Saturday, December 2, 2023

The Psychology of Repressed Memories, Deja Vu, Anorexia Nervosa and our Fascination with Ghosts, Witches, the Misshapen (Modern Art) and Halloween


Deja vu is an uncanny feeling of having experienced before what one is experiencing in the present, while being aware that this is not true, yet without insight as to why this false recall (illusion) has made an inroad into one's consciousness.

The doctors too have little to tell us. Their boilerplate explanations that it is "cognitive uncertainty" caused by one part of the brain not connecting with another part quite correctly, and, therefore, two sets of memories are dissonantly getting stimulated, or it is some kind of temporal or hippocampal lobe epileptoid activity, all sound very profound but do they really tell anything?

 The first explanation is too broad and since it explains all other neurological and psychiatric disorders as well, other than giving an aura of punditry, explains nothing. Temporal lobe epilepsy while it may trigger some stored memory in some sufferers, which usually unfolds stereotypically, it does not quite give the feeling of deja vu but what was best summarized by a patient of mine as "Oh man, the shit is happening again". Furthermore, it does not happen while one is in full possession of one's mental faculties as in deja vu but in the context of varying degrees of clouded consciousness.

This patient who developed a pituitary tumor in his mid-twenties, and because of it psychomotor seizures, his symptoms clearly tell us that no matter what the learned articles say, Deja vu is a psychological phenomenon whose etiology must not be looked into the neurological substrate.  The seizures would begin with the exact same sequence of memory generation of being in a house where a conversation is going on between a few people, none of whom he knows, with a realization that of course this is fake (illusion) and he declared them to be the aura of the impending seizure. This would be followed by an intense paranoia of an imminent attack with the need to protect himself by covering his head with his hands, the accompanying anxiety so painfully intense that his stomach would churn into knots. These seizures, which at their zenith, before the tumor was removed, happened almost two to three times a week and since they  followed the same script unvaryingly, he viewed them as a text book case of deja vu. But a little reflection shows that while this patient, who is a philosophy major and very intelligent, thought of these seizures as a classic case of deja vu, they clearly are not. In deja vu what you are currently experiencing feels like you have experienced before, but no memory of that past experience emerges, just the (false) feeling of the current experience having been experienced before. In temporal, or other cortical, lobe seizure there is an actual emergence of memories that are unrelated to what you are experiencing in the present, and the realization of having experienced them before is nothing but a true recall of having experienced them before for they did occur during previous seizures. By the way, my patient made sure to tell me that the memory of 'being in a house and conversing with people he does not know' and 'the intense paranoia that he felt of being attacked' were not based upon any real memory of such events ever happening but entirely the product of the seizure caused by the impingement of the tumor upon the contiguous brain matter.    

Now Freud in his article on "The Uncanny" shows us that “the affect of uncanny" is generated when a repressed memory is triggered, and its derivatives make their way into consciousness. Not the entire repressed complex[1]  but only its transformed (distorted) offshoots. Some perceptual element/s common to the repressed complex and what one is currently experiencing gives the repressed memory the steppingstones to find representation in the conscious strata of the mind, with the aim of finding satisfaction for the libidinal impulses embedded in that repressed memory. The emergence of these derivatives in the perceptual consciousness gives an eerie feeling of something strange yet something quite familiar happening and something far more mysterious and powerful than meets the eye, and a sense of foreboding, if not outright dread. as if what is happening is something not natural but from some parallel (paranormal) world.

The feeling of strange yet familiar arises because what is now repressed and forbidden was once very familiar and lovingly pursued; and even encouraged by one's parents/caretakers to be indulged in. It is like how if one goes back after decades of absence to one's elementary school, or the house in which one grew up, everything looks so hauntingly strange and yet so familiar. The other emotions - mysterious and powerful - are aroused from a subliminal realization of the complexity and power of the unconscious mental processes against which our conscious control is no match. especially if they break through with all their vehemence. Our fascination with movies where half-man-half-beast like King Kong, Incredible Hulk, Werewolf, and of natural disasters like the Titanic, Contagion, Deep Sea, and of insanity itself, are our ode to this might of the unconscious. The aura of paranormal (supernatural) attached to the uncanny arises from a subliminal realization that the laws of logic and order that is the norm in the conscious mind do not operate in the unconscious where primary process (magical) thinking prevails as it does in the world of dreams, jokes, witchcraft, sorcery and the afterworld, where very strange things that defy laws of nature, that take no cognizance of the distance in time and space, and where one thing easily substitutes for another, can happen by just wishing them to happen.  It is a projection of one's own unconscious world, and its primary process illogical rules, upon the real world and a reaction to it which is a mixture of fascination, awe, and fear. 

But what are repressed memories? How are they different from other memories? If by repressed memories we mean those that cannot be retrieved, why would the brain even make them? Did not mnemic systems evolve so one can use the past as the template to more efficiently traverse the present?  Our inability to recall them certainly does not arise because they are so old and faded that they have withered away. For when the repression temporarily lifts, as in dreams, or after the resolution of a mental symptom (which in essence is a distorted, condensed, unfathomable part expression of a repressed complex), they are often vivid and clear.  And if they are not old and withered but blocked memories what is the factor that blocks them?  

Let's begin with the last question. The factor that blocks emergence of any memory is pain. Pleasurable memories are cherished while painful memories are shunned. Even a minor success is replayed over and over to fully savor its delight and to upgrade one's esteem of oneself, and whenever present feels like insurmountable and future ominous, one harks back to past memories of triumphs to bolster one's self confidence in facing the current uphill battle. And as far as pain is concerned the mind is not just averse to putting one's hand in fire but even of thinking about having put one's hand in fire if done so in the past. 

At this point an objection may be justly raised that like how Rod Stewart's song goes: “some guys do nothing but complain", at least a minority of mankind, composed of such guys and gals, must prefer painful over pleasurable memories as their default mode in remembering things past. The psychology of why people dredge up painful memories to ruin their day is interesting but on deeper examination does not contradict the most fundamental law of biology : a living organism moves away from pain (injury) and moves towards pleasure (accretion of satisfying objects from outside and excretion of painful ones from within) and this trend [which by the way was responsible for the separation of the animal kingdom from the plant through developing the ability to move towards and away from objects more rapidly] persists in the recording and recall of the memories of these movements of repulsion and attraction as well. Rod Stewart's complaining guys may be endlessly recounting the painful harm done to them but only because the pleasure of milking the victimhood (secondary gain from drawing concessions from others thorough exhibition of one's miseries) outweighs the pain (which through repeated recounting and redoing (embellishments) may hardly be painful anymore).[2]

Coming back to the main thread. So do all painful memories get repressed? No. While plenty of painful memories exist which the mind rather not think about, they can still be recalled when it is important to do so (with the ego willing to tolerate the momentary unpleasantness for long term pleasure) repressed memories on the other hand are those painful memories that cannot be recalled despite the person wanting to do so. Ordinary traumatic memories, no matter how painful, remain accessible.  A soldier returning from war loathes to talk about the mayhem and gore he left behind and actively distracts his mind from thinking about it, but that does not mean he cannot recall them if required to do so. In fact, in the beginning, despite his utmost desire to do the contrary, they dart into his consciousness as intrusive thoughts during the day and as nightmares in his dreams.  This is to "magically" undo (attempts to erase it by pretending as if the event never happened, substituting it with wishful imaginary situations in which one could have been at that time [imaginary alibis]) and redo the trauma (retrospective attempts to obtain mastery over it) by replaying it over and over again and embellishing and remodeling the truth to better fit with one's ideal image of oneself. So painful memories due to straightforward trauma are unwanted, but not inaccessible.  

Repressed memories on the other hand either cannot be recalled at all or if they do emerge in to the consciousness, it is after a struggle with the mental forces which want to keep them repressed and unless it is a light temporary repression (like when one forgets a dinner appointment till the time of it is long past, or mislays the cell phone, or suddenly cannot recall the name of the person which he could a few minutes ago) a deeply buried repressed memory from childhood has to go through considerable distortion (imposed by ego using such defensive cognitive processes as displacements,  condensation, reversals, ellipsisms, representation through allusions and ambiguity) so the true nature and intent of what emerges is unfathomable, and does not quite fit in with the coherent structure of the rest of the mental activity that one is engaged upon.  

