experiences facilitate this reconnection? That question leads to the very essence of trauma because it is trauma that makes us disconnect in the first place...This loss of connection is often hard to recognize, because it doesn’t happen all at once. It can happen slowly, over time, and we adapt to these subtle changes sometimes without even noticing them." Typically addictions are used to regulate emotions as a quick way to feel better. "If it is so painful to be myself, I better disconnect. If it is so painful for me to be aware of my gut feelings and to be able to assert, manifest, and declare them, I better disconnect."

Because of human nature, conflict is so common and when so few people look to therapy or even try to read material like this, societal structures take the blame. With most of these texts, there's a knee-jerk reaction to blame capitalism for all ills, for example, but I think that is a weakness in the humanities where there is a pervasive political and economic deficit in wisdom. "The capitalist economy depends on your false sense of self. That’s why even those people who do the work of reconnecting with themselves while in ceremony with a substance or practice discover that the real difficulty is not in having these experiences but in manifesting their insights in daily living when the world is so intent on robbing them of the very truth of things." One could also add that money is connected with the fear centers in the mind, as Marxist psychoanalyst Otto Fenichel concluded. If money is good, there is well-being. If money is bad, there's discomfort. The only problem with this is that fish hook of believing that there can be a system that doesn't behave this way. If you remove money, which is only a medium of exchange, people will still think about the abundance or lack thereof of resources and still be stuck looking for a panacea from work and subsistence. There are also differing levels of intelligence, skill, and experience in any population. It's universal for people to demand reciprocity, no matter their politics, and because there are so many people and moving parts in any economy, it's impossible to eliminate all unfairness or negative emotions related to power differentials. Power structures have the same results in the psychology of any human. History shows that most humans cannot withstand power without a lot of temptation to increase entitlement and consumption, and they will fight tooth and nail to avoid losing that power. Any progressive improvements in the political economy will have to be incremental, decentralized, and prove themselves by their fruit. Closing the loop on the belief in utopia can also be healing because the patient can then focus on their own development with the tools at hand instead of waiting for the politics to change in one direction or another. It's very possible for people to wait their entire lives for a politician to "finally get it right this time." Even if they do a good job, individuals have to self-parent enough so they can benefit from the economic opportunities when they are available. Your favorite person could be in power but you miss the boat anyways.

Dr. Gabor Maté on Having Sympathy for Trump and Healing an Insane Society: https://youtu.be/6VVOs1ZylFU?si=q2HHjWHjeQmOAb8b

Tucker Carlson Ep. 19 - Debate Night with Donald Trump: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gCMUPRLYmxs

Slavoj Žižek: Donald Trump is a Postmodernist: https://youtu.be/olAaZZXkXns?si=JsFICtXPyHah5SoS

School Board Calls Police on 'Unrecognized' & 'Trumpish' Citizens! - James O'Keefe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TZ1S7M5Tfcw

Is Donald Trump a Fascist? | Robert Reich: https://youtu.be/9XTJNy_OrjE?si=efYVq90UWWQAQ_yv

Joe Biden Looked Like A Dictator Last Night | Dave Portnoy: https://youtu.be/Ar2HgqMwx5U?si=I-0ecrxQIBaiMPdB

The process of integration of those psychedelic insights, requires self-parenting and a handful of deep experiences will not be enough. "Integration following an ayahuasca ceremony consists of the practice of catching ourselves when we fall into old patterns of thinking and feeling and choosing to respond differently." There is a need for "repetition...through journaling, ritual, art, song, prayer, and the Jungian technique of active imagination...If we outsource our healing and growth to psychedelics without making the effort to support and integrate these experiences, abdicate responsibility, and adopt a passive stance toward our unconscious, we are taking an enormous risk in allowing unprocessed experiences to dictate our choices and our life trajectory. To genuinely transcend our wounds, defenses, and early conditioning, it is essential to maintain our responsibility of bringing back the gifts of the imaginal world into a relationship with everyday life...We need to be aware of how these states have the potential both to facilitate psychospiritual growth and to undermine that very process through psychedelic bypassing. A psychedelic experience can leave people in a state of ego inflation with a defensive attachment to these states. It can leave people possessed by archetypal energies in a way that separates them from their true nature and can create a dependence on expanded states for filling the void of an unsatisfactory life, which then stalls any movement of change in the real world. While psychedelic experiences are certainly not short of creative and healing potential, in the therapeutic space we need the maturity and clarity of occupying a space that bridges the split between the proponents and the opponents of these substances if we are to truly serve those that require our support."

Therapists also have to preserve their boundaries when patients look to them to be a surrogate Jesus that will cure all their ailments and book a ticket for them to fly to Shangri-la where heaven is a passive experience of delight. There are also ethical boundaries where self-help gurus can take advantage of people and make promises of a cancer cure, for example, leading to bitter disappointment. One example of a therapist in the book "...made it clear [to an ailing client] that no spiritual energy healing, or substance could be guaranteed to cure him, prevent, or treat his condition, and a sacred medicine facilitator should never make such specific claims."

Dr. Wayne W. Dyer and Mira Kelley Vancouver I Can Do It - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G2pTGdeekG0

Abraham Hicks - After Death Message from Wayne Dyer: https://youtu.be/KQARkWXluYQ?si=C75qDosRxYA1NOHJ

Abraham talks about what's next for Jerry Hicks - Esther Hicks: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uV9pPIkRcy0

Like a meditation, relief comes from "clearing your resistance to the universal flow of energy in your life, allowing the source of existence to flow through you unobstructed by your conditioning and self-identity. This is analogous to the shamanic practice of nondoing. Nondoing is not the same as inaction; it is about ceasing to micromanage everything by thinking, analyzing, and forcing action, about no longer working your will on life...The essence of the practice of humility means being completely present and releasing attachment to outcomes." To bring this to reality would also need to include an acceptance of death because for many people reading these teachings at this point in time, they may be at that final stage in life already, and all that remains is letting go of everything.

For those who are healthier and have more years to live, meditation, visions, and psychedelia, bring up symbols and images from the unconscious. Through an admittedly subjective interpretation on the part of the patient, those symbols have to bridge the unconscious to reality by first realizing that these symbols are coming from one's mind, ideally without suggestions and heavy influences from a therapist or healer, and can be internally trusted as authentic. Expressions from the patient can be manifested into various art therapies to express those symbols, to own them. Then those symbols can be visualized and used as a motivation to act on developing new skills, to reduce that feeling of being compelled by an authority figure or to be compliant. The therapist creates a holding space so that the patient is free to express themselves, but like with Winnicott's advice, surprises are allowed and the patient can feel that they are generating what is particular for them. For example, anger is processed in violent scribbles and drawings. The therapist can ask what each piece of content means to bring out the patient's internal resonances. Questions are asked about how the body feels to reconnect people who have been disembodied for long periods of their life. Obstacles in life are also visualized, just like in any coaching practice, and realistic solutions and approaches are brainstormed to meet those challenges with intention. Symbols and images can also be recalled easier after art therapy and are a source of memory that connects with those feelings of play and engagement. Recalling those symbols can bring up feelings of motivation.

The integration challenge then has to be brought into the real world of jobs, deadlines, and expectations. Lowering expectations in the traumatized world and understanding them better, reduces the chances of re-traumatization, because shocks are less of a surprise. Each person then has to work backwards again from an idealistic recovery goal where the answer to most questions is continued periods of activity and rest. This then replaces the need for the therapist. The book has a tentative list that many could add or subtract to depending on the circumstances of their life. Recovering patients try to reconnect with

positive friends and community

passions, hobbies, and interests

journaling

goals by outlining and tracking them

the breath and inner truth via meditation and breathwork

nature via walking, hiking, or camping

creative expression through music and visual arts

dance or movement arts

a coach for accountability and support

The Default Mode Network will repeatedly try to reassert itself and the solution again is to aim and move towards the agreed upon compass for life. "He or she also needs to watch out for any temptations that arise because 'you are doing so good' and 'you deserve something' or 'you can now handle something.' Dedication will be tested, but overall, this phase is characterized by the recovery process being smoother, more natural, and less arduous. The more the person commits to new passions and interests and positive communities, the harder it will be for addiction or other chronic states of suffering to creep back in again."

In the final instalment of Fear of Success, I will be exploring methods of control that the powerful can exert on populations and the imposed limitations that are not easy,  or in some cases, impossible to control. There will also be a preliminary review on the impact of Artificial Intelligence on the economy, how technology can be leveraged by the powerful against the less powerful, and what strategies critics and researchers recommend for people who want to keep their balance.

A Happy Life Is About This - Teal Swan: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lxk5BYWNsH8

The Language of Winnicott: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9781855754324/

Psychology of Shame: Theory and Treatment of Shame-based Syndromes: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780826166722/

Cognitive Therapy: Basics and Beyond by Judith S. Beck: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780898628470/

Handbook of Approach and Avoidance Motivation by Andrew J. Elliot: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780805860191/

Your Heart's Desire - Sonia Choquette: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780749920128/

Kuehner, C., Huffziger, S., & Liebsch, K. (2008). Rumination, distraction and mindful self-focus: effects on mood, dysfunctional attitudes and cortisol stress response. Psychological Medicine, 39(02), 219.

Valim CPRAT, Marques LM and Boggio PS (2019) A Positive Emotional-Based Meditation but Not Mindfulness-Based Meditation Improves Emotion Regulation. Front. Psychol. 10:647

Skinner, B. F. (1992). “Superstition” in the pigeon. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 121(3), 273–274.

Ogden, T. H. (2010). On Three Forms of Thinking: Magical Thinking, Dream Thinking, and Transformative Thinking. The Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 79(2), 317–347.

Malancharuvil, J.M. Projection, Introjection, and Projective Identification: A Reformulation. American Journal of Psychoanalysis 64, 375–382 (2004).

Repetition, the Compulsion to Repeat, and the Death Drive - M. Andrew Holowchak and Michael Lavin: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9781498570503/

The Self-Sabotage Cycle: Why We Repeat Behaviors That Create Hardships and Ruin Relationships - Stanley Rosner, Patricia Hermes: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780275990039/

Psychedelics and Psychotherapy by Tim Read, Maria Papaspyrou, Gabor Maté: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9781644113325/

Psychology: http://psychreviews.org/category/psychology01/

#object relations #fear of success #goals #ayahuasca #donald winnicott #emotional regulation #magical thinking #separation individuation #playpsychology

[psychreviews2]

Object Relations: Fear Of Success Pt. 5

Choosing a vocation

With all the difficulties in achieving success, especially in office politics and the political corruption described in the last episode, the question now is how can Psychoanalysis help people towards a better working life with these problems in the background? Regardless of how things are we have to find a way. Paul Marcus of The Psychoanalysis of Career Choice, Job Performance, and Satisfaction provides a good overview of how psychoanalysis can contribute to Career Counselling towards success. "French psychoanalyst Christophe Dejours wrote that 'the relation to work is intertwined with the sexual economy', that is, with the attitudes and behaviors in the personal realm, including body-ego, body-image and love relationships." A pure rational pro and con analysis approach has to be balanced with unconscious forces that often nudge one in completely different directions. "As Carl Jung noted, 'You are what you do, not what you say you’ll do.'... Childhood experiences (both positive and negative) and familial heritage have a major influence on vocational choices. People choose an occupation that enables them to replicate significant childhood experiences, satisfy needs that were unfulfilled in their childhood, and actualize dreams passed on to them by their familial heritage...Freud famously said, 'all love is a re-finding': it tends to replicate emotional aspects of infantile templates, those impacting early experiences of satisfaction and frustration between parents and children."

To tolerate this trial and error, and to create new things without a fear of failure, work has to resemble experimentation, a learning orientation, which is similar to play. "The supreme accomplishment is to blur the line between work and play...The most successful businesses seem to be aware that a hospitable work setting, one that is more likely to facilitate innovation, in part emanates from allowing workers to intellectually play with ideas without worrying about failing." The impulse to develop play in psychoanalysis is to express love, desire, and aggression in a playful way: Sublimation. Through symbolization, acknowledging one's emotions in frustration, therapeutic catharsis, and play, one can transform the power of love, lust, and aggression into motivated action.

Sublimation: - Sigmund Freud: https://rumble.com/v1gv2fr-sublimation-sigmund-freud.html

"All sublimation relies on symbolization, so that, for instance, gardening, an activity that is infused with erotic impulse and is a long-standing metaphor in literature and the arts for sexuality, requires just such instinctual redirection and refashioning, that is, engaging in adaptive 'desexualized' and 'deaggressified' psychic processes. It is not by chance that horticultural metaphors are often used by people as creative visualizations regarding their career journey, using such terms as 'growing, flowering and blossoming,' as well as when the going gets tough as in 'being pruned and cut back.' Likewise, voyeuristic wishes are satisfied by becoming a psychoanalyst or photographer; the wish to hurt or kill is satisfied by becoming a surgeon or butcher; or exhibitionistic wishes are satisfied by becoming an actor or lifeguard. In other words, work represents one very good venue for the individual to negotiate the conflicting demands between desires, that is, instinctual gratifications, and culture, the requirements of normative social reality. As psychoanalyst and Freud translator A. A. Brill noted, from a classical point of view, 'every activity or vocation not directed to sex in the broadest sense, no matter under what guise, is a form of sublimation…in the service of hunger and love…guided by the individual’s unconscious motives.'"

Connected with a life drive, Sublimation can appear as symbol and belief in the mind connected with achievement in perception. The mind daydreams about putting things together, taking care of them, union, or the death drive as a form of destruction. Whether one can see sexual connotations of foreplay, engagement, and climax in projects, or sexual ideas of birthing a new project etc., creating something timeless to find immortality, or if one can see the benefit of meditation, surrender, disengaging from goals, taking out the trash, recycling, controlled demolition of old buildings, war to protect your country, and the closure of a business, as examples of the death drive, it's the healthy use of those desires in prosocial economic spheres as a stand in for procreation or dying.

When the above authenticity is tapped into, as talked about in past episodes, and shame is healed, then sublimation can move unhindered. "Developing a sense of initiative versus guilt can impact to what degree a person can create a realistic basis for his aspirations, focus and work-related decisions, including exploring what one might want to do in the adult work world. A lack of initiative often leads to choosing unsatisfying career paths. Acquiring a sense of industry versus inferiority can impact a sense of self-assurance, productivity and that all-important sense of being an agent in the world that can make things work: 'I am what I can learn to make work,' said Erikson. From a psychoanalytic point of view, the ability to actualize one’s creative visualizations and projections in real life is a sign of psychological health as well as a necessary constituent aspect of living the 'good life.'"

The destructive drives in work often get lodged in the Super-ego with arguments over self-preservation and shifting blame. For the Ego to work better, and to have confidence, playing has to be allowed to emerge, and the Super-ego conscience has to be ethically satisfied, to prevent remorse and conflict..."The best sublimations are those that 'fuse' the erotic with the aggressive. As Menninger points out, 'If the erotic impulse sufficiently dominates, the result is constructive behavior; if the aggressive impulses dominate, the result is more or less destructive behavior.' The point is that in civilized society an individual’s aggression cannot have full expression; it cannot find a direct outlet. Therefore it has to turn inward, and by doing so it becomes used by the super-ego. The super-ego in turn forces the ego to use its executive functions to submit to the reality of work with all of its adversity, drudgery and boredom. This internalized aggression [i.e., the ego submitting to the super-ego] is the ultimate guarantee for the maintenance of work and therefore, of self-preservation.' In this view, instinctual pleasure is not the ultimate driving force of work. Rather, the need for self-preservation is mediated by reason and intellect and reinforced by the voice of conscience. Thus, from a classically based perspective, the pleasure connected with work is the relief from the tension between the super-ego and ego, that is, the harmonization of conscience and reason, and this process allows the person to transform instinctually driven play actions rooted in one’s childhood into reality-driven adult work ones. As Lantos concludes, 'it is not the object or the skill of the activities which makes the difference between work and play, but the participation of the super ego, which changes play-activities into work-activities.' In short, at its best adult work is a pleasurable form of purposive play that is judged to be creative and productive...From the classical point of view, at its best work is erotically tinged, if not infused, by love. It is Eros made manifest." So here if one feels a sense of grind at work, it's because the Super-ego is micro-managing, bullying and over-processing in order to understand and complete the work. When the "rules of the game" so to say are habituated into skill, to make the work more effortless and effective, then the sense of play and Eros with the Ego can manifest, when one can get a taste of what it's like to do good work with a feeling of love.

