tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-73187536410656927302024-03-13T07:10:20.471-07:00Psychoanalysis, Dream Interpretation & PsychiatryThis blog site is for anyone who is interested in psychoanalysis, dream interpretation, understanding the unconscious roots of psychiatric symptoms, and other applications of psychoanalysis. It will also delve in medical, governmental and economic issues relevant to psychiatry to make the site interesting to all.Surendra Kelwalahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17208258557612952541noreply@blogger.comBlogger171125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7318753641065692730.post-8672105779306498232023-12-02T19:34:00.000-08:002024-01-25T06:58:34.201-08:00The Psychology of Repressed Memories, Deja Vu, Anorexia Nervosa and our Fascination with Ghosts, Witches, the Misshapen (Modern Art) and Halloween<p><br /></p><p>Deja vu is an <i>uncanny</i> 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.<o:p></o:p></p><p>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 <i>dissonantly </i>getting stimulated, or it is some
kind of temporal or hippocampal lobe epileptoid activity, all sound very
profound but do they really tell anything?<o:p></o:p></p><p> 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. <o:p></o:p></p><p>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, <b>but
no memory of that past experience emerges,</b> just the (false) feeling of
the current experience having been experienced before.<b> In temporal, or
other cortical, lobe seizure there is an <i>actual</i> emergence of
memories that are unrelated to what you are experiencing in the presen</b>t,
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.
<o:p></o:p></p><p>Now Freud in his article on "The Uncanny" shows us that “the
affect of uncanny" is generated when a <i>repressed memory</i> is
triggered, and its <i>derivatives</i> make their way into consciousness. Not the entire repressed complex<a href="https://d.docs.live.net/9facd14e83596848/Documents/The%20psychology%20of%20Deja%20Vu%20and%20repressed%20memories.docx#_ftn1" name="_ftnref1" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;">[1]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a>
but only its<i> transformed
(distorted) </i>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 <i>something strange yet something
quite familiar happening</i> and something<i> far more mysterious and
powerful than meets the eye, </i>and <i>a sense of foreboding, if not
outright dread. as if what is happening is something not natural but from some
parallel (paranormal) world.</i></p><p>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 <i>primary
process </i>(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<i> real</i> world and a
reaction to it which is a mixture of fascination, awe, and fear. <o:p></o:p></p><p>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<i> part</i> 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? <o:p></o:p></p><p>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. <o:p></o:p></p><p>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).<a href="https://d.docs.live.net/9facd14e83596848/Documents/The%20psychology%20of%20Deja%20Vu%20and%20repressed%20memories.docx#_ftn2" name="_ftnref2" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;">[2]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a>
<o:p></o:p></p><p>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 <i>intrusive thoughts</i> during
the day and as <i>nightmares </i>in his dreams. This is to
"magically" <i>undo </i>(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 <i>redo</i> 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<b> painful memories due to
straightforward trauma</b> <b>are unwanted, but not inaccessible.</b> <o:p></o:p></p><p><b>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 <i>distortion</i> (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. </b><o:p></o:p></p><p>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<a href="https://d.docs.live.net/9facd14e83596848/Documents/The%20psychology%20of%20Deja%20Vu%20and%20repressed%20memories.docx#_ftn3" name="_ftnref3" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;">[3]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a>.
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 <i>subject to</i> <i>repression </i>(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)<a href="https://d.docs.live.net/9facd14e83596848/Documents/The%20psychology%20of%20Deja%20Vu%20and%20repressed%20memories.docx#_ftn4" name="_ftnref4" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;">[4]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a>
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. <o:p></o:p></p><p>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. <o:p></o:p></p><p>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.<a href="https://d.docs.live.net/9facd14e83596848/Documents/The%20psychology%20of%20Deja%20Vu%20and%20repressed%20memories.docx#_ftn5" name="_ftnref5" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;">[5]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a> 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 <b><i>false memories </i></b>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. <o:p></o:p></p><p>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 <b>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. </b> 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. <o:p></o:p></p><p>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 <i>moral/good/self-preservatory/purpose
driven behaviors</i> because they were rewarded while sexual were
punished, spring to the forefront. These non-sexual good behaviors become the<i> defensive
wall</i> 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 <i>their association with the oral and anal phases of sexuality produce
disgust </i>- 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. <o:p></o:p></p><p>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.<o:p></o:p></p><p>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. <o:p></o:p></p><p><b>Is Deja vu a variation of the uncanny</b>? 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. <o:p></o:p></p><p> 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 <i>reversal </i>and by
<i>multiplication</i>. <o:p></o:p></p><p>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 <i>bhoot.</i> But <i>bhoot </i>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 <i>bhoot</i> and <i>chudails</i> (ghosts
and witches). She dreamt of these <i>unsavory parodies of human form</i> 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 <i>aim-inhibited and
desexualized </i>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. <o:p></o:p></p><p>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?<o:p></o:p></p><p> 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 <i>chudail</i> (witch) has put a spell on him to love nothing
other than her (with <i>chudail</i> [witch] being the dreaded
dimension of the mother) - or "possessed" - by which they
mean a <i>bhoot</i> (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 "<i>Maata</i>" (mother) was a
frequent occurrence among Hindu housewives, and entering into "<i>Haal</i>",
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. <o:p></o:p></p><p>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.<o:p></o:p></p><p>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. <o:p></o:p></p><p> 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.<o:p></o:p></p><p>From the bus station we took a <i>tonga.</i> 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. <o:p></o:p></p><p>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." <o:p></o:p></p><p>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.<o:p></o:p></p><p>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>I had
been there in that ashram before</i> 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. <o:p></o:p></p><p>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. <o:p></o:p></p><p>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 <i>unheimlich</i> [uncanny in German] place, however, is the
entrance to the former <i>heim</i> [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 <i>unheimlich</i> is
what was once<i> heimisch,</i> home-like, familiar; the prefix 'un'
is the token of repression. <o:p></o:p></p><p>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. <o:p></o:p></p><p>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. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p><p>
</p><div><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><br clear="all" />
<hr align="left" size="1" width="33%" />
<!--[endif]-->
<div id="ftn1">
<p class="MsoFootnoteText"><a href="https://d.docs.live.net/9facd14e83596848/Documents/The%20psychology%20of%20Deja%20Vu%20and%20repressed%20memories.docx#_ftnref1" name="_ftn1" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span face=""Aptos",sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Aptos; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[1]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a>
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.<o:p></o:p></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn2">
<p><a href="https://d.docs.live.net/9facd14e83596848/Documents/The%20psychology%20of%20Deja%20Vu%20and%20repressed%20memories.docx#_ftnref2" name="_ftn2" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;">[2]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a>
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. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoFootnoteText"><o:p> </o:p><a href="https://d.docs.live.net/9facd14e83596848/Documents/The%20psychology%20of%20Deja%20Vu%20and%20repressed%20memories.docx#_ftnref3" name="_ftn3" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span face=""Aptos",sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Aptos; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[3]</span></span></span></a>
The origin of why mother-fucker is the most insulting epithet one can inflict
on any man across the globe</p></div><div id="ftn3"><p class="MsoFootnoteText"><o:p></o:p></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn4">
<p class="MsoFootnoteText"><a href="https://d.docs.live.net/9facd14e83596848/Documents/The%20psychology%20of%20Deja%20Vu%20and%20repressed%20memories.docx#_ftnref4" name="_ftn4" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span face=""Aptos",sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Aptos; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[4]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a>
Religious rituals are socially doing the opposite of indulging in private
sexual rituals to appease God.<o:p></o:p></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn5">
<p class="MsoFootnoteText"><a href="https://d.docs.live.net/9facd14e83596848/Documents/The%20psychology%20of%20Deja%20Vu%20and%20repressed%20memories.docx#_ftnref5" name="_ftn5" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span face=""Aptos",sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Aptos; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[5]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a>
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. <o:p></o:p></p>
</div>
</div><p><br /></p><p><br /></p>Surendra Kelwalahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17208258557612952541noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7318753641065692730.post-30260294989034896342023-03-18T11:03:04.040-07:002023-08-27T08:38:30.710-07:00The similarity of the Primal Scene dreams across cultures and time. <p><b>Witnessing parental intercourse (the Primal Scene)</b>, <b> dreading or experiencing</b> <b>castration</b> (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 <i>prehistoric past</i> {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<b> seduction by parent or parent substitute,</b> are three<b> Primal Fantasies </b>that Freud enumerated in his Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis and in his analysis of the Wolfman's Neurosis and Dream.</p><p> 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. </p><p> Are there other primal fantasies?</p><p> 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.</p><p>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 <b>Totem and Taboo</b> when humans lived in <i>primal horde</i> {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. </p><p>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 <i>repressed back</i> 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. </p><p>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. </p><p>What is most remarkable about them is as to how some of the details of the <b>manifest content</b> 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.. </p><p>For those who have not read Freud's <i>History of an Infantile Neurosis</i> let me give here the Wolfman's dream that will make it easier to follow what I write here:</p><p><span face="sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #202122; font-size: 14px;">"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."</span></p><p><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhSEsHTobF0QXMEaSjq8rWibAOPMzzIAMRZd-RiKI1nS13--1MZs9kW6fLKjzVXf6JyacamQ17YtiOjAiOE1heLntCp48n2H104AFZOV2xFypT_w0Ki57ooY_fL5GC49Z5pVlu6IYwaUNKAh5ZGzS4_RiXu1bFc50oyfH_YqsnhwwNpK0KNiuDH7WcXww" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img alt="" data-original-height="1138" data-original-width="1440" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhSEsHTobF0QXMEaSjq8rWibAOPMzzIAMRZd-RiKI1nS13--1MZs9kW6fLKjzVXf6JyacamQ17YtiOjAiOE1heLntCp48n2H104AFZOV2xFypT_w0Ki57ooY_fL5GC49Z5pVlu6IYwaUNKAh5ZGzS4_RiXu1bFc50oyfH_YqsnhwwNpK0KNiuDH7WcXww" width="304" /></a></p><p><span face="sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #202122; font-size: 14px;"><br /></span></p><p>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. </p><p><b>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. </b></p><p>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. </p><p>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 <i>day's residue</i> which had woven the fabric of the<i> manifest content</i>. 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. </p><p>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. </p><p>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<i> hats</i>. </p><p>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 <i>denied</i> <i>by the dreamwork</i> through making the wolves' tails <b>big and fox like. </b>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<i> hats</i> that she draws (fetishistic compensation for the absent penis)? </p><p>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, <b>the large weight pressing from the side</b> pointed out to it being the fantasy of being <i>sandwiched</i> 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 (<b>the large weight pressing from the side).</b> 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 (<b>the two whales were pushing heavy from on top of me)</b>.</p><p>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.</p><p>He drew the following:</p><p><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjrXNq3eIvc7pptnjJMk_T4FYPwxlNo0dupg5eYfdA4AsoAI2PpcujsFwiic-FPDjQQsOfpvqkYJo4-VKlTl5AftS5UlDUZCzmsHN73j1Y_NPU3Ng8R_whthlMlQswoigYFkuhVJvJ7-MhQhUMBStZLVOjOFLRPGj-FK_ZrvycYiOEpWit0R95I6t7ZTg/s4032/IMG_5220.jpg" style="clear: left; display: inline; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" data-original-height="4032" data-original-width="3024" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjrXNq3eIvc7pptnjJMk_T4FYPwxlNo0dupg5eYfdA4AsoAI2PpcujsFwiic-FPDjQQsOfpvqkYJo4-VKlTl5AftS5UlDUZCzmsHN73j1Y_NPU3Ng8R_whthlMlQswoigYFkuhVJvJ7-MhQhUMBStZLVOjOFLRPGj-FK_ZrvycYiOEpWit0R95I6t7ZTg/s320/IMG_5220.jpg" width="240" /></a></p>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.<div>Had he also shifted the position of the father below him instead of above him while drawing? </div><div>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. <div>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. </div><div>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 <i>construction</i> : Putting the father below him was a symbolic retaliatory castration of the father for the homosexual humiliation. </div><div>At this point another fragment of the dream emerged out of repression as if to confirm the correctness of the construction. </div><div><br /></div><div> <b>Later a large squid was passing by and again the weight was being pushed against me. </b><p>When asked to draw this fragment, he drew the following.</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiwhBBwl9OYbwIzka8Ne5CnC1fkRNiJftjONEQCLRtMD7H1V0cM2gZduBRYFdn28MisawMLFh8hr66IKreO2qxu_Mi3ZWB31Cr0PGZdTR5xEwvrLLatS4gp6Kx45hCSsbfMvikL44GdOf2hn5oTg3D48KJ6gNs5DU3yX3kyhmLYAyzS_xkSyWaV6oXP8w/s4032/IMG_5224.jpg" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="4032" data-original-width="3024" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiwhBBwl9OYbwIzka8Ne5CnC1fkRNiJftjONEQCLRtMD7H1V0cM2gZduBRYFdn28MisawMLFh8hr66IKreO2qxu_Mi3ZWB31Cr0PGZdTR5xEwvrLLatS4gp6Kx45hCSsbfMvikL44GdOf2hn5oTg3D48KJ6gNs5DU3yX3kyhmLYAyzS_xkSyWaV6oXP8w/s320/IMG_5224.jpg" width="240" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">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). </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">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.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">When asked how many limbs the squid had, he stated: 6-8.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">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. </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">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. </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">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. </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><b>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.</b></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">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. </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">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: <b>I noticed a hole in the wing</b>. 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.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">Fragments of other dreams during the same period are presented below. The theme of castration is unmistakable in them.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><b>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 <i>we were worried it would cut our hand off</i></b></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><b>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 . <i>His arm was bent</i></b> <b>in a way where we had to lift the blocks off cement to get it straightened. I was scared. </b></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><b><br /></b></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><b>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<i> impulses to gouge my eyes out to not look at women with lust</i>. </b></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><b><br /></b></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><b>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 [</b>the castration displaced upon the testicles instead of the penis<b>]....told the doctor </b>[it got to be you, for doctors in my dreams stand for you<b>]....and he </b><span style="text-align: center;"><b>said shouldn't be a problem....Then an evil devil came and was wrestling with me. I was so scared. </b>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. </span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span style="text-align: center;"><br /></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span style="text-align: center;">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. </span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span style="text-align: center;"><b><br /></b></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span style="text-align: center;"><b>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 mons</b></span><span style="text-align: center;"><b>ter finding me. But he finds me nevertheless and standing tall over the house tears apart the roof and reaches out for me. </b></span><b style="text-align: center;">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. </b></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">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. </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">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. </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">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,<i> though without realizing (having insight) that that is what she (mother) was aiming at</i>. 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.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">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. </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"> The dream was made up of a single scene. </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><b><br /></b></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><b>I am on the threshold of the door between the living room and the kitchen. </b><b>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. </b> </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">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: " <span face="Roboto, arial, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #202124; font-size: 14px;">I love you, I hate you, </span><span face="Roboto, arial, sans-serif" jsname="YS01Ge" style="color: #202124; font-size: 14px;">I'd forget you, but I'm afraid to. </span><span face="Roboto, arial, sans-serif" jsname="YS01Ge" style="color: #202124; font-size: 14px;">You loved me or did you' </span><span face="Roboto, arial, sans-serif" jsname="YS01Ge" style="color: #202124; font-size: 14px;">I'll never be sure. </span><span face="Roboto, arial, sans-serif" jsname="YS01Ge" style="color: #202124; font-size: 14px;">But one thing's for certain .