Is it because childhood repressed memories are more painful than ordinary traumatic memories and therefore more strongly buried? No. In fact the repressed memories once upon a time were not even painful but pleasurable memories and therefore are constantly striving to enter into consciousness and have to be repelled back by the efforts of the coherent rational part of the mind (ego), and while this is accomplished by the generation of pain too, the pain did not arise from accidental traumas but by the pain programmed into the human nature as part of its psychosexual developmental process. Human species psychosexuality goes through several stages before reaching its final shape and each stage after the initial phase of ascendency undergoes de-escalation to make room for the next one. And this decline of age-inappropriate sexual expressions is achieved through the creation of pain. Repression is literally the result of "growing pains". For repressed memories are memories of sexual experiences (gratifications) to which pain was added to make them irretrievable. Even at the risk of redundancy let me restate the phenomenon in a few more ways since there is so much confusion even among the experts as to what is the metapsychology of repressed memories. Our psychosexual development requires that with the attainment of every new milestone the previous ones for the most part must bow out of action (at least their direct expression) through getting subjected to repression. Repressed memories originally were pleasurable to which pain was added later on to block the drives embedded in them from moving into consciousness and from there to motility to obtain discharge (satisfaction).  And why does this happen? Because the development of sexuality to its final stage (heterosexual genital contact leading to reproduction) is a complicated affair. Prior to reaching that stage, earlier phases of psychosexuality first blossom and then undergo repression. All sprouting of sexuality from the time one was on mother’s breast to when one is ready to make love to one's heterosexual partner for reproduction cannot find equal representation in the act. Most of the sexual strivings have to be pruned out. Just how the mother was the most ardently loved sexual object during the Oedipal phase becomes an object of queasy repulsion when thoughts of having sex with her is imputed to a grown man[3]. As the human sexuality marches from oral-incorporative to anal-sadistic, to phallic-exhibitionistic, to genital-altruistic, and from autoerotic (organ pleasure) to narcissistic to homosexual to heterosexual, each succession results in much of the previous phases becoming age inappropriate and subject to repression (with only their aim-inhibited sublimated expressions continuing to find limited outlets in social behaviors). The satisfaction of the now dethroned drive which previously just brought pleasure at its discharge now brings pain more than pleasure. One part of the mind experiences pleasure while another part pain. It is this pain that initiates repression. The generation of pain arouses the feeling of having done something wrong (guilt) for which one is experiencing displeasure. This guilt (having done something wrong) is connected with the harboring of temptations to give into forbidden sexual impulses. There is anticipation of harm for this guilt which is experienced as anxiety. The anxiety initiates a cascade of events. There is the impulse to withdraw from the entire situation but since, unlike animals, humans rarely can run away with their feet from their problems they do the second-best thing which is withdrawal of perceptual-consciousness from the unpleasurable problem (like the ostrich digging its head in the sand to avoid the unpleasant perception). This withdrawal of consciousness from troubled situations and memories is what repression is all about. The impulse to withdraw initiates other motor behaviors as well. Different scenarios of making the escape, which though not acted out and mostly remaining in the unconscious as thoughts, nevertheless cause preparedness for running away, keeping the muscles in high state of alert and tension. This muscle tension is compounded by impulses that arise to do the opposite of the libidinal behaviors (austere and altruistic practices)[4] as an appeasement to the punishing agency (superego). There is also the generation of impulses to fight back instead of running away from those (or rather their psychic representations) who originally made these pleasurable impulses painful (the tension between the ego and the superego). Generation of these motor tensions from various directions is subjectively felt as a sense of oppression, mental and bodily heaviness, body aches and pains, chronic fatigue, immobility (different shades of catatonia), body posture distortions (hunchback syndrome), and motor overactivity and visceral secretions from gastrointestinal, respiratory and other mucosal surfaces (psychosomatic illnesses). Since our repressed complexes are always being tempted to move towards motility and satisfaction, we are always suffused with different degrees of counter motor-tensions and the default status of human beings is that of mild guilt, [moral] anxiety and subminimal body pain.  

From where arises this pain that makes sexually pleasurable behaviors into painful ones leading to their repression?  It is done through upbringing. Human culture through the agency of parents, teachers and other grownups who are viewed as parent substitutes, use many methods to generate the repressive pain: disapproval, criticism, shaming, punishment, including corporal, deprivation of other sources of pleasures as a punishment for indulging in the age-inappropriate sexual, threat of withdrawal of parental love and threat of genital mutilation itself (castration).  Also, the later stages of psychosexuality sends inhibitory impulses to make the previous stages non-operative.  A two-year-old who just recently was putting everything that was coming its way into the mouth now show little interest in doing so in favor of tearing them apart and later in preserving and accumulating them as part of his collections. Similarly, a child of four deeply into exhibiting his acrobatics feels shame and disgust at his excretion which just a year or so ago he treasured and refused to part with. A fully grown man who makes a show of himself as a means to win love (phallic exhibitionism), instead of winning the desired woman by loving her attributes, provokes embarrassment in the onlookers.  

In case where there is seduction of the child, or worse still sexual molestation and abuse, repressive process takes very twisted and drastic measures. It is because a premature stimulation of sexuality before the ego has developed enough to contain it properly, causes it to become inordinately strong. With the prepubertal child's sexual apparatus not yet capable of responding genitally, the oral and anal routes of sexual discharge become overactive, burdening the individual with pathologically strong pregenital sexuality, an aversion to genital sexuality, and a host of mental illnesses, primarily anxiety.[5] An interesting corollary to this is that in some people despite normal upbringing, and no seduction or molestation, on growing into adulthood, memories emerge of having been seduced in their infancy, in some as early as immediately after birth, and worse still that they were brutally sexually abused and it is their parents and other caretakers, in some cases bizarre parental substitutes like aliens from outer space, whom they accuse of being the perpetrators. These false memories are a return of the repressed, and do have a kernel of truth to them, but with a qualification, actually a major one: it is an actual return of the repressed memories alright but with so much distortion that the fantasies (formed from hearing or reading about something similar happening to others from later periods of life) replace the real content of what was originally repressed. 

At this point it dawns upon us that repressed memories are subjected to falsification which is not the case with simply traumatic memories. The latter are embellished, sometime quite extensively, but only in order to show everything that happened in a light favorable to one's self image. But no matter how long time back in time it occurred, and how much it was embellished, the basic outline of the ordinary traumatic memory is not trifled with. Repressed memories on the other hand may show so much distortion that they often put the truth upon its head. Having had sexual seduction and intercourse with aliens alighting from flying saucer may replace the original sexual memory of being tucked in bed by doting parents. It also now dawns upon us that repression is a psychodynamic conflict where two forces contend with each other, one pressing for the right to move towards consciousness, motility and discharge and other trying to keep it immobile and unrepresented.  In simple traumatic memories there is no such dynamic process and no attempt to make its content unfathomable. Also, this psychodynamic process fluctuates and it represses memories differently at different times influenced by the emotional state of the person. What is repressed at the moment or during the daytime may not be repressed a little later or in the confines of the bedroom while making love. Also, what may remain repressed while one is acting as an individual may not remain so in a group, especially if one is part of a marauding mob or a soldier in war or a participant in a Roman Orgy.  It also dawns upon us that repression is a much wider phenomenon than just suppression of memories. Finally, simply traumatic memories fade with time with the degree of its obliteration is proportional to how long back the trauma occurred, unlike repressed memory where its recall and freshness depends upon what is happening in the present which is resonating with it.   

Since whatever was once pleasurable cannot be fully extinguished by pain, the earlier stages of libidinal drives, even after subjection to the societal and parental disapproval, continue their subterranean existence, continue to demand satisfaction, though mostly in their non-sexualized (aim-inhibited) forms. The activities of these non-sexualized aims give individuals their personality and character and together the human culture. Rewards are meted out by the parents and society in general for practicing these aim-inhibited and therefore now ostensibly asexual behaviors, in fact now subjected to so much transformation and sublimation that they are often outright hostile to the original sexual intentions. We also now realize that repression is brought about by now just pain but by rewarding behaviors that replace the originally sexual behaviors. In fact this rewarding of the antithetical behaviors may be a more potent force in maintaining the repression than the memory of the pain that occurred when the behavior was punished. For whenever one is sexually tempted these contrary moral/good/self-preservatory/purpose driven behaviors because they were rewarded while sexual were punished, spring to the forefront. These non-sexual good behaviors become the defensive wall and the forefront of the personality (ego) that keeps the raw (untamed) sexual behaviors submerged and unable to see the light of consciousness and action. By teaching and rewarding these contrary behaviors (anti-cathexis), the repressed behavior is kept in subordination. Whenever the repressed behavior is activated by some temptation, instead of it coming to the consciousness the behavior that opposes it usurps its space. The most drastic of such anti-cathexis (countermeasures) to keep repressed sexuality from moving towards action is seen in the disorder of Anorexia Nervosa. Here the desire to "pig out" on sexuality (oro-genital sexual gratification (fellatio)/orgiastic fusion with multiple men) is combated by its reversal (bulimia) and by the rejection of one food item after the another - which by their association with the oral and anal phases of sexuality produce disgust - to the point that all libidinal drives (life itself) are rejected. Every piece of body fat and gain in weight becomes the symbol of the failure of repression and a reminder of the loss of control over one's sexuality. Here the repression does not just kill the sexuality but kills the person itself. But all psychoneurotic symptoms can be conceptualized as a fusion between repressed impulses that have broken through into consciousness (albeit in displacement and with their true nature hidden through distortion obtained by admixing with the memories of non-sexual drives) and the anti-cathectic counter impulses.  