Beyond love, a lot of a good fit with a vocation is the connection with psychoanalytic characters of the 'anal,' 'oral,' and 'phallic' kind. They are characters with a particular type of work style that is comfortable. Anal types are about neatness, cleanliness, and order. Oral types are about taking things in, using intuition, and are less concerned about messes. Naturally those two types wouldn't work too well together. Phallic types assert authority and domination over others and seek executive circles for networking and social protection from the other two types, because those types call them "dicks."

One of the big stressors at work is being a misfit for a job and trying to persist when one doesn't like it. For example, an Anal character "has an emotionally constricted comportment that is overly rigid, stubborn, perfectionistic and stingy, with preoccupation with trivial details and over-concern with having everything done one’s own way, and he displays excessive devotion to work, productivity and conscientiousness. These personality types tend to perform well and are happy in occupations that emphasize technical details, which demand concentrated, logical, methodical ways of thinking and continuous attention to their practical tasks. Moreover, they do well where social interaction is not primary to the work requirements, where decision-making is limited to their narrow technical expertise and where emotional expressiveness is not highly valued. Such personality types perform well on the job in work circumstances where they can control the parameters of work and in occupations that emphasize objectivity and detachment. One only has to call to mind the typical computer analyst, programmer, scientist, accountant, surveyor and lithographer to have an intuitive understanding of why an obsessive-compulsive personality would likely 'fit' well in these occupations..."

"Oral characters tend to be discernible by their optimism, self-confidence and carefree generosity, this being a reflection of the pleasurable aspects of the stage. Such people may be drawn to teaching, social work, non-profit work or the performing arts. Oral characters may also be characterized by pessimism, futility, anxiety and sadism, these being expressions of frustrations or conflicts occurring during this phase of psychosexual development. Such people tend to experience their occupation in dark, nasty terms and they are, often correctly, perceived as needy, dependent and moody, these being their main defensive ways of managing their anxiety and emptiness..."

"Phallic characters often express inordinate degrees of narcissistic behavior such as vanity, undue self-assurance, swagger, compulsive sexual behavior and in some contexts, primitive exhibitionistic and violent behavior. Indeed, more recently, such phallic characters are typically described as phallic-narcissistic characters. Political, religious and academic occupations permit such people to take advantage of their personality organization and defenses in which they satisfy their needs and wishes for adulation, self-aggrandizement and dependency attachments in a fairly shielded set of circumstances."

Of course, one could develop all elements of those types to try and balance out the weaknesses one has since many occupations require skills in all areas for some of the duration of the work day. If one also wants to work in areas that are opposed to their psychoanalytic character, they would want to emphasize skill development in those areas, so if an area is considered uninteresting, then if those activities eventually become skilled habits, they can be acted on with less friction, even if the work is mostly joyless. Both Anal and Oral characters could see the advantages of being more Phallic with assertiveness in areas of their job where it may help. Phallic types could also learn how improving their accuracy and increasing their creativity can balance their over-confidence. Anal characters can infuse creativity in areas where there is some wiggle room, and Oral characters can make their projects more robust by adding due diligence to their work.

Sexuality Pt 2: Infantile Sexuality - Sigmund Freud: https://rumble.com/v1gtort-sexuality-pt-2-infantile-sexuality-sigmund-freud.html

One has to keep in mind what a person risks if they work against type, which is a common scenario. "Individuals who have a 'job' and 'career' orientation toward work tend to have personal identities that do not significantly overlap with the actual work they do; to a large extent they view what they do at work as distinct from the rest of their life. They narrate their lives in terms of having a 'work self' and a 'non-work self,' and rarely do they feel they are a 'whole' or 'complete self'...In contrast, a 'calling' is a work orientation in which a person views their work as deeply satisfying and socially beneficial. That is, an individual chooses an occupation that he 'feels drawn to pursue,' often powerfully. He anticipates it to be 'intrinsically enjoyable and meaningful,' especially as a socially useful endeavor, and he views it 'as a central part of his identity.' As such work constitutes a practical ideal of activity and character that makes a person’s work morally inseparable from his or her life, and it links the person not only more intensely to his co-workers but to the larger community." The trick with connecting hobbies with work is to be able to monetize the activity one likes, and if one wants more control and choice over their work life, running a business can be the vehicle. Connecting passion for the product or service can also help sell the enjoyment of the products and services from the standpoint of one's own personal experience.

Matching the personality to the work can stabilize a strong sense of self by extending authenticity from home life to work life. "Such people are impressive when you encounter them, for one can sense there is no marked discrepancy between what they seem to be and what they are." In a way, the unconscious authenticity is powering the work behavior that one sees outwardly. "As cognitive psychologists have shown, 'most processing performed by the human mind for decision-making and behavior initiation is not performed at the conscious level' and 'introspective access to cognitive processes is limited'...The path of a career calling is a continuing, reciprocal and cyclical process which includes deep exploration of personal needs, wishes and goals, trial and error efforts, and critical reflection on failure and success, all of which constitute thoughtful career self-exploration, judgment and decision-making. Most importantly in this formulation is the 'feedback loop,' as it 'completes the success process and makes it self-reinforcing as a cycle.' Thus, given that unconscious meanings are in significant play with regards to the individual’s trajectory of a career calling, from a psychoanalytic point of view it is best to view a calling as both discovered and created, encountered and imposed, and found and made. Regardless of how one comes to one’s sense of having found/created one’s 'calling,' the fact is that it is based on the heartfelt assumption that no kind of work is insignificant if it uplifts humanity, if it enhances individual dignity and significance. Therefore, whatever work one does it should be engaged in with painstaking excellence."

To tolerate trial and error in developing skills to the level of excellence is partly explained by the sublimation descriptions above, but partly the endeavor to give one self more fully so as to guarantee that employers and customers will appreciate the efforts. Through visualization of growth, development, union, building, and creative destruction, one has to inhabit the other person in the exchange by "radiating out into intersubjectivity, expressing our ontological rootedness and togetherness." It's done through admiration of good qualities, but also authentic appreciation. This steps one out of having too much self-consciousness. You feel less blame when you know you put your current best into something. Also, excitement at work comes from knowing that you can do something well and can anticipate the steps to completion. "It is a psychological paradox that to give the best of oneself is the surest way one can receive. Research inspired by Frederickson’s 'broaden and build' theory has found that, in the workplace, institutionalized care-giving and supportive attachments and other pro-social behaviors that are rooted in heartfelt collective values that reflect 'organizational virtuousness' generate upward emotion spirals, so compassion begets compassion among employees." This can also follow through in romantic relationships where one gives as much of oneself as realistically possible, but in relationships with reciprocity, partners give back the same. To engage in this reciprocity, one has to have the ability to feel admiration and appreciation for others. You can recognize their value because it can be withdrawn from society as they choose.

The dangers of people not liking their jobs, relationships, and their feelings of alienation from society, is a threatening insecurity and helplessness that can bleed into criminality and destructive political beliefs. "Some people experience the urge to admire as a moment of radical diminishment. To admire someone else’s intelligence, work product, good character or looks, for example, is experienced as humiliating and, hence, is vigorously resisted. Such people are extremely suspicious of any act of recognition of someone else’s superiority in any domain. In fact, they resent such acknowledgment of another’s superiority. For such people there is 'a burning preoccupation with self at the bottom of this suspicion, a ‘but what about me, what becomes of me in that case?' According to Marcel, what people who cannot admire, hate, is the awareness that the acknowledgment of superiority is an 'absolute' judgment at the time it is given: '[the judgment] indicates that this new light can make me pale into insignificance in my own eyes or in those of others whose judgment I must consider since that judgment directly influences the judgment I tend to have of myself.' Such people experience the admired other as having power over them, while further fostering their beleaguered sense of self-control; hence, they often feel resentment, jealousy or envy. Where the jealous person feels bitter and unhappy because of another’s perceived advantages, possession or luck, the envious person, in addition, wants to aggressively 'steal' somebody else’s success, good fortune, qualities or possessions, take it all for himself, and leave the 'victim' with nothing. Perhaps what the person who cannot admire most profoundly resents and is jealous of is that [the] admired other lacks the 'inner inertia,' as Marcel calls it, the self-enclosure, low self-esteem and poor self-concept that the person who cannot admire feels. Thus, for the person who refuses to admire, the main self-deficit is that he will feel that his own dignity and pride are [permanently] damaged if he admires; he will experience a profound and lasting narcissistic injury that becomes fertile breeding ground for narcissistic rage; for the person who is unable to admire, the main self-deficit is that he is self-enclosed, hermetically sealed from allowing the unique otherness of the other inside himself. To do so would be too disruptive, disorienting or over-stimulating for him to let the other enter him; thus he pretends to himself that he does not notice the admirable qualities in others...There is an enfeebled self that consciously and/or unconsciously feels under siege from the condemning self-judgment that is evoked in the presence of someone or something who they believe is superior to them. Secondly, in both types the greater plenitude that one feels and derives in the presence of someone or something that transcends us is denied and they are less of a person as a result."

The capacity to admire others is similar to how one can admire things in the world. Like a meditation, one is concentrated in one's own activity. One can move to the next appropriate challenge, get absorbed, and repeat. "For example, when we look at a beautiful rose, we stare at it, note its loveliness and, when satisfied, move on to the next perception without clinging to the memory of the rose or trying to interfere with it. We simply engage the rose on its own terms with the fullness of our entire being. We then move on and become temporarily attached to another beautiful object of perception. 'Life, in other words,' says Yearley, 'is a series of esthetically pleasing new beginnings, and all such beginnings should be grasped and then surrendered as change proceeds'...The best way to go through the world, including in the workplace, is to experience life as it is lived, on its own terms, at least as one construes it, without trying to hold on, direct and/or control the experience. With this kind of moment-to-moment awareness, the mind is less likely to be ensnared by an experience, but instead can move effortlessly and continuously, seeing the world as a series of movie frames, some more pleasing than others but always changing, just as Nature does. The trick is to be able to become a person in whom the 'Tao acts without impediment.'"

Failing these standards, a person can resort to magical thinking and look for gurus, political leaders, and other powerful people for guidance, even if these people cannot possibly know your job or prove they have any deep knowledge of politics or economics to make the world change in any perceivable way. With buzz words like "alignment" and "abundance" these rituals can take over the mind. An article on Courier, describes one of these problems: Money manifesting gurus. At one point or another, whether a person is dealing with something psychological or not, they inevitably look for a guru to deal with poor finances, which are big reason why many people have psychological problems in the first place. "...All of [these financial gurus] seem to have one thing in common: they tend to be excellent at marketing and self-promotion...The manifesting coaches rely on anecdotal evidence (especially their own) as proof of their methods. But there’s no peer-reviewed science linking techniques like the law of attraction to real-world results." There is also an economic reality that if everyone kept day-dreaming themselves into abundance, what would that actually mean in terms of work and output in the economy? The reality is that if people got 30% richer on the average, and unless Artificial Intelligence takes over the work world and does most of the work for us, people would have to work 30% more to produce that extra wealth. Certainly in economics, there needs to be more effort for there to be more output. The remaining successes from the Law of Attraction are examples of confirmation bias where we focus in on positive situations and falsely attach those successes to seminar speakers or Tarot cards, without any evidence or self-examination, and usually by discounting our own efforts. "While coaches themselves are clearly making a success of money manifesting, it's less clear whether their course attendees are getting value for money." Some might say that it's just your outlook, and that it should be unrelentingly positive, so the Universe will bring you these opportunities, but the details of what's happening and what skills you have to develop can't be overlooked. There's no guarantee where you'll end up. Trial and error as a method may take a long time or be for the rest of your life.

Inside the 'money manifesting' myth - Courier magazine issue 41

Money Manifesting - Abraham Hicks: https://youtu.be/4Jk5FsAPVhI

Receiving Prosperity - Louise Hay: https://youtu.be/78gNJ3t5EfE

Cult Psychology: https://rumble.com/v1gvih9-cult-psychology.html

Some Might Say - Oasis: https://youtu.be/HPKeoRgdhzI

Even further, any skills that provide money are jealously guarded by the professionals who have them, to protect against being replaced. Because education is mostly a scam, because very few of your textbooks are usable in the workplace, many masters program students have lots of debt and no income to justify the risk they took. In the end, the most important knowledge is passed on from supervisor to employee when it is the right timing for the supervisor to move onto something better. Employees can practice all they want, but if they have no access to that knowledge, they have to reinvent the wheel, or search for another opportunity in another company. If there are generational imbalances, where there are plenty of older people who need the money and will work very late in their lives, there can be intergenerational conflicts when younger couples are looking for that all important promotion, to provide consistent sums of money for years, so they can get married and raise children. All bottlenecks demand a creativity out of employees to branch out into new businesses or to find underappreciated employment elsewhere. Those who remain in the wrong careers they chose in University are destined to fall into an endless cycle of narcissistic injury, until they change tack.

The Pinch: How the Baby Boomers Took Their Children's Future - and Why They Should Give it Back: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9781786491220/

Beau Is Afraid: https://youtu.be/XrCg9G_OHAA

Deliberate Practice

So let's say that you do find a position where you have all the resources necessary to perform well. What would that look like? Part of the sense of living a 'Tao without impediment' is being able to play. A condition for play is having enough challenge to push against, but also balancing energy so that one can go into new territory without complete exhaustion. The modern expert on this kind of high performance is Anders Ericsson. Despite what many self-help gurus say about doing easy things, and "let the universe do the rest," etc., people who actually meet their potentials in any arena have to assess their study and learning methods. "Purposeful practice is all about putting a bunch of baby steps together to reach a longer-term goal." This requires a lot of concentration emotionally. It means that when the cobwebs of the unconscious are resolved and relaxed there should be less avoidance distractions. Certainly looking at the above information and seeing what types of jobs are more in the wheelhouse of one's character helps a lot. Owners prize workers who live and breathe the industry and naturally try to separate the wheat and chaff. For generalist jobs, low paying jobs, or jobs that have high turnover, authenticity is not demanded as much. Some jobs are considered desperation jobs, entry level jobs, or jobs only for people with criminal records.

Nowadays there are lots of YouTube videos with doctors talking about how they study, though the gist of it is "stay on top of things" so the anxiety decreases. This isn't so easy if there's not enough energy or motivation. For so many, just about anything else is more interesting than their job. A recent Gallup poll found that only 15% were engaged. Typical of slavery mentalities, if people don't see progress, don't have time to celebrate progress, have no rest, it can move into extremes where there are mental health consequences. "To demonstrate the historical seriousness, stress and clinical burnout and subsequent suicide rates in Japan have caused the government to intervene. The current practice of management is now destroying their culture -- a staggering 94% of Japanese workers are not engaged at work...It is significantly better in the U.S., at around 30% engaged, but this still means that roughly 70% of American workers aren't engaged. It would change the world if we did better...Our conclusion is that organizations should change from having command-and-control managers to high-performance coaches." If the mind is focused squarely on the job as something to look forward to, with a sense of meaning, and an anticipation of growth, people won't feel that they are missing out when they are at work. This is why it's crucial that people try different things out before they put all their eggs in one basket with a career. "Employees everywhere don't necessarily hate the company or organization they work for as much as they do their boss. Employees -- especially the stars -- join a company and then quit their manager. It may not be the manager's fault so much as these managers have not been prepared to coach the new workforce."