</span><span face="Roboto, arial, sans-serif" jsname="YS01Ge" style="color: #202124; font-size: 14px;">In spite of this hurtin' </span><span face="Roboto, arial, sans-serif" jsname="YS01Ge" style="color: #202124; font-size: 14px;">I'll always be </span><span face="Roboto, arial, sans-serif" jsname="YS01Ge" style="color: #202124; font-size: 14px;">Hopelessly yours. </span><span face="Roboto, arial, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #202124; font-size: 14px;">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. </span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span face="Roboto, arial, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #202124; font-size: 14px;">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. </span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span face="Roboto, arial, sans-serif" style="color: #202124;"><span style="background-color: white; font-size: 14px;">As for the </span></span>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.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">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. </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">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. . </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">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. </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">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. </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">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.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">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. </div></div></div></div>Surendra Kelwalahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17208258557612952541noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7318753641065692730.post-88891192939661371722023-02-05T10:50:00.010-08:002023-02-27T06:52:06.640-08:00"Talking Leg" as a substitute for Phantom Pain in an Amputee - Is Phantom Pain a form of Mourning?<p> 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. </p><p>Is the missing part<i> crying painfully</i> 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? </p><p>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. </p><p>Is the above description of mourning backed by clinical experience and what is the role of pain in it?</p><p> 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.</p><p>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.</p><p>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. </p><p>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. </p><p>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. </p><p>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. </p><p>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. </p><p>About 10 months after the amputation she began having a recurrent dream:</p><p><b>I am in my bed sleeping (</b>this is part of the dream and not description of when she dreams<b>). 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. </b></p><p><b> At times, </b>which is the alternate version of the dream<b>, 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</b></p><p>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. </p><p>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. </p><p>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.</p><p>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. </p><p>The patient agreed that her bitter complaint that <b>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 </b>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.</p>Surendra Kelwalahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17208258557612952541noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7318753641065692730.post-90807581280275940682022-07-25T20:00:00.001-07:002022-07-25T20:00:47.680-07:00A dream that confirms that paranoid defenses are activated to control unruly homosexual impulses<p> A very talented artist, who draws cartoons that rival the finest productions of Disney World, but who failed to get but minimal recognition for his extraordinary abilities, in his early thirties, came down with persecutory delusions, chief of which was that the security guards at the college campus where he worked at a low level job were following him. He stopped stepping out of the house (agoraphobic withdrawal) because whichever street he went, he was bound to run into black cars filled with security guards. He heard voices telling him that he will go to hell because he had indulged in too much masturbation. This was deeply disturbing to him because his brother and him, both of whom were single, and devoutly religious, considered the only purpose of life was to make it into the heaven by living the straight and narrow. At the church where he had regularly gone at least twice a week all his life, he was horrified to notice that blasphemous and sexually insulting thoughts against Jesus kept interrupting the church's pious proceedings. What was most disturbing was that these blasphemous thoughts could be seen by other church members. It was a classical paranoid breakdown. </p><p> Mellaril stabilized him. </p><p>Thirty years later, he brought in a dream which threw light upon the etiology of his illness. He was greatly worried, as he told the dream, whether it was not harbinger of his coming down with dementia soon. </p><p>The dream:</p><p><b>My memory was gone I did not know anything. I was in a group and I purposely sat in the middle of a round table where I could have no one to my left my right. People sitting on the table also were suffering from same problem. Just like myself they also could not remember anything. They were laughing at me.</b></p><p><b>The next scene was of my walking with my Dad and we stopped at Tim Horton's. My dad ordered a pastry - bunny pastry- and I ordered a hot chocolate and a beautiful cat pastry. The bill was 4 dollars and 99 cents.</b></p><p>Patient was assured that the dream was not a premonition of his becoming demented. The most priced organ in the body is one's genitals and losing it is the greatest fear man has. However, this fear easily gets displaced to fear of going blind, or losing a limb, or teeth falling out, or hair falling (going bald). In his case it had gone a step further and turned into losing his mind, an organ almost as precious as the genitals. The irrational fear was easily divined in his case as that of castration anxiety, which the patient has in plenty. When he has psychotic relapses he dreads the security guards cornering and castrating him. Once assured that the dream is not a harbinger of his impending dementia and that it is only a new variation of his castration fears, the patient was no longer afraid to explore the meaning of the dream, which earlier he had apprehension that if he tries to find its meaning the process of his going demented will hasten.</p><p>When asked why the table was round no associations emerged, but he knew that he chose the place where he was sitting because the seats next to him, on both sides, were empty. Which meant that the security guards who always keep eye on him were not there.</p><p>This was immediately interpreted as the dream wish was so strong that it had overpowered the dream censor (symbolized by security guards) and had made them disappear. The security guards were not watching him so he could do as he wished without fear of getting castrated. </p><p>When asked what could it mean that he and others on the table could not remember anything, he replied, it could only mean that I could do whatever I wanted do without fear of neither others nor myself remembering it. We were all demented. So the memory of what wrong I would do I need not fear they will remember it and later taunt me about it. The censorship however was not completely suspended because in the dream all those memoryless people were still laughing at him.</p><p>So far there was no trace of the wish. Only the agencies which had interest in quashing the wish - the security guards and his own moral sense and public's disapproval - getting their power nullified. </p><p>But what was the wish?</p><p>"Why Tim Horton's?" I asked him. </p><p>The patient could not come up with any useful associations. </p><p>"Why 4 dollars and 99 cents?"</p><p>"Everything now costs so much. A single sandwich whether at Arby's or at Tim Hortons invariably costs 4 dollars 99 cents." The previous day, patient had paid 4 dollars 99 cents for buying a gyro at the Arby's and that had made it into the dream as the day's residue. </p><p>"Was the wish seeking fulfillment before it would get too costly to indulge in it?" Patient half heartedly agreed with that interpretation. But added a crucial piece. His father in the dream was around 40 and he 20 when things were much cheaper and easily gettable. </p><p>"The wish had to be in relationship with the father," I told him. </p><p>Now eating sweets is usually symbol of sexual satisfaction. But who was he seeking the sexual satisfaction with? Did pastries symbolize woman which the patient was attracted to, the day before and now was enjoying her by turning her into a sweet thing? And was giving the same pleasure to the father? Patient felt that was correct but not the essence of the dream. And I agreed with him.</p><p>"Why the father's pastry was bunny and yours cat?"</p><p>Patient replied, the only thing that comes to the mind is the interpretation of another dream which we had undertaken a few months ago where he had dreamt of a beaver in a dream and it had symbolized female genitals. </p><p>"Are you saying the bunny and cat are alluding to genitals like beaver did?"</p><p>"I think they do," the patient replied.</p><p>Suddenly a conjecture struck to me. Are you and your father eating together the pastries is symbolizing sexual intercourse between the two of you?"</p><p>"I never thought of that," the patient replied. "It is so far fetched."</p><p>Now it is almost guaranteed when a patient says I never thought of that or I would have never guessed that it can be safely taken for granted that the interpretation has hit its mark. What the person accomplishes through that <i><b>negation</b></i> is to allow the repressed thought to emerge but with the negative sign so it can be acknowledged as true yet rejected as perhaps not for I did not ever even think of that. . It is a kind of confession that I always knew that being so but never allowed it to emerge in my thoughts.</p><p>Then as if to further confirm the correctness of the interpretation, he added, "But you are the doctor you know if it is true or not."</p><p>In his conscious thoughts he has no interest in man. He assured me that his father and he never had anything sexually inappropriate between them. But the dream allowed that repressed wish to emerge. And I could not help but deduce that his paranoid illness began as an attempt to suppress this homosexual thought from reaching his conscious mind. A complex thought (plan of action) has to reach consciousness before one can convert it into behavior. The paranoia of security guards following him, voices jeering him and people laughing at him, were all trying to keep the homosexual wish with the father out of his consciousness but at the expense of making him come down with frank paranoid illness. </p>Surendra Kelwalahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17208258557612952541noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7318753641065692730.post-66391142992817764812021-05-31T20:59:00.009-07:002021-12-19T10:10:54.017-08:00Fear as the basic cause behind reversal and skipping of letters while writing and reading <p> A mother of three children, now in her mid-thirties, complained that her youngest child, a five-year-old boy, is oppositional and aggressively defiant, and as a consequence always hyperactive, running away from getting his butt smacked. He also reverses his letters when writing and skips a few here and there while reading. This missing out of a letter or two in words makes him come up with some unique pronunciations which make others laugh but for her, they are a matter of great concern for they bruise his self-esteem. </p><p>The mother placed the blame for her child's behavior squarely upon her husband's family being alcoholics. "The child's father, his uncle, his paternal grandfather, they all drink. And it is obvious to her that they do so to hide the fear that runs in their genes. </p><p>"This fear," she continued, "as a child, they deal through hyperactivity, which is a muted form of constantly distancing themselves from the fearful world, but when they grow older and cannot be physically hyperactive, which as a child they could, they turn to the bottle. For alcohol is great stuff to block fear. As soon as they are drunk they are not afraid of anything and in fact, become a nuisance provoking others to fight them." </p><p>She added that the boy constantly tests limits with her while he unquestionably obeys his father, who hardly takes interest in him. It was felt by the mother that he is less afraid of her because he counts upon her forgiveness, and also because the fear that his father generates in him, which must be taken out somewhere, he takes it out by being a tyrant towards her. By showing dominance over her he denies he is afraid of his father or anybody else. "I am the one who bullies therefore I cannot be viewed as the one who is afraid," so goes his reasoning.</p><p>When asked why he reverses letters she said since he is so fearful of his father he reacts to it not just by bullying me to prove to himself he is terrorizing others instead of being terrorized by them but also by defiantly doing the opposite of what is expected of him. By not writing as how it should be done, he makes his stand against the world at one front to deny his fear of it at another. </p><p>And why does he skip letters, she said, say in a word composed of 6 letters he often sees only 4 because he is so eager to run away from where his performance will be judged and he will be humiliated that as soon as the challenge of reading comes, the part of the mind which wants to take off succeeds in not noticing a couple of letters while the rest of the mind wanting to read and accomplish something manages to register the rest. This tendency to have a blind eye towards some aspects of the word may be part of a general tendency to not notice the world fully but only parts of it.</p><p> This scotomotized appreciation of the world while a handicap in some functions may serve the fearful person well in developing some extraordinary niche ability in other areas. While his father cannot read or write but at an elementary level, he is very good with his hands and can repair anything, the mother proudly proclaimed. This quickness with hands in straightening out anything that is broke is a continuation of his childhood hyperactivity, she added. The reading and writing of letters and words were too slow a form for his hyperactivity to find fast enough expression so he abandoned the world of letters and literature, choosing the world of repairing leaking water pipes, cold furnaces, broken lawnmowers, etc. All these jobs make others' lives comfortable and that has something to do with his wanting to make up (penance) for his tendency to defy the world. </p>Surendra Kelwalahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17208258557612952541noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7318753641065692730.post-6649601682196028672021-02-19T21:00:00.022-08:002021-12-19T07:51:54.027-08:00Resistance towards vaccination - an unconscious wish for the Pandemic to continue?<p><span style="background-color: white; color: #500050; font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">People who object to the coronavirus vaccines will give you the most ingenious reasons as to why they are opposed to it, but, at the bottom, when judged psychoanalytically, invisible to their consciousness, it is a reflection of their wish for the Pandemic to continue. </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="background-clip: initial; background-color: white; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; color: #222222; font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 8pt;"><span style="color: #500050; font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">It sounds counterintuitive. The direct evidence from our observations is just the opposite. Did not humanity rise as one to combat the menace of Covid, with all the nations promulgating the most stringent measures ever devised by mankind against an illness, selflessly ignoring the negative impact it would have upon their economies, in fact, every aspect of their living. Were not all rivalries between researchers and pharmaceutical companies put aside, information shared freely, and highly effective vaccines forged in record time? Whence comes such a preposterous idea, then. that we are about ending lives not saving them? </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="background-clip: initial; background-color: white; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; color: #222222; font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 8pt;"><span style="color: #500050; font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">Granted, humans are remarkably noble, yet alongside our nobility isn't there the possibility that plenty of base impulses also coexist, and the heroism is so unremittingly pursued, and its drums so loudly beaten, to prevent the evil side of us getting a foothold upon our conscious willful behavior? Once we go past our conventional hypocrisy regarding issues of death which we so scrupulously keep off-limits from our thinking in our daily conduct and furthermore try to analyze as to why<i> impulses</i> out of nowhere come to our mind of harming others or harm befalling them and, no doubt, as a punishment for these evil thoughts, we visualize our own death or death of those dear to us, my claim does not sound as preposterous. And the idea gains further traction when we recall what Freud had to say about the human tendency to murder each other individually and en masse: </span><span style="color: #181818; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 10.5pt;">“The very emphasis of the commandment: Thou shalt not kill, makes it certain that we are descended from an endlessly long chain of generations of murderers, whose love of murder was in their blood as it is perhaps also in ours.”</span><span style="color: #500050; font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;"></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="background-clip: initial; background-color: white; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; color: #222222; font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 8pt;"><span style="color: #500050; font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;"> We all have different degrees of axes to grind, and it appears that through the agency of Covid morbidity and mortality we have found a most convenient conduit to discharge our gripes. The fear that the vaccination will cause us harm and the government and the medical profession is conspiring to hide information on the downside of these vaccines, is a "projection" of our own unconscious conspiratorial thinking to harm others. This wish however is not evenly distributed, and the presence of the counter wish to help others and prevent their death obscures the picture of what goes on in the deeper layers of our psychic life.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="background-clip: initial; background-color: white; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; color: #222222; font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 8pt;"><span style="color: #500050; font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;"> "Projection" is an ego mechanism, present from the very first stirrings of our separation from our mother. We "introject" what we feel as "good" about others and strive to make it our attribute. We "project" upon others what we feel as "bad" within us and would rather see it as a problem of someone else's. An interesting phase of this ego mechanism, which incidentally explains <b>why we spin conspiracy theories, </b>occurs during the oedipal period. The child gripped in the throes of the parental complex of love and hate, hatches all kinds of plots to do away with the feared oedipal father and mother and to lessen the guilt of parricidal and matricidal thoughts "projects" these unacceptable fantasies upon the latter. "It is my father (for it is towards him these fantasies are the most virulent and extensive) who is the bad one, not me. It is he who is full of ingenious schemes to harm me, not I who is planning his death. And it is my mother who practices voodoo, witchcraft, and black magic and will cause me all kinds of strange maladies, not I who wants her to disappear." With the end of the oedipal phase, these phantasies go into repression, but their influence upon our thinking and behavior unbeknownst to us continues till our dying day. </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="background-clip: initial; background-color: white; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; color: #222222; font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 8pt;"><span style="color: #500050; font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">While the human species is infinitely kind, and we will lay down our lives for others, we can, nevertheless, alongside, be infinitely cruel. No memory is completely obliterated in the unconscious and we never let go of our grudges in it, harboring long chains of convoluted thoughts, designed to result in the death of all those, no matter how far in the past, who have crossed our path, done us wrong and caused us pain. These memories are like our cross to carry. They may be faint, they may be strong, but they are there to stay. And they put constant pressure upon us to seek new paths of discharge for the affects (emotions) associated with them. Since most of the originators of our pain are long gone from our current existence we have to find new, often ingenious, ways to do so, and upon people and entities who had nothing to do with our original hurt. Life is mostly about finding reasons for and means of discharging our bottled-up emotions upon the wrong people. By not getting vaccinated we may want to make our own little contribution to keep the hellfire of the Pandemic going and the hope alive of our imagined enemies catching the virus either directly by our own unvaccinated self or by the mysterious workings of<i> karma</i> with the aid of the still smoldering disease.