How does stimulation of the repressed complex trigger the anti-cathectic (repressive) behaviors? The memories of the punishments received in the past that had enabled the sexual impulses to be repressed are also activated, generating the affect of pain, a sense of doing something wrong (guilt), and forebodings of further punishment (anxiety). To ward of this anxiety (anticipated punishment) the memories of the behaviors that in the past prevented the punishment and pain for giving into libidinal satisfactions emerge - the good behaviors that were the opposite of the sexual behavior. And one starts practicing these good behaviors to quell the anxiety and maintain the repression. Human civilization arose as a byproduct of this endless pressure upon the members of its species to keep doing these good deeds to prevent the instinctual impulses  from breaking into consciousness and obtaining satisfaction. These good deeds, when closely examined. are behaviors to enable others (parental and once hated siblings but who one was exhorted to love by the parents) to enjoy pleasures which one must deny to oneself. It is as my medical school motto says: "Not to be ministered unto, but to minister". It is a form of apology (appeasement) for possessing unruly sexual impulses but whose existence even, ironically, one has no clue due to their subjection to repression. What appears in consciousness is the need for constant vigilance and a compulsion to be doing something useful and purposeful (protective measures to prevent this harm from happening to oneself and to one's dear ones). The 'purpose driven life’, ‘only a life lived for others is a life worthwhile', all these are mottos concocted to justify why we are always running like a chicken with its head cutoff to appease society (which as we grow up becomes the representative of the parents) to avert punishment and thus control the ever-present anxiety. Human being is best described not as rational, political, or economical animal but a anxious animal – Homo Anxietus as a patient of mine once put it. A Chinese proverb sums it: Dog always looking for food, man always looking for trouble. If there are no fires to put out, he will start a fire to put it out to get rid of the feeling of having done something wrong. And this harm he always sees as arising from his transgressions in his non-sexual conduct, instead of where it truly arises: his fear of harm for inadvertently relaxing his reins over his sexuality.

Which repressed memories the ego finds most difficult to keep under control? Undoubtedly the ones arising from the Oedipal Complex. They contain the child's most powerful sexual and aggressive impulses. And it is these repressed memories from the Oedipal phase, or rather their fragments, which when they manage to make into the perceptual apparatus, since they do not fit in with rest of the what is going on there at that point, are felt as odd piece of mental activity, and generate the affect of uncanny.   

Is Deja vu a variation of the uncanny? Now the whole world of paranormal fascinates us because of it being uncanny.  Attraction towards ghosts, goblins and witches, misshapen humans and other weird looking anthropomorphized entities, animate and inanimate, which strike horror in us and give us the creeps, are at bottom our compulsion to revisit our repressed Oedipal phase. Movies of haunted houses, twilight zone, even the modern art where body parts do not go where they should but are weirdly torn off (castrated) and put all over the canvass, are a magnet for us y because of the theme of castration that underlies them. They are renewed attempts to repeat our relationship with the attractive and fearful dimensions of our parents that we experienced during the Oedipal phase and to master our castration anxiety (fear of loss of love being the substitution of castration complex in females). One must qualify that all of it is done in displacement and without a clue to our conscious mind as to why we are compelled to do it. On being asked why one finds scary bloody figures so fascinating, all one gets back is “for thrills”, without any insight (such is the power of the repressive forces) as why nasty horrifying things should attract alongside the repulsion.    

 Mutilation, gore, misplacement of body parts, which comprise much of the artwork of Halloween - coming to think of it all modern art - once again echo the castration complex.  In Halloween we see all variations of the theme of castration: mutilated and defective scary figures, the dreaded castration already realized, and also representing the retaliatory castration of the parents, the fleeing ghosts and other retreating monstrous figures. Funky, shiny, oversized, loud, colorful, ostentatious, opulent features in adorning oneself is denial and depiction of castration by reversal and by multiplication.   

Let us see if we have any other support for our inference that fascination with ghosts and other paranormal things is to redo our repressed Oedipal past. The Sanskrit (Hindi) word for ghost is bhoot. But bhoot also means the past. Both concepts have split off from a common Indo-European word-root and perhaps return of the past is from where the idea of ghosts developed.  But not everything from the past is spooky. It is the return of the "repressed past" that gives us the creeps. That the fear of ghosts and witches has an intimate connection with our infantile love for our parents was driven home to me many decades ago when a niece of mine asked me as to why she dreams of bhoot and chudails (ghosts and witches). She dreamt of these unsavory parodies of human form in haunted mansions.  Now this 15-year-old teenager was still very attached to her parents. She took pride in telling everybody she intends to become a kindergarten teacher and live with her parents for the rest of her life. Behind this resolve was filial devotion and never to transfer her libido from them to strangers. Associations to the dream elements revealed that the ghosts and spooky creatures were her parents, the haunted mansions - her mother's womb. Because of her attractive looks she had begun to garner attention from potential suitors, and it had stimulated her sexuality hitherto in wraps of Indian virtue which encourages celibacy. And there was guilt too over shifting her love away from her parents to these new objects. Not her love for her parents as they were now, which was aim-inhibited and desexualized but her love for them as she had loved them in the Oedipal phase with the full measure of eroticism and passion behind it. An intrapsychic conflict had developed. Oedipal love for her parents wanting to keep her attached to them contending with the love that wanted to be free of parental influence and unfettered in loving extra-familial objects with full erotic fervor. In the daytime she could ignore the beckoning of her parents' pull to take no interest in others. But in night repression partially suspended, the parents were haunting her as ghosts and witches to stick to loving them and not others. The fear of their wrath for taking this developmental step was transforming them into Halloween look-alike ghosts and witches instead of how they looked in real life. There is nothing too farfetched in seeing how once the most beautiful and wonderful looking parents with time turn into ghosts and witches at least in the dreams. The girl who looked like a doll when one was passionately in love with her before marriage, turns into the ugliest looking shrew if the marriage fails and one is dragged through the dirt of a bitter divorce.  

Do I have anything else to support the claim that ghosts, witches and other paranormal entities are fear of our past grabbing and pulling us back from life's present concerns?

 In rural India, the first diagnosis the villagers will give to someone amongst them slipping into mental illness is "bewitched" - by which they mean that some chudail (witch) has put a spell on him to love nothing other than her (with chudail [witch] being the dreaded dimension of the mother) - or "possessed" - by which they mean a bhoot (ghost) has taken over his functioning (the ghost being the fear of father escalated to demonic proportions.  And there is nothing too radical in viewing mental illnesses as being haunted by the past. For one way to look at hysterics is to see them as victims of their reminiscences. Being possessed by "Maata" (mother) was a frequent occurrence among Hindu housewives, and entering into "Haal", in which one self-flagellates, identifying oneself with the suffering and death of Imam Hussain  (father substitute) in Shia Muslims, are other examples of mental illnesses being a return of the past into the present.   

I am not much of a Deja vu person. I can recall only one episode of it in my life. It happened when I was 12 years old, at Raman Maharshi's ashram, in Tiruvannamalai, Tamilnadu. My mother, like the lama-in-search-of-the-sacred-stream in Rudyard Kipling's Kim, was always in search of something; an unquenchable thirst to find that [supernatural] elixir that would transform everything.  And for that end, without ever taking a break, but never ignoring the mundane aspects of life either, she was always on the go, from one spiritual endeavor to the next. In this quest she always initially overestimated the Gurus and other wise men, even conventionally successful men, convinced that they had found the key to life's secrets and possessed secret supernatural prowess and then dropped them as hot potatoes on quickly seeing through them that they were as plagued by petty concerns of life as rest of us. And the search for enlightenment was not from just the living, but also from the books of past masters. Her favorite books were. P D Ouspensky's "In Search of the Miraculous”, G. I Gurdjieff's "All and Everything", Madame Blavatsky’s “The Secret Doctrine",  Jaishankar Prasad's  Kamayeni, Lobsang Rampa's and Marie Corelle's entire anthology.  Bhagwan Rajneesh (Osho) and she were friends for years, when he was just a lecturer in Philosophy at Robertson College, Jabalpur, where she was Associate Professor in Hindi and Linguistics. Her broad sweep also incorporated learning from classic religions, and not for the sake of earning piety brownies but to make sense of the real values present in them. Her interpretations of Vedas, Puranas, Upanishads, without any formal training in Sanskrit, was not just brilliant, but different with every new listener. The Sikhs of Jabalpur revered her for her commentaries on Guru Granth Sahib.