The World's Broken Workplace - Gallup: https://news.gallup.com/opinion/chairman/212045/world-broken-workplace.aspx

Mindfulness: Letting Go: https://rumble.com/v1grbjr-mindfulness-letting-go.html

Study Techniques I Swear By As A Medical Student - StudyMD: https://youtu.be/QrLzs2oIfe8

Not everything is incumbent on the manager to facilitate motivation for employees, but there is that entitlement expectation that managers and owners have this duty. Filling jobs frees up time for executives for their other projects and there's a sense of duty to motivate new employees to keep from having to terminate employment only to start all over again. There are also political considerations. Managers don't want to let people into their job, yet employees want to see a pathway forward. This is why there's plenty of poaching between companies. For many managers their current role is as far as they want to go and they want the stability to work at a place for many years. This creates another separate group of employees, ones who want to limit the amount of change and resist to the point of burnout when forced to accept change, and those who excel at their roles and want to improve things. They look at change as part of the progress. When there's individual dynamism to manage oneself, the manager can relax and get out of the way. This is so much so that another Gallup poll found that "employees who work exclusively remote or hybrid tend to have higher levels of engagement (37% engaged in both groups) than those who work exclusively on-site (29% engaged)." Being at close quarters with other employees doesn't always enhance motivation. It has to do with connecting work with home, which adds meaning, and the reduced levels of the usual bullying, sexual harassment, while maintaining privacy from employees who may want to steal your ideas, judge you on looks, what you wear, and lifestyle. There's also less room for the usual slander and false accusations that Cluster B employees heap on the workers in jobs you have to commute to. Some workplaces are so toxic that employees dread going to work. Working at home means one can focus more on the work, and this is the same benefit that parents find when home schooling their kids. With bullying that goes unpunished, school shootings, inane juvenile cultures, all the parent's efforts at conditioning their kids for success, can be derailed very easily. The negatives of working at home is still down to politics, and in this case the politics of getting promoted. If you're never at the office how are you going to be considered?

The complexity of world wide politics is also clearly connected with office politics. The left and the right only want to work with people who agree with them, because the values are so different. With the influence of China and the CCP style Environmental, social and governance (ESG) scores, there's even more intrusion from corporations that identify with globalist policies to hire based on affirmative action and there's a nationalist push back where workers, who are also consumers, are boycotting companies that don't support their family values. People are now voting with their money, as you can see with organizations like PublicSq where you can shop not based on price, but based on values. Scandals and accusations of trying to groom children, adolescents, and teenagers with Disney and Budweiser are obvious examples, and now that sales for Bud Light have plummeted, there's now a Woke Alert that will send emails to let people know which companies are pushing a left-wing social agendas to replicate bans on those products.

An example of culture wars in my life was being hired by a narcissist psychopath in a brief Accounting job, and at the Christmas party one of the other guys that was newly hired brought his boyfriend and the psycho accounting partner was completely shocked and said "what? They're gay?!" and walked off  from the table to pretend to be a social butterfly with clients who were also invited to this dinner theatre. Just imagine a guy with a permanent facial expression of repressed sadism and vibes out of an Ari Aster movie, who could at the drop of a hat start a human sacrifice, with a barely controlled aggression, and no authentic self, yet at the same time call himself a Christian, and as expected, a pillar of the community. On the other hand you have cancel culture which is also full of Cluster B types who are more interested in threatening lawsuits than doing actual work. They support a Neo-Communism that's not based on class but on race and sexual orientation. If you don't fit with an alphabet group or a marginalized ethnic group, you're an oppressor. There are even some people who fake ancestry to a marginalized ethnic group just to tap into that sympathy and attention.

Employers are also worried that work quality cannot be judged without one accusation or another. One viral short video explained the conundrum for employers. "So if I was like hiring, and I saw pronouns, so here's what I'm going to assume. I'm going to assume you're obviously very liberal. So I'm going to assume you're one of those people that is super far left. Hey. I'm going to assume you're not a very hard worker. You are either a female or you're a probably not straight guy. So everything in the office is going to have to cater to you, your feelings, your needs, and your emotions. So everyone around you is not going to be able to be themselves and walk on eggshells. Why would anyone want someone like you unless everyone is like you? In a work environment you're going to be the laziest person. You're going to be the most entitled, complain the most, and I think you're going to be the first to sue. So shocker that pronouns weren't helping you guys." Even when every side of the culture war pays lip service about diversity, people are tempted to find people with the same politics to work with. People with the same values feel more comfortable working with people who are the same. On top of sexual orientation, religion, and ethnicity, people go out of their way to hate those who are single, old, and ugly. Needless to say, that 70% minimum of disengagement at work sounds about right. Some years ago I remember meeting a marketing guy who told me, "Richard. It's really easy to be in sales. Just be like your clients." The pressure to be unlike yourself is so strong that it is not a shock that personality disorders where people don't have an authentic self are common. Being an actor is so well practiced that it bleeds into life outside work. Ideally, all that should matter at work is the work, and at home people can have their own lifestyles, but humans with power love getting into other people's businesses because they want to force one kind of imitation or another so they can feel they are working with people who are a mirror image of themselves. The only people in the end they are comfortable working with. In a way, cancel culture has always been there and it's leverage comes from being the decision maker on who can join the staff. When people chase power by saying the right things until they gain power, and when they get that power, they begin the process a new of making people into clones of themselves and rejecting more independent people. You have to ask yourself, if you had power would you do any differently?

Public Square: https://publicsq.com/

Woke Alert: https://consumersresearch.org/wokealert/

She has a point - Employers vs. Pronouns: https://youtube.com/shorts/JZ0YZvC6u-Y

U.S. Employee Engagement Slump Continues - Gallup: https://www.gallup.com/workplace/391922/employee-engagement-slump-continues.aspx

Tar Offends BIPOC Pan-gendered Person During Lecture: https://youtu.be/VTAXQYic9uU

For those employees, regardless of lifestyle, who are interested in work, there are some things that they look for from employers that creates a better environment. In Management innovation roadmap, by Vittorio D'Amato, what many employees want is:

• responsibility for doing something useful, • high level of freedom in the way results are reached, • opportunity for professional growth and skill development, • opportunities to work with professional people, • recognition for having done a good job.

A big part of management is to provide regulation where necessary, but employees want to preserve a certain amount of freedom to engage their personality in the work. Again, these are employees who are self-managing, and we are talking about jobs that allow for that kind of creativity. That process of training and pushing back, allows managers and employees to feel out how self-regulating an employee truly is and supervisors can gradually allow employees to continue with more freedom. Similar to Super-ego and Ego functions, they work well when there's no conflict along with that freedom. The Ego employee agrees with the regulations implemented by the Super-ego manager, because they are commonsensical, and in turn, the Super-ego trusts the Ego to use freedom responsibly. If one is willing put in as much effort towards self-management as one can develop, there's less need for an authoritarian management style.

The Ego and the Id - Sigmund Freud: https://rumble.com/v1gvdo1-the-ego-and-the-id-sigmund-freud.html

The complexity of this topic expands when accepting that employees and managers have differing views on what abuse is and what are reprimands for mistakes and irresponsibility. The workplace is full of situations where people are measuring interactional justice, which "describes the fairness of the interpersonal treatment received at the hands of decision makers or the quality of treatment an employee receives from his or her supervisor." This moves into attribution theory and locus of control, which are about those who put responsibility on themselves for outcomes or blame external forces, respectively. This is a tricky area because one has to be scientific enough to blame others where there is appropriate blame, because there's ample evidence, but to not scapegoat others for one's evidential failures. All arguments need to have some evidential basis. There's also a disconnect between managers and employees when they have differing values. What one manager thinks is justice may mean something totally different to an employee. Beyond checking for evidential support for abusive claims, matching employee values with the organizational values, there are situations of corruption and abusive supervision that are observed.

Emotional Exhaustion is a term used for what can be objectively seen in the consequences to workers. Typical Abusive Supervision includes obvious mocking and belittling. This isn't the same as highlighting weaknesses in job performance to motivate change, which unfortunately some with an external locus of control can't handle. It's the type of comments that craft a negative identity that reduces self-esteem and low self-esteem means low performance. The workload is also another obvious externally provable metric. "When employees take sustained effort to meet the demands but cannot adequately recover, job demands may turn to stressors, resulting in energy depletion and subsequently impaired health." High performance simply means being able to handle more because of increased skill and efficiency, and the term High Performance, should not be confused with workaholism and burnout, which many types who like to grind through their workday think it is. Similar to the Management Innovation Roadmap above, researchers posit Perceived Job Characteristics (PJCs) that include dimensions of skill variety, task identity, task significance, autonomy, and feedback, as a way to counter emotional exhaustion due to repetitive task overload.

Development in soft skills, including skills in constructive criticism, is a big way to help reduce turnover. Managers have to resist the temptation of sadism and mockery towards employees, especially in areas totally unrelated to behavior, and employees have to develop more of an internal locus of control, like having an ability to learn from legitimate criticism. A lot of readers may laugh because this basic level of attainment is actually quite hard for both managers and employees to achieve, and this is especially true for those dealing with persistent mental illness. Sometimes there's denial before one can move into acceptance of one's own faults, and it's important to know that all personality tests find each type has some weaknesses. Teams with this kind of self-awareness can avoid obvious bigotry on one side and political correctness on the other.

So let's say that you have an internal locus of control and your employer provides freedom for creativity and constructive criticism. What does Ericsson think is required for high performance? Deliberate Practice for Ericsson is not just rote repeating to lodge skills into memory, but a particular type of practice where there is a reflection on what good performance looks like. When there aren't examples, one has to experiment to find new standards beyond the current ones. "The amateur pianist who took half a dozen years of lessons when he was a teenager but who for the past thirty years has been playing the same set of songs in exactly the same way over and over again may have accumulated ten thousand hours of 'practice' during that time, but he is no better at playing the piano than he was thirty years ago. Indeed, he’s probably gotten worse." Instead of trying harder and grinding, it's better to try differently, which is similar to the maxim "try smarter, not harder." It also means that organizations have to accept experimentation and there's always an edge to one's skills so that no procedures can be permanently codified. A new edge means new procedures. This can be a strain for those who work as a means to an end and are not jazzed up that they have to take more of their personal time to learn new aspects of a job.

There has to be a curiosity to see how far one can go before it's decided that this is the edge of the universe. Many limits are self-imposed because making mistakes and having an overactive Super-ego is draining. "In all of my years of research, I have found it is surprisingly rare to get clear evidence in any field that a person has reached some immutable limit on performance. Instead, I’ve found that people more often just give up and stop trying to improve." Internal and external signs of improvement make it easier for people to accept changes and also believe in their own ability to improve. The longer it takes to see results the higher the probability one will give up. The way to improve motivation is to work with the sense of self and monitor progress. "...once he started to see improvement after the first few sessions, he really enjoyed seeing his memory scores go up. It felt good, and he wanted to keep feeling that way...It can be internal feedback, such as the satisfaction of seeing yourself improve at something, or external feedback provided by others, but it makes a huge difference in whether a person will be able to maintain the consistent effort necessary to improve through purposeful practice."

There are different ways of doing this depending on the work or activity. One can reorganize information in the mind with self-tests, although the closer the test is to reality, the better. There is some upfront effort that is needed to create tests where none exist. When tests are matched to realistic scenarios, confidence increases as it normally does when one feels prepared. A lot of what makes up self-esteem is self-efficacy: knowing you can achieve. There is a version of you before Deliberate Practice and the version after. These two different self-images come about based on signs of progress and signs of failure. The pleasure comes from achieving personal goals and collective goals within an organization. Most important are the personal goals, and there have to be enough of them with frequent feedback to maintain motivation. When there's politics at work and difficult challenges, a learning orientation that can accept failure is needed to prevent burnout that comes from repeated resistance to setbacks. Employees that can lead themselves put themselves in a good position to negotiate with employers. Individuals working at their cutting edge can decide if where they are working provides enough satisfaction. Deliberate practice also clarifies what commitment is needed in order to be the best one can be. Each person has to assess how much personal time they have to give up in order to perform at this level. Is the trade-off worth it?

Initial successes and confidence with this method can provide a life long interest in deliberate practice. Things that seem to work well tend to be repeated. "If we can show students that they have the power to develop a skill of their choice and that, while it is not easy, it has many rewards that will make it worthwhile, we make it much more likely that they will use deliberate practice to develop various skills over their lifetimes."

The Psychoanalysis of Career Choice, Job Performance, and Satisfaction: How to Flourish in the Workplace by Paul Marcus: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9781138211650/

Aryee, S., Chen, Z. X., Sun, L.-Y., & Debrah, Y. A. (2007). Antecedents and outcomes of abusive supervision: Test of a trickle-down model. Journal of Applied Psychology, 92(1), 191–201.

Lin, W., Wang, L., & Chen, S. (2013). Abusive Supervision and Employee Well-Being: The Moderating Effect of Power Distance Orientation. Applied Psychology, 62(2), 308–329.

Martinko, M. J., Harvey, P., Sikora, D., & Douglas, S. C. (2011). Perceptions of abusive supervision: The role of subordinates’ attribution styles. The Leadership Quarterly, 22(4), 751–764.

Tepper, B. J. (2007). Abusive Supervision in Work Organizations: Review, Synthesis, and Research Agenda. Journal of Management, 33(3), 261–289.

Calcagno, A. (2010). Hannah Arendt and Augustine of Hippo: On the Pleasure of and Desire for Evil. Laval Théologique et Philosophique, 66(2), 371.

Freud on Sublimation: Reconsiderations by Volney Patrick Gay: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780791411841/

Management innovation roadmap by Vittorio D'Amato: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9788823844711/

Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise - Anders Ericsson: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780544947221/

The Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance - Anders Ericsson: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9781316502617/

Psychology: http://psychreviews.org/category/psychology01/

#object relations #fear of success #career counselling #deliberate practice #andersericsson #burnout #cancel culture #emotional exhaustion #sublimation #wokeness #culture wars #envy #love #psychoanalysis

[psychreviews2]

Object Relations: Fear Of Success Pt. 4

The Fear of Losing Success

Now that a possible protagonist has learned to understand how they feel "castrated" when having to deal with criticism, like in Part 1 of this series, and has discovered a form of True Self in Part 2, and has battled with self-hatred in Part 3, this part of the series looks at what a protagonist may go through when they are to embrace the Work side of Freud's equation of Work and Love as a goal for mental health. With the success of any cultures and institutions, and expanding marketplaces, like with all things in life, there are limitations and drawbacks to all systems, and even if there are improvements, they are taken for granted. The mind moves onto the next problem. How can we progress? Because we are all mortal, there will always be a medical problem, and because we work, there's always a labour problem. We have relationships that go through bouts of integration and disintegration. There's always a room for complaint and a desire for a rescuer or a hope for a new system to usher in a better world. Those desires can be partially improved as technology and social systems react to injustice with real improvements, but there are also cults where promises are not fulfilled and failed attempts at reform are discarded into the dustbin of history. This is usually due to one kind of ignorance towards practicality or another. For there to be a real improvement there has to be real manifestation. It usually shows up as an improvement that is real and tangible, is exciting due to novelty, and begins to show some drawbacks, albeit less drawbacks than what prior generations had to suffer. The drawbacks lead to boredom and a new desire to transcend those drawbacks returns. Political, economic, and cultural development. We often learn the most from our mistakes and contrasts when walking down a wrong path, but with the intention of walking down the right one. Many books are written about progressives and often what some people call success, others call failure. Everyone wants to be part of a utopia, or to feel like part of a vanguard ushering in a better future. In the modern world, people seek to look for success in the marketplace or in government. Each of these institutions has their benefits and dangers.