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="background-clip: initial; background-color: white; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; color: #222222; font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 8pt;"><span style="color: #500050; font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">People who harbor such wishes in their behavior are either paradoxically the most conscientious advocates of social distancing, mask-masochists would be an apt moniker for them, rarely if ever stepping out of the house, not even visiting their parent or children since the Pandemic started, and always ready to chime in "be safe"', all of which is as much a <i>"reaction formation</i>" against their evil intentions as concern for others or are flagrant violators of the COVID norms, believing in the theory that COVID is a hoax, in being mask skeptics, and in taking pride in hugging and doing high fives with each other in social gatherings, which is a deflected continuation of their unconscious foul designs into their conscious conduct as well. </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="background-clip: initial; background-color: white; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; color: #222222; font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: normal; margin: 0in;"><span style="color: #500050; font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">Behind the slogan of "health freedom" of the latter group is the demand for the freedom to exact vengeance, and if not via God Himself, indirectly through an Act of His. The Pandemic after all is an Act of God. When these rebels suspect that the government is pushing these vaccines without having enough data on it and may turn us into Frankenstein monsters from some rogue element of the inadequately studied mRNA, or suspect the opposite that the vaccines are such advanced sci-fi stuff that embedded in them are chips that will carry all our medical data along with a GPS to locate our whereabouts 24/7 through 5G towers, they are hatching up theories which are a distorted elaboration of the conspiracies that they have been cooking up in the recesses of their own mind. The bizarreness of chips and GPS being embedded in the vaccine makes sense only when we make the construction that they are a reflection of the fear that the government (parent substitute) will through them get hold of their sick thinking. What they cannot see in their own interior, because of their refusal to accept that the darker side of their selves can possess such mean murderous thoughts, they can easily suspect in the act of the government, the Pharma, and the big business. These are <i>parental entities</i> against whom they can rant and rave without fear of making a dent because of their size, and from whom, for the same reason, they need not fear retaliation. You can take on a super Goliath (George Soros, Bill Gates, and the government itself) as your enemy with impunity if your entity is no larger than a gnat in the grand scheme of things. Sometimes of course this game of revenge is not all symbolic and does come down to actual interference like the behaviors of vaccine skeptic legislators who, when the Pandemic was at its zenith, were introducing bills to totally end lockdowns and COVID mandates totally and all those who peddle vaccine misinformation like that it is a conspiracy to depopulate and that vaccinated individuals, even entire families, will start falling dead after two or four years. As to how they arrived at the figure of two or four remains a mystery but certainly gives a ring of scientific exactness. </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="background-clip: initial; background-color: white; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; color: #222222; font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 8pt;"><span style="color: #500050; font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">But the above cannot be wholly true. We instinctively feel that something is missing here, even if we cannot tell exactly what. There are too many people you know who are opposed to the vaccine but don't give you the impression of being tortured by death wishes and revenge fantasies, even if it remains in their unconscious mind as I claim but are just regular guys. There has to be more to the story. </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="background-clip: initial; background-color: white; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; color: #222222; font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: normal; margin: 0in;"><span style="color: #500050; font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">Well, we can never overestimate the herd mentality of humans. People who are quite rational in other ways, even of penetrating intelligence in their own field, show remarkable infantilism in making an independent judgment in matters outside their expertise. One of my patients who completely believed in not taking the vaccine until <i>he had done enough research</i> and he would not buy my logic that if “Bill Gates comes from a family of eugenicists and unleashed the virus to reap profits from the vaccine the patent of which he holds” why would he want to depopulate his customer base through mass infertility</span><span style="color: #500050; font-family: Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;"> (apparently, his researches also had revealed that a lipid in the vaccine uncouples once inside the body and goes to the ovaries to render women infertile)</span><span style="color: #500050; font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;"> because of his trust in me as his doctor got the vaccine and not surprisingly this reformed anti-vaxxer is now the most ardent vaccine promoter.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="background-clip: initial; background-color: white; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; color: #222222; font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: normal; margin: 0in;"><span style="color: #500050; font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="background-clip: initial; background-color: white; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; color: #222222; font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: normal; margin: 0in;"><span style="color: #500050; font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">While it is tempting to see the matter simply as a lacuna in such people's ability to trust their own judgment, such shirking of responsibilities arises from a fear that if they make their own decision their hostile wishes towards others may get the upper hand. It is only when we fear that we have too much troublemaking inside us that will overwhelm our good sense if we fully take over the reins of our affairs that we begin to rely upon </span><span style="color: black; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">others to make up our minds for us. It may be worthwhile to add here that in my patient’s case there was a particularly strange dread and horror of the mRNA of the vaccine. Despite the fact that he did not know a thing about the molecular biology of RNA or DNA, he quivered in his boot thinking as to how the messenger RNA once inside him will take over his DNA and destroy everything good and precious about him. It was easy to see by putting on psychoanalytic spectacles that the mRNA symbolized to him his base, aggressive destructive anal id impulses, which if they once broke through his ego shield will overpower his rational self. </span><span style="color: #500050; font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;"></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="background-clip: initial; background-color: white; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; color: #222222; font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 8pt;"><span style="color: #500050; font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">We cannot ignore the fear of the needle-phobes either, who rather die of Covid than be poked with that pinprick. The problem here is not the fear of the vaccine but of the prick (pun intended). Since phobias are a matter of <i>hysterical anxiety</i> it behooves us to figure out what the needle symbolizes to these hysterics. A seasoned psychoanalyst would tell you the needle is a quintessential symbol of the penis and the queasy nauseous feeling that is evoked by the poking of the skin and the gushing of blood into the syringe a <i>displaced</i> dread of castration and impregnation. The phobia is a neurotic precipitate of a premature repression of cruel impulses from the anal sadistic phase now displaced and condensed with all its fury upon the dread of the needle. The mechanism appears to be as follows: the advancement from the pregenital to the genital phase of psychosexuality is met with a hysterical horror of the brutality of the reproductive (genital) sexual act and a regression back to the anal phase, where the fear of penis is now displaced upon all things cruel, including the medical profession and their needles. However, this psychoanalytical knowledge of the needle phobia at the practical level does not mean much for by the time the needle-phobes will get analyzed, if we can find enough psychoanalysts, for there are hardly any left, and their phobia cured, the Pandemic will be over. </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="background-clip: initial; background-color: white; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; color: #222222; font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 8pt;"><span style="color: #500050; font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">Then we come to those who are rugged individualists and take pride in rejecting anything imposed from "the top". They are freedom nuts. Behind the rebellion lies the oppositional defiance disorder, such a large part of human nature, and once again a remnant of the Oedipal Phase of our psychosexual development. It is in the human DNA to be insubordinate to authorities, the father substitutes. Rejecting vaccine is experienced as standing one's ground, being a man. Underneath lies obsessive-compulsive's <i>stubbor<wbr></wbr>nness. "</i>I will match the virus's lethality against my own immortality and come out the winner." It is a love for playing with fire; being a David against the Goliath. Others will die of the virus but not me. I am a horse of a different color, an exception. Alongside the bravado, a strong streak of suicidal impulse is unmistakable. Pleasure in life is highly correlated with the risk undertaken to obtain that pleasure. Wagering one's life itself to defy Covid's might is a pretty strong suicidal <i>high</i>. Even in this group at the very bottom lies the patricidal impulse, generalized to the entire population. I have been done wrong, others have taken advantage of me and unfairly shown me to be second to them so it behooves me to stand apart from the crowd, completely independent in my thinking, defiant of any exhortations on part of the world to bend to its will. </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="background-clip: initial; background-color: white; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; color: #222222; font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 8pt;"><span style="color: #500050; font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">But the one which is the hardest to contend with is due to the distrust of the government. Anything that comes from the government they suspect is designed to favor others over them. Here lies the sibling rivalry behind the vaccine skepticism. My parents favored others over me so I should be wary; for what is being offered must be at my expense and to the advantage of my rivals. Rejection of the government is being acted out through the rejection of the vaccine. While defiance against the government is at the core of the vaccine opposition of many disgruntled folks there are two demographic groups who have the most reasons for wallowing in such morbid thoughts.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="background-clip: initial; background-color: white; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; color: #222222; font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: normal; margin: 0in;"><span style="color: #500050; font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;"> We will start with the first group whose opposition to the vaccine is more perplexing: the traditional White Americans. They are more likely to be from rural or smaller cities than metropolitan areas, parochially religious than self-dependent on spiritual matters, blue than white-collar, Republican than Democrat. These are the folks who since the passage of the Civil Rights Act and the change in the immigration policies in the Sixties have seen a steady decline in their relative standing when compared with those who hitherto they had taken for granted were born inferior. Their overall standard of living has improved but since happiness depends more not on what you have but what you have that others don't, they have a feeling the outsiders are making strides faster than they are. On the world stage too, they have suffered a narcissistic setback. Other economies and political powers are challenging their geopolitical supremacy. But what is causing the greatest rage in them is their helplessness over new legal and cultural changes that are eroding their traditional way of living. Their greatest pride - that America is the land of the free and home of the brave; where one can do as one pleases as long as one is twenty-one and white - is becoming an empty phrase. For quite a few things that were once looked upon as “boys will be boys” and dealt with a rap on the knuckles and something to laugh about, are now treated as severe moral lapses, especially in matters such as sexual harassment, and criminal charges, heavy fines, and prison terms can be quickly imposed by an increasingly punitive and rapacious legal system. Within the confines of their homes as well they cannot discharge their pent-up aggressive energy [<i>thanatos</i>] upon their spouse and children and then make up for the excessive aggression by the release of equally strong compensatory love impulses [<i>eros</i>]). Self-appointed moral police of all kinds are breathing down their neck knowing more than they do as to how one should live one's life.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="background-clip: initial; background-color: white; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; color: #222222; font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: normal; margin: 0in;"><span style="color: #500050; font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">All aggression is becoming off limit but that which can be taken out on one's own self through LGBTQ dilution of one's once strictly practiced masculine or feminine gender identity, self-cutting, drugs, physical and mental illnesses, and outright suicide. Forget going to war in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan and fighting with other races, even ethnic jokes, the staple of mankind to let off some steam and feel better about oneself through one's group identity is now forbidden. They are also askance at their hard-earned White Credibility being declared as White Privilege.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="background-clip: initial; background-color: white; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; color: #222222; font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: normal; margin: 0in;"><span style="color: #500050; font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">There is no denying that these cultural changes have their good points and are making the world a more level playing field, but can one really deny that embedded within this culture war there is not a mad self-destructive fratricidal sadism and a perverse interest in bringing down everything that was once held as sacrosanct. No wonder these Trump supporters are resentful towards the government. By not trusting the vaccine they are registering their displeasure. By declaring the virus is a hoax they are making a statement that the government is working for their best interests is a hoax.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="background-clip: initial; background-color: white; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; color: #222222; font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 8pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">The other group is the African Americans. They too are government skeptics rather than vaccine skeptics despite their loud proclamations that their opposition is intellectual in nature and they are <i>researching</i> the matter and have not made up their minds yet. Unlike the former group whose rage at the government is for destroying the natural right of white people to dominate and lead, and for imposing too many stringent ordinances and self-restraints on their daily living, the gripe of Black people is for exactly the opposite reason. The government is not doing enough to remove the gap that exists between their living standards and those of other ethnicities. There is little insight here that the government cannot legislate away discrimination. The laws can only go so far in molding social behavior. Deeper change can only happen through the co-mingling of ethnicities on their own without coercion depending upon the natural instinct in all humans for upward mobility through using each other's gene pool and unique skills. But meanwhile, somebody has to be held responsible for the lack of the so-called <i>equity</i> and all the pain that darker hued have to undergo for being less white on the color spectrum. As one of my African American patients once quipped, "We have to catch subtle hell from the minute we get up to the time we fall asleep for being black." Rejecting the vaccine is one way to get even for this unfairness. The reasoning goes: since I have no choice over being black and the government has been worthless in preventing all the ignominies that go along with it, I rebuke your vaccine. There are far weightier issues that adversely impact my life than that virus does. If anything, that virus has been a great leveler, killing whites and blacks alike. Even then the virus is unfair towards the Black, for the amount of harm Fate/Ananke/Government has done by making us black, I need to be compensated with a million bucks each. Give me a million and I will take your vaccine. </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="background-clip: initial; background-color: white; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; color: #222222; font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 8pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">There is two surprising or perhaps not so surprising commonality between the African American and Trump vaccine skeptics. Both groups believe that the Government and Big Business are out to selectively depopulate their particular ethnicity and the Jews are its prime movers as they were of 911. Since the world has made it it's business to depopulate Jewish ethnicity, it is not that puzzling as to why they want to blame them for all ethnic cleansing and genocide that occurs anywhere. It is a form of adding insult to injury.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="background-clip: initial; background-color: white; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; color: #222222; font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 8pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">I cannot take leave without making a comment as to how utterly useless it is to persuade those people whose resistance arises from unconscious emotional hangups to accept rational scientific reasoning. A 70-year-old assisted-living patient, who smokes two packs of cigarettes a day, is in poor health and barely able to breathe due to COPD, told my wife, who is her internist, that she will not take the vaccine because she does not know what is in it and will not allow anything unknown inside her body. When asked that considering that she smokes like a chimney does she realize that she regularly inhales hundreds of toxins that she knows nothing about, she responded that that is different because we have known for a long time that cigarettes are harmful but we know nothing about mRNAs’ long term effects. When it was pointed out that she is already too old and in poor health and that she should worry more about the possibility of immediate death from Covid than about the vaccines turning her into a tridactyl or affecting her fertility or causing her to drop dead in a set number of years, she agreed with the logic but said that she still does not trust the vaccine for it came to the market too fast. When countered does she trust the virus more than the vaccine, she declared that she trusts only the Lord. It is He who giveth life and it is He who taketh it away. </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 15.6933px; margin: 0in 0in 8pt;"><span style="background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; color: #888888; font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 17.12px;">--</span></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p> </p>Surendra Kelwalahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17208258557612952541noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7318753641065692730.post-44546686517098197662020-11-01T08:54:00.051-08:002022-03-02T06:01:22.436-08:00Passionate Trumpism and Anti-Trumpism - two sides of the same coin<p> A vast swath of Americans are having difficulty falling asleep at night afraid if they snooze too long Trump will once again slither his way into becoming the president. Any good thought about him is such an anathema to these Trump-haters that many have severed their relationships, some of which were life-long, with friends and family members, on finding they were Trump supporters. Then there are their polar opposites. These people, no less in number, see Trump's taking the helm of affairs in Washington second only to the Second Coming of the Lord Himself. Glued to the TV from the minute they wake up to the time they fall asleep, they cannot get enough of praising his virtues to the like-minded, and rush to his rallies, often not even donning the mask, as if by such endangering of their lives they are enhancing the glory of his Godhood. </p><p>While diametrically opposite in their outward political behavior these two groups are identical at heart. They are moved by the same cauldron of hatred. </p><p>But this does not make sense. Are not the Progressives, who embrace every deviation as some form of welcome diversity are fundamentally opposite of the staid Conservatives who see in every change a step closer to America becoming the latter-day Sodom and Gomorrah?