One day, when she was at the zenith of her intellectual powers and her search, in her late thirties, on reading Paul Brunton, "In Search of Secret India", where Raman Maharshi was described as an enlightened one, she packed our bags and headed 1300 miles away, a three day train journey and a bus ride, to his ashram, tucked in the very heart of Tamil Nadu. 

 Mind you, when this happened, the Maharshi was already dead and by about a dozen years. But, perchance, his spirit was still hovering on this planet? Maybe his last act here, in which he attained Moksha and now reborn on another more evolved planet to continue his spiritual journey, was to enlighten her.

From the bus station we took a tonga. As we approached the ashram a majestic mountain came upon the horizon. It was breathtaking. How grand the ashram would be if such a beautiful green mountain was its backdrop. We eagerly waited for Maharshi's abode to appear which would be perhaps grander than the exponentially expanding mountain. And then came the disappointment. If the ultimate answers of life were to be obtained in those scattered ordinary houses with a central structure where uninspired devotees were doing their routine, for such was the overall ambiance of that ashram, God certainly was acting in mysterious ways to show his magnificence.   

Looking at my mother, I wondered if she was experiencing the same disappointment.  She was. And then out of nowhere I had a feeling that I had been in that place before. Everything looked familiar and I exclaimed, "This place looks very familiar. It feels as I have been here before." 

My mother immediately took notice of what I had said and from her expressions I could deduce that she had telepathically joined with me in thinking what I was thinking. The year was 1963, I was 12 years old, and Maharshi had died in 1950, could it be possible that his soul has transmigrated and the child she was carrying in 1950-51, that is me, was his reincarnation. The deja vu definitely had a motive. It was not due to some cognitive uncertainty caused by one part of the brain defectively communicating with another or sudden sprouting of temporal lobe epilepsy, but something happening in a clear headed child who was so much in tune with his mother's needs that to cheer up her sagging spirits and of course to draw her obsession with all these wise men who would give her what she was seeking back to himself as if to tell her why you run after these men, when your own son is as worthy of your interest as them; in fact he is as good as the very reincarnation of the Maharshi.

Was there a repressed element in this experience of deja vu? While not at all obvious, there is little doubt that behind the feeling that I had been there in that ashram before there was an element of claim for Oedipal love. For the deja vu was making a declaration to her to not let your spirits sag and be disappointed once again, for in this enclave your son once resided as the Maharshi. It was the emergence of the repressed Oedipal love. For there was also a very vague subliminal fear as we alighted off the tonga would my mother find the Maharshi's presence there despite his death, with his spirit still hovering there and would she be then swept off her feet by it into enlightenment that she has been so desperately seeking and stay back here and I will lose her. There was a fear of Oedipal defeat to this new rival Maharshi (father surrogate). Was there a feeling of uncanny in that experience of deja vu? There was something uncanny about the idea of the soul of that great sage after his death making a journey into the womb of someone who was pregnant at that time and beginning its reincarnation there. Such a thing was only possible through the magical medium of the paranormal, for in the real world souls of the dead do not travel 1300 miles and sneak inside a growing conception of unknown and unrelated person. 

While my patients rarely report deja vu and the phenomenon may be more frequent in movies and songs than in real life, a friend of mine, Xenia, reported to me that she does experience feelings of deja vu frequently. And in contrast to finding them uncanny she finds them as warm and fuzzy. They happen when she is in stress or in a situation where she feels like a fish out of water and then the feeling of deja vu takes over and she feels warm and comfortable, the situation no longer alien, and she back in her element. 

She insisted that the deja vu in her is the intrusion of womb fantasy, and done not in dreams where it makes such a great percentage of her dream life, but brazenly during the waking hours itself. Now sleep itself from one way of looking is a return of the individual back to the womb. From tiring hustle bustle of life to a temporary break in to few hours of as-close-to-death as we can manage. We try to make our sleeping ambiance as close to the intrauterine existence as we can, excluding all sounds and lights, covering ourselves with warm comforters (to make it even more intrauterine, insomniacs crave for weighted ones to simulate the cramped position), curling ourselves into a ball [fetal position], and still not feeling protected, especially when our life at that point loaded with worries of the real world, we dream in which we see ourselves retreating into closed safe places. All through life we, tired of the alien hostile world, are struggling to reach back into mother's womb, which once was the only place we knew and hence the most familiar. As Freud on his treatise on Uncanny states: It often happens that male patients declare that they feel there is something uncanny about the female genital organs. This unheimlich [uncanny in German] place, however, is the entrance to the former heim [home] of all human beings, to the place where everyone dwelt once upon a time and in the beginning. There is a humorous saying : 'Love is homesickness'; and whenever a man dreams of a place or country and says to himself, still in the dream, 'this place is familiar to me, I have been there before', we may interpret the place as being his mother's genitals or her body. In this case, too, the unheimlich is what was once heimisch, home-like, familiar; the prefix 'un' is the token of repression.   

It is interesting the deja vu is far more prevalent in dreams than in real life. While dreaming we often suddenly realize "Oh, I have been in this place before or I have dreamt this before." Some people have recurrent dreams for years and in which as soon as it begins they realize that they have dreamt this or something similar to it before. A purist may object that this a phenomenon of the dream world and should not be confused with the deja vu of waking life which happens while one is in full possession of one's faculties. But I tend to see this phenomenon of the sleep world as no different than the deja vu of waking life. 

And just like in dreams this assurance to oneself oh I have seen this place in my previous dreams or I have dreamt this before is to lessen the anxiety connected with the dream, making it less disturbing by saying don't panic, its contents are already familiar to you so keep on sleeping and dreaming instead of waking out of it, the feeling of deja vu occurs to make the person feel comfortable and less intimidated when in a frightening or strange situation. What it does is to say that don't panic, don't get too intimidated. You have already been in this situation before and so you will once again handle it with flying colors.   

 



[1] for that will be so overwhelming that instead of getting feelings of uncanniness or deja vu one would be sent straight into the oblivion of severe headache and incapacitation with no possibility of the repressed impulses getting any representation in the perceptions other than of the self-punishment of headache.

[2] A few further corollaries: the pain of nursing  past injustices can be utilized to justify that one's lack of success in life is because other people harmed and obstructed one thus shifting the blame of failed ambitions from oneself to others with the pain generated from mulling over the harm done to them being felt comparatively less painful than the pain from coming to terms with one's true worth; a painful grievance may be nursed till one's last breath in the hope of eventually comparatively greater pleasure coming one's way through revenge (keeping grievance stoked for revenge is what lies behind the burning ambition of humans and gives rise in languages to such metaphors as fire in the belly, touched by fire etc.); and wallowing in painful memories may serve the function of shifting the human need for self-punishment (self-injury/masochism) arising from the Oedipal phase and other unprocessed traumas, from being acted out in real life, which is more inimical, to just experiencing it through invoking painful memories of humiliation and harm one has been subjected to in the past. 

 [3] The origin of why mother-fucker is the most insulting epithet one can inflict on any man across the globe

[4] Religious rituals are socially doing the opposite of indulging in private sexual rituals to appease God.

[5] The current massive increase in anxiety disorder is because our children are getting seduced and sexually molested from the tenderest age, though the perpetrator is not some grown person but the ubiquitous presence of television and other visual images on the social media which are highly erotic. 



Saturday, March 18, 2023

The similarity of the Primal Scene dreams across cultures and time.