One of the best compendiums of social complaint related to weaknesses of the marketplace was Main Currents of Marxism, by Leszek Kołakowski. Being a philosopher he was able to tap into his experiences of being a Marxist in the Soviet Union. Marxism is about alienation under Capitalism and the painful self-consciousness encountered in modern life. As Leszek moved from one strain to another, to try and revive the best humanist aspects of Karl Marx's writings, he saw that he undervalued Western society and overvalued Marxism, because of it's difficulty in finding ways to advance without embracing one form of oppression or another. Those Western influences go far back before Marx as well. Leszek found that Plotinus and Hegel were able to look at the sense of suffering in the goal orientation connected with self-consciousness. Again, like with many Western writers, you'll find lots of meditative connections towards oneness and a need to reduce the feeling of alienation in the sense of self. The Buddhist example is to weaken that impulse of Subject > Object > Time as much as possible. In the West there is a desire to use the Ego as an ally, to develop it, expand it, and to continue to transcend obstacles to life as they appear. One can adopt a sense of healthy challenge with obstacles. As soon as one obstacle is done away with, there is a momentary celebration, but then to avoid depression, it's on to the next obstacle, and there can be a zest and meaning to life when it's viewed as a game of trying to transcend limitation. Yet, medical breakthroughs are limited and the Ego has to shrink back to basic consciousness with age and with the hope that there's something more on the other side of total obliteration. God to us is continued existence, but as human consciousness grows up from adolescence, and when witnessing the death of older generations, those experiences bring in the feeling of our own finality. We are not God because we do not continue forever. An Ego desire to transcend can be presumed with its motivation to manipulate the environment to enhance life and increase independence. Plotinus describes what that would be like if we could be absolutely independent. "Certainly that which has never passed outside its own orbit, unbendingly what it is, its own unchangeably, is that which most strictly be said to possess its own being." Humans on the other hand are stuck in interdependence with the environment and a feeling of separation with individual consciousness. We can't "possess our own being."

Like you see in Freud and Psychoanalysis, when we're born, the Ego is underdeveloped and has to use comparison and contrast with the environment to slowly build up a sense of this self alienation from an environment that could be rewarding or hostile. "The first form of the existence of Mind is awareness that is still not self-awareness. It goes through a phase of sensual certainty, in which consciousness is distinguished from the object, so that for consciousness there is such a thing as being-in-itself. What was an object has become knowledge of an object, so that Being has become being-in-itself-for-consciousness. At the same time consciousness changes in character and gradually frees itself from the illusion that it is burdened by something alien. Then, when consciousness grasps things in their specific character and understands their unity, it becomes a perceiving consciousness, or simply perception. In perception consciousness attains to a new phase, that of apprehending generality in the individual phenomenon. Every actual perception contains a general element: in order to grasp that a present phenomenon is present, we must apprehend the now as something distinct from the perception itself, thus deriving an abstract element from the concrete datum. In the same way, when we apprehend the individuality of things we can do so only by means of an abstract conception of individuality, and we are on the level of generalized knowledge when we become aware of individuality as such. The actual 'thing out there' is inexpressible: language belongs to the realm of generality, and so therefore does every perception as soon as we express it. Perception, by imparting generality to the world of sense, surpasses the concreteness of the given object yet at the same time preserves it. Again, the object is distinguished by its particular qualities from other objects, and this opposition gives it its independence; yet at the same time it deprives it of independence, for the independence that consists in being different from other things is not absolute independence but a negative dependence on something else. The object dissolves into a set of relationships to other objects, so that it is a being-in-itself only in so far as it is a being-for-something-else, and vice versa."

We are also agents in the environment but we come from the environment. In meditation, tracing our interdependence tends to momentarily heal the sense of alienation, but it returns as soon as we direct our attention to differences in the environment that are more or less pleasing to our consciousness. All oneness leads to a sense of infinity when one reminds oneself that all experiences have an interdependence with something else with no known starting point, including oneself as a starting point. Yet as soon as this knowledge is available, the goal orientation to satisfy a myriad of cravings, while picking out details to transcend, we return to a sense of oneself as objectified, and there's a desire to transcend circumstance once again. We look at objects not as just "there" but as objects of utility. Objects appear to us as subjectively useful or useless, not an agenda-less objective scientific project. "...When the conception of infinity becomes an object of consciousness, the latter becomes self-awareness or self-reflection. Self-knowledge is aware that the object’s being-in-itself is its manner of existing for another; it endeavours to possess itself of the object and cancel its objectivity." For a Buddhist, you are already in alienation when chasing goals and "stop doing that!" The problem with this is Buddhist economics which relies on a religious caste that lives off of donations. The rest of the population has to manage with Ego in order to create goods that can be distributed to one religious group or another, a form of exploitation. The argument for religious types is that those goods are minimal and a true religious group has to be in self-denial while demonstrating a confident happiness for the laity to imitate in part, and in limitation with the work world as it is. In the world of work and the market, there is always attraction and rejection, including rejecting objects based on important data that could lead to damaging products and services, and there is a concomitant sense of self undergoing repeated humiliations, or as Freud put it, "castrations," that feel like mini-deaths. Each loss of a job, each divorce, and each banishment from an arena of society has the distinct feeling of death, even if one's body is still completely intact. The Ego wants to expand but when it gains some territory it doesn't like contracting, or letting go. This includes all our labour contracts and imaginations of an enjoyable sunset retirement with as little limitation as possible.

Alienation is a feeling of being contingent in time, which can't be eliminated completely, only accepted at deeper and deeper levels of meditation on our interdependence and the good choices we can make while we're conscious. Those good choices, and why we call them GOOD, has to do with a myriad of pleasures that follow those choices. As an individual consciousness competes with others, because of scarcity, a conflict within the means of production begins. As the marketplace unshackled from feudalism, Marxism viewed this more advanced state of being as having its own kind of shackles. You feel a sense of alienation, which is a loss of choice and opportunity, which is also a loss of ownership of what you produce. Your skill development is for someone else and at any time you can be rejected. In that view, the tendency is towards monopoly, since the owners want to avoid being in the position of workers, and the goal is to pay workers as little as possible in order to amass enough profit so as to live with higher consumption on tap. Profit to Marx was considered surplus-value and a signal of exploitation. The capitalist argument against that is if you are able save money as a worker, you can be a partial owner and earn dividends and interest. Profit is also necessary because a small business owner is taking a big risk by investing their capital, saved from individual renunciation, and they wouldn't do that unless there was a reward in the form of profit. Profits also help to absorb losses over time in order to make the business activity a going concern. All this falls apart when workers can't earn enough to save and can only bridge the gap with debt, which is limited as well. This also means that property owners, especially the very big ones, and as I showed in my review of Right Livelihood, those with power look at those without with an eye of objectification and utility, or disutility. When people feel objectified they feel that the more money they get from the organization, the more beholden. As workers become poorer and mistreated, because part of the consequence of leverage is that those without power can't escape mistreatment and if there are no consequences for abuse, then the owner, master, or the one with the power to make choices for others, can unleash their basest desires with no consequence. This happens in slavery situations where workers are only paid enough to work and produce more workers, and sometimes not even that. With a fractured consciousness that compares ego with other egos, the master is in the best position and is resistant to relinquish it.

The Noble Eightfold Path: Right Livelihood: https://rumble.com/v1grhrh-the-noble-eightfold-path-right-livelihood.html

American Workers Are Working At A Record “63 Hours A Week” To Afford Median-Priced Apartments - Steve Cortes - War Room: https://rumble.com/v1whktq-american-workers-are-working-at-a-record-63-hours-a-week-to-afford-median-p.html

When capitalism is working well, the competition can wipe out monopolies, but monopolies can sneak in via technological advancements and manipulation of the labour market to displace workers to reduce their value on the income statement. Each labour addition to an industry displaces another worker to force them to renegotiate their wages at a lower level or not at all. They have to seek a different occupation and try to displace someone else, or find a position that has been vacated. Each technological advance can displace many workers at one time and they have the pressure to create new skills to reenter the workforce. Again, the worker who wants to avoid exploitation needs to find work that allows for rest and recreation from burnout and injury, and enough money to save when one is old and invalid. Systems rise and fall depending on whether they can create a large middle class where a great majority can find themselves there. This means they have more time in their lifespans where they can make decisions towards the kind of work they want to do, and crucially like to do, and their choice for recreation, and choices for relationships. The more one can choose for oneself, the more one feels like an integrated self with reduced alienation, and the more one feels an ongoing sense of wellbeing. The slave scenario is having no pleasure to look forward to, only daily drudgery, if they can't find a way to enjoy their work. The worst scenario is one where one cannot handle the challenges of work, or finds work impossibly boring, like in Csikszentmihalyi's Flow system, where there is rampant abuse from the master, especially if sadism is the only enjoyment for a pathological master, and where there is also no rest or recreation that allows one to heal the nervous system and there ends up being a mixture of physical and psychological breakdowns where work ends either with injury or simple flight. The worker simply leaves work and has to look for sustenance in the form of a donation or a social program via taxation.

Van Diemen's Land U2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Oji9TlprRk

How to gain Flow in 7 steps: https://rumble.com/v1gvked-how-to-gain-flow-in-7-steps.html

This is partially why an interest in politics and economics is necessary to understand alienation for the individual worker and the owner. The pain tends to occur when one singles out a section of reality and ties a difficult goal to it, leading to frustration. Many workers actually delay consumption by investing all their time in risk taking and creating new products and services to add something new to the world of interconnection. To not lose the social connection of endeavor, one can remind oneself how it connects to the propagation of a new generation, and also how it helps to protect against future violence and revolution when you instead have a grateful populace. There's a reciprocity that competes with individual survival. If I'm contingent, because I will exist finitely, there's a time trade. For example, if I'm a good nurse today, maybe when I'm older and sick, I'll get good nursing care in return. Like a Karma, or a reaping of what we sow. Our individual goals have to be seen interconnectedly. It's a complex balance between individual batteries, individual regeneration, and connecting that with a market where people can discharge pent up craving by making consumption choices. Unsatisfied cravings turn to social systems outside of the market. Most businesses accept that a certain amount of taxes have to be paid or else they would have to create the social services themselves. Since many corporations aren't big enough to do that, the state took up that mantle throughout the 20th century until now. Successes in creating a basic welfare state, public education, and various forms of public health care, have a cost, but one that many are willing to pay. This allowed people with varying pay rates to get basic help without them requiring a certain level of salary to pay for expensive things, you know, like dying slowly. The cost of taxes and regulation shifts back and forth based on ironically the same problem of feeling exploited. Workers in government require good pay and benefits and those in the private sector have to pay taxes and follow regulations. As those taxes and regulations get too onerous on the progressive side, the conservative side has to beat back power grabs, oppression and the same feelings of alienation. Again, seeing interconnection is important in politics because of the danger of splitting and creating false enemies. Workers in the private sector require social services when they can't find a private solution. Workers in government need to invest pension funds in the market. People who work in government are afraid of conservatives limiting their spending. Those in business, who finally managed to find enough zest and enjoyment in their work, they are afraid of over-regulation, taxes, and corrupt governments that literally plant government agents from a 1-party state political party into those business activities. The goal of course is to graft kickbacks with the threat of persecution on one side, to motivate payment, or the promise of protection on the other. Like gangsters charging for protection. Maybe one gangster doesn't take as much as another does. Private gangsterism or a Public police state. In the latter, the police can simply be seen as a glorified protection racket for a political party. Like all systems with too much leverage and power for a few, there is corruption, and workers feel a desire to limit their production because of a fear that a tax collector will simply take it way, so "why bother?," or having wealth simply means your a target for a gangster. Reducing corruption and reinstating fair rewards, so that one is more interested in production, means a thriving society. A failed state cannot thrive for the majority. People aren't just poor. They feel slighted. Even worse, one can feel slighted even if one is not poor.

Marxist efforts to change society had some successes, but power grabs where 40% of the GDP is not enough for a progressive movement, and only 100% will do, a certain acceptance of free will for the population has to be allowed again. Even a gangster or a tax collector knows that if you take too much you can proverbially "kill the goose that lays the golden egg." The person producing may not be able to produce anymore and joins the ranks of the needy. Rationality prevails a little and the exploitation has to pull back a bit because there is now less to pillage. You can also depopulate your country if slaves can't afford to have kids and produce another generation of slaves. If you displace workers enough, they may not have skills to find replacement work. It's like having a permanent buyers market for labor, and the sellers market of the labor themselves experience alienation. What's left is to join a gang or to join the government, or a massive business, which sometimes there's not much distinction between the two, depending on how much corruption there is and collusion. Like Saul Alinsky quoted in the last episode, that feeling of being slighted and frowned upon, it can lead to desires for revenge, and corruption is tempting. Another example is the Johnny Friendly character from On The Waterfront, the corrupt labor boss who has a fear of being at the bottom of society. "But my old lady raised us ten kids on a stinkin' watchman's pension. When I was sixteen I had to beg for work in the hold. I didn't work my way up out of there for nuthin.'" There's a priority to develop one's ego in contrast with others and there's resistance to lowering your position, even just a little. "First he crosses me in public and gets away with it and then the next joker, and pretty soon I'm just another fellow down here."

Johnny Friendly - On The Waterfront: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5YFonHjiCec

Losing status, even if it doesn't mean starvation, but just a lack of regard can be enough to make one fear more mistreatment, and I'm sure many people who pursue power to make choices, if they were honest, secretly harbor the motivation to escape castration and abuse. The successful influence on the West from Marxism lay in the necessities of life being provided so that actual starvation would be eradicated. Much of that has been alleviated by most Western countries adopting some form of a taxpayer funded cushion, with some cracks in systems to haggle over here and there. As self-esteem shifts over a life as it measures against different generations, different office holders, and senses that other people are having more savouring than oneself, albeit temporarily, this envy decouples the connection between necessities and self-esteem. Going from a billionaire to a millionaire can have a similar threat impulse as someone living paycheque to paycheque. It's an emotional feeding or famine, not always an actual threat of famine. When people are negotiating with those in power, they are negotiating their self-esteem, which Otto Fenichel accurately connected with money in his The Drive To Amass Wealth.