</p><p>That may be true but that kind of boiling hatred and anger can it be really provoked by the difference in political ideology? Is it possible that the hatred in American has reached such a high watermark that politics has become of such disproportionate importance? Perhaps it is not politics that is making the Americans so mad, it is because they are so mad that they are attracted to politics.</p><p>Americans are easily bored with humdrum existence. They are a restless people. People from all over the world who could not stand the routine way of life in the old-world gravitated towards America. Upward mobility and exploration of new vistas is in their DNA. But now there are no new lands to conquer. There is no West to explore and win. There is no slavery and the abolitionists and antiabolitionists to fight a Civil War. There are no World Wars left to go and rescue Europe from fratricidal madness. There are no Korean and Vietnam wars to halt the great yellow wave. There is no Soviet Union to do Cold War posturing. There are no Desert Shield, Desert Storm, and no Saddam Hussain to kick around. There is no Osama Bin Laden hiding in Afghanistan to invade and convert their lifestyles to reflect ours. They are whipping up their hatred of China, who, burdened by their own inferiority complex due to their physiognomy of slanted eyes and flat noses, are looking for adversaries to defeat and disprove it, but it has not reached the critical threshold to unburden rage. </p><p>Americans now have only themselves to attack and triumph over. </p><p>In the name of Trump, they are fighting with each other. </p><p>Once the World Wars were over and the Civil Rights Movement emerged which greatly lessened the scope of taking out of the collective surplus hatred upon each other and the blacks respectively, Americans relaxed the restrictive laws on immigration, and now they had people of all colors, arriving in droves, whom they could patronize, show the ropes, feel good about themselves by doing so, get mad at their Third World ways, shake their heads in disbelief over their crudity, and compete with each other to give these underdogs more benefits than their own selves. Unfortunately, the ones they allowed to come in hoping to feel sorry for them on at least some ground, these yesterday whipping boys are abandoning their preordained role and becoming economically more prosperous than the ones who viewed them first and foremost as economic refugees. Also, no good deed goes unpunished and no hatred is as great as the hatred that one feels towards one's benefactor who one no longer needs. </p><p>A great disgruntlement is creeping into the White America which took for granted they were cut above all other peoples. Interestingly the White Americans who live in metropolitan areas are holding their own with the immigrants and who still need the latter as conduits for feeling superior. But that is not true with rural White Americans who with their standard of living slipping down can see that the more driven non-white immigrants actually doing better than themselves. It is these people who find a magnet in Trump and his slogan of Make America Great Again. In which they see the echo of the call for making America parochial and white again, even if translates into becoming less prosperous than what they are now - for the entrepreneurship and energy of the immigrants in long run always brings greater wealth - since it did not carry the ignominy of being inferior to people of color. </p><p>While unbridled immigration is a major cause of the American schism, it is not the main one. The main one is the restless spirit of America. America invites the most ambitious and motivated people from all over the world. It is natural that those who are most talented are also the most frustrated and disgruntled and filled with barely contained rage because there will always be people who will get ahead of you no matter how talented you are if not for anything else because of one's aging. In this fight for and against Trump, it is just the quintessential American spirit dividing itself into two and fighting against its own self.</p>Surendra Kelwalahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17208258557612952541noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7318753641065692730.post-49147879116463501712020-10-11T08:46:00.059-07:002020-10-30T21:30:08.665-07:00The Hidden Sadomasochism behind the Obsessive Rituals of Social Distancing<p> <span style="background-color: white; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">As prime ministers and
presidents, state governors and city mayors, doctors and non-doctors in the
pursuit of "flattening the curve" rush to close down whatever
they can lay their eyes upon, and the populace, at least a subsection, nay the
great majority, not to be left behind in this race to quell everything,
as long as it is happening to others at least as much as to oneself, and one's
survival is not yet at stake, urges them to do even more, one wonders whether
behind the noble motive of saving lives there are not other ignoble ones,
riding on the coattails of the highmindedness.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 150%;">Even if such baser
motives exist, you may want to ask, why even think in those lines and weaken
the resolve of mankind to wipe out this scourge, especially when I know for a
fact that the more rigorous the social isolation the more rapidly the pandemic
will end?<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 150%;">I have nothing against
containing the virus as aggressively as possible, but when it begins to border
on the absurd like a state governor telling family members living under the
same roof to socially distance themselves from each other, or when the Wuhan
Chinese, amongst whom the virus first emerged, start persecuting the African
students in the region, prematurely ending their leases and forcing them to sleep
on the streets, as if their black skin itself were the virus, or when my two
secretaries lock the entrance to the office even when they know other than the
three of us nobody comes through it - it is all telehealth now - as if the
coronavirus will creep through an unlocked door faster than a locked one, or
when the head of the security at my wife's hospital, who has been seeing and
greeting her for 30 years, on her forgetting the hospital keys and not having
her ID badge on her person does not let her in the doctor's lounge with his
master key as if such harrassment - racial at its core because of her brown
skin - will flatten the curve faster, or when one obsessional neurotic patient
after another tries to convince me that it is a man made virus, designed by the
Chinese to get even with Donald Trump and in the very same breath expounds the
theory that it is a Big Pharma conspiracy, hatched in cahoots with Donald
Trump, to vaccinate us all, with the vaccine already in the vaults, ready
to be released when the moment is right for the greatest financial killing of
all time, and as icing on the cake adds that in the vaccine there is also a
tiny chip that will store our medical records and keep a minute-to-minute tab
on our movements through 5-G towers, or when a hysterical patient tells that
for three months before the virus emerged she was regularly dreaming of flying
over that ocean all the way to China and seeing there her deceased father
chatting with those people (did not clarify in Chinese or English), and when
the virus hit the American shores the recurrent dream disappeared and it was
certainly an attempt on the part of her father from the beyond to forewarn her
of the coming danger, or when my wife starts to instruct me as to how I should
tell the police I am a doctor if I get stopped as I prepare to leave my house
to visit a rental property which is an "inessential activity" and I
tell her that I rather pay the 1000 dollar fine than abuse my medical privileges
and she comes back with "for a 10,000 dollars I bet you will, and it is
not just thousand dollars but your behind that may go to jail too for 90
days", it is time to examine what lies behind these behaviors which
basically are not so much driven by medical considerations as to make each
other's life miserable. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 150%;">If the above examples
are not sufficient to convince that behind the medical there are a
multitude of other agendas, driven by schadenfreude, jockeying to find
expression, let us consider the immense elasticity of the social isolation that
I practice. I am more lax with women than with men. With the former, if
she impulsively moves towards me, abrogating the six feet rule, I am left
speechless while I do not hesitate to sharply check a man if he invades that
personal space. And if the woman is young and pretty I am quite
likely to forget even to don on my mask. A white man is more likely to be
viewed as free of the virus while a black man, especially if he is burly and
towers over me, I may reach for the gloves in addition to the mask. A person
whom I dislike does not matter man or woman, black or white, I feel like
wearing a hazmat suit in addition to the mask and gloves and the thought creeps
up as to what social distancing would be like if it is made say a mile or
longer. So the strength of social distancing has less to do with medical
science than the attraction or hate we feel towards the person we are dealing
with. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 150%;">Is hatred in humans more
powerful than love? Hate definitely is older than love. The newborn, if he had
a choice, would have nothing to do with the world, which, at least in the very
beginning, he finds as an unwelcome disturber of the cocooned peace that
he was used to until then. This was driven home to me with no uncertainty when I
watched my nephew Derek Hall, four-hours-old, lying content and happy next to
his mother, getting stabbed in his heel with a needle for a blood test,
and as he squealed and opened his eyes in shock, the expression was
unmistakable, "What the f*** is going on? What was that for? Why I am
here? Whose idea is all this anyway? Why did you all poke me so cruelly? If
this is the harbinger of what living will be like for I don't know how long I
rather be beamed back to my mother's womb; adieus."<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 150%;">It is only gradually
that we begin to love others and at first only those aspects of them that
satisfy our needs. It begins with the mother's breast - which we probably see
as an appendage of ourselves than a part of the outside world - gradually
extending to her entire person. It does not matter if the caretaker is not the
biological mother and the baby is bottle-fed, for the phylogenetic memories
(what our ancestors did countless times for millions of years) patch up the
ontogenetic gaps. The love then broadens to include the father and others in
the household, as they increasingly share the responsibility of our care with
the mother. And we begin to realize that there are aspects of the world that
are not painful and violators of our peace, <i>but whose</i> <i>appearance</i> <i>means
relief</i> from the tensions that relentlessly arise - hunger, thirst,
wetness, cold, and other unpleasant body sensations. And the calming (pleasure)
that follows from the abatement of these stimuli by these entities makes them
deserving of love, not rejection. <br />
The next step we take is to start loving our brothers and sisters, rather
unwillingly, and at first only because doing so earns the love of the parents
and avoiding spells its loss if not outright punishment. As rivals for
the love and attention of the parents, and whose presence means less food and
toys, they are an annoying nuisance; objects of intense jealousy, and,
initially, we can find no good reason for their existence, for they do exactly
what we were doing just yesterday for the parents' admiration; superfluous
copycats. But that is not entirely correct, for when we see in them so much of
ourselves, it compels us to share our narcissism (self-love) with them. The
bond strengthens as they turn into readily available playmates and
comrades-in-arm in our struggle to understand and master the world outside and
the instinctual needs from within. They also provide us a template to model our
behavior if older and to be a surrogate parent if younger. The march of love
continues its stride, from the family to extra-familial objects - aunts and
uncles, neighbors and playmates, teachers and impersonal ideals, and thence to
the world at large.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 150%;">But all this love is
still on shaky grounds. It is not like the ever-expanding sphere of love keeps
pushing the hatred out the window until we are full of love for the entire
creation. This, of course, is what society, especially through the agency of religion,
exhorts us to achieve, but we know with how little success. And the reason is
not difficult to discern. Antithetical forces are in action from the very
beginning. While others satisfy our needs, they also hurt and disappoint
us. The mother's breast, while deeply satisfying, leaves a bitter taste
whenever the nipple is pulled out. Other frustrations follow and knowing
nothing but the mother at that stage, she is held responsible for every
thwarting of our will. Whether she nurtures a lot or a little (often she has
her own ambivalence and aggressive impulses towards us), we always have varying
degrees of grudge against her for not doing enough. In cultures where babies
are routinely breastfed, it is not uncommon for girls, even long after they are
weaned, to complain that they were not given enough milk (love) by the mother
in comparison to their brothers [and that is the reason they became the weaker
sex; the reasoning, though, soon gets repressed into the unconscious]. This
complaint that my mother's milk (love) was not pure pleasure but also a source
of pain becomes the soil from which a number of eating disorders arise if the
life trajectory does not go according to schedule. Fear of contaminants in food
and water, eating of strictly organic fares, obsessive filtering or
boiling of drinking water, religiously watching "bad parts" of food
like gluten, egg yolks, processed meat, refined sugar, and in some eschewing
meat altogether, all these fads at bottom are attempts to convert one's past passive
and helpless feeding role with the mother to an active and controlling one,
where the bitter aspects of the mother are rejected. Even the current obsession
with wearing masks and taking so many similar precautions against the foul
virus has as a secondary motive to block out all the negative aspects of the
mother, allowing only the pleasurable ones, now projected upon the world at
large which becomes a substitute for the mother. In paranoid
psychosis, this memory of the mother's love being admixed with hatred leads to
the interesting delusion that the illness was caused by some trusted person
secretly putting LSD or some similar poisonous drug in one's drink. Paranoid
people's subtle rage at the world with the fantasy of annihilating it for being
fed bullshit (poison with nourishment) by it was most amusingly portrayed
in the movie <i>Dr. Strangelove </i>where General Ripper, convinced
that America is being slowly poisoned by the Russians through the adding of
fluoride in its water supply triggers a nuclear apocalypse. It is unclear if in
Anorexia Nervosa also it is not this hatred/rejection of the mother (food) for
not doing enough for one that underlies the illness. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 150%;">Even more painful than
the nipple getting withdrawn from one's mouth is seeing it being put in a
sibling's mouth, and we never quite forgive our mother for having other
children, and instead of devoting all of herself to us, dividing it with them,
her husband and her other interests. Soon the grudge extends to the father. He
too disappoints us. He disciplines us, sometimes cruelly, and not just because
the culture has brainwashed him into believing the doctrine of <i>spare
the rod spoil the child,</i> but it is so easy to overdo one's duty if it
entails exercising power over somebody much weaker than oneself. Furthermore,
it seems that nature has its own agenda towards making father in some ways
harsher towards sons than their transgressions justify. Cultural advancement
depends in no small measure upon the antagonism between the generations. And
mother and father both also earn our resentment when they favor or seem to
favor some other brother or sister over us, even if it is done for short
periods and done only to groom his or her competitive spirit. Our <i>rejection
sensitivity</i> is so overarching that even a shift of attention from
ourselves to another is sufficient to trigger a murderous rage.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 150%;">During the Oedipal
phase, the ambivalence towards parents enters into an entirely new dimension.
Erotic love emerges alongside the affectionate one and is naturally directed
towards the mother for she is the only truly beautiful one around. To make
matters more complicated, it is coupled with a virulent hatred for the father.
The emergence of this hatred does not mean the love for him ceases. It
continues to play its role in the background, tugging the mind in two opposite
directions. The hatred spawns myriad fantasies on how to get exclusive
possession of the mother through getting rid of the father, and doing it in
such a way that nobody would guess who did it - the basis of our species
endless fascination with tales of triangular romances, murder mysteries, and
perfect-crime plots. With the end of the Oedipal phase, these fantasies go into
repression, but from the unconscious continue to be the fountainhead of
literature, drama, cinema, and other arts. The <i>projection</i> of
our evil intentions towards the father - it is not me who wants to kill
him, but it is he who wants to do away with me - is the wellspring of all
the bizarre and ingenious conspiracy theories. For while we are putting
together a plan of action to do him in, we are also making preparations to
defend ourselves from his anticipated reaction to it, and with time the
defensive preparations become more elaborate and stronger than the plans to
harm him. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 150%;">The fear of giant organizations
like the Government, the IRS, the FBI, Big Pharma, even smaller ones like City
Hall, one's Home Owners Association, next-door neighbor, secret societies
like the Illuminati, the Free Masons, abstractions like 5g-towers, Fate, they
are all the result of this dread that <i>the father</i> is conspiring
to kill us, having become privy to our treacherous thoughts against him. These
entities become a proxy for the father because of their size, strength, and
authoritarian mantle. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 150%;">But the oedipal phase is
not all just about hating the father and loving the mother. There is the
negative Oedipus Complex too - the craving for love and sexual satisfaction
from the father and hatred and doing away with the mother. Since it is in
direct conflict with the positive Oedipus Complex - loving the mother and
hating the father - it is vigorously suppressed by the society's vested
interest in cultivating masculine impulses in the male sex and opposed by the
boy's own pride in his masculinity and the fear of it getting submerged by the
feminine trends. The derivatives of this Oedipal hatred of the mother [strengthened by the discovery that she lacks the penis, which due to the eroticism at that point being almost entirely phallocentric, causes a severe devaluation of the female sex] transform
into different forms of misogyny. The denial and rejection of passive erotic
impulses, taking the role of the mother and abjectly submitting oneself to the
father is handled by reactionary exaggerated masculinity (machismo),
hair-raising bravado, logic-defying brinkmanship, pursual of dare-devil sports
and stunts, arrogance towards authorities and gaudy masculine
flamboyance. The projection of the hatred towards the mother (it is not I
who wants her out of my way but it is she who wants to get rid of me) is the
soil from which arises the dread of witchcraft, sorcery, black magic, voodoo,
and other fears of female subterfuge, trickery, and duplicity.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 150%;">While the content and the outcome of the Oedipal phase described above is from the vantage point of the
boy, the girl's love and hatred towards the parents also undergo similar,
though not identical, vicissitudes. Here also the hatred of the father is
coupled with a love for the mother, and hatred of the mother conjoint with a
love for the father. However, the processes are not exactly alike and not as
well studied. We do know the outcome in the rough though. Her Oedipal phase
begins too with erotic love for the mother and a hatred for the father but it
comes to a roadblock on realizing that her fantasies cannot be fulfilled
because of the inferiority of the clitoris in playing the <i>active</i> role
in the relationship with the mother. Her love for the mother takes a big hit.