Witnessing parental intercourse (the Primal Scene),  dreading or experiencing castration (fear of or experiencing body mutilation in man; in woman obscure memories, or just mere conviction of having been subjected to some painful victimization in her prehistoric past {the period of infantile amnesia}, when some part of her, perhaps the penis, which she did once possess, got brutally taken away from her, in all probability by the father {the endless source of the woman's grudge against men and the muse of feminism}, and in which the mother also participated in some fashion, and because of this betrayal she {the mother} deserves her {daughter's} rage {woman's unrelenting ambivalence towards her mother and her sex}and which {the stealing of her penis}, eventually, one way or another, by hook or crook, perhaps by solving some great knot/riddle, or by simply being troublesome,  paradoxical and inscrutable in her designs and behaviors {enigmatic nature of the female sex}, she will reverse), and seduction by parent or parent substitute, are three Primal Fantasies that Freud enumerated in his Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis and in his analysis of the Wolfman's Neurosis and Dream.

 I must clarify here that Wolfman was not like a centaur, wolf in his lower half and human above his waist from some psychoanalytic miscegenation experimentation gone awry or a werewolf who had to be transformed back into 100 percent human upon the psychoanalytic couch but a very rich Russian aristocrat who sought Freud's help in resolving his obsessional neurosis and phobia of wolves, a fear which had first emerged in a nightmare at the age of four. A dream which so dramatically portrayed his terror of wolves that the followers of Freud dubbed him as Wolfman and his case history, perhaps the finest description of the anatomy of a neurotic mind, as Wolfman's case. Psychoanalysts are not above dramatization and sensationalism to escape the arduous task of actually understanding mental issues. 

 Are there other primal fantasies?

 An interesting question. It is a safe bet that nobody has added anything new to Freud's discoveries of these Primal Fantasies. The trouble with Freud's genius is that whatever he observed he observed  so deeply, and described it so shorn of neurotic clutter, that the latter day psychoanalysts are stumped in adding anything of significance that goes beyond what Freud has already described or hinted at.

Whence do these primal fantasies come from and what role they play in our psychic development? The fantasies like everything else that passes intergenerationally are precipitates from the species phylogenetic past. Which means that once upon a time they were regular part of the species behavior.  In our prehistoric past it must have been common for children - when perhaps the clothes were not yet invented and humans did not conceal their sexual behavior from others that scrupulously - to easily witness parental intercourse. One may interpolate here that with the emergence of the Internet and Social Media, this prehistoric past is reemerging and may have something to do with the exponential rise in anxiety and transgender behavior worldwide. Also in some epoch of our prehistory (See Freud's book Totem and Taboo when humans lived in primal horde {by horde Freud meant small clans like a pack of wolf or pride of lions} under the protection of a despotic polygamous father who dominated the clan brutally) it must have been common for the father to castrate his sons once they reached the age to pose threat to his supremacy and also for him to routinely take his daughters as his mates in order to sexually possess all the females in the clan.  

Now in human children ontogeny recapitulates the above three phylogenetic experiences. Which means that reexperiencing them in human development has some evolutionary purpose. But the fact that it is not reexperienced as acted out behaviors but only as phantasies means that the evolutionary and cultural imperatives have made these behaviors obsolete in practice though they must still be bringing some benefit from reemerging in the psyche. Actual witnessing of parental intercourse (in fact exposure to any form of direct expression of genital sexuality before puberty) there is a general consensus is harmful for the psychosocial development of the child and  modern day fathers do not castrate their sons nor take their daughters as their wives.  But the inclination to do so persists and the phylogenetic memories of these once practiced behaviors do emerge as phantasies. It must be clarified these phantasies undergo considerable distortion before they make it into the consciousness - and mostly do so in dreams where distortion is the language of the day - making them almost unfathomable. They first appear during the Oedipal phase, around the age of 3 to 5, when they act as impulsions in the child to discover the core nature of the relationship (which at the bottom of course is sexual) between the parents and to provoke and attempt sexual satisfaction from the parents/parent substitutes even if it involves dealing with the dreaded  issue of castration. The seduction is not with just one parent at a time while wishing the other parent to disappear (die) - the positive and negative Oedipal Complex - but with both the parents simultaneously (precursor of the perversion of orgies and orgiastic fusion and its sublimation in to seeking oneness with entire humanity, the wellspring of human spirituality/religion/interlinking art designs). On meeting frustration in these endeavors which is the norm (though unfortunately not always, and if actual seduction does occur it causes severe distortions in the person's psychosexual development) these impulsions find satisfactions either in other pursuits (social and cultural goals/aim-inhibited goals) or are repressed back into the unconscious for them to try another attempt at satisfaction after puberty with new objects. The repressed components continue to operate throughout our lives forming the backbone of our characters. They also forge our psychosexual expressions in all our subsequent relationships and if we fall mentally ill provide the blueprint of our neuroses. Recognizing the manifestations of these primal fantasies in their myriad forms, and unravelling the distortions and displacements they undergo before emerging in the patients' consciousness and communications, is the heart of psychoanalytic treatment. It may not be perhaps an error to consider that the formation of the Superego (the heir of the Oedipus Complex as Freud put it) owes to the frustration, or rather the restrain the child and parents have to practice, in finding direct satisfaction of these phylogenetic fantasies in their relationship. Greater the direct sexualization (erotic arousal) when these phantasies are acted out by the child with the parents, greater will be the defects in his superego and more will be the child robbed off its full quota of sexuality in loving non-familial people later in life. 

In this essay I will present a few dreams of the Primal Scene and will show how its expression is so alike across cultures and time.  

What is most remarkable about them is as to how some of the details of the manifest content show similarity to Wolfman's Dream (the prototypical Primal Scene Dream of psychoanalysis), even though in the latter the manifest scenes were derived from the fairy tales of "The Wolf and Seven Little Goats", "The Little Red Riding Hood" and "The Tailor and the Tailless Wolf". It only goes to show that the fairy tales are derived from our phylogenetic heritage too.. 

For those who have not read Freud's History of an Infantile Neurosis let me give here the Wolfman's dream that will make it easier to follow what I write here:

"I dreamt that it was night and that I was lying in bed. (My bed stood with its foot towards the window; in front of the window there was a row of old walnut trees. I know it was winter when I had the dream, and night-time.) Suddenly the window opened of its own accord, and I was terrified to see that some white wolves were sitting on the big walnut tree in front of the window. There were six or seven of them. The wolves were quite white, and looked more like foxes or sheep-dogs, for they had big tails like foxes and they had their ears pricked like dogs when they pay attention to something. In great terror, evidently of being eaten up by the wolves, I screamed and woke up. My nurse hurried to my bed, to see what had happened to me. It took quite a long while before I was convinced that it had only been a dream; I had had such a clear and life-like picture of the window opening and the wolves sitting on the tree. At last I grew quieter, felt as though I had escaped from some danger, and went to sleep again."


And now back to my patients' primal scene dreams, I will begin with a dream whose structure could be penetrated with fair certainty and the latent content could be easily guessed from theoretical considerations and from the presence of typical dream symbols. The dream had been written by the patient as soon as he woke up and I reproduce it here unchanged. 

I was dreaming that I was inside of a whale and another whale was passing by. I was being crushed from the other whale.  A large weight was pressing on me from the side. I felt that I was the whale and the two whales were pushing heavy from on top of me. 

The patient who suffers from paranoid disorder, but is remarkably intelligent, artistically gifted, familiar with the technique of dream interpretation, and quite aware of the "womb fantasy" - escaping the pains and sorrows of living in the harsh realities of the world by returning to the mother's womb - from the analysis of previous similar dreams, had no difficulty in recognizing even as he was writing the dream down that being inside the whale symbolized his crawling back to his mother's womb and taking respite there. 

He was puzzled however as to why the second whale was pressing upon him. When asked what thoughts come to his mind in connection with that he could first think of nothing, but a few minutes later, while the session had moved to some other topic unrelated to the dream, he suddenly remembered the day's residue which had woven the fabric of the manifest content.  On the day before the dream he was with a cousin who talked about how when she was a very young girl her dad would playfully squeeze her between his thighs till she could hardly breath. Though the pressure would be on the stomach, it would be so strong that it would be hard to catch her breath. It felt like a punishment yet so blissful - for it  represented her father's strong love (crush) for her.  

The narration of this aim-inhibited sexual play between the father and daughter obviously had been utilized by the dreamwork to give expression to the fantasy of the Primal Scene. 

Recognizing it as such, the patient was asked if he had ever witnessed parental intercourse. He had not, but associated the question immediately with having seen his mother naked while she was taking bath, confirming that the analysis of the dream was on the right path. Then added that her mother was very pretty and artistically gifted as well, and he really admired how she could draw cowboys with hats

This association led me to think of Wolfman's dream where mother's lack of penis, which enabled the father to copulate with her, but acted as the source of dread for the child as a confirmation of the reality of castration, was denied by the dreamwork through making the wolves' tails big and fox like. The dreamwork had distracted the dreamer, with the aim of mitigating the horror of castration, by the pictorial representation of the logic: why worry about what is absent when you can focus upon the wolves' big and bushy tails. Similarly in my patient the logic went: why fear the presence of castration in her instead notice how lovely she is and admire those majestic cowboy hats that she draws (fetishistic compensation for the absent penis)?  