The Drive To Amass Wealth - Otto Fenichel: http://freudians.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/Fenichel-The-Drive-to-Amass-Wealth.pdf

Narcissistic Supply - Freud and Beyond: https://rumble.com/v1gveop-narcissistic-supply-freud-and-beyond-wnaad.html

The irony was that Marxist attempts in the 20th century involved self-created famines because of politics. Oppression and murder. Not universal brotherhood. The problem of decoupling self-esteem from necessities is how a cloud of depression can project over the populace, even when people aren't necessarily dying from extreme poverty. Media can also mass-produce that kind of projection by focusing on dysfunctions in society as an emphasis and ignore actual successes. If you take in those toxic emotions you might be more uneasy than you should be. "Marx took over the romantic ideal of social unity, and Communism realized it in the only way feasible in an industrial society, namely, by a despotic system of government...Marx seems to have imagined that once capitalists were done away with the whole world could become a kind of Athenian agora: one had only to forbid private ownership of machines or land and, as if by magic, human beings would cease to be selfish and their interests would coincide in perfect harmony. Marxism affords no explanation of how this prophecy is founded or what reason there is to think that human interests will cease to conflict as soon as the means of production are nationalized." Who watches the watchers? It doesn't matter what political labels you put on something "fascist," "communist," "capitalist," "gangster," etc. This person has power and leverage, and this person doesn't. Any system can be corrupted because people aren't like an inert changeless constitution. As soon as they gain power, they want to use it to gratify their personal dreams. In fact their Ego daydreams are limited and as power increases, those dreams gobble up more of the environment and the people in it. Taxation, property abolishment, or regulation can strangle and oppress just the same as any capitalist monopoly. One of the accounting tricks for a supposed non-profit government entity is to include personal expenses into organizational expenses. "Surplus-value" or profit can creep in if people so desire. In the end all corporations are creating work that benefits individuals and the corporate legal entity is just to spread risk to increase creative risk taking activity. When it goes awry, it's when the general public has to work multiple jobs 7 days a week to make ends meet, and this includes the arena of needs plus wants in modern Western countries.

"Marx moreover combined his romantic dreams with the socialist expectation that all needs would be fully satisfied in the earthly paradise. The early socialists seem to have understood the slogan 'To each according to his needs’ in a limited sense: they meant that people should not have to suffer cold and hunger or spend their lives staving off destitution. Marx, however, and many Marxists after him imagined that under socialism all scarcity would come to an end. It was possible to entertain this hope in the ultra-sanguine form that all wants would be satisfied, as though every human being had a magic ring or obedient jinn at his disposal. But since this could hardly be taken seriously, Marxists who considered the question decided, with a fair degree of support from Marx’s works, that Communism would ensure the satisfaction of ‘true’ or ‘genuine’ needs consonant with human nature, but not whims or desires of all kinds. This, however, gave rise to a problem which no one answered clearly: who is to decide what needs are genuine, and by what criteria? If every man is to judge this for himself then all needs are equally genuine provided they are actually, subjectively felt, and there is no room for any distinction. If, on the other hand, it is the state which decides; then the greatest emancipation in history consists in a system of universal rationing."

A system of universal rationing with people cheating rules here and there would fail as kleptocracies of all kinds have historically shown. "...For perfect equality can only be imagined under a system of extreme despotism, but despotism itself presupposes inequality at least in such basic advantages as participation in power and access to information." The way to understand why it is despotism that is needed is because of the clinging described above. People don't relinquish property voluntarily so you need to take by force, or gain by the threat of force. Once people gain that much power, they learn aggressive power tactics to preserve their power, like with Johnny Friendly, it includes others who work for them and have to obey orders to preserve their source of income from him. "You're a walkin' dead man! You're dead on this waterfront and every other waterfront from Boston to New Orleans. You won't go anywhere, drive a truck or a cab or push a baggage rack without one of my guys have the eye on you. You just dug your own grave, dead man, go fall in it!" Because of the complexity of human power and how it evolves over a lifespan and transfers to new generations, it's going to be impossible to plan out a perfectly just society. "Technical progress cannot coexist with absolute security of living conditions for everyone. Conflicts inevitably arise between freedom and equality, planning and the autonomy of small groups, economic democracy and efficient management, and these conflicts can only be mitigated by compromise and partial solutions." For progressives, solutions from their end have to be small, targeted, and accrue over time. This way, any large encroachments on freedom, which is what Marxism was supposed to protect against, can be beaten back without having to rebuild a destroyed system from the ground up. Any signs of success have to come from signs in reality, not propaganda to protect entrenched interests.

Waterfront Labour Corruption - On The Waterfront: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4thvTkvbZjU&t=143s

Oligarchy

Now that we've reviewed a past attempt at utopia and have come down to reality, the fear of success can also been seen as the fear of having to fight corruption that is in the way. Most whistleblowers of every stipe have to go through some kind of crucifixion. The "new kid on the block" at a workplace is a threat to the office clique, which include many of those patients we talked about in Parts 2 and 3 of Fear Of Success. The tragedy of not succeeding with this social problem is that extreme political movements in history were always connected with these very ontological sicknesses, and the common feeling of being slighted. The way to get out of being confused on who the predators are comes from Kohut's understanding of the gradient with which people are more or less connected to reality. Any political prescriptions have to be compared to their real results, regardless if the truth hurts, or narcissistically wounds certain propagandists who protect their pet theories from reality, like they protect their wounded selves. Predators change their spots with every flavor of revolution you can think of, but their psychological damage appears the same, especially when they ignore the real failure of their social projects. They resort to lies and go as far as they can get away with. For example, Walter C. Langer profiled Adolph Hitler and the rules he used to brainwash the population. "Never allow the public to cool off; never admit a fault or wrong; never concede that there may be some good in your enemy; never leave room for alternatives; never accept blame; concentrate on one enemy at a time and blame him for everything that goes wrong; people will believe a big lie sooner than a little one; and if you repeat it frequently enough people will sooner or later believe it." Now as a disclaimer, I'm definitely in the conservative camp, and think they are closer to reality, not perfect by all means, than the current globalist left, but I will explore left-wing politics as it shows up in the usual places, like the Frankfurt School, Alfred Adler, and so on. Certainly pro-business people can't stay in business if there's no connection to reality, and many business people don't like competition and would prefer a monopoly and act like their stereotypical criticisms of government power. Power is power is power is power.

Because power allows you access to more consumption, making it more addictive, there's less need to follow values and principles. You don't care if it's government or business that provides you that power. People with money and power will intermarry and create revolving doors of employment cronyism between public and private partnerships to maintain their power, which is synonymous with Oligarchy. Each person that is afraid of success is partially afraid of being on the wrong end of power. Jeffrey Winters makes his own definition of Oligarchy as a specific type. "An oligarchy is different in that the scope of oligarchic minority power extends so widely across the space or community that exit is nearly impossible or prohibitively expensive. Thus to be worthy of the name, oligarchic power must be based on a form of power that is unusually resistant to dispersion, and its scope must be systemic...Extreme material inequality produces extreme political inequality...Oligarchs alone are able to use wealth for wealth’s defense...Oligarchy refers to the politics of wealth defense by materially endowed actors." Examples of wealth defense are found in terms like "lawfare" and such. If a victim can't afford adequate legal representation, they are less able to punish transgressions. How things slip away is when a large section of the population can't save very much money compared to others who have large streams of income due to their platforms. Minority power stems from leverage with important platforms, which include ownership of as many areas that individuals purchase from and find difficult to do without. This Winters calls Income Defense. "Oligarchs and oligarchy arise because some actors succeed in stockpiling massive material power resources and then use a portion of them for wealth defense – with important implications for the rest of the social formation. It follows that oligarchs and oligarchy will cease to exist not through democratic procedures, but rather when extremely unequal distributions of material resources are undone, and thus no longer confer exaggerated political power to a minority of actors." Of course if an oligarchy is aware of people wanting to come after them they can get an active head start in co-opting any dissent and opposition through influence of politicians. They might even use the same tactics used against them by revolutionaries or buy their skills as mercenaries.

Living In A Ghost Town - Rolling Stones: https://youtu.be/LNNPNweSbp8

A Message from Michael Stipe: https://youtu.be/awX5lGiqrl4

Gal Gadot and Stars singing Imagine: https://youtu.be/bQK32bwvRuI

Let Your Love Be Known - U2: https://youtu.be/ZRjaUjJb3Z8

In modern politics there are the Alinsky tactics that have a similar noise and fog as the Langer quote on Hitler and have been increasingly used as an affective method to attack self-esteem in political candidates. These practices are so effective that his influence has gone beyond progressive politics. You have to manipulate perception with these tactics but the weakness is that a connection with reality is lost, because it's just about scoring points. If these tactics actually work, then political opposition will copy it, like sports teams copying championship teams. The discourse goes into character assassination and policy prescriptions lose attention. It helps to look at Alinsky's Rules for Radicals, to recognize what you've been seeing for a long time. "Power is not only what you have but what the enemy thinks you have." In keeping with a disconnection from reality and no room for learning, "never go outside the experience of your people." Conversely for the conservatives cut from different swathes, they often have a similar problem but they learn painfully when progressives "go outside of the experience of the [them]." Of course, those who read everyone's playbook is less surprised and can keep a better grip on reality when assaulted with these tactics. An important rule for Saul is to "make the enemy live up to their own book of rules," which has the correct understanding that Conservative Christians sin all the time and don't live up to their standards, but this has the problem of splitting where you can fall into the trap of "two wrongs make a right," and the standards that are abandoned means there's more disconnection from reality and no ability to learn from mistakes. To be a Christian, the goal is not to be perfect but to learn from mistakes and show personal progress.

One area that is a favorite of all politicians from every political stripe is "ridicule is mans most potent weapon." "I do the unforgivable. You can attack the establishment and get away with it. You can insult them but still survive, but I laugh at them and this is one thing they will not tolerate." Also throughout all politics is seeing that "a good tactic is one that your people enjoy," which means that entertainment can creep in and separate one from reality again, because reality can boring. Even a policy prescription that works gets taken for granted and becomes boring. As realistic boredom continues in politics with too much repetition, "a tactic that drags on too long becomes a drag," because people ultimately want to see real results at the end of a bout of effort and protesting, and it's also nice if an evil doer is brought down in humiliation. Reality can in fact be fun, just like an engineer coming up with an airplane design that actually works, and some fun ideas are only fun as entertainment but yield no results. It's all how one looks at it. Similar to all political movements, there's the rule to "keep the pressure on," though the danger with this is pushing ideas that don't work. More pressure is thinking harder instead of smarter. "The threat is usually more terrifying than the thing itself," which is a sign that people aren't looking at policies, just the attainment of power. When there's an abandonment of policy and cause and effect, the rationale for constant pressure is self-justified by personal interest and comradery. "The major premise for tactics is the development of operations that will maintain a constant pressure upon the opposition." Certainly not very radical and similar to all political debates is that "if you push a negative hard and deep enough it will break through into its counterside," but what is missing is replacement policies, and if those policies don't connect with reality it becomes just negative politics with a sense of futility, like choosing a lesser of two evils. Alinsky saw this so the next rule is "the price of a successful attack is a constructive alternative." Anyone who follows politics long enough knows that the most rare achievement is a constructive alternative. Decades go by without meaningful change, which is why the populace becomes jaded and tunes out. Politics then resorts to the politics of character assassination out of that sense of emptiness of having shallow alternatives.

A great past example was John King from CNN zeroing in on Newt Gingrich's divorce and making the opening debate topic to be about open marriages. "As you know, your ex-wife gave an interview to ABC News, and another interview with the Washington Post, and this story has now gone viral on the internet. In it she says that you came to her in 1999 at a time when you were having an affair. She says she asked you sir to enter into an open marriage. Would you like to take some time to respond to that?"

"No, but I will. I think the destructive, vicious, negative nature of much of the news media makes it harder to govern this country, harder to attract decent people to run for public office, and I'm appalled you would begin a presidential debate on a topic like that."

Gingrich slams CNN for asking about ex-wife: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ygtFc3eR6So

Pressure needs a focal point and politics can sidestep debates on economics and regulations through personal attacks. "Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it." The danger is the narcissistic tactic of goading people into reactions that aren't well thought out that lead to violence, martyrdom, which is then used as an excuse to eliminate political opposition through a conflation of targets and incrimination of dissent. The relief is that you don't have to debate people who are in jail. "The enemy properly goaded and guided in his reaction will be your major strength." If you downplay in the media a provocation that you make, and heighten the reaction caused by that provocation in the same media, it will appear in the general public that you're not the instigator but the victim. Narcissists chuckle at that one because it's their favorite tactic in divorce proceedings. Of course the weakness of this tactic is if the target appears the victim from the get go and there are enough witnesses or a large audience for the initial provocation. This is why it's important for big social changes to control political violence and aim for peaceful transfers of power. Political assassinations and violent riots just lead to escalation, desires for revenge, and the political theories and remedies again are put in the backseat.

Politicians know that most in the audience don't put the effort into finding evidence or a lack thereof in political assertions, because of the time required for research, or a lack of interest, so their opinions are based on the trust they have for media representatives and their platforms. Whether these are boring, but realistic citizen journalists, or propagandists, you have to look at any political party and focus on real results from policies, not on the promises. Left-wing, Right-wing, Capitalist, Communist, Religious, Atheist, or any labels you can conjure, these questions about which systems are good or evil can be confusing to sift through. Both sides make accusations of a similar kind at each other but the actions are what matter most. No matter the government in power, the duty of real journalists is to compare real data and actions with propaganda and write about the variance. In this psychoanalysis modality, the higher connection to reality and cause and effect, the healthier you are. It's also healthy because people bandy around the term Extremist to avoid debate, but it can't be extremism if it's cause and effect and reality that you're looking at, and the goal is non-violent. A political system that works well for more people, though not perfect because of individual choices and mistakes, can't be extreme.

The term extreme is used as a way to police dissent and leads to governments creating censorship bodies like in Orwell's 1984. The problem is again: Who watches the Watchers? The self-interested censors naturally load their fake fact checking and aim at political opponents. To have political success when there's popular dissent, everything has to be reversed. "War is peace, freedom is slavery, and ignorance is strength." I would add that the word Democracy is abused when it's used to defend authoritarianism. Recently Barack Obama supported this kind of censorship. His Stanford speech sounded really pro free speech at one point and he criticized the CCP model, but then quickly this derailed when he talked about tech platforms. Even his use of the term "toxic information," which is reserved for political opponents, you can see a line has been crossed into authoritarianism. "The good news is that almost all the big tech platforms now acknowledge some responsibility for content on their platforms and they are investing in large teams to monitor it." Obama continues to talk about the value of stopping hate speech and what incites violence, including what would be shared values for people across the political spectrum, but he then says "it doesn't go far enough. Users who want to spread disinformation want to become experts of pushing right up to the line what published company policies allow." Then he blamed the platforms for weakening against pressure from the predictable accusations of censorship, but also the motivation for profit to have as many engaged users as possible. He then applauded the use of algorithms and purposeful slowing of information dissemination against political opponents, but he wants more oversight than this. "Decisions like this shouldn't be left solely to private businesses." Leaving aside that one could pick apart his speech for contradictions on a myriad of topics, and Obama admitted that he's very aware that many people don't agree with him, a few days after this speech, Homeland Security introduced the infamous Disinformation Governance Board headed by Nina Jankowicz, which one could ascribe as Obama's real intent.

[Scary Poppins Propaganda Video]

Nina Jankowicz 'Scary Poppins': https://twitter.com/RealJamesWoods/status/1519871245856112640?s=20&t=JWM--Tc_YJoJOGZ4F8J__g

"Talking about the Deep State, and things like that, is a thread among conspiracy communities here in the United States, that there is this secret cabal here working to undermine the American people. It couldn't be farther from the truth, as someone who works in and around public servants everyday."

Democrat Steny Hoyer: "They want to eliminate what they call 'The Deep State.' The Deep State is a cadre of professionals dedicated to honoring the Constitution, the laws of this country, and carrying out the policies of the Congress and The President."