She is filled with envy towards the brothers who will have an unfair advantage
in loving the mother in the way she can never do and fury against the mother
for shortchanging her. She deduces, and correctly, the extent of the
drawback she will face in the future because of this handicap. Thenceforth in
her relationships with her own sex, behind the narcissistic love and pride for
common feminine beauty and attributes, there will also be back-stabbing malice
as a revenge for the underhanded betrayal done to her by the mother. The shift
of love from the mother to the father, from whom she now expects to receive the
penis (which soon transforms into the wish to receive a child) is also not free
of ambivalence. Her first love, after all, was her mother and much of that love
refuses to abandon its first dwelling place. The erotic love for the mother,
and her own sex by extension, continue to exist in the background and all
through life will undermine the attachment for the opposite sex. This
homosexual love (attraction towards women) will often be<i> projected </i>upon
her lover/husband (it is not I but he who lusts after this or that woman), and
she will accuse her partner of having affairs with other women with or without
justification. She may even drive them to have affairs. There are other factors
besides this lingering homosexuality derived out of her strong attachment to
the mother that will interfere with her ability to love heterosexually. The
girl never quite accepts the genital injustice done to her, convinced that she
once did have genitals like her brother, but because of some <i>naughtiness</i> on
her part, they were <i>violently</i> mutilated. The dysphoria that
women display during menstruation, besides the hormonal causes, is due to the
rage generated from the memory (even though in actuality it is a <i>false
memory</i> and not even present in the conscious mind beyond the Oedipal
period) of such a trauma. Somatization Disorder, where the woman cannot tire of complaining of body aches and pains, caused by multitudes of illnesses festering within her, also perhaps arise from the false memory of a painful castration that she feels she was subjected to before she became properly aware of her self and her surroundings. Women's fascination with crime dramas like Forensic
Files, biographies of serial murderers, especially those rare females who serially
poison their victims, arises from these revenge fantasies of having suffered
genital mutilation. Growing up experiencing humiliations and other
disadvantages because of her sex, she becomes hyperfocused on men's defects and
their follies, always quick to point to their missteps, and in some marriages
all the woman does is to criticize her husband from dawn to dusk and sees to it
that he gets no pleasure out of their relationship. Behind the constant
complaining lies just one gripe - an appeal to the world to notice that it is
my husband who is the defective one and deserving of genital mutilation, not
me, and I should be in his shoes and he in mine. This complaint that I have
been unfairly treated accompanied by scapegoating of some random person or organization
as the cause may result in others taking up the cudgels against the
targeted one, especially if the woman is exceptionally pretty and hysterical (a
drama queen). Many great family and community disputes occur because of this
grudge in the woman for her lover and a good example of it would be Salome's
request for John the Baptist's head on a platter (beheading as a quintessential
symbol of castration). The enigmatic nature of women, which men cannot complain
enough about, also lies in this same complex, in that she helps her man with
one hand and undermines him with the other. She helps because she identifies
with his ambitions - her own ambitions dependent upon his success - but
on seeing that he is fundamentally no better than her and undeserving of the
superior role in the partnership, she acts as his enemy, cutting his leg from under him in
small and big ways, subtly and overtly, from mild uncooperativeness to taking
up the knife and outright castrating him as Lorena Bobbit did. Sudden switches
of women's mood from loving and friendly to "bitchy" and
contradictory owes to the same complex. This vengeance of women for being the
second sex, the one who has to play the passive subordinate role only because
of her biology and which generates different degrees of rage after the
intoxicating sex act is over, is best illustrated in Euripedes's play
Medea. Medea after loving her husband Jason for a period, and only because
Aphrodite instigated Cupid to strike her with his arrow (mythological depiction
of how the rise of sex hormones can override the antagonism between the sexes),
on seeing that he wants to bring another woman into his life, kills their
two sons and through that grievous act him. That it was a revenge for her
belief that she was violently castrated in her early childhood by her father is
supported by the storyline that she kills her brother and King Pelias (a father
substitute) by cutting them into pieces. As the Hindi saying goes, "<i>Triya
charitra koi naa janey, khasam maar, sati ho jaye</i>" (woman's character
no one can fathom, will kill her husband and then jump on his funeral pyre to
be a <i>sati</i>). One of my patients agreed to marry her boyfriend only
on the condition - and mind you this was after years of dating him - that she
be allowed for three months to go wild and sleep with whomever she felt like
before she could accept his proposal and left for California from Detroit so
that she could do so with complete abandonment. Behind it was her rage that if
I am going to marry him and be subordinate to him as the wife, which is unfair
for I am superior to him, I should make up for the injustice by making myself
less valuable through sleeping with other men besides him, and also enjoy a
wild sex life that traditionally has been the prerogative of men, even if for
just three months. On being asked whether such sowing of her wild oats would
hurt the success of her marriage, she replied no it is better for me to get
even with him now than to hurt him and the marriage by cheating on him once we
are a family. Many a woman marry much below their social status to take
vengeance upon their father and brothers for acting superior. Many interracial
marriages, besides finding a partner whom one can treat as inferior, discharge
one's aggression upon him with less fear of retaliation and perhaps find a way
to steal his penis with less difficulty, are motivated by the same complex. A
refusal to marry someone of the same background as oneself out of anger for the
family constellation of one's origin where one was treated like a second class
citizen.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 150%;">The ambivalence towards
siblings and non-family members is much more straightforward. Love for siblings
mostly forged out of fear of parents is further tempered by the realization
that they are our competitors in every way. They steal our toys, they malign us
to exculpate themselves, they bicker, they argue, they fight, and they upstage
us whenever they get the chance. But then there are always such endearing
similarities between one's siblings and oneself that one cannot help but invest
some of one's narcissistic love in them. People outside the family first become
worthy of our attention and libidinal ties while acting as substitute family
members. Later, as our critical faculty awakens, we cannot help but realize
that our parents, who once appeared to us as the most beautiful and wisest of
all, are really quite ordinary Joe Blows. To punish them for the earlier
overestimation, for a while, we shift our filial and fraternal devotion and
loyalties to outsiders, convinced they are more worthy of emulation. A church-going suburban all American kid may suddenly join the ISIS, a girl with midwestern values may become francophile and dropping her earlier resolve to become a physician move to Paris and make speaking French like the native her primary goal in life. However,
we soon learn that outsiders do not reciprocate the love with the same
sincerity and have little or no scruples when it comes to taking advantage of
us. They definitely belong to the troublesome outside world more than the family
members do. Then the outsiders, by their sheer numbers, become a constant
source of narcissistic humiliation. There is always somebody out there better
than we are no matter the area in which we match our ability against his.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 150%;">The original hatred of
others, therefore, never quite dies down no matter how much love blossoms
between us and the world. Even with the advent of puberty, when there is a
tremendous surge of sex hormones, and thus everything regardless of its defects
and shortcomings becomes attractive and we are pervaded with the spirit of
love, altruistic strivings and socialism (the basic psychology of which lies in
the impetuous juvenile demand for the right to make love to anybody no matter
what their socioeconomic status), hatred goes into hiding only temporarily. It
continues to smolder in the subterranean, ready to erupt whenever there is a
breach in our love relationship. Even after the deepest carnal love, where all
boundaries between self and the loved one are dissolved, once the ardor is satisfied
the ego feels the pressure to repudiate the other for self-assertiveness. In
fact, the more attractive the loved person and the more fervent the love, the
greater is our hatred right behind, as if to prevent us from getting too
blinded by the passion. The greatest lovers are the greatest adversaries. This
may explain why people who are deeply in love have the most tumultuous lovers'
spats and when they divorce they behave like Kathleen Turner and Michael
Douglas in the movie <i>War of the Roses</i> - they rather kill each
other than give up their attachment now tethered with pure hatred.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 150%;">I seem to be spending
way too much time describing the struggle between love and hate towards fellow
beings than on how it is shaping the pandemic, yet it may not be out of place
to examine further the vicissitudes of hatred as it compromises love. Many of
us cannot even talk with loved ones without an unpleasant tone of voice or
without subliminal contempt, teasing, and bullying. Many families cannot
converse but through screaming at each other. While in most of us there is time
to love and time to hate, in some of us the love and the hate cancel each other
out, making us emotionless (alexithymic). Many marriages after a while become
asexual. All the hurt feelings from years of negative exchanges leave so much
unexpressed hate that it can only be contained by withholding sexual love from
the partner. Finally, every sling and arrow that life throws our way provokes
an immediate impulse to wantonly destroy - the primal aggression - without
taking into account whether that means a frustration of sexual satisfaction or
of the satisfaction of self-preservative needs in the future.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 150%;">Now that we have taken a
survey of the extensive and complex origins of human hatred and have developed
an appreciation of how strong it can be, it should not feel too strange when I
make the claim that the embracing of the Coronavirus shutdown is as much driven
by medical prudence as by finding in it a great opportunity to release the
bottled up collective aggression of mankind. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 150%;">The human species
currently is at the high watermark of malcontent and resentment because
of the changes in the cultural standards of the last century that demand
far greater renunciation of aggression than humans are capable of. All through
history whenever we felt that the aggression seething within the group that we
belonged to needed some letup we started a tribal squabble with some other
group, which, as we became larger units of religions, ethnicities, nations,
etc., evolved into wars with similar neighboring units. When travel to distant
lands became a reality, colonization and the treatment of the subjugated
people as second class citizens turned into a good way to rid the surplus
hatred. With the horrifying carnage of the two world wars and the advent of
weapons of mass destruction, wars as a way to get hatred out of our systems
have become impractical. An equally grave injury to our time-honored ways
to release aggression from our systems has been the new cultural demand that
prohibits picking on each other on the basis of sex, race, color, religion, and
national origin. With all these modes of discharging aggression blocked, there
has been a paralyzing effect upon our capacity to love as well. Love and hate
are like two entwined snakes that keep a check on each other's movement. Only
when one of the two finds a discharge through some change in external
circumstance or internal neurochemical balance does the other one finds an
outlet too. This phenomenon is best seen in many marriages where the couple can
make love only after a good fight. It may be worth mentioning in passing that
by making all forms of aggression between married couples domestic
violence, modern culture is destroying the institution of marriage. Marriage
is not only about having guaranteed sex but also a guaranteed whipping
boy. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 150%;">This principle that love
and hate hold each other back until one gets a sudden unexpected discharge
explains why the Roaring Twenties could only occur after the massive
bloodshed of the First World War, and the sexual revolution of the Sixties was
an attempt on part of the baby boomers to put scabs on the wounds of the Second
World War, aided of course by the wish to reverse the trauma of
witnessing through television (as if one were right there) the daily
killings in Vietnam.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 150%;">It may not be too
farfetched to claim on the basis of how love and hate are interlocked, and the
release of one brings the release of the other, that the Iraq and Afghanistan
wars gave birth to the Arab Spring; that the 9/11created Homeland Security
and its byzantine procedures (which incidentally have less to do with the
catching of terrorists than with the expanding the power of the
government, creating a department that does nothing but pseudo-work, and above
all forging a new means to humiliate people). However, this circumscribed
and subtle bullying never crossed the critical threshold that leads to
provoking a massive counter hostility, and to the subsequent outpouring of love
to balance it. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 150%;">The world had to wait
for the Coronavirus to provide that vent for the hatred that had been
accumulating for decades with no Vietnam War, no Desert Storm, and no Cambodian
Killing Fields happening. In its basic style, it is an extension of the sadism
that Homeland Security practices at the airports. Even the recorded messages
that one hears every few minutes at Kroger and Home Depot and other superstores
as to how we must wear the mask, wash our hands, cough and sneeze into our
elbows, stay safe, stay healthy, stay six feet away, have the same patronizing
tone and the attitude that you all are idiots and this message must be drummed
into you every five minutes, 24/7, that
is blared at the airports. The uselessness and redundancy of checking people's
temperature - in a hospital ER where a patient of mine works, he tells me,
every time he goes in and out of the building, which he does a dozen times a
day for he is security police, his temperature is checked anew - is modeled
after the same subtle abuse practiced via airports security rituals.
When we don the mask, glower at those who don't, get disturbed when others
forget and cross that hallowed 6-feet line, refuse to shake hands, tell friends
no we cannot accept their invitation and sorry we do not want them to drop
by, pay more attention to rubbing the sanitizer on our palms than what
someone is saying, they are all microaggressive messages as to how I rather not
be dealing with you. Of course, we don't go so far as to tell the other
to get out of my face, don't touch my belongings, don't touch my
food, don't gross me with your bad breath, nevertheless what we are
telling others to do in the name of preventing the ravages of the pandemic,
comes quite close to it. The cruelty practiced through frightening each other
as to what the virus will do through permanently affecting one's smell, taste,
brains, lungs, cognition etc., with the aim of limiting each other's mobility -
one mother jealous of her 21- year-old daughter's blooming sexuality and
budding independence banned her from seeing her boyfriend but once a week
instead of three times which was the norm - is less based upon the lethality of
the COVID virus than the degree of jealousy we harbor within us. A patient of
mine who is in his early seventies, but still vigorous and lively, complained
that since the virus he has been virtually imprisoned by his family. They won't
let him leave afraid the minute he steps out he will catch the virus and before
you know he will be dead. He lives alone. He has not interacted
with anybody in months. The family. afraid that they will cause his death if
they enter his house, talk with him via cellphone from the driveway. He calls them
weirdos and their concerns a pretension. "I was their inconvenient
father, who had to be visited as a necessary evil, thanks to COVID now they are
free of that obligation. How little they want to visit me is an
indication of not how much they want to protect me from the virus but how much
they want me dead so they can be free to live their lives without any fear of
my disapproval."</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 18pt; line-height: 150%;"> </span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 150%;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 150%;">Even in normal times
besides the affection and camaraderie that we feel in the company of others,
there is always a counter impulse to tell them to get lost. Granted this
impulse rarely breaks into consciousness while the person is there, emerging
only in muted hostile thoughts after he leaves or less directly by
feeling slightly irritable, or through the impulse to indulge in displaced
motor actions like lighting up a cigarette, obsessive straightening of objects
or pacing. But it is an impulse that is ubiquitously present no matter how fond
we are of the person in general. Now, with the pandemic, we can discharge
this antithetical impulse in-your-face instead of behind your back; and
what is most wonderful, indulge in this antisocial impulse without a trace of
guilt. In fact, we can feel good and moral in doing so. And this is
accomplished through exclusively focusing upon the idea that it is being done
for the other person's and community's sake. The other person has no recourse
but to accept it as such, too, and ignore the underlying malice because of all
the loud proclamations being made "stay safe, stay healthy, drive carefully,
etc." <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 150%;">The people who have
found the greatest bonanza from this pandemic are the OCD folks, and we are all
OCD to varying degrees. The obsessional neurotics are troubled by their
aggressive impulses. The source of this aggression is the resentment that
builds inside us from years of our will getting thwarted at the crossroads of
life, giving rise to wishes and designs for others' death. It is the
obsessive-compulsive part of our nature that keeps us glued to the TV,
fascinated as to how many got sick and how many died, locally, nationally,
internationally. And when not tethered to the TV we are checking these morbid
statistics on our smartphones, keeping up on the latest like the sports fans do
with their favorite players' scores. A patient of mine who rushed
from one TV channel to another all day long to know anything and everything on
the subject of COVID ostensibly to keep herself, her children, and the world
protected, confessed that behind it must be the desire for their destruction
because while doing so she had to keep clutching her hair strands, sometimes
pulling them out in clumps, to prevent her dear ones coming down with the
virus. As she showed me the bald spots on her scalp she said: "while I can
relay the stats on COVID probably better than Anthony Fauci, and keeping a
continuous tab on the numbers keeps me calm as if I have got the virus by its
tail, I cannot turn a blind eye to the fact that deep down there is a
satisfaction from savoring those numbers of millions dying while I am triumphantly
alive." <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 150%;">Now the
obsessive-compulsive not only enjoy others' suffering and death they take
responsibility for it too. It arises from the guilt generated from their death
wishes coming true. As the guilt accumulates they start quivering with fear
whenever disaster happens no matter how remote from themselves. Even if they
live in America while deaths are occurring in Brazil overestimating the power
of their thoughts to affect others, they take the blame for the telekilling.
OCD people, therefore, are big into expiation of the troubles they believe they
are authors of. Like Lady Macbeth, they wash the blood of others from their
hands. But their handwashing is not just repentance and penance for the past
misdeeds but also to prevent it from happening in the future, especially from
germs they will introduce and contaminate others with. Excessive washing of
hands soon spills into stopping shaking the hands of others, the checking and
rechecking of stoves and doorknobs, and in extreme cases, the touch phobia gets
so strong that, like Howard Hughes, the world's most famous agoraphobic, they
lock themselves in some hole and refuse to have any contact with the
outside world. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 150%;">These OCD behaviors thus
far have mostly been objects of ridicule. The endless rituals and obsession
with numbers, counted in some symmetry, to prevent death, was looked upon as
silliness. But with the pandemic things have changed. The OCD folks are now
gloating with superiority. Their fear of germs, after all, was not
neurotic but scientifically justified. They can look contemptuously upon
those who only recently have come into the fold as Johnny-come-latelies and
take satisfaction in seeing everybody else also suffer the same
restrictions that they have for years without reward. They have also begun
to invoke the psychobiological reasoning - <i>it gave evolutionary
advantage </i>the catch-all and practically useless answer for every human
puzzle: - as something our ancestors did more than the competition and
therefore we became humans. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 150%;">This contention,
however, is a bunch of nonsense. Neurosis does not bestow any evolutionary
advantage. On the contrary, it hampers our chances to reproduce.
Obsessive-compulsives not only fear causing death by touching, but touching
also has another meaning to them, and one that is no less momentous in
derailing their life goals and having children. In their unconscious, all
touching starts signifying <i>sexual touching</i>. The process is
interesting and deserves elaboration. Because of their extremely competitive
nature, sexuality of those suffering from OCD, regresses from genital,
where it has to best others, to the anal-sadistic level, which being
auto-erotic takes away the tension of competition, seeking discharge through
coprophilic drives. The ambivalence towards seeking satisfaction through
pregenital sources results in the compulsion to avoid touching anything
that can be associated with feces and the anal zone. Soon the person spends
lesser and lesser time in wooing and mating in favor of washing hands, cleanliness,
and avoiding all forms of contact. The more civilized and obsessively clean a
culture becomes, the more repugnant its members find the sexual act, and even
having and bringing up children because of the latter's messy ways. So there is
no evolutionary advantage for the individual or the culture to embrace OCD
ways.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 150%;">The running away from
the emerging sadomasochistic sexual drives in the OCD has another
interesting consequence. First, sex becomes off-limits and then other forms of
pleasure meet the same fate. And since misery loves company, what becomes
forbidden to them they want it to be denied to others, too. OCD folks at heart
are killjoys and are having a field day in this pandemic. It does not matter if
they lose out too with there being no activity, no enthusiasm, no triumph, no
romance in the world as long all this is happening to others as well. The
closing down of courts, reducing store hours, subjecting people to endless
rituals before giving service, sometimes denying services altogether, postponing
elective medical procedures, are all less dictated by safety concerns than
finding in the pandemic a justification to frustrate and delay others' needs.