Unlike the Wolfman's Primal Scene dream, a further step had been taken in my patient's dream. The Wolfman had witnessed the parental intercourse at the age of one and a half but had understood its sexual meaning only at the age of 4, when he had rejuvenated this memory in a dream, after getting seduced by his sister, which had stimulated his sexual curiosity and had aroused the phantasy to reexperience similar seduction in hands of his father, a more desired person. The Wolfman had identified with the mother while witnessing the parental intercourse but had not placed himself in her position at least in the manifest content of the dream. In my patient, the large weight pressing from the side pointed out to it being the fantasy of being sandwiched between the two copulating parents while in the womb. So his dream was condensation of two Primal Fantasies: watching the parental intercourse and being seduced by them. When this interpretation was offered, he could easily identify with the fantasy of substituting himself for the mother and sexually submitting himself to the father, but had difficulty in accepting that he was also substituting himself for the father and copulating with the mother, This was obviously due to a greater fear attached to displacing the father from exercising his rights over the mother than displacing the mother. The repressive process had also tried to shift the presence of the father on top of him (the passive homosexual connotation of which was humiliating) to as coming from the side (the large weight pressing from the side). Though the wish to copulate with the father while taking the role of the mother had continued to assert its presence with the weight also being felt from the top (the two whales were pushing heavy from on top of me).

Curious as to how the copulation with the father while inside the mother's womb was depicted in the manifest content by the dreamwork, I asked him to draw the dream scene.

He drew the following:

The father at the bottom, with the patient on his back, with the mother behind the son, did not fit in with how father could copulate with the son while the latter was inside the womb. I raised this doubt  and the patient admitted that out of shame of showing himself being homosexually penetrated from the back  by his father he had, while drawing it for me, reversed his position in the womb to face him instead of being impaled by him as it really was in the dream.
Had he also shifted the position of the father below him instead of above him while drawing? 
No. the reversal of the position of the father as at the bottom instead of on top was the work of the dreamwork and not the work of his drawing it for me.   
The patient agreed when a further interpretation was made that putting the father down was revenge for the passive homosexual position he had to adopt in relationship with the father.  
Knowing that his paranoid relapses occur when while attending church blasphemous thoughts (visualizing kicking the pregnant Virgin Mary in her stomach or hurling abuses at the priest for the  endless praising of the virtues of Jesus) make a breakthrough into this psyche, I put forward the following construction : Putting  the father below him was a symbolic retaliatory castration of the father for the homosexual humiliation.   
At this point another fragment of the dream emerged out of repression as if to confirm the correctness of the construction. 

 Later a large squid was passing by and again the weight was being pushed against me. 

When asked to draw this fragment, he drew the following.





Based upon my previous knowledge of him, it was felt the squid replaced the whale to depict his elder brother with whom he lives (both are confirmed bachelors), and with whom he has strong libidinal ties  (though aim-inhibited, without any overt eroticism).  
But squid was also chosen because that is his favorite sea creature. He often uses the squid for his  cartoon drawings. Its multiple arms allows one to express so much more than one can achieve with other sea animals with no limbs at all but they also (akin to the special fascination humans have for  octopuses, spiders and multipedes) symbolize reversal of castration.  Instead of the dreaded missing penis there is multiplication of it though in the form of limbs. In this connection one cannot help but be reminded of how Hindu Gods are endowed with multiple arms and sometimes multiple heads.
When asked how many limbs the squid had, he stated: 6-8.
One cannot help but notice as to how the numbers chosen 6-8 to deny castration are similar to Wolfman's multiplying his 2 parents into 6 or 7 wolves though he drew only 5 of them. 
That the interpretation of the dream was correct was confirmed when the patient in the next couple of sessions brought in a string of dreams with the Primal Scene and castration as their main theme - a subject he had not touched despite decades of once a month treatment.  
I will give analysis of only one of the dreams and excerpts from others where the issue of castration is dealt with by the dreamer. 

Mom, Robert and I were flying in an airplane - a two winger. Mom was nervous because she doesn't like to fly. She was moving things around back in the plane. It was a beautiful view of the grand canyons. I noticed a hole in the wing. Robert picked up a rock and was trying to cover the hole. Robert was flying the plane. I told him not to do that but go on flying the plane. We went into a cave where we were coming to a crash landing but eventually we made it to the ground.

The affect accompanying the dream was remarkably different from the whale dream where great dread was the order of the day. Here it was all bright and happy romping on the plane with just the mother being a little nervous till of course the bonhomie gradually got engulfed by the rising dread of castration. 
Both the patient and I were in agreement that this dream was a therapeutic after effect of the successful interpretation of the whale dream, and an attempt on his part to manage intercourse with the fragments from the Primal Scene being used to facilitate it. He has never had a intercourse with a woman in his entire life. The brother had replaced the father in the dream just as he had in real life, the father being dead now for decades. Successfully flying was overcoming of all his inhibitions in one stroke (at least in the dream) and being able to take a masculine stance (defying gravity, achieving erection). The two winger alluded to his need to have his brother (behind which the figure of the father also stood) as his accomplice to do the act of flying (the sexual act). The anxiety over doing the act was projected upon the mother as it is she who is afraid to fly (have sex). The beautiful view of the grand canyons was the restored ability to appreciate the beauty of the mother  (extended to mother earth) by overcoming the fear of castration which through the generation of anxiety swallows up other affects. The mother's moving things around was her attempt to cover up the absence of penis in her so as to not provoke the castration anxiety and spoil the joy of watching the Grand Canyon (her majestic beauty). But the fear of castration nevertheless broke through: I noticed a hole in the wing.  Attempts to deny the reality of castration for libidinal enjoyment was too dangerous and nevertheless he persists in the denial persuading his brother to concentrate upon keeping the enjoyment going instead of worrying about the coming danger. However, once the castration anxiety was triggered the party was over. Despite attempts to deny the danger to the plane (erection) and despite  exhortation to the co-pilot to keep the enjoyment going the libidinal excitement was on the wane. Entering  into the cave to keep the plane safe (keep the anxiety at bay and for the castration to not happen [crash landing]) was no more than taking refuge back into the mother's womb. The dream had a little happier ending in that they did not go right back to the womb (death) but made it to the ground safely. So there was a progress in his level of courage from the interpretation of the earlier dream.
Fragments of other dreams during the same period are presented below. The theme of castration is unmistakable in them.

My dad was working on board panel....Robert and I were holding the panel boards....we were helping dad but resenting it.... Dad was using a circular saw to cut the boards and we were worried it would cut our hand off

Suddenly a big rain and wind storm blew and a pile of construction blocks landed on top of my dad. I immediately went to help my dad . His arm was bent in a way where we had to lift the blocks off cement to get it straightened. I was scared. 

Jesus was speaking my name. [As a consequence] felt warmth in my chest. Heard His voice: "Were you speaking my name?" Felt really guilty because He wanted me to become priest where you cannot get married.  I could not become priest but decided never to go out with girls again. Then fought with impulses to gouge my eyes out to not look at women with lust

The doctor brought in a picture of a trifold.... it was something Jesus wanted me to see....So I gouged out the two sides of the trifold artwork [the castration displaced upon the testicles instead of the penis]....told the doctor [it got to be you, for doctors in my dreams stand for you]....and he said shouldn't be a problem....Then an evil devil came and was wrestling with me. I was so scared. He added that the devil is another version of the security guards who follow him around and threaten to cut his penis when he has episodes [paranoid relapses] in which he insults Jesus (his father) and has weird sexual thoughts like commands to go and molest children. 

The next Primal Scene dream is of an 18 year old boy. This recurrent dream had made its debut when he was 4 or 5. It was very frightening and he dreaded sleeping because of it. Around 6 or 7 years of age it stopped. Then recently, accompanied by depression, caused by his being excluded by his school mates from hanging out with them and a dawning realization that he is not like others but has unusual slightly dysmorphic built and an eccentric personality which would make it hard for him to get an ideal girlfriend, he had begun dreaming it again. 