Sen. Kennedy: "Who at the department picked her?" DHS Mayorkas: "Senator we don't discuss our internal hiring processes, but I am the Secretary of Homeland Security, and ultimately I am responsible." "When the department picked her, did it know that she had said that Mr. Hunter Biden's laptop is Russian Disinformation?" "I was not aware of that. We do not discuss the internal hiring process. Ultimate as the Secretary I am responsible for the decisions of the department of Homeland Security." "When the department picked Ms. Jankowicz, did it know that she had vouched for the veracity of the Steele Dossier?" "I was not aware of that fact." Eventually Mayorkas only paused the Disinformation Governance Board, and as of working on this post, August 24th, it got terminated. Of course if power changes hands again, it could spring up again.

Typical of recent power grabs related to the COVID19 lockdowns, The Great Reset intrusions on farmers, the clamp down on trucker protests, and the CCP's method of conditioning tactics being used to intimidate the public into compliance, you know that warning you feel in your gut that asks "hey isn't this authoritarianism? Doesn't this feel like a school bully? Is this gaslighting?," the last 2 years since COVID19 has been endlessly surreal. Jordan Peterson described this intimidation process from Ordinary Men by Robert Browning about NAZI tactics. "Things get to terrible places one tiny step at a time. If I encroach on you and I'm sophisticated about it, I'm going to encroach 2mm. I'm going to encroach right to the point where you start to protest. Then I'm going to stop and wait. Then you're going to calm down. Then I'm going to encroach again, right to the point where you'll protest. Then I'm going to stop. Then I'm going to wait. I'm just going to do that forever."

All these topics I'm talking about could expand into huge detours for investigation, and that includes charges of voter fraud that both sides level at each other. Hillary Clinton famously accused Trump of stealing the election from her and even goes into pre-emptive election denial while also calling conservatives election deniers, who don't believe Biden got 81 million legal votes in the last presidential election. "Right Wing extremists already have a plan to literally steal the next Presidential Election." The debate moves between paper fraud accusations down to vote machine manipulation. There's a deep fear of voting machines with limited to no audits allowed in many American jurisdictions. In lawfare, the dollars are big and trials move slowly. One of the accused was Eric Coomer from Dominion voting machines, which is in a lawsuit with an accuser Joe Oltmann, who said he allegedly overheard Coomer on an ANTIFA group call say "Don't worry about the election. Trump's not going to win. I made fucking sure of that!" This is an ongoing legal warfare that includes others like Mike Lindell. Mike Lindell feels China was more involved more than Joe Oltmann who focuses more on Dominion. These are the typical lawsuits that nobody can pay for and losers go into bankruptcy because they need income the size of a GDP of a country to handle it. Eric Coomer is accused of being an unreliable addict, and Joe Oltmann is accused of being an unreliable used car salesman turned Conservative podcaster. You end up with weird depositions like this one.

"In the Facebook posts you use the word fuck quite often don't you?" "Actually I'm not sure I can answer that." "You don't know whether you use that word often?" "Can you define often?" "You know what often means?" "No I don't, not in your terms. Are we talking 1%, 5%, 20%, 50%? What's often, sir?" "You can define it anyway you like." "Then I would say no." "You're testimony sitting here under oath today is that you don't use the word fuck often?" "In a Facebook post?" "No, generally." "Again I won't answer that until you define the terms." "You understand what the English word often means?" "Tell me as you understand the word often, you use that word fuck a lot?" "I would say I use it less than a lot of people I know. I would characterize it as not often." In the deposition Eric said that if a person believed that Dominion Machines could steal elections it would be a "deficient" understanding. He also said that his posts on ANTIFA were all satire and not to be taken literally, and he wasn't on a group call with ANTIFA.

Certainly, there were charges of conspiracy theories when conservatives said the machines could be connected to the internet, but a recent AP news story said that "Electronic voting machines from a leading vendor used in at least 16 states have software vulnerabilities that leave them susceptible to hacking if unaddressed," but not to worry because "there is no evidence the flaws in the Dominion Voting Systems’ equipment have been exploited to alter election results." The Arizona Audit found illegal data access after the election, which is data that needs to be held for 22 months. A more recent review of election data by Verity Vote found that 740,000 ballots "do not have the required chain of custody..." This is just Maricopa County and an unfinished audit at that when it comes to the electronics to test for outside connectivity. It also didn't help to secure trust in elections when a dementia ridden President before the 2020 Presidential Election made a Freudian slip that was very particular and exacting. "We have put together, and you guys did it for President Obama's administration before this, we have put together I think the most extensive and inclusive voter fraud organization in the history of American politics." It was all brushed off as unimportant and an assertion that this voter fraud organization was to watch Republicans and their supposed voter suppression like Democrats are election hawks protecting integrity.

Voting Machines and Election Fraud - Barack Obama: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BFyMJTRaf5c

Conservatives in Arizona were also disappointed when the AG Mark Brnovich was given the information from the audit to investigate and make arrests. Very little was done in 1 year. Mark got lots of phone calls from residents to take action and here was his response. "It's Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich. We've gotten a lot of calls and a lot of emails, but there is one thing people definitely want to see. They want to see more chucks. So people? You want more chucks? We got more chucks." His latest report was a small investigation of dead voters but they found there were only 282 dead voters. In regards to other irregularities and the lack of chain of custody "the work of the Attorney General's election integrity unit remains ongoing." State Senator Sonny Borelli had to dive in and work with his team to sample votes and he found 20% uncertifiable votes from a 100,000 sample. He remained guarded as to why the AG didn't do their job and attributed it to laziness or corruption.

"We did it! We did it Joe. You're going to be the next President of the United States."

From then on, any criticism of election integrity was treated as if the people who want full transparent audits are trying to suppress votes and guilty of election stealing. Biden treated the Republicans like they were Joseph Stalin. "The struggle is not who gets to vote, or to make it easy for eligible people to vote, it's about who gets to count the votes, and whether your vote counts at all." Yet the irony is that the Center for American Progress, a Democratic party think tank, provided suggestions in 2018 for protecting elections, back when it was alleged that Trump stole the 2016 election, they advised to "Conduct robust postelection audits to confirm election outcomes." This of course would solve all problems because the transparency would eliminate any concerns which would help the losers gather data about why they lost so they could try new policies to gather momentum for the next election. When people believe in elections and politicians respond to constituents, there's a healthy back and forth between the public and politicians, and usually small adjustments and changes done towards progressivism and conservatism.

In the political spectrum, conservatives have a problem of "what are we trying to conserve? Is it worth it?" The strength they have is that there's a history of what has worked well in the past more or less. The problem with progressives is the question "are we actually progressing?" Their strength is when they create policies that have popular support and the populace doesn't want to relinquish those changes, because they provide protections and also enhance some freedoms. When conservatives conserve things that don't need to be conserved, that's their weakness, and progressive experiments often have little to no real world data so unintended consequences, which are signs of reality, can derail policies. Even worse, there can be new fallible policies that fail to fix past policies that already failed. You can have failure after failure. There are also repeated temptations to centralize power and then decentralize in response to overreach. Elitists from elite schools, and so called professionals or experts have trouble in competition with the rule that "more heads are better than one," but they do try. The populace goes through cycles of dependency when very young or very old and independence in middle adulthood where the need for independence or dependence can switch places depending on circumstances. Can experts really help you more than you can help yourself? Sometimes that's true, like when going into surgery or asking for a prescription, etc., but it isn't always the case. Politics is not like hard science. Politicians prefer to save face and spin excuses, rather than change course into another theory. You try to double-down and triple-down until you get away with a failure. You rarely hear politicians say "oops. We made a mistake, but we figured out a much better path. Please trust us again!" You also don't hear "actually our opposition was more correct than we are. I will now resign and promote the opposition leader." Like in British Commonwealth Parliaments, the government needs a vote of non-confidence and a new election. New movements have to arise and replace old political dynasties in order for new ideas to be acted on. This can even be seen in hard science when science gets politicized because of the need for funding and if results from studies have political consequences. Nobody wants to see real world data that threatens their job, and everyone wants to entertain theories that they can exploit to increase their wealth.

How Nietzsche Explains Woke Madness: https://youtu.be/iVY9Ljhtxnc

The reality is that many people are disengaged from politics when their lives are going according to plan. They forget that a lot of really complex systems are allowing that smoothness to happen. When something goes wrong, that's the only time when there's an alarm and a desire to change things and "throw the bums out!" The ugliness of politics tunes them out as well when they return to more interesting personal goals. Who wants to read about problems with supply chains when one can watch a comedy show and have a beer? Like René Girard pointed out, we only notice institutions when they stop running smoothly or are totally corrupt. Maybe beer becomes too expensive and now something has to be done!

A more difficult part of social change is the sense of individual helplessness in a giant machine. People can be daunted or intimidated by reality even if they want that connection. It takes a certain amount of courage to take what you see and act on it without deferring to authority figures. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was fighting the unreality of progressives in the Soviet Union where lies were treated as common sense and what "good" people should support, and truth was always considered "extreme" and "dangerous," which is a projection of people in power who are only truthfully expressing the danger to their ongoing interests. Aleksandr had the same difficulty in convincing people to make some sacrifice in order to get involved and preserve freedom of speech and freedom of association. "But really, there is nothing to be done! Our mouths are gagged, no one listens to us, no one asks us. How can we make them listen to us?...The natural thing would be simply not to reelect them, but there are no re-elections in our country."

Alexandr's micro-prescription is to maintain a grip on reality, individual by individual, and how each person subjectively sees truth, which Alexandr was adept at including, because people do not agree on what reality is even if they feel it strongly. "...A personal nonparticipation in lies! Even if all is covered by lies, even if all is under their rule, let us resist in the smallest way: Let their rule hold not through me!...For when people renounce lies, lies simply cease to exist. Like parasites, they can only survive when attached to a person...Let us not glue back the flaking scales of the Ideology, not gather back its crumbling bones, nor patch together its decomposing garb, and we will be amazed how swiftly and helplessly the lies will fall away, and that which is destined to be naked will be exposed as such to the world...Let each man choose: Will he remain a witting servant of the lies (needless to say, not due to natural predisposition, but in order to provide a living for the family, to rear the children in the spirit of lies!), or has the time come for him to stand straight as an honest man, worthy of the respect of his children and contemporaries?"

In the old Soviet Union, people like the composer Shostakovich, had to make dog whistles and involve cryptic messaging in his music when there was a threat of persecution, repression, threats of imprisonment, threats of political audits and raids, threats of lost jobs and bankruptcy, but the desire to say what you think can only be bottled up for a certain amount of time. Eventually people lose their fear and speak up anyways. Alexandr listed out repeated behaviors of sheepish yes-people that scaffold inauthentic systems, and how to live differently.

· Will not write, sign, nor publish in any way, a single line distorting, so far as he can see, the truth;

· Will not utter such a line in private or in public conversation, nor read it from a crib sheet, nor speak it in the role of educator, canvasser, teacher, actor;

· Will not in painting, sculpture, photograph, technology, or music depict, support, or broadcast a single false thought, a single distortion of the truth as he discerns it;

· Will not cite in writing or in speech a single 'guiding' quote for gratification, insurance, for his success at work, unless he fully shares the cited thought and believes that it fits the context precisely;

· Will not be forced to a demonstration or a rally if it runs counter to his desire and his will; will not take up and raise a banner or slogan in which he does not fully believe;

· Will not raise a hand in vote for a proposal which he does not sincerely support; will not vote openly or in secret ballot for a candidate whom he deems dubious or unworthy;

· Will not be impelled to a meeting where a forced and distorted discussion is expected to take place;

· Will at once walk out from a session, meeting, lecture, play, or film as soon as he hears the speaker utter a lie, ideological drivel, or shameless propaganda;

· Will not subscribe to, nor buy in retail, a newspaper or journal that distorts or hides the underlying facts.

Alexandr knew that many people will not follow these precepts, which are very connected to Western Enlightenment and revolutions in those centuries. "And as for him who lacks the courage to defend even his own soul: Let him not brag of his progressive views, boast of his status as an academician or a recognized artist, a distinguished citizen or general. Let him say to himself plainly: I am cattle, I am a coward, I seek only warmth and to eat my fill...Let us then cower and hunker down, while our comrades the biologists bring closer the day when our thoughts can be read and our genes altered."

When people are able to let go of the body and lean on conscience it's "not an easy choice for the body, but the only one for the soul." Fear of success can also include the fear of speaking the truth and the consequences for doing so.

Main Currents of Marxism - Leszek Kolakowski: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780393329438/

Oligarchy - Jeffrey Winters: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9781107005280/

Live Not By Lies - Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: https://www.solzhenitsyncenter.org/live-not-by-lies

Rules for Radicals - Saul Alinsky: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780679721130/

A Psychological Analysis of Adolf Hitler: https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP78-02646R000600240001-5.pdf

Group Psychology - Freud and Beyond: https://rumble.com/v1gvcxr-group-psychology-freud-and-beyond-war-pt.-33.html

1984 - George Orwell: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9781788282369/

Barack Obama Warns Social Media Misinformation Is A Threat To Democracy - Newsweek: https://youtu.be/l-QuQc_E2rI

'Ministry of Truth' - Tulsi Gabbard: https://twitter.com/TulsiGabbard/status/1520713806086696960?s=20&t=ZmCyy0d-Dg3MGGag10Q1og

"There is no Deep State" - Nina Jankowicz: https://rumble.com/v13qfz5-nina-jankowicz-says-there-is-no-deep-state.html

Adding Context to Tweets about Voter Fraud Accusations: https://rumble.com/v147uhl-clown-nina-jankowicz-wants-trustworthy-people-like-herself-to-add-context-t.html

DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas claims Nina Jankowicz is eminently qualified to lead Biden’s disinformation board: https://rumble.com/v139x27-dhs-secretary-alejandro-mayorkas-claims-nina-jankowicz-is-qualified.html

Mayorkas admits that he didn't know that the head of Biden's "Ministry of Truth" Nina Jankowicz called the Hunter Biden laptop "Russian disinformation": https://rumble.com/v13i65p-may-4-2022.html

NYT finally admits Hunter's Laptop was real - Maria Bartiromo: https://rumble.com/vy2g9p-new-york-times-finally-admitted-that-hunter-bidens-laptop-was-real.html

'We made a total mistake': Jack Dorsey questioned over Hunter Biden censorship - Sky News Australia: https://youtu.be/7vJZdEk53xo

Tyranny, One Tiny Step at a Time - Jordan Peterson: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=16uBwZxtzi0

Interview with Joe Oltmann: https://rumble.com/v1fhg97-interview-with-joe-oltmann-in-response-to-recent-media-smears.html

Cyber agency: Voting software vulnerable in some states: https://apnews.com/article/2022-midterm-elections-technology-georgia-election-2020-a746b253f3404dbf794349df498c9542

Arizona Audit Results: https://youtu.be/sAAu6O33rNE

Maricopa Dropbox Chain of Custody - Verity Vote: https://verityvote.us/maricopa-dropbox-chain-of-custody/

Mark Brnovich "They want to see more chucks!": https://youtu.be/JO-wZykVHDY

Arizona Letter to Karen Fann: https://www.azag.gov/sites/default/files/2022-08/Letter%20to%20Fann%20-%20EIU%20Update%20080122.pdf

Sonny Borrelli Shows Receipts For 2020 Stolen Election In Arizona: https://rumble.com/v1rdmdo-sonny-borelli-shows-receipts-for-2020-stolen-election-in-arizona.html

CAP: https://www.americanprogress.org/article/9-solutions-secure-americas-elections/

2020 Presidential Election Voter Fraud Compilation: https://rumble.com/vb2j7b-2020-presidential-election-voter-fraud-compilation.html

Rules for Radicals - David Horowitz: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gRUP5yEm1WE

Joe Biden Breaks Down Donald Trump, Climate Change and The Election | Pod Save America: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C6u1uKznCYw

Psychology: http://psychreviews.org/category/psychology01/

#object relations #fear of success #voter integrity #Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn #Otto Fenichel #barack obama #joe biden #communism #capitalism #nina jankowicz #oligarchy #income defense #dominion #eric coomer #arizona audit #alejandro mayorkas #george orwell #antifa #deep state #saul alinsky #on the waterfront #ministry of truth

[psychreviews2]

Object Relations: Fear Of Success Pt. 3

The Obstacle of Self-Hatred

It is fortunate when people learn about mimetic rivalry and are able to adjust their lives accordingly, but there are many who will not learn this and bound into every conflict, and these conflicts can start early in childhood and pathology can develop before they enter the workforce. Everything is just an empty search for approval from others for the objects that are chosen. When people look at work as only a means to an end, motivation saps and it becomes robotic. One of the best psychoanalysts that understood this problem well was Heinz Kohut who was in the lineage of Ego Psychology. Ideally employers provide boundaries to work within, but many people have grown up in families where everything is motivated by parents, and eventually authority figures in the world of work. To not be able to create personal goals to fulfill means no fulfillment. One just looks for cues from authority figures, and like a slave, one's emotions are tied to the criticisms of others. Attention is an unreliable source of energy. "A rebuff, the absence of expected approval, the environment’s lack of interest in the patient, and the like, will soon again bring about the former state of depletion." Heinz saw that prior methods of psychoanalysis did demonstrate incremental improvements in patients, but he noticed that some people improved better than others. Some improvements were short-lived and self-direction would disintegrate after a period of time. Narcissistic Woundings are those criticisms that keep us away from a self-appreciation that matches an ideal-self. That pain can lead to avoidances, aggressive reactivity found in Narcissistic Rage, and addictions. "The fantasies stood, of course, in opposition to meaningful insight and progress since they were in the service of pleasure gain and provided an escape route from narcissistic tensions." The problem of course is that reality doesn't always conform to our views of ourselves.

Due to our parenting, which may have included too much restriction, or abuse, and too much indulgence, which keeps one from important reality checks, one can be more or less connected with reality depending on how much of a need there is for repeated confirmations from others. "Many of the most severe and chronic work disturbances of our patients are in my experience due to the fact that the self is poorly [attached] with narcissistic [craving] and in chronic danger of fragmentation, with a secondary reduction of the efficacy of the ego. Such people are either chronically unable to work at all, or (since their self is not participating) they are able to work only in an automatic way (as the isolated activity of an autonomous ego, without the participation of a self in depth), i.e., passively, without pleasure and without initiative, simply responding to external cues and demands. Occasionally even the patient’s awareness of this rather frequent type of work disturbance in narcissistic personality disorders comes about only in the course of a successful analysis. The patient will one day report that his work has changed, that he is now enjoying it, that he now has the choice whether to work or not, that the work is now undertaken on his own initiative rather than as if by a passively obedient automaton, and, last but not least, that his approach has now some originality rather than being humdrum and routine."

Part of developing a sense of self is to create one's own goals, go into Flow states, and learn that one can create one's own pleasure, much like in play. Yet play is not possible if there isn't any feedback from the real world. Certainly a sports game is not going to be very much fun if one can't tell if one is winning or not. Fantasizing that one is winning, when one clearly isn't, is also not very much fun. For Kohut, the therapeutic environment is one that recreates the early childhood experience "in which the child attempts to save the originally all-embracing narcissism by concentrating perfection and power upon the self—here called the grandiose self—and by turning away disdainfully from an outside to which all imperfections have been assigned." In that environment, everything is laid out neatly. In the real world, this manifests as a denial of realistic facts, avoidance of responsibility, and eventually a hostile aggression against any reality that may interfere with uninterrupted fantasy. This plays out in office politics with callousness, sabotage, and unethical short-cuts that are detrimental to organizations. It happens when there is an unconscious expanding of the Super-ego to take over boundaries of others and it relies on bridging weaknesses in skills with those surrounding the individual.

Narcissistic Supply - Freud and Beyond: https://rumble.com/v1gveop-narcissistic-supply-freud-and-beyond-wnaad.html

There is an importance in having that sense of omnipotence and all consuming passion, but it is mainly in the world of the infant. As development ideally improves, there's a sense of autonomous control over choices in activities to conform to socially accepted rules. Boundaries between self and others develop, which helps to develop empathy. Daydreaming and manipulating others like toys to satisfy goals, as an extension of ownership and self-hood, leads to conflict with others as they fight to maintain their independence, but in healthy narcissism it allows for those boundaries, hobbies, interests, and an acceptance of realistic limitations and imperfections in others. When one doesn't develop those passions and interests, and has no boundaries, then that parenting is echoed into the narcissist's adult life, and colored by past imitation of parents and authority figures. "The specific goals and purposes which frequently determine the later major directions of one’s life are often derived from identifications with the very figures who originally had been experienced as extensions of the grandiose self."

In therapy, one doesn't eliminate all narcissism, but tries to aim it in better directions and partially complete the parenting that one didn't receive. One can entertain fantasies, but also progressively tolerate how out of bounds it is from reality, or accept the amount of work and effort required to achieve those goals. Self-esteem based on a fantasy is turbulent, but self-esteem based on reality is stable. Smothering and spoiling remove one from reality, and excessive inhibition through abuse also disconnects one from the self-assertion needed to be able to self-satisfy and function in reality. One is confronted with reality and the pathological responses are avoidance, aggression, and denial. "Our ultimate goals and purposes and our self-esteem, also carry the earmark of the original narcissism which infuses into the central purposes of our life and into our healthy self-esteem that absoluteness of persistence and of conviction of the right to success which betrays that an unaltered piece of the old, limitless narcissism functions actively alongside with the new, tamed, and realistic structures. If the optimal development and integration of the grandiose self is interfered with, however, then this psychic structure may become split off from the reality ego and/or may become separated from it by repression. It is then no longer accessible to external influence but is retained in its archaic form."

As one in therapy is able to tolerate reality, including bouts of shame, realization of the unreality of fantastical goals, and the requirements of skill development to achieve any realistic goal, a patient who isn't severely narcissistic to the point of a permanent disorder, can learn to thaw out defenses and develop a more human self-esteem. "The gradual recognition of the realistic imperfections and limitations of the self, i.e., the gradual diminution of the domain and power of the grandiose fantasy, is in general a precondition for mental health in the narcissistic sector of the personality. But there are exceptions to this rule. A persistently active grandiose self with its delusional claims may severely incapacitate an ego of average endowment. A gifted person’s ego, however, may well be pushed to the use of its utmost capacities, and thus to a realistically outstanding performance, by the demands of the grandiose fantasies of a persistent, poorly modified grandiose self." Magical thinking about skills that aren't there can be a boon in one sense in that it becomes next to impossible to deny the lack of skill when there's any attempt at making dreams reality. The therapy can move faster to knowing one's weaknesses with less reactivity and to adjust with a learning attitude placed in the responsibility of the Ego and it's interest in reality. Unfortunately, someone who is gifted may have enough justifications for their false self, because of their high skill level, that they may not get the therapy they need to improve their relationships. It's usually a narcissist who had a big failure, or multiple failures, that seeks therapy or is pushed into therapy by significant others.

The Ego and the Id - Sigmund Freud: https://rumble.com/v1gvdo1-the-ego-and-the-id-sigmund-freud.html

Treatment of Narcissistic Personality Disorder: https://rumble.com/v1gtj2d-treatment-of-narcissistic-personality-disorder-narcissism-part-4-of-4.html

Buried in the successful narcissist's problem of not being able to see the difference between a True Self that is self-satisfying and responding to the real world, and the False Self that is still too fantastical, is the value of reality. Reality can appear boring, frightening, essentially a threat. The patient who is recovering notices that "...his realism was paying off." Real skills are nothing to be ashamed of and have to now find self-satisfaction in the real world. For those with only undeveloped potentials, then skills have to be planned for. "Gradually, the nature of the [identification process] changes: they are not gross and indiscriminate anymore, but become selective—increasingly focusing on features and qualities which are indeed compatible with the analysand’s personality and enhance (up to now dormant) talents of the patient himself...Ultimately the patient, may discover with calm but deep and genuine pleasure that he has acquired solid nuclei of autonomous function and initiative...All of a sudden, as if the sun were unexpectedly breaking through the clouds, the analyst will witness, to his great pleasure, how a genuine sense of humor expressed by the patient testifies to the fact that the ego can now see in realistic proportions the greatness aspirations of the infantile grandiose self or the former demands for the unlimited perfection and power of the idealized parent imago, and that the ego can now contemplate these old configurations with the amusement that is an expression of its freedom."

Finding pleasure in realistic goals also means that the delay of gratification is shorter, which lightens narcissistic neuroses. "Unsolved intellectual and aesthetic problems, for example, create a narcissistic imbalance which in turn propels the individual toward a solution—be it now the completion of a crossword puzzle or the search for the perfect place for the new sofa in the living room. The solving of the intellectual or aesthetic problem, however, especially when the correct answer becomes apparent within a relatively short time span, always leads to a feeling of narcissistic pleasure, which is the emotional accompaniment of the suddenly restored narcissistic balance." Seeing imperfections in oneself makes it easier to see imperfections in others. Empathy may increase if there's a desire to avoid hypocrisy. Empathy connected with love and realistic relationship goals can also be informed by expectations of imperfection and a need for problem solving. Like with earlier episodes, Psychoanalysis wants people to be able to rely on themselves more and bring on an ever expanding Ego responsibility so that the Super-ego can take a backseat from micro-managing. "Creativeness, too, ranging from a new-found ability to perform a restricted range of tasks with zestful initiative to the emergence of brilliantly inventive artistic schemes or of penetrating scientific undertakings, may appear, seemingly spontaneously, in the course of many analyses of narcissistic personalities. Its appearance is again specifically related to the mobilization of formerly frozen narcissistic [attachments], in the area of both the grandiose self and the idealized parent Imago...If this objective is reached, the aggressions in the narcissistic sector of the personality will be employed in the service of the realistic ambitions and purposes of a securely established self and in the service of the cherished ideals and goals of a superego that has taken over the function of the archaic omnipotent object and has become independent from it."

Empathy also allows a person to go into the shoes of another and feel a bit like their experiences were also experienced by oneself. A healthier Super-ego that can autonomously sample experiences of others without needing a leader's perspective means it co-creates with the realistic Ego without needing others to bridge skill gaps and slavishly respond to demands. The enjoyment comes from the Super-ego seeing the Ego succeed based on personally chosen goals to modify the environment in some way, and then ideally to connect those aims with the world for a healthier connection with others. Maybe a person can enjoy more parts of their work or take on new hobbies that have the potential for long lasting interest. The difficulty for Kohut was making sure that these small improvements were of lasting value, not just a way of killing time only to be abandoned later. The self in this system involves looking at preferences and making changes to the environment to match those preferences in a self-satisfying way. Dangers with narcissistic patients could be that it was all done as an acting performance to get positive responses from the therapist. Making changes can't be for the sake of rebellion or dogma. The persistence of a hobby, interest, or vocation has to have a sense of that daydreaming "it would be nice if..." but then a belief in oneself that one is capable of making those changes, and then providing some inertia by just starting something. With concentration and action, the feedback signaling progress creates natural zest. There maybe distractions from other people in any activity, but like in sports, those distractions can be included in the self-chosen list of goals, that one will ignore distractions from others with concentration and keep plugging away.

How to motivate yourself - Freud and Beyond: https://rumble.com/v1gv3zl-how-to-motivate-yourself-freud-and-beyond.html

Reality also has a benefit because it provides experiences and knowledge from others on what values are currently entertained by the culture. A sifting and comparing process gives the Super-Ego an opportunity to compare parental and cultural values so that one has meaning in life. During that search one can easily see how others have already been undergoing this process and now there's an opportunity to catch up. Those priorities create a life for a person. "...The patient’s devotion to his values and ideals is not that of a fanatic but is accompanied by a sense of proportion which can be expressed through humor. The coexistence of idealism and humor demonstrates not only that the content and psychological locus of the narcissistic positions have changed but also that the narcissistic energies are now tamed and neutralized and that they are following an aim-inhibited course."

These developments for Kohut were viewed as optimal frustrations, where the delay of gratification is not unreasonable, and if better parenting was encountered, then children would have learned self-soothing sooner, with more positive mental talk, and layers of conditioning would have developed so that the adult would tolerate frustration and stick with problem solving. There would be more acceptance of imperfections in the body, such as looks, and imperfect skills. Looks can be amended to a certain extent but much of how people look has to be accepted because the body is partly out of our control. There should be a solidarity between self-esteem and taking care of oneself. A reduction of self-consciousness. Skills can be developed or goals changed to more appropriate ones. There's also no need to tolerate exploitative relationships where one is expected to simply react to demands from authority figures.

The sad reality is that many narcissistic types are not going to be cured and there's no cure on the horizon. Most will not go into therapy so the chances of recovering these pathological relationships is next to nothing. This means separating from bad relationships and being very skeptical of miraculous cures. When these types have an agenda, the devastation for those in their path is life changing. Kohut calls this Narcissistic Rage. "...That the narcissistically vulnerable individual responds to actual (or anticipated) narcissistic injury either with shamefaced withdrawal (flight) or with narcissistic rage (fight)...Human aggression is most dangerous when it is attached to the two great absolutarian psychological constellations: the grandiose self and the archaic omnipotent object. And the most gruesome human destructiveness is encountered, not in the form of wild, regressive, and primitive behavior, but in the form of orderly and organized activities in which the perpetrators' destructiveness is alloyed with absolute conviction about their greatness and with their devotion to archaic omnipotent figures...The need for revenge, for righting a wrong, for undoing a hurt by whatever means, and a deeply anchored, unrelenting compulsion in the pursuit of all these aims, which gives no rest to those who have suffered a narcissistic injury-these are the characteristic features of narcissistic rage in all its forms and which set it apart from other kinds of aggression."

Kohut is similar with Freud in how sadism and revenge are connected. People see they can regain some power by using sadism to their advantage and then one can turn into the monster one was fighting before. "The desire to turn a passive experience into an active one, the mechanism of identification with the aggressor, the sadistic tensions retained by those who as children had been treated sadistically by their parents-all these factors help explain the readiness of the shame-prone individual to respond to a potentially shame-provoking situation by the employment of a simple remedy: the active (often anticipatory) inflicting on others of those narcissistic injuries which he is most afraid of suffering himself." This is partly the reason why people attack others unconsciously for things they are guilty of, to take the spotlight off of themselves, and to know from personal experience that if it potentially hurts oneself, then it will probably hurt others just as effectively. People with shame identities are not going to meditate and treat the self as a sensation and let identities transform from particles to waves and wait for those strong affects to wane on their own. They reinforce the complexes and go into defensiveness as per Freud and Jung.

Beyond the Pleasure Principle - Freud & Beyond - War Pt. (2/3): https://rumble.com/v1gv855-beyond-the-pleasure-principle-freud-and-beyond-war-pt.-23.html

The Psychopathology of Everyday Life - Sigmund Freud: https://rumble.com/v1gtj2d-treatment-of-narcissistic-personality-disorder-narcissism-part-4-of-4.html

That fear of being in a weak position can motivate the powerful to find ever inventive ways of using sadism and destruction to control the rest of society. "Mr. P., for example, who was exceedingly shame-prone and narcissistically vulnerable, was a master of a specific form of social sadism." Connecting with totalitarian movements of the 20th century, the danger of these types who are skilled at sadism is that their skills can inflict more damage than a general angry person who feels momentarily frustrated about something. "The irrationality of the vengeful attitude becomes even more frightening in view of the fact that—in narcissistic personalities as in the paranoiac—the reasoning capacity, while totally under the domination and in the service of the overriding emotion, is often not only intact but even sharpened. (This dangerous feature of individual psychopathology is the parallel of an equally malignant social phenomenon: the subordination of the rational class of technicians to a paranoid leader and the efficiency-and even brilliance-of their amoral cooperation in carrying out his purposes.)"

Otto Kernberg's research also ties these etiologies of pathology into political systems where there's "socialized dishonesty" as in the former Soviet Union, and paranoia has a quality that allows one to see more enemies than there actually are and it becomes easy to betray people with psychotic false narratives that support social dishonesty in the form of rationalizations and excuses. For Kernberg, Narcissists have a tilt in their psychology in his drive theory which leans out of control because the Super-ego conscience is not missing like in a theoretical pure psychopath, but it failed to integrate properly. Integration is learning from trial and error and then reacting appropriately to many different types of stimuli and impingements. A lack of integration becomes a problem because if left untreated those negative patterns can become rigid. Those individuals will have lifelong problems with relationships and be a path of wreckage for others. Imperfect policing functions in a society can also be coopted by these types and they can end up jailing and killing the healthy people in the population. No one wants painful treatment and certainly they don't want to go to jail, so why not make the rest of the world a jail and preempt incarceration by incarcerating everyone else? This is an ever present worry because so many Cluster B types are not getting treatment and are acquiring powerful positions in society as a way to use leverage to force people into exchanges with them. "Once a pathological grandiose self infiltrated by aggression dominates psychic functioning in the absence of the moderating and maturing reliance on an integrated super-ego—can later psychosocial influences and, in particular, psychotherapeutic treatment help?"

Many people feel anger and negative emotions but they have quite a bit of control on them, sometimes too much control, but for personality disorders that tilt and lean towards aggression as a solution, there is much more acting out. "...Aggressive affect—and affective dysregulation related to inadequate cognitive control, on one hand, and the development of the syndrome of identity diffusion, on the other." Identity diffusion is a "lack of integration of the concept of self and significant others, a predominance of primitive defensive operations centering around splitting, and loss of reality testing. The basic function of the defensive operations of splitting and its derivatives (projective identification, denial, primitive idealization, omnipotence, omnipotent control, devaluation) is to keep separate the idealized and persecutory internalized object relations in order to prevent the overwhelming control or destruction of ideal object relations by aggressively infiltrated ones and thus to protect the capacity to depend on good objects." Essentially, the pathology of these defenses in identity diffusion is to protect the self from legitimate criticism, deny reality, and to prevent the feeling of shame or humiliation. If splitting is the source defense mechanism, that certain things are all good or all bad, the projective identification is to suggest to others that they do what is embarrassing for them as well as for the narcissist, to smear others as all bad to make one look like one is all good, because the false accusation is treated as a regular person pointing out what's wrong. The general public doesn't see it's a defense. Denial has a hope that realistic consequences can be avoided by short-cuts and magical attitudes that consequences will just go away, or hopefully be forgotten. Idealization helps to move a narcissist closer to people who have the aura of success and to bask in their light. Omnipotence has a strange benefit in that it gets one motivated to work, but success without the appropriate skill can't be defended by denial forever. Reality will set in eventually. Omnipotent control can work in the sense that would-be dictators can continually push the envelope with others, that is until the general public fights back to maintain their independence. Devaluation is a way to underrate something so as to make oneself rated better, but again, one can be overrated. Splitting is to make oneself into an object and to purify it's reputation through these defenses because they are successful enough to fool people, but only in the short-term.

Identity diffusion helps to create these false narratives where the projections make predictions about people in persecutory and paranoid ways, and as stated before, projection is not just a prediction but there's a self-interest in it which can distort it's accuracy. "I want to make a prediction that makes me look better." There's also a lack of reality in these false narratives and there's no attempt to get back in touch with it. We have to remember that Objects in the mind, which are memories of people, not the actual people, have emotional investment for us. We want them to be useful for us. "Reality testing refers to the capacity to differentiate self from non-self and intrapsychic from external stimuli, and to maintain empathy with ordinary social criteria of reality, all of which capacities are typically lost in the psychoses and are manifested particularly in hallucinations and delusions. The loss of reality testing reflects the lack of differentiation between self-representations and object representations under conditions of peak affect states, that is, a structural persistence of the symbiotic states of development." Essentially there are strong impulses that motivate action and their strength after being triggered becomes difficult to control. In social relationships, these fears and threats lead to affect states that move into splitting, which is to look at people as not mixed with good and bad qualities but they are treated as all good or all bad. This connects with idealization when a person is seen as useful, resourceful, and a powerful ally, then turns into devaluation when a sense of threat or independence is demonstrated in the social environment. Control tactics are used until they don't work and victims are ejected so that predatory behavior can find new targets who are amenable to the narcissist's fantasies. This can be seen in cults where there's precisely no reality to their promises and members eat their own as they fight off feelings of shame, if they are the types that feel shame. A reconstruction of the cult based on false narratives goes back to the same old behavior because one always has to be cocooned from reality to preserve the ideal. The only choice is to start again with new members and maybe new fantasies to organize projects around. Healthy organizations accept the reality and learn from it. Learning from reality and truth is a method to reduce shame when the capacity is there.

Cult Psychology: https://rumble.com/v1gvih9-cult-psychology.html

There can be a pathological loneliness in these organizations and relationships where the narcissist really can't trust people because he or she doesn't recognize another person's independence, because that independence has a sense of truth and truth is threatening. The illusory fantasy has to be reconstructed to soothe the defensiveness. "The primitive defenses centering around splitting attempt to protect these patients from the chaos in all object relations that stems from their loss of ego boundaries in intense relationships with others." Control mechanisms are highly aggressive at the outset so they intrude to the level of being intolerable and that's when victimization, theft, and violence can manifest in society. "Hatred aims at the destruction of a source of frustration perceived as sadistically attacking the self; envy is a form of hatred of another who is perceived as sadistically or teasingly withholding something highly desirable."

That feeling of teasing and withholding sounds a lot like pathological parenting. "These aspects of inborn dispositions toward the activation of aggression mediated by the activation of aggressive affect states complement the now well-established findings that structured aggressive behavior in infants may derive from early, severe, chronic physical pain and that habitual aggressive teasing interactions with the mother are followed by similar behaviors of infants." Like in the drive theory, there has to be a connection to the biology and Kernberg believes that many of these individuals may not be autotelic as Csikszentmihalyi describes, to have an ability to self-satisfy with creative goals. "Inborn thresholds for the activation of positive (pleasurable, rewarding) and negative (painful, aggressive) affects represent, I believe, the most important bridge between biological and psychological determinants of the personality." This partly increases the envy, and is the reason why many victims can be talented, beautiful, or just have the capacity for hobbies, interests, zest, pleasure and initiative. The disordered can sense that many people have a light they don't have and resent them for it. In a way the envy is partly justified because if there's a genetic predisposition, or at least a belief that this has happened, it feels like losing a lottery. It explains why pathological types tend to attack pleasure and want to flaunt their own pleasure and hypocrisy at you, because they hate your light, and the only soothing mechanism left for them is sadism and leveling, which is the activity of taking down perceived advantages in others to soothe low self-esteem.

Pathology stems from an inborn difficulty to soothe oneself, find interests in the world, and then the teasing and abuse solidifies the character in this direction of being almost like a villain. The patient is between a rock and a hard place because their desires are socially unacceptable, their genetic predisposition leads them to an inflexibility when it comes to having skills to self-soothe, and then when there's teasing and criticism, including justifiable criticism for real behaviors, the affect and shame responses are so high that defense mechanisms become the only reliable avenues to pursue. These types know that the only way people can be resourceful to them in their lives is if they find leverage and power in society to make contrived relationships with others based on dependence, like a micro-dictatorship, which can morph into a macro one when the leverage tilts society enough in one direction. "You need me so you can't reject me!"

What the healthy have that is different is an integrated Super-ego. "The normal personality is characterized, first of all, by an integrated concept of the self and an integrated concept of significant others. These structural characteristics, jointly called ego identity, are reflected in an internal sense and an external appearance of self-coherence and form a fundamental precondition for normal self-esteem, self-enjoyment, and zest for life. An integrated view of one’s self assures the capacity for a realization of one’s desires, capacities, and long-range commitments. An integrated view of significant others guarantees the capacity for an appropriate evaluation of others, empathy, and an emotional investment in others that implies a capacity for mature dependency while maintaining a consistent sense of autonomy. The second structural characteristic of the normal personality, largely derived from ego identity, is ego strength, particularly as reflected in a broad spectrum of affect dispositions, capacity for affect and impulse control, and capacity for sublimation in work and values (also contributed to in important ways by superego integration). Consistency, persistence, and creativity in work as well as in interpersonal relations are also largely derived from normal ego identity, as are the capacity for trust, reciprocity, and commitment to others, also codetermined in significant ways by superego functions. The third aspect of the normal personality is an integrated and mature superego, representing an internalization of value systems...reflected in a sense of personal responsibility, a capacity for realistic self-criticism, integrity as well as flexibility in dealing with the ethical aspects of decision-making, and a commitment to standards, values, and ideals, and it contributes to such aforementioned ego functions as reciprocity, trust, and investment in depth in relationships with others. The fourth aspect of the normal personality is an appropriate and satisfactory management of libidinal and aggressive impulses. This involves the capacity for a full expression of sensual and sexual needs integrated with tenderness and emotional commitment to a loved other and a normal degree of idealization of the other and the relationship. Freedom of sexual expression is integrated with ego identity and the ego ideal. A normal personality structure includes the capacity for sublimation of aggressive impulses in the form of self-assertion, for withstanding attacks without excessive reaction, and for reacting protectively and without turning aggression against the self. Again, ego and superego functions contribute to such an equilibrium."

Part of the fear of engulfment is the lack of skill of boundaries to be able to be with people without turning into a complete hive mind and just imitating everything that is around. "An integrated superego, as we have seen, in turn strengthens the capacity for object relatedness as well as autonomy: An internalized value system makes the individual less dependent on external confirmation or behavior control while facilitating a deeper commitment to relationships with others. In short, autonomy and independence and a capacity for mature dependence go hand in hand." Society needs you to cooperate but it also needs your individual abilities to point out new scientific knowledge, to push back to protect your boundaries, and it needs your individual talents and abilities to connect society because not everyone can be in the same place in the economy with bottlenecks and "weeding out" systems in employment, which would lead to the very problems we see described above with emotional insecurity. A healthy society needs varieties of personalities, strengths, specialties, products, and services to trade with one another. Power decentralizes and the need for authoritarian systems dwindle precisely because the public sees they don't need dictators to scaffold their sense of self and they would prefer more autonomy.

Kohut also saw the need for healthy forms of aggression so that Narcissistic Rage has to give way to Ego assertion and anger can burn off into energy for assertiveness, especially in areas where there are actual rewards so that tilt of aggression can move towards positive emotions and various forms of satisfaction. "...Such rage must not be confused with mature aggression. Narcissistic rage enslaves the ego and allows it to function only as its tool and rationalizer. Mature aggression is under the control of the ego, and the degree of its neutralization is regulated by the ego in conformance with the purposes for which it is employed. The mobilization of narcissistic rage is therefore not an end point in analysis, but the beginning of a new phase—a phase of working through which is concluded when ego dominance in this sector of the personality has been established." To control anger without false pretense or unhealthy suppression, the energy needs a target and that's why for Kohut, the analysand has to find values to create realistic and achievable goals around for that assertiveness to find satisfaction. "The transformation of narcissistic rage is not achieved directly—e.g., via appeals to the ego to increase its control over the angry impulses—but is brought about indirectly, secondary to the gradual transformation of the matrix of narcissism from which the rage arose. The analysand's archaic exhibitionism and grandiosity must be gradually transformed into aim-inhibited self-esteem and realistic ambitions; and his desire to merge into an archaic omnipotent self-object has to be replaced by attitudes that are under the control of the ego, e.g., by his enthusiasm for meaningful ideals and by his devotion to them."

A decisive shift happens when grudges and resentments gradually turn into new zestful goals and plans. If political groups are running amok or one's bosses or business leaders are getting lost, instead of harsh brutal attacks, one can focus on the reality of their mistakes and focus on realistic solutions so that humor and humanity is preserved in it's imperfection. Kohut could see these gradual improvements in his patients and a weakening of the defense of splitting. "He continued to complain about the current stand-ins for the archaic idealized figure (his father who had disappointed him in his early life), but his attacks became less bitter and sarcastic, acquired an admixture of humor, and were more in tune with the real shortcomings of those whom he criticized. And there was another remarkable change: while he had formerly nourished his grudges in isolation (even in the analytic sessions his complaints were predominantly soliloquy, not message), he now banded together with his fellow workers and was able to savor, in enjoyable comradeship with them, the pleasure, of prolonged bull sessions in which the bosses were taken apart. In still later stages of his analysis when the patient had already mastered a large part of his psychological difficulties, some anger at idealized figures for withholding their approval continued to be in evidence—but now there was not only benign humor instead of sarcasm, and companionship instead of isolation, but also the ability to see some positive features in those he criticized, side by side with their defects."

In the next episode, we'll take a deep dive into what politics looks like when one doesn't get therapy, when one hates oneself and has no outlet. Sure some people commit suicide like Otto Weininger, but for those who don't, you need someone to blame and vent against. Politics is full of splitting, projection, character assassination, delusions of grandeur, lies, deception, and social engineering. When we feel helpless, hopeless, unsuccessful, poor, and emotionally castrated, who are the authority figures and role models that trigger our our desire for revenge? A modern influence that has been ignored at peril was the Community Organizer Saul Alinsky. When it comes to where Alinsky would like to go after death, he would like a very warm place and continue where he left off.

Case Studies: Dora and Freud:https://rumble.com/v1gu2dt-case-studies-dora-and-freud.html

Saul Alinsky "I'd Organize Hell":https://www.openculture.com/2017/02/13-rules-for-radicals.html

"The reason I would pick hell, because that's where all the have-nots are...Once I got into hell I'd start organizing, just like I do down here. I'd be in heaven personally, because this is the thing that gives me the greatest happiness in life. Look out heaven, here we come. I'm sure there are a lot of grievances that a lot of people have, to be worked out one way or another...When we go in there, we organize them, so they can have power, by power I mean the ability to act where they can become citizens, they can have a place at the decision making table, have something to say about their own future, the future of their kids, and as a consequence, be part of the American family...In the world as it is, the real question has always been that this particular end is justified by this particular means. In the world as it is, you have to start from where you are, not from where you wish you would be...Look at the issue of representation. You may talk about how the poor should have political equality, and that we respect them and so forth, but we don't in fact. Mostly we consider them a bunch of poor slobs...There's nothing worse than the combination of not only power but of self-righteousness..."

The Analysis of The Self - Heinz Kohut:https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780226450124/

How Does Analysis Cure? - Heinz Kohut: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780226006000/

The Search For The Self - Heinz Kohut: Volume 1: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780367328702/ Volume 2: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9781855758742/ Volume 3: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780367328733/ Volume 4: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780429907890/

Aggressivity, Narcissism, and Self-Destructiveness in the Psychotherapeutic Relationship - Otto Kernberg: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780300101805/

Psychology: http://psychreviews.org/category/psychology01/

#fear of success #object relations #castrationcomplex #castration anxiety #Otto Kernberg #Heinz Kohut #ontological sickness