Not unlike how the financial industry in the name of protecting your privacy
gives you a third-degree before doing the thing that you asked in the first
place. We can now be as much of a pain in the ass to others as we like as
long as we can show it is at least partly arising out of concern for their own
good. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 150%;">How strictly one is
following the restrictions imposed or suggested by the authorities, and how
scared to death is one of catching the virus - some don't open their
home-delivered Amazon packages for two weeks and only after sanitizing the box
with gloved hands - is a good indicator of the strength of one's obsessionality
and unconscious hatred of the world. How enraged we feel at others who do not
go by the book is another good indicator of one's obsessionality. Some of my
OCD patients have not seen their parents even once in the last five months, so
afraid they are of causing their death through giving them the infection even
when they have hardly left their own house but for minimal periods, taking
every precaution to avoid getting infected, and there is no possibility of
their passing the COVID to their parents. It is this type of obsessive
characters who are having the greatest difficulties in handling the
pandemic. They are the ones who are getting morbidly gloomy, and dreaming of
weird and scary dreams in the wake of the Coronavirus that the psychologists
and psychiatrists are making so much fuss about. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 150%;">These pandemic dreams
deserve some analysis. OCD people are constantly murdering others, or at least
doing away with their existence, for the littlest of transgressions, not unlike
how the Queen of Hearts does in Alice in Wonderland. She orders people's heads
to be chopped off for the slightest offense. At daytime, these murderous wishes
can only emerge as trying to be one-up on whoever crosses one's path, but in
sleep and dreams, they can display their full intensity and glory. It is
not uncommon to dream of suddenly being in a world where there are no humans
left. A doomsday scenario where some nuclear catastrophe or alien invasion has
wiped everybody out or the zombies have taken over the world and are
annihilating all humans by turning them into zombies as well. The zombies are
nothing but a projection of the murderous aspect of us. Zombies are us without
our conscience (superego), our moral part, restraining us. The pandemic has
made it possible for this fantasy to emerge out of our dreams and into the real
world. One looks with secret satisfaction at the parking lots of malls which
until yesterday were overflowing with cars and people, now ghost towns. The
Obsessive-Compulsive's dream of doing away with all competition and getting
one's hatred avenged is now being fulfilled in the real world. It is not
surprising that while we lament at these empty streets, beaches, movie
theaters, strip malls, we also find a subtle evil pleasure in the emptiness, in
the fall of these mighty entities, in contrast to which we were nothing at all
until yesterday. When we declare it is all so <i>surrealistic,</i> it
is a euphemistic declaration of the feeling of depersonalization that emerges
to cover up showing the joy at the mighty world's big fall, which would be so
wrong to consciously feel with full emotional intensity. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 150%;">Coronavirus as a
great equalizer deserves a couple of comments. With social distancing mandatory
to all, everyone can be on the giving end. The pauper can tell the king to not
invade his space and the S<i>hudra</i> (the untouchable) can tell the
Brahmin (the pure one) whose touch phobia, like that of the Jews, is so
great, or at least it used to be, that even if the shadow of some low life
(lower castes) who indulge in carnal pleasures with little restraint, fell upon
him, he has to practice penance and social isolation for a prescribed period of
time, to keep his germ-laden butt six feet away. At heart, we never give up the
illusion that we are the ultimate human being who should be the model for
everybody else to emulate. At the core of our being, we are superior to
everybody else. Since the coronavirus does not discriminate between the rich
and the poor, we can practice untouchability, like the holy Brahmin.
Coronavirus has greatly disturbed the balance of discrimination between the
privileged and the run-of-the-mill. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 150%;">And this may be the main
factor behind the Black-Lives-Matter protest that arose as one of the reactions
to the Coronavirus. It is a grand attack on the part of the have-nots to
bring down the well-to-do of the world who have become way too wealthy with the
advent of computers and the Internet which allows money to move much faster
than it use to and money always flows in the direction of the rich from the
poor. Coronavirus lockdown served as a great way for mankind to get rid of its
surplus hatred. However, it was quite one-sided in that most of the hatred was
being discharged through the agency of the government disproportionately upon the
lower echelons of society. While everybody was restrained from doing anything
much it was financially impacting the poor more than the rich. The BLM protests
and Cancel Culture movement ostensibly an outrage at the callous way in which
blacks are treated in reality is an outrage at the way young and poor people,
black and white, are treated. The young whites see in blacks the
disenfranchisement present in their own lives. Society has become way too
intolerant and is penalizing normal human foibles extremely harshly. For the
smallest transgressions, the punishment that the establishment now wants to
mete out is unfair. A DUI at the age of 17 or 18 can cost thousands of dollars
and an inability to obtain a license for ten or more years and a handicap for life
in career choices and advancement. A minor fight between husband and wife is
sufficient grounds on the part of Child Protective Services to take away one's
children and all in order for CPS people to keep their business going. The
power of the government, the rich and old of the society at the expense of the
poor and the young has been expanding quite rapidly in the last few
decades. The young and the restless, living under the lockdown, their
personal, economic, and sexual freedom restrained, unable to contain the rising
counter hatred, found in the death of George Floyd an ideal opportunity to turn
around that hostility from the poor to the rich. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p>Surendra Kelwalahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17208258557612952541noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7318753641065692730.post-3735095654203443902020-02-20T21:05:00.001-08:002020-02-24T16:20:58.763-08:00Psychoanalysis of The concept of The Third Eye and why we celebrate Halloween and Zombies<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
The idea that human beings are capable of evolving the Third Eye with divine powers is not an uncommon belief among people who want to achieve success in life beyond the mundane and to achieve this aim are attracted to the paranormal world of metaphysics, esotericism, mysticism, eastern cults and religions, New Age spiritualism and sci-fi movies and literature.<br />
What is the psychology behind this eccentric striving? For an actual third eye on the forehead - that is where it is usually depicted in its artistic renderings - in real life would only appear creepy and arouse horror.<br />
In passing it may be mentioned that the horror at anatomical anomalies arises from the castration complex. Even the medical and accidental deformities such as the absence of an eye or a limb, the strange and distorted body postures and gaits seen in mentally retarded, mental retardation itself, growths from tumors, prominent birthmarks, skin aberrations such as vitiligo/leucoderma, even freckles to the evenly tanned Indian, cause a queasy repulsion and at bottom because they symbolize castration. The imagery of actual castration fails to emerge into consciousness, indicative of the strength of the repression, replaced by just a shudder up the spine in the sensitive ones and some such thought, "there but for the grace of God go I, for look how much worse my fate could have been. I should be thankful for what I have been blessed with."<br />
Why does deformity in non-genital areas remind one of genital mutilation? It is simple association. One type of injury reminding of another. The vision of mutilation on one part of the body, through displacement, provoking the more dreaded possibility. The fear of castration is so ubiquitously present in all human interactions and so pervasively shapes every facet of our relationship with each other and yet so completely and <b>phobically denied</b> in the conscious thoughts, that any mutilation or deformity is capable of provoking the affect associated with castration without the emergence of its actual depiction in the consciousness.<br />
Now the mutilation of other parts of the body while dreaded is less horrifying than the actual castration. And it is this lessening of the fear by repeating the idea of castration in other spheres than the genitals that lies at the core of festivals that celebrate castration, the chief of which would be Halloween.<br />
That Halloween is at bottom a festival to abreact the fear of castration is further strengthened when one compares it to Dushehra, an ancient Indian festival, predating Halloween by thousands of years, and most likely its progenitor, for it is observed around the same time of the year as Halloween, where clay sculptures of demons, chief of which is Ravana, the ten-headed twenty-armed demon king, with super-sized canine teeth and protruding blood-shot eyes, are paraded through the streets and then laid to rest at the nearest expanse of water. All these multiplication and awesome enlargement of body parts being a defiant denial of castration by emphasizing just its reverse.<br />
The macabre enjoyment from viewing mangled, grisly, grotesque bodies, whether depicted in Halloween attires and accessories, or in haunted houses, or in horror movies, arises from trying to obtain a mastery over the fear of castration. The fascination with cemeteries, zombies, ghosts, ghouls, goblins and gnomes is at bottom viewing castrated individuals who will attack and drag one, out of jealousy and vengeance, into the same fate as they have been unfortunately subjected to - brinkmanship with castration. Even our love for action movies to a large part owes its origin to the fascination with castration, where body parts (penis substitutes) are cut off or mangled. It is a revenge for subjection to the threat of castration during the Oedipal phase.<br />
Anyway, coming back to the Third Eye. It cannot be a real anatomic event. No amount of spiritual practices, no matter how dedicated, can abrogate the laws of nature and the emergence of a Third Eye capable of making connections with the already formed brain and the preexisting pair of eyes has to remain a fantasy. A Third Eye, therefore, must be a symbol of the development of some other kind of ability which is akin to visual function yet distinct from it. <br />
What could be this ability that the seekers of superhuman prowess prize so much and which they believe does happen though very rarely and only with great efforts?<br />
Let us turn to the two great ancient religions of the world, Egyptian and Indian, where deities sometimes are shown with a Third Eye.<br />
Egyptian Gods have the Third Eye at the same spot where often a serpent is shown darting out from a headgear. So behind the desire to awaken the Third Eye is there a desire to awaken some psychic force whose nature is similar to a darting snake?<br />
<img alt="Image result for pictures of Pharaohs with serpent head gear" src="https://i7.pngguru.com/preview/5/62/572/art-of-ancient-egypt-begravningsmask-new-kingdom-of-egypt-pharaoh-egypt-thumbnail.jpg" /><img alt="Image result for pictures of Pharaohs with serpent head gear" src="https://assets.answersingenesis.org/img/articles/utp/chap17/head.jpg" /><br />
Serpents, especially cobras, play a prominent role in enhancing the power of the Egyptian deities. Since cobra is a quintessentially phallic symbol, adorning them with it, is it a glorification of their phallic prowess? By showing the cobra specifically at the spot where the Third Eye should be is it possible that there is a connection between the power of the phallic energy, some coveted quality of cobras and the concept of the Third Eye? Let us see if such a view is confirmed by the Hindu religion and its mythologies.<br />
<img alt="Attributes of Lord Shiva By PavitraJyotish" src="https://www.pavitrajyotish.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/Attributes-of-Lord-Shiva-By-PavitraJyotish.jpg" /><br />
<br />
Shiva is undoubtedly the Hindu deity most often shown with the Third Eye, and never without the cobra with its prominent hood encircling his neck, and the Third Eye so powerful that if His ire is aroused its fury can instantly burn the disturber into ashes.<br />
His devotees often harbor the ambition of acquiring the Third Eye as a boon from Him through <i>Tapasya. </i><br />
What exactly is Tapasya?<br />
It is a devotional meditation, usually concentrating upon a single favorite deity, but not necessarily so, and can be towards a few or towards Godhood in general, usually for something that one wants, which could be quite material, but most often it is for attaining an all-encompassing wisdom. The possibility of its happening, it is believed, depends upon the degree of asceticism practiced. For example, while praying to the Sun, one may not breathe for so long that one may faint. Or one may stand submerged up to the waist in water for hours till all sensations from the body disappear. Or one may take a <i>hatha yoga</i> posture and stay in it concentrating upon the God from whom one wants the boon till he appears, a practice that may even lead to death. Buddha sat in a meditative pose for so long that the mud that had accumulated over his body had termites living in it and supposedly did not eat for 49 days under the Bodhi tree before the realization occurred to him that this is not the way to obtain Nirvana. Chandragupta Marya - a contemporary of Alexander the Great - took samadhi after abdicating his throne and died through starving himself (some variation of Anorexia Nervosa emerging as Tapasya). They are all forms of voluntary inhibitions of functions, especially motoric activity, something which happens involuntarily in depression, reaching complete immobility in catatonia.<br />
What lies behind Tapasya? All forms of abstinence at the bottom are really refrainment from sexual satisfaction, with the sexual continence (brahmacharya) extending from genital sexuality to all forms of satisfaction. It is overdoing of not having sex into not having anything.<br />
There is a belief that if I deny the body and mind gratification (self-mortification) it will be rewarded through obtaining something that will be manifold more than what is being sacrificed. <br />
Now the word tapasya is interesting. It originates from the Indu-European word root <i>Taap </i>which means heat in Hindi. The English temperature appears to be derived from the same word-root. If Tapasya means a method to generate heat, it, in all likelihood, is the generation of psychosexual heat from denial of physical sexual discharge.<br />
The popular language recognizes a close connection between the rise of sexual tension and the affect of heat. We often say when a girl is suffused with sexuality that she is hot. A bitch is in heat we say when the dog is in her estrous phase. So tapasya is nothing but raising of the sexual tension (cathexis) through extreme continence, where no gratification is allowed through not just the genital but pregenital anal and oral phases of sexuality. The Jain nun barely eats. She is allowed to beg for food but has to stop after whatever she gets from the first benefactor for the rest of the day. To further block oral libidinal gratification she often takes the vow of not speaking which can be for hours, days, sometimes for years. Neither she is allowed pleasure in accumulating material goods nor in discharging the sexual tension through cruelty, practicing preservation of life (prevention of cruelty) to such an extent that she wears mouth-mask to prevent swallowing of microorganisms. So what the devotee aims through tapasya is to block the pleasure from sexual discharge not only genitally but from pregenital channels as well. Such blockage of sexuality multiplies its force like the dammed river.<br />
But sexual energy cannot be held in check completely for too long without causing the death of the person as it happens in Anorexia Nervosa or iatrogenically with Neuroleptic Malignant Syndrome. It will search for some discharge somewhere. And if the Tapaswi (one who practices Tapasya) is not allowed to put the objects suitable for his sexual needs in a position favorable for the sexual act through physical action, his eyes, including his mental eye (the Third Eye), will scan every nook and cranny of his environment to find alternative paths to achieve his aims. He will look at the world and all aspects of it with a sexually jaundiced eye. It will watch the actions and the ways of fellow humans in a much deeper manner than he would if he was not in such a state of sexual pressure. Just like for the man with a hammer everything looks like a nail, the man whose mental eye is in extreme search for a conduit for the discharge of his sexual tension, everything will turn into a potential female sexual object, searching for a defect in them that can be treated as a substitute for the female genital, in to which the searching vision can dart into like the cobra darts into rodent burrows.<br />
But we know the instinct to look and gaze is a component of the anal phase of psychosexual development. Now it makes sense when the mythology tells that if you cross Shiva His Third Eye, will turn you to ashes. The whole of his sexual energy will emerge in red hot cruelty and destroy you.<br />
In short, Tapasya with the aim of developing the Third Eye is nothing but empowering the scopophilic instinct - the love for looking - in ways that would not be possible if they were not conditioned by extreme asceticism.<br />
So behind the wish for the Third Eye is the desire to intensify the scoptophilic instinct - the love for looking or knowing - to the highest possibility. It is the wish for procreative energy instead of getting discharged in actual physical intercourse (direct gratification) into the wish to know everything about the sexual act - how babies are born - and since our attitude and behavior towards the world is modeled after our sexuality, extending from there to know the origin of everything. It is at its core turning the entire libido's satisfaction into getting curious about the world. Scoptophilia at its core is a form of discharge of cruelty where instead of tearing apart the loved object with hands one does it with the eyes.<br />
So arousal of the Third Eye is giving ascendancy to the scopophilic instinct over all other forms of libidinal expression. It is a form of perversion but the most sublime perversion, where the pursuit of knowledge trumps every other desire.<br />
It is interesting the Shiva is also called <i>Bholenath</i> - the credulous, gullible, simple God, who trusts everybody and is ready to believe in everything. His symbol is Om, <span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: "roboto" , "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 16px;">ॐ, </span>which is a modified way of writing the number 3<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: "roboto" , "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 16px;">. </span> Now number 3, per Freud, in dreams symbolizes the phallus - the penis with the two testicles. Shiva, in fact, is also depicted as an elongated black rock, recognized as phallus (lingam) by the devotees, on which symbol of <span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: "roboto" , "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 16px;">ॐ </span>is drawn with the fragrant paste of Chandan, and everybody looks upon it as Mahadev, the chief God, under whose umbrella and through him all other Gods discharge their heat. Hindus are thankful for Mahadev who through its medium, absorbs and discharges the Taap of all other deities, singing his praise in hymns for doing so.<br />
But does not it sound like the sexual tensions arising from all other pregenital impulses are displaced and concentrated upon the Genital Impulse (Mahadev), which through its satisfaction/discharge brings mental peace to the humans?<br />
Why Shiva is called Bholenath? Now we know a person who is sick with sexual tension, thinks with his penis (dickhead) and can be easily manipulated. Shiva by extreme asceticism has all his sexual energy concentrated in his Third Eye and can be easily led by his devotees to be credulous towards the most outrageous things. And devotees who have more deviant aims behind getting favors from deities, choose Shiva over others, for he can be manipulated into granting boons which other Gods will immediately see as evil and not worthy of getting granted. Ravana, the great evil king of the demons, by hiding his wicked side, got Shiva to grant him the boon of immortality, by having 10 heads, each of which grows back the minute it is cut. This confirms the view that the nearest thing to death that humans can experience is the dread of castration (getting the penis/head cut off).<br />
It is interesting too that Shiva's company is made up of the world's most outlandish motley crew. Not only Shiva when not in meditation hangs around graveyards/cremation grounds, where ghosts, spooks, spirits, ghouls, demons, and misfits of every kind, follow him - in fact, another name for Shiva is Bhootnath which means lord of the dead - his closest companions are G<span style="background-color: white; font-family: "robotoregular"; font-size: 16px; text-align: justify;">anas, they are humanoid creatures with limbs that have no bones and which come out of odd parts of their bodies. They speak in the cacophony and appear distorted and demented beings. Now we are immediately struck here by recalling that they are similar to the folks with anatomical anomalies that arouse in us the horror of castration. </span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: "robotoregular"; font-size: 16px; text-align: justify;">So Siva's companions are castrated individuals at least socially. Which makes sense. It is fear of castration that forces people to abandon genital sexuality and then in the attempt to regain it their whole interest turns into understanding the nature of sexuality itself, generating the Third Eye in a lucky few, whose thirst for knowledge, scoptophilia, becomes the main, if not the entire conduit for the discharge of their libidinal energy. </span></div>
Surendra Kelwalahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17208258557612952541noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7318753641065692730.post-67944208262163475202019-02-13T19:53:00.000-08:002019-11-23T11:29:58.185-08:00The Psychology of Laughter<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<br />
<div class="" style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Roboto, RobotoDraft, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif;">
<div class="ii gt adO" id=":1c0" style="direction: ltr; font-size: 0.875rem; margin: 8px 0px 0px; padding: 0px; position: relative;">
<div class="a3s aXjCH " id=":1bz" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: small; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: 1.5; overflow: hidden;">
<div dir="ltr">
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 22px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://www.blogger.com/null" name="m_-6530381921361792347__Hlk18156986"><b><u><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 27px;">The Psychology of Laughter</span></u></b></a><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 24px;"></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 22px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;">
<span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 27px;">Why do humans laugh?</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 24px;"></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 22px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;">
<span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 27px;">One thing everybody agrees upon is that laughter is good for us. "Laughter is the best medicine,” we are told. It boosts our immune system, decreases stress-induced inflammation, releases oxytocin, and bonds people. Even listening to somebody else's laughter releases endorphins, a classmate of mine from medical school made this comment on our class's Internet site, and its members, all doctors, usually at loggerheads, all were in agreement on this one. It goes without saying that the members of this highly competitive elite group are always trying to be the funniest one, often posting jokes that had made them laugh as if to boost each other's endorphins.</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 24px;"></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 22px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;">
<span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 27px;">Why does laughter cause all those wonderful health-promoting physiochemical changes?</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 24px;"></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 22px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;">
<span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 27px;">This brings us back to the basic question: what is laughter?</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 24px;"></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 22px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;">
<span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 27px;">To answer this we will have to go first to the smile. For <b>smiling is the forerunner of laughter</b>, appearing in babies shortly after birth. <b>It is a fear reflex</b>, triggered by random stimuli interpreted as slightly different from other sensations, and, therefore, <b><i>because of the</i></b><i> <b>novelty</b>, worthy of a reaction with a hint of fear</i>. It is not a full-fledged fear response, but a sliver of it, limited to the pulling back of the muscles surrounding the mouth and exposing the teeth as a show of retaliatory aggression. The objection that the baby does not yet have teeth can be explained by the consideration that the reflex to signal aggression by withdrawing the muscles of the mouth is present even before the teeth appear.</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 24px;"></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 22px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;">
<span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 27px;">The appearance of fear in the baby, no matter how slight, immediately provokes in its caretakers <b>one of the most fundamental impulses of mankind:</b> <b>protect the helpless. </b>As Freud<sup>1</sup> put it: <b><i>the original helplessness of human beings is....the primal source of all moral motives</i></b>.</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 24px;"></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 22px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;">
<span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 27px;">This <i>moral</i> impulse itself appears to be a reaction formation to an even more fundamental impulse - blind aggression upon the vulnerable. A real feel for this primal irrational aggression I fully appreciated in myself the other day when on seeing my handyman bent over doing some work on my house, with his back towards me, provoked a powerful urge to kick his defenseless behind. This aggressive impulse could be the same as the dread one feels on being asked to hold a newborn, afraid that one may dash the completely helpless thing to the floor. The exclusion of children from weddings, senior citizen housings, and other adult social get-togethers also perhaps arises from a fear that one may not be able to control one's impulse to discharge raw aggression towards the defenseless rambunctious hyperactive rug rats. </span><span style="background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; color: black; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 27px;">Many a potential parent, who quite likely would have looked after his or her children no worse than others (perhaps better because of greater self-doubt) forgo parenthood </span><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 27px;">under the sway of this impulse, afraid they will be terrible at it, if not </span><span style="background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; color: black; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 27px;">through actual physical aggression, by maintaining an emotional distance to avoid acting out on the impulse. </span><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 27px;"> It is interesting that they often make wonderful parents to pets upon whom they can freely shower the held-back love without fear that the ambivalence lurking behind will cause the animal harm. The dread of senselessly jumping off from great heights, like when one is on the ledges of the Grand Canyon, or crossing high suspension bridges like the Golden Gate Bridge, may also owe its origin to this same drive, however with a twist that the object of the aggression is <i>reversed</i> and directed towards one's own self. Self is treated as the helpless child and the immensity of the height treated as the potentially aggressive grownup. The great moral indignation some people feel over abortion also may be due to a detection of outrage in themselves over their failure to safeguard the vulnerability of the fetus, which interestingly is not felt so strongly by the woman who seeks it, or at least she is conflicted over it, because she feels herself to be the more vulnerable one rather than the fetus which for her does not yet quite exist. This primal aggression perhaps is the most pure (minimally alloyed with libidinal impulses) expression of death instinct (<i>Thanatos</i>).</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 22px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;">
<span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 27px;">Let’s</span> <span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 27px;">return to the nature of the smile. Showing a window of vulnerability to provoke<i> the protective instinct </i>in the caretakers and the other adults around the baby soon becomes a powerful social tool and almost "a magical means" to relate with and manipulate others. The fully developed smile response, with its ability to neutralize others' aggression towards one, should be regarded as the most important social feature the human species has evolved for its members to get along with each other. The smile is the primary lubricant of civilized behavior.</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 24px;"></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 22px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;">
<span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 27px;">The next step in this developmental process is the emergence of laughter, alongside the smile. Laughter is the brake upon crying by the smile. <b>Laughter is no more than crying punctuated by smiles</b>. In rapid succession, crying alternates with smiling. Crying is a shriek for help emitted in distress, which readily occurs in babies because their level of tolerance for discomfort is very low. However, when crying turns out to be unjustified and the anticipated unknown fearful thing which should have brought pain, or at least a rise in the level of tension, turns out to be something <b>pleasurable</b> <b>and familiar,</b> the baby abruptly punctuates its crying with a smile. This punctuation of crying with a smile, when rapidly repeated, become peals of laughter. The baby replays the scenario of distress followed by pleasure over and over again as if to relive the trauma and the relief from it under <b>the sway of repetition-compulsion,</b> <wbr></wbr>producing the characteristic sound of laughter.</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 24px;"></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 22px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;">
<span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 27px;">That laughter is produced from a rise of distress/tension in anticipation of danger/harm followed by an abrupt relief because all that preparation was for naught is bolstered by the observations that mothers make their baby laugh by making funny faces (mock frightening faces) which after an initial brief period of fear and bracing for harm are recognized to be the familiar face of the mother. The same holds true for making animal sounds which are half frightening/half cajoling, where the threat is rapidly dissipated by the realization that after all it is not a scary animal but one's familiar mother; playing peek-a-boo where the distress of the mother's disappearance is quickly followed by her pleasurable appearance; chasing the baby where the fear of being caught, harmed or gobbled up by some dangerous entity is negated by the knowledge that it is one's harmless nay protective mother who is pretending to be that entity; and tickling where the aggressive act of the nail pushing through the skin which should cause pain instead gives the baby pleasure because the nail rather than hurting gives relief through the mechanism of counter-irritation (this pleasure from tickling/counter-irritation in its extreme form is one of the factors behind self-cutting). The confirmation of this biphasic mechanism behind laughing was even more strongly borne out to me a few weeks ago when I saw a young father playing with his two-year-old boy, dangling him over the parapet of a high deck, pretending that he was going to let him fall to the ground, resulting in serious injuries if not death, which the child, instead of finding it scary was finding it hilarious (or at least the fear was overlaid by the hilarity), making him laugh and laugh. Here the fear and stress of falling and getting hurt was activating the innervations that underlie crying which was being punctuated by the realization that the danger was only apparent and not real because his father loves him so much that in no way would he drop him to the ground below. It is no more than “just my father kidding me" which was activating the innervations of smiling, turning the combination of crying and smiling into laughter.</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 24px;"></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 22px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;">
<span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 27px;">Theme Park thrill-seekers adhere to this same pattern as their roller coaster descends from dangerous heights. Because of the potential mortal danger, this should make them tense up and cry. Instead, they laugh, because of the realization that they will come out of it unscathed. The attraction of such joy rides exists because through this game of tensing up, expecting great harm and then finding a discharge for it by the realization it is not going to happen after all, one can also<b> transfer </b>and get rid of other tensions existing in one’s life/psyche.</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 24px;"></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 22px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;">
<span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 27px;">Thus laughter occurs when one braces up, causing the brain, muscles, and autonomic system to tense up with a readiness to cry only to find that the tension and ratcheting up of the level of alertness was unwarranted. Laughter with its relaxation of the muscles around the mouth gives the signal that a similar decrease of psychic expenditure (tensing up to ward off potential harm) in the brain is occurring because what was expected is not what is happening. The smile, the mini-laughter, is the main tool humans use to ward off conflict when they meet strangers, as when passing somebody on the road, for it signals that I am relaxing the psychic tension that is building up inside me in preparation to defend myself or attack you. I pose no threat and correspondingly gear down your own build-up of tension. We also smile at familiar people as well when we pass them to signal that there is no need to tense up for we are no strangers. But also we smile at <i>the stranger in the familiar. </i> For just like we know our psyche only to what is capable of becoming conscious, we know the motives of even the most familiar only to a certain depth and no more and the closest of human relationships are not free of ambivalence. </span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 24px;"></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 22px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;">
<span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 27px;">The greater the buildup of distress and tension before the realization that it was all for naught (false alarm), the greater the force of laughter (alternation between crying and smiling) and its duration. For example, rolling on the floor laughing due to profound loss of muscle tone that extends through the body, with muscle tension plummeting so profoundly that it cannot support the erect posture. Such laughter sometimes is accompanied by a tear or two rolling down the cheek which bolsters the contention that laughter originates out of crying.</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 24px;"></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 22px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;">
<span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 27px;">The person who has a gift for telling jokes uses this principle to first gradually build up a tense scenario with proper amounts of delay and sidetracking in the narration to incorporate more and more neuronal circuits of the brain into a preparatory action mode and when the audience is all keyed up, anticipating some grand action to resolve the complex situation, provides an escape from the tension but not with a solution which is commensurate with the dammed-up emotions but through some silly <i>primary process</i><sup>2,3</sup> logic or some <i>primary process</i> play upon words, like a pun or double entendre, or some incongruous comic behavior, bringing the realization that all the gearing up of the energy to act was unnecessary and the relief that occurs from not having to maintain that psychic expenditure anymore brings pleasure, and whatever tension was already in the system is discharged through the innervations surrounding the mouth. The process perhaps is not too dissimilar from the sexual act, where the built-up tensions from the exigencies of life find an outlet through sexual arousal and discharge through the muscles - including the well-recognized phenomenon of the <i>curling toe</i> - which first experience a rise in tension and then the release (pleasure/orgasm). As to why this discharge takes place through the regions surrounding the mouth and [usually] not elsewhere may be because those were the first set of muscles to become socially functional in humans and therefore are most extensively represented in the brain, and then the mouth is centrally placed, easy to observe by others, and, with its ability to make sounds of crying and laughter, most apt to communicate the increase and reduction of tension. Of course, not all the psychic expenditure (tension) that becomes superfluous and needs discharge can always find an outlet through the innervation surrounding the mouth. If it is quite high, the respiratory, abdominal, and peripheral muscles also are dragged into the process as when one laughs so hysterically that one can hardly catch one's breath, or when one's abdominal muscles go into convulsions (belly laugh), or when one gleefully slaps one's knee or the back of one's accomplice in delight, or when one involuntarily moves one's torso back and forth with the head thrown back roaring laughter.</span><span style="background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; color: black; font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"> </span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 24px;"></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 22px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;">
<span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 27px;">Laughter then takes the next step in its evolution, entering into its final and most important phase, becoming the key social process behind the ability of human beings to get along with each other. With the smile/laughter at the very bottom being fear response, it became an excellent tool to pair with aggression, signaling that while I am attacking you I am also afraid of you, and the twain when interwoven and expressed together, allows humans to interact with each other in the most nuanced fashions in every facet of their social life. Yesterday I went to a "Home Improvement Show" where the vendors were doing their best to get the crowd to stop at their stall and listen to their sales pitch. It was obvious their main hurdle was the natural hesitancy of the visitor to start listening to somebody that they had never met before. For unfamiliarity means danger and anticipation of aggression. And so what were the salespeople doing to signal they would not bite you if you let them speak to you? They were breaking into welcoming smiles to arrest your attention and make you stop. One woman with her painted blooming cheeks and liberally applied red lipstick on her petal-like lips, which allowed just the right amount of opening of her mouth, reminded me of the girls with their alluring smiles in the Red Light district of Amsterdam. One could not help but wonder looking at her pretty inviting face whether the mouth in humans has not become beside the organ of digestion a substitute for flashing sexuality through the smile.</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 24px;"></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 22px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;">
<span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 27px;"> Human interactions are full of microaggressions. We constantly try to triumph over others not only because our success in life to a great deal depends upon it but because the innate aggressive drive of humans (<i>Thanatos</i>), the death wish, demands frequent acting out and discharge. As Freud<sup>4</sup> put it, if we were given full play to our wishes one would <b><i>take any woman one pleases as a sexual object…[and]…without hesitation kill one’s rival for her love or anyone else who stands in one’s way</i></b>. Since this cannot be, for there are strong internal inhibitions (conscience) and dangerous external circumstances, humans have developed equally powerful counterbalancing passive behaviors to go alongside the aggression. Laughter appears to be the most ubiquitously used maneuver to signal this passivity, which softens the impact of the aggression perpetrated and lessens the possibility of retaliatory counter-aggression. Most laughing, perhaps 90 percent of it, is done for the softening of this aggression that we are constantly discharging on each other. Whenever we say something which we think would sound to the hearer as if we are not giving him sufficient respect, ordering him around, slighting him, demeaning him, outright insulting him, raising our voice at him, acting his superior, defying him - in other words if our words, demeanor, or actions will be perceived by the hearer as an act of direct or indirect aggression that will upset the balance of power between the other and oneself - we soften its force by some appeasement that is done before, simultaneously or immediately after the aggression. A hint of a smile or small mechanical laughter, usually with little emotions attached to it, is the most commonly used gesture of this counterbalancing. It has become as specialized for showing appeasement in humans as wagging of the tail in dogs and purring in cats. Back and forth aggression in human communications is often so subtle and indirect, clothed in submissive jocularity, gestures, and allusions, that we often only recognize it as an act of aggression by the accompanying sly smile or chortle of laughter. A bipolar patient of mine who is plagued with having to constantly master a relentless stream of contempt and hatred for others, periodically apologizes for possessing such negative emotions by abruptly breaking into laughter in the loudest possible manner which serves the purpose of appeasement, and yet because of its explosive, untamed, hostile tone simultaneously discharges the aggression. His abnormal incongruous laughter, through which the rage breaks through, betrays the disturbance of his mind and his social crudeness. It is not the kind of laughter which invites others to join in, like the uncontrollable laughter that leaves the person helplessly on the ground where the aggression has been totally overpowered by the mirth and therefore the person feels no need to maintain any tension in his muscles and which invites others to <i>sympathetically</i> laugh along with and partake in the pleasure of complete passivity.</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 24px;"></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 22px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;">
<span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 27px;">Much of the gracefulness of humans lies in how well a person can seamlessly fuse appeasement/smile with aggression, hiding the latter so well that even when he is taking advantage of others they do not detect it. In those whom aggression and appeasement are<i> defused, </i>which often happens when the anger/aggressiveness</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 22px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;">
<span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 27px;">far outweighs the desire to appease, the laughter appears odd, incongruous, and with a gap between subject matter that is being expressed and the laughter that is supposed to counterbalance it. If the gap between the distressing emotion that is being discharged - whether it is of anger, sadness, lamentation, pain - which would be stressful to the listener, and the laughter that follows to cover it up is too long, it indicates failure of the mechanism of laughter to adequately soften the impact of the dysphoric emotion. Macabre, black and sick laughter/humor are terms used for describing covering up of aggressive behavior or thought with laughter where in a more moral person outright suppression of the aggression would have been the appropriate course.</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 24px;"></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 22px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;">
<span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 27px;"> Laughter is not just used to cover up (lessen the impact) of the distressing emotions that we cause in others. Distressing emotions caused in oneself by others, where one is the object and not the subject of aggressive exchange, also is often dealt with [tearful] laughter. <b>Bitter laughter</b> is how the language describes the method of lessening the impact and pain of such aggression with laughter. When one deals with adversity - where the aggression towards oneself is lethal or near-lethal through laughing, it is aptly viewed as a sardonic laugh or gallows humor.</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 24px;"></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 22px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;">
<span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 27px;">Even when there is no other person on whom one is discharging aggression and one is simply conversing about a third party or describing some situation where aggressive action occurred, laughter is often added as an additional soundtrack, a facade, to hide one's enjoyment of the cruel nature of what one is narrating. For example, a patient of mine who drove four hours from Dayton to Detroit to make it to the session on time, could not be happier that he was driving on the Interstate going North, for on the other side a semi carrying chemicals had overturned and the traffic going South was blocked for miles. And he smiled first gingerly at their plight, as he recreated the scene of those who were standing still on the other side of the interstate while he was sailing happily over the speed limit on his side, and then laughed as if to apologize for indulging in that perverse cruel pleasure (schadenfreude). This schadenfreude varies among people. There are those [masochists] whose aggression towards others is so inhibited that for its slightest manifestation they have to immediately apologize with a great deal of sheepish laughter (in teenage girls it manifests as giggling), and then there are those [sadists] who behave like the <i>Rakshas </i>(Demons) of Hindu mythology who while vandalizing, maiming, and killing, guffaw loudly, which is more a mockery of appeasement than appeasement. Children’s teasing and attacking the vulnerable amongst them, which can get quite demonic, is often coupled with laugher, which as with the demons of Hindu mythology, where there is total lack of empathy with the suffering of the victim, also should be looked upon as a mockery of appeasement.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 22px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;">
<span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 27px;">A patient of mine whose primary problem is masochism, and because of that despite coming from a good family and having a license in a skilled trade is always broke, while talking about his near-fatal boat accident, caused by an error of his friend, described how half of his face has been reconstructed with 27 plastic parts and thirty-six inches of wire, all the while flashing a <i>fixed smile</i> (character defense) which turned into frank laughter when he came to the part where the hospital, instead of saving his life, damn near killed him again when the X-ray technician lost control and dropping him on the CAT-Scan table, fracturing his rib and puncturing his lung. Here the smile and laughter had emerged to soften the aggression, but one should note that the cruelty was directed against his own self which he was enjoying by identifying with the ones who had caused him harm. The aggression rightfully belonged against the person who had caused the boat accident and the hospital personnel who had compounded his injuries, but unable to take it out on them he was taking it out on himself. But after lessening its full fury with laughter, because hidden behind his own self were the figures of his boat companion and the powerful hospital, who could potentially retaliate and therefore had to be appeased.</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 24px;"></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 22px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;">
<span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 27px;">The way one's sense of humor lessens the pain of ill-fortune also is best understood if we view it as an appeasement of aggression in a convoluted fashion. A patient of mine told me that whenever something bad happens to her sister, she giggles and grins through it. When their mother was terminally ill and in great suffering, her sister's coping mechanism was to grin and laugh through every piece of bad news they received from the doctors. What she was doing was to take an attitude towards fate (Ananke) that no matter what bad thing you hurl upon me I will just laugh at that aggression of yours, treating it as something humorous, and thus not allow it to provoke painful emotions in me.</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 24px;"></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 22px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;">
<span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 27px;">But why package laughter with aggression and make the process unnecessarily complicated instead of just notching down the aggression itself a few pegs? This may have to do with the need to express the full extent - or as much as one can safely do - of the hostility/anger/aggression one feels to get maximum relief, but which can only be done if appeasement is also offered simultaneously as if the whole thing has been done in jest and not worthy of counter-aggression. By the laughter, I tell the other person not to get so distressed or offended with my aggression that he or she is compelled to retaliate with such severity that it will cause me more tension than the relief I am seeking from discharging my aggression upon you. By the accompanying laughter one makes the statement: Please treat my aggression with kid’s gloves. Consider it as not entirely real and serious, and just like you would not retaliate against a child who hits you playfully, please indulge me in the same manner. And lest you miss the point that my aggression is being done to humor you, let me initiate the laughing even before you do so.</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 24px;"></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 22px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;">
<span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 27px;">It may not be totally without value to add that laughter is not utilized just to make aggression palatable but also when we make fun of somebody, make a sly dig, or even make an allusion to stealing from them. Looking at a big insurance company check which I had just received, one of our office secretaries once remarked that it is only a matter of time before she is going to cash one and be on her way to Jamaica and then covered up the allusion to stealing with a hearty laugh to make sure that I consider it a joke and give no weight to the underlying temptation to actually embezzle. On another occasion, after charging a patient his co-pay, she failed to hand him back his credit card and instead told him that he was all set to leave. When he would not, she glared at him until he pointed out that she had failed to give him back the card, at which point she broke out in an embarrassed laughter. Here the mistake was immediately realized by her, and by the patient as well, to be a Freudian Slip, and the laughter emerged to cover up the intent to steal his card, which also should be looked upon as an act of aggression. Comedy, whether on stage, in movies, in TV shows or in comedy clubs, heavily relies upon aggression directed towards authorities, which the actors and the comic execute while the audience cover up the full impact of the aggression by laughing and thus protecting the protagonist of the show (with whom they identify) from retaliation, and thus vicariously discharge their own pent up aggression against authorities. Mr. Bean, the English disruptive comedian, is so popular because he goes around discharging his aggression towards the world at large by doing things the way a child would, rejecting the claims of reality and proceeding under the sway of the <i>primary process</i>, which leaves us no choice but to laugh at his immature oppositional-defiant antics instead of punishing/inhibiting them. We also laugh because if he can get away with that kind of childishness why should I keep myself fearful and tense with my defenses up. I can relax, decrease the psychic expenditure on my neuronal networks and muscles, and discharge the liberated energy through laughter, secure in the knowledge that if any societal (and superego) castigation falls it will be upon that <i>clown</i> not me. Our laughter at other’s foolishness is owing to our superego’s relaxing its iron grip upon the ego to always behave <i>ideally</i>, for now its attention is deflected upon the comedian with his <i>primary process</i> <i>(stupid/funny) behavior</i> allowing for the ego, unshackled from being watched, to relax momentarily. To put it another way, though using more technical terms, observing someone using <i>primary process</i> for fulfillment of a wish (an extreme though a rather crude example would be giving into gastrointestinal relief by passing gas loudly in the midst of a solemn church proceedings) allows one to <i>decathect</i> one’s own <i>secondary process</i> <i>inhibitions</i>, with the freed energy finding discharge through laughter. Putting it in yet another way one can say that laughter quite often is due to a momentary deflation of the self-elevation (sense of superiority) which the ego feels at keeping one’s <i>secondary process guards </i>up (puffed up with self-importance) on observing someone using <i>primary process thinking or behavior</i> in defiance of the demands of societal and superego standards. While any <i>primary process</i> activity or logic is capable of bringing a smile to the face, the uproarious laughter occurs only on perceiving <i>primary process </i><b>shortcut </b>outright triumphing over the <b>elaborate </b><i>secondary process</i> in achieving the wish fulfillment. When Laurel and Hardy get mixed up with the matadors and Laurel does an astonishing job of killing the bull with his primary process reasoning and actions, it has us rolling on the floor with laughter.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 22px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;">
<span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 27px;">Laughter and smile as a tool to sugarcoat aggression and other mean behaviors alone would not by itself bring the great physiochemical changes that we talked about at the start of this essay, and which supposedly bring so much health benefits. There has to be another element. It appears that laughter over time has evolved into not just a tool to show appeasement, but through that appeasement also find discharge for <b>passive sexual trends.</b></span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 24px;"></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 22px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;">
<span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 27px;">Now our muscle tension, along with the skin, is the protective barrier that guards our vital organs from external irritants/aggression. If we anticipate aggression/attack, our muscles tense up. The defensive muscle wall that envelopes us has evolved to protect the core part of us, our essence, our vegetative system. So when we laugh, it is signaling to others that perceive no threat. I am dropping my guards and making the vital delicate part of me, which is more valuable than my outer shell, vulnerable to you. Consider my laughing as a signal that there is no tension between you and me. I am being passive and opening up to you. It is not different from the way dogs to show submissiveness to their master go down on their back and expose their chest and belly. Dogs go belly up; humans laugh. Both are acts of appeasement, signaling one’s lesser status. [Incidentally, this may explain why women laugh, or at least the young ones giggle, more than men, and why smiling and laughter lessens as one rises up in social hierarchy, with guys at the very pinnacle of their life trajectory often becoming grumpy old curmudgeons. According to one account (Osho, the Indian Sex Guru of Oregon), Jesus never laughed [for he had no aggressiveness towards anyone and therefore had no need to appease]. </span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 24px;"></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 22px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;">
<span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 27px;">It may not be without merit to digress a little and throw light upon a social phenomenon that my medical school classmates were recently discussing on our Internet site. They pointed out to me that since the Sixties, when posing for a picture, instead of looking stiff, solemn and proper, bordering on the melancholic, people now flash the broadest smile, cracking their mouth from ear to ear. This transformation perhaps has to do with our greater tolerance towards showing our passive softer sexual side to the world because of increasing global prosperity. In yesteryears, the portrait painters and the photographers tried to capture a man’s strongest aggressive self, making the statement that here is a person who is no milquetoast but a force to be reckoned with. Likewise, in portrait of a woman, they made sure no smile crept up on the face lest people suspect the presence of salaciousness in her character. Smiling was a no, no, which only the vulgar, the weak, the spineless, the sycophantic, the lewd quickly gave in to. With everybody having so much more to give now, people want to show in pictures how well off and happy they are and do not have as much fear of showing their windows of vulnerability, their softer side to the world. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 22px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;">
<span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 27px;">Now the peculiarity of the appeasement via laughing is that it contracts the muscles surrounding the mouth and gives a glimpse of the red mucosal lining of its inside, exposing the softer, the vital, the more essential part of ourselves. It is an act of making the defenseless flesh, unprotected by skin and muscle tension, vulnerable to others. But isn’t that exactly what a woman does when she offers herself to be made love to, exposing the red mucosal lining of her genital passage by withdrawing the sheaths of covering clothes, skin and protective muscles? Human beings, or for that matter all living organisms, are composed of the inner core, which is the essence of our being, and in which all vital processes, including reproductive activity, occur, while surrounding it is the shielding outer husk of the skin, muscles and sense organs which, while the loudest aspect of us, really exist only as the bodyguard of the former. It is this sweet core, the heart of our being, which we offer to others when we smile and laugh and when we sexually submit ourselves to others. In dreams, it is not infrequent for the mouth to symbolize the genitals. In those whose genital sexuality comes under repression, mouth often replaces the vagina as the organ to be made love to. The peculiar strong attraction humans feel for dimples, a mark of sexual cuteness across cultures, owes its existence to the multiplication of this genital symbol on the face.</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 24px;"></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 22px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;">
<span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 27px;">Do I have any other evidence than that region of the mouth symbolizes the region of the female genitals, and revealing the intimate aspect of oneself symbolically through the smile produces similar physiological responses as offering one’s genitals sexually?</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 24px;"></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 22px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;">
<span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 27px;">Now there is a song from a great old Hindi movie, in which the heroine sings: “<b>when I heard my lover’s voice, every piece of me bloomed into a smile.” </b>It’s a very beautiful song, at least to my Indian ears and can be googled:<i> Jane Na Nazar Pehchane jigar – Aah (1953 <a data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v%3D90ooNta8icg&source=gmail&ust=1574623121172000&usg=AFQjCNE2spwNCgPUnaDKFPaVNpXjCIV0Dw" href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=90ooNta8icg" style="color: #1155cc;" target="_blank">https://www.youtube.com/watch?<wbr></wbr>v=90ooNta8icg</a></i>) to appreciate its beauty. Besides the quality of its music, the song’s appeal owes to the fact that it reveals a most important secret of humans: why they smile. The girl goes on to sing: “I have not yet set my eyes on him but my heart has already recognized his voice turning every pore of my body in to a smile; who is this whose shadow has fallen over my soul, <i>pervading </i>the entire depth of my being, turning me into a ball of [sexual] shyness; what game this magician is weaving that every particle of my body is smiling.” </span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 24px;"></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 22px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;">
<span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 27px;">That the opening of the mouth in a smile or laughter and opening of the female genital passage both aim for passive sexual satisfaction is further bolstered by the fact that popular language often refers to making someone smile or laugh as making them <b>crack up</b>; get an opening into their being. There is a saying in Hindi: <i>hansi to fansi </i>which roughly translates: make her laugh and she will be entrapped. A woman places so much emphasis upon a man’s ability to make her laugh because she knows she will be sexually responsive to him and he will be able to crack her open vaginally if he can crack her open into smiles by his sense of humor; one passive sexual trend will lead to the other. The recent fashion of wearing torn clothes, exposing the proud skin underneath – in some the clothes serving more to expose the erotogenic zones while covering the libidinally less sensitive areas (the attraction of fishnets and lingerie arises from the same principle) – is in a way smiling through the entire body, becoming eye candy for all who can lay their eyes upon oneself. </span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 24px;"></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 22px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;">
<span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 27px;">So through smiling and laughter we take on the passive feminine role and appease others by giving them the active masculine one. </span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 24px;"></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 22px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;">
<span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 27px;">Could it be possible that the numerous physiological responses that promote our health when we smile and laugh occur because they are mini-sexual expressions?</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