I am alone in the house. Suddenly I  look out of the window and see a tall monster, taller than the house, 2-storey tall, about 20 feet, shaped like a TV character, I think it was taken from the Sesame Street,  a character there who was taller than all the other Muppets. Frozen with fear I run and hide inside the house to avoid the monster finding me. But he finds me nevertheless and standing tall over the house tears apart the roof and reaches out for me. That is when I wake up with fright. At times my cat is with me. Other times she is not. To protect her I carry her with me to when I run to hide.   

The boy was very skeptical that the dream had anything to do with sex, let alone Primal Scene. But gave no resistance in producing the associations. He agreed that the cat most likely symbolized his mother (compare this with Wolfman's dream where the mother and father were replaced by wolves). In the former the wolves (father substitutes) were on a tree at a height from where they watched him with strained attention, which was a "reversal" of his watching the parental intercourse. Satisfaction of Scopophilic instinct is usually represented in dreams as watching from a height. Here the monster (father) was looking at him from the top as well. In both dreams the same mechanism was utilized: the child's sexual curiosity being shown as father's curiosity about him In both dreams the Primal Scene was witnessed from the window (entrance of the genital passage). Tearing apart of the roof and grabbing him were allusions to castration and copulation respectively. 

The last dream of the Primal Scene was of an attractive, flamboyant, always heavily made-up, histrionic, blond Irish girl, in her late thirties. She recalled that at around the age of 5, but it could have been 6 or 7, she was filled with forebodings that something ominous was going to happen to her and the author of it would be her stepfather. The forebodings had no clear content but she knew was related to something sexual as she had been privy to her parents sexual activities every now and then either guessing from the sounds coming out of their room but also perhaps having witnessed it outright while they were not too careful about hiding it. While anticipating and dreading for it to happen to her, a longing that was sensed both by her mother and her stepfather, and the fulfillment of which the mother facilitated, and the stepfather took advantage of. 
One afternoon the mother left to do errands.  The patient claimed that I could sense that my mother had left the house so my stepfather could take advantage of her, though without realizing (having insight) that that is what she (mother) was aiming at. She was literally handing me to her husband, so afraid she was of the world and so desperate for a man's protection that she wanted to keep him tied to her at any cost including sacrificing her daughter to his sexual appetite  The minute she had driven away, with the expression on her face that she was not returning for hours and is turning a blind eye to whatever is about to happen, my stepfather came after me. I ran but tripped on the threshold of the door between the living room and the kitchen and he did to me what he did being slightly confused as to what to do since I was so little and would not get off the floor.  She refused to give any further details of what actually transpired at that point adding only one detail that next day she tried to cook a meal for her stepfather by haphazardly mixing some cooking ingredients on the kitchen floor which brought tears to his eyes, for he realized that she was trying to be wife to him now that the act which bonds a woman and a man had been done by him to her and so it was now her duty to cook for him.
From that point onwards she became deeply bonded to the stepfather. The sexual activity ended when she got pregnant at age of 17 and left with the boy who had impregnated her. That relationship did not last beyond a few months. That separation and living on her own. It is at that time that the dream first made its entrance. But at times she claimed it was perhaps present from when she first experienced the sex with her stepfather. 
 The dream was made up of a single scene. 

I am on the threshold of the door between the living room and the kitchen. I look up and I see two lions staring at me. So intense is their stare that I remain hypnotized with fear. Everything is so eerily still that it is oppressive.  I keep staring at the lions as if to keep them on bay from eating me up.  

The patient strangely had no significant  ill feelings towards her step-father,  or perhaps more correctly her feelings were admixture of anger and continued fondness for him. She still saw him when she visited her mother, which she frequently did and let them babysit her two children, claiming that she did not think he ever molested them. Her biological father had taken no interest in her and to escape child support had allowed her to be adopted by the stepfather when she was a toddler. She claimed her mother was devoid of any true maternal emotions because of  her high anxiety and if her stepfather had not taken interest in her she would have grown up without any parental love or guidance. The sexual relationship that went on all through her latency period and adolescence had bonded her so strongly to him that she derived no significant sexual pleasure or orgasm from all her subsequent relationships  She was married and divorced four  times and had many relationships in between those marriages. But she claimed that she did not feel much for any of them as if her relationship with the man who had seduced her at the age of 5 somehow interfered with it.  In fact one of her favorite songs was "hopelessly yours," the lyrics of which went:  " I love you, I hate you, I'd forget you, but I'm afraid to. You loved me or did you' I'll never be sure. But one thing's for certain .In spite of this hurtin' I'll always be Hopelessly yours. From laughin' to cryin' from livin' to dyin' from heaven to a heartache I know I can't cure But one thing's for certain In spite of this hurtin' I'll always be hopelessly yours. 
She frankly admitted that the song captured the complex love and hate relationship she had with the man who had made her love life so strange. While she did not have orgasmic sexual discharge with her husbands and boyfriends she always had to have sex with them as frequently as was feasible. In addition those men found favor in her eyes who would take her to Strip Clubs where she could satisfy her overwhelmingly strong scopophillic propensities and would watch pornographic movies with her. 
As for the dream, both the patient and I quickly concluded that it was the depiction of the Primal Scene. The two lions symbolized the parents. In Wolfman's dream the two parents were replaced by several wolves. In my lady's case the two parents were symbolized by the two lions, their number had not been altered. It could have been because the Wolfman dread was primarily of the father in whose hands he feared castration (depicted with aid of regression from genital to the oral phase of sexuality as fear of getting eaten up by the wolves) and to mitigate this fear he had not only changed the figure of the father from human to that of a wolf, but to many wolves, as if by increasing their numbers he was decreasing the fear of each individual one of them. Unlike the wolfman my patient was as afraid of the mother as of the father and with both parents equally feared, they both had found expression on equal footing, each being symbolized as a lion.
When she began treatment with me she was dreaming this dream every night. In fact, all through the night. She claimed she never really slept. As soon as she closed her eyes the dream would start and stay with her with lesser or greater intensity all night long, not allowing her full rest. She hated the dream and consequently the stepfather, who she held responsible for making it such an integral the part of her life in such a relentless way. Yet, she liked the dream. There was something hypnotically beautiful about those two lions staring at her like that with no movement or activity anywhere. As if the whole world constituted of nothing more but her and those two lions and endless dread. Even during the day a haunting fear of everything accompanied her which she rightly anticipated as emanating from that dream and those lions. Her eyes hauntingly beautiful dripped with fear of something ominous which was about to happen.  
I could not help but notice that the way the wolves on that walnut tree stared at the Wolfman, which was projection of his own strained staring at the parental intercourse, was so similar to my patient's two  lions staring at her. . 
That in the dream she derived sexual satisfaction that was denied to her in her relationship with various men in her waking life was conjectured based upon her claim that the lions staring her like that gave her fear but yet satisfaction. It was felt to be a hysterical condensation of all her sexual energy into the component of scopophilia, concentrated upon watching the parental intercourse. Looking at other people's beauty and sexual attributes and being admired by others for the same was the central feature of her life. The desire to exhibit had led her to become a singer and she successfully performed as part of a ban in nightclubs. 
She was convinced that her cure lies in the cessation of that dream, which was not just recurrent or even vehemently intrusive as it happens in PTSD, but something that was present with her every night, and always playing in the background, no matter how light or deep her sleep. 
To my great surprise psychotherapy did make a change in that direction. She reported lessening in the intensity of the dream and attributed it to the emergence of a third lion in the dream. She referred to him as a baby lion, who makes his appearance alongside the two big lions, towards whom she feels motherly, and who does not stare at her but sits with his back towards her. Because of that little lion, she claimed, she actually may even start liking her dream. On being asked what is about that little lion that is helping her get better, she said that she does not have to fear that he will eat her up. The patient soon reached the conclusion that that third lion was me, who had no sexual interest in her, hence had his back towards her instead of staring at her. That lion will grow up in size and chase the other lions away in time, she claimed.
Unfortunately, if her claim was correct, we did not get the opportunity to see it come to full fruition. The patient who was living the life of a celibate, having found religion, and was taking treatment as an attempt to conquer her out of control sexuality, met a man who was heavily in child pornography, and like a pied piper took her under his wing, ending her religiosity, celibacy, desire to heal, only to follow this man, living besides him in his Motorhome, out of the state, and out of treatment. 

Sunday, February 5, 2023

"Talking Leg" as a substitute for Phantom Pain in an Amputee - Is Phantom Pain a form of Mourning?

 Phantom pain is a weird phenomenon. After losing a body part, usually a lower or an upper limb, but  not infrequently a missing breast, tooth or an internal organ, the sufferer is plagued, in more cases than not, with sensations of pain arising from where the missing part should be. One can feel one's toes or fingers, or the entire missing limb, often uncomfortably, even excruciatingly, with sensations that are described as burning, tingling, stabbing, boring, squeezing, throbbing etc.  Psychologically the physical pain is accompanied by mental distress. 

Is the missing part crying painfully for its right to continue to exist alongside the rest of the body that is still alive?   Or is the pain due to the missing part's mental and brain representation being attacked by other brain regions with the aim of dissolving its organization and incorporating the ensuing fragments  to enrich their organizations and purposes and the resistance to this dissolution is what creates the sensations of tingling, stabbing, burning, throbbing etc. at the level of the brain?  

If the above is true then the phantom pain is similar to the pain of mourning. Mourning is a reaction to the loss of something valuable, the memory of which wants to keep occupying one's psyche till one adjusts to the adverse consequences of the loss through compensating for them  And we know that the loss does not have to be due to death but even when we lose in the other the meaning they held for us and for which we loved them. And the mourning is not limited to loss of living entities like a family member, a close friend, or a pet, but material possessions, even cherished abstractions, which enriched one's life, like loss of a job, loss of status in wealth or social ranking, fading away of one's once good looks, realization that a long sought ambition of becoming somebody extraordinary like a celebrity or a beauty queen or even accomplishing a coveted career as a doctor or a lawyer which is no longer tenable, expulsion from a prized organization like one's church or trade union or motherland or street gang membership. 

Is the above description of mourning backed by clinical experience and what is the role of pain in it?

 Let us examine the  behavior of a patient of mine who came to me to help him tide over the mental pain he was feeling on finding that his wife was cheating on him and when caught had left him and their two young children for the other man. He was determined to never forgive and never go back with her even if she returned which his children kept asking her to do. She had lost her value to him as a wife. What he most ardently wanted was not to think about her at all and to resume life with others but without her being in the picture. But what was happening in reality was just the reverse. He had isolated himself from all interests and people in his life and was thinking about her 24/7, crying over all the good times they had had in the past, followed by feelings of pain by contemplating as to how she had done him wrong and by imagining her making love to the rival and how he will find alternate superior ways of living to get even with her.

Mourning appears to be a psychological and physiological brain process by means of which a person reorganizes his/her living situation so as to be able to continue to exist without the benefit of whatever the loss object had been doing for him/her hitherto. If we examine the behavior of someone whose beloved spouse dies, we see that he shuts himself from all other interests and his mind is concentrated only upon the memories of his times with the lost one, which he once again experiences in great intensity with all the emotions attached, with the aim of "dampening" them so as to put them to rest and to get free of their incorporation in his future conduct.  This dampening of the departed person's memories is accomplished through generation of pain. The mechanism that generates the pain appears to be analogous to what happens in depression.  While in depression there is an across the board inhibition mourning attempts to selectively inhibit all those behaviors in which the lost object was a significant contributor. Fundamentally depression appears to be mourning gone overboard; spreading of the mental processes of inhibition beyond their original aim.

The pain's role in mourning and depression appears to be biphasic. The pain first compels attention to prevent the loss from being forgotten and becoming permanent, goading one to do something about it and to undo the loss. But the gradual realization that there is no prospect of succeeding in this endeavor the pain initiates the next phase of putting inhibitions on all those behaviors where the lost object was one's associate in the past with the aim of reorganizing their planning so in the future one would be able to do it without the presence of the lost person. 

By generating pain, which at the cortex would be overactivity of the neuronal circuitry of the homuncular region where the missing part is represented along with all its connections to the other parts of the brain, rest of the brain would be compelled to take notice of it leading to its incorporation in their organization causing a reorganization that would try to give a new life to these areas which are now idling. With loss of a hand or a leg the region that most likely will try to usurp its function would naturally be the areas of speech, for what one can no longer do with one's limbs one would attempt to make others do it for oneself through the faculty of language. There is some evidence that the region representing the lips and mouth in the homunculus of an amputee hypertrophies after the loss.  

That the phantom pain in an amputated limb is to inhibit the functioning of its psychic representation in the brain as it was when the limb was actually present and to reorganize it so as to become a new auxiliary to the oral region, among other reorganizations,  was illustrated in a very educational fashion in the recurring dreams of a patient of mine who just 10 months ago had a below knee amputation on one of her legs. 

A divorcee in her late forties, with two grown children, who lives with her cantankerous mother, and who has since childhood suffered from Obsessional Neurosis due to childhood abuse, the effects of which were not just psychic but spilled into the psychosomatic sphere and over the years she developed numerous medical and psychological problems, the former primarily emanating from autoimmune disturbances, which ended up after years of suffering in an emergency amputation of her right limb. They amputation occurred without any prior hint that such a narcissistic assault was about to happen. She had leg pain for over a year, but it was dismissed by numerous doctors a either psychogenic or part of her sciatica, and when the correct diagnosis was made, the gangrene had already set in, with all her leg arteries irreversibly blocked, and there was no choice but to amputate. From the time of the correct diagnosis to the amputation was just three days, with only 24-hours given to make up her mind whether she wanted below the knee or above the knee amputation or certain death from not choosing one or the other, from the creeping gangrene. With considerable narcissism in her good looks, for she is a beautiful woman,  it was a complete shock for her. She had naturally chosen below-knee amputation, the decision made in a twilight zone, with the feeling that all that was happening was a dream. 

After going through a period when she was numb to the reality of what had happened, a great degree of anger, depression and suicidal impulses emerged. She was furious with the doctors for not diagnosing her problem in time. Their lack of concern for her illnesses, feeling that they did not take her leg pain seriously because she had so many medical problems arising from her autoimmune pathology. She also suspected, and correctly, that her having Medicaid, a low paying insurance, with too many problems, made the doctors listen to her complaints less attentively in comparison to their better paying patients. 

About 10 months after the amputation she began having a recurrent dream:

I am in my bed sleeping (this is part of the dream and not description of when she dreams). I get up already to go and not realizing that I do not have both my legs start off only to fall. I look down at the legs. The stump of the amputated leg has a mouth that has big cartoon lips. It is like watching a cartoon but not at all pleasant. Those lips berate me. "This is what happens when you do not take care of your body. You did not pay attention. This is your fault. God did this to you." There is great fright associated with it. It scares the crap out of me as I listen to that talking leg.  

 At times, which is the alternate version of the dream, I am whole and I run and run, effortlessly, enjoying the freedom of my leg activities, with both of my legs there. The affect is that of joy

The dream required no interpretation for its meaning is transparent. The alternate version is simple wish fulfillment. The painful version is working through to get reconciled to the trauma and the narcissistic injury. The cartoon like lips could be an accurate description of the labial region of the homunculus getting hypertrophied. As to why the lips berate her the patient said it must be a warning on part of the missing leg to not allow the other leg to be lost too out of neglect and to take care of my health diligently which I did not do with the leg that I lost. I should not have accepted the shallow explanations by the doctors that it is sciatica or non-specific pain or in my head. 

To me however, the striking similarity of this beratement with the beratement that the superego imposes upon the ego in obsessional neurosis and in melancholia was the most intriguing. In her case the lips of the stump were doing what in depressed patient their sense of guilt does through the agency of superego upon the ego. This beratement in depression to me appears to be an exaggeration of the mourning in normal people. In mourning the memory of the lost person is put to rest by bringing them up in great intensity and then putting an inhibition upon them. In depression the memory of the lost person is brought up in great intensity but instead of putting it to rest, it is introjected into the ego, where it is constantly berated and condemned. 

It is interesting that the patient while she occasionally does have sensations of touch in the region of toes in the amputated limb, which she finds very weird, she has absolutely no phantom pain.

Is it possible that the phantom pain that occurs in other amputee in her case is emerging in the dreams of beratement and the frightening painful affect associated with them are the substitute for the phantom pain. The similarity of the dream structure with that of the process of mourning and melancholia tells us that the phantom pain too in its essence is no different than mourning and melancholia. 

The patient agreed that her bitter complaint that This is what happens when you do not take care of your body. You did not pay attention. This is your fault. God did this to you is not just beratement of herself but behind her guise that of the doctors who were too stupid to diagnose her problem in time and to do something about it when there was still time.  And the process is similar to that in melancholia where the patient who laments about being stupid and ugly, lazy and selfish, is in reality making these complaints about the departed person, with whom he still has to settle scores and towards whom he still nurtures grievances, and who he cannot let rest in peace, and whom he makes part of himself, which he can now berate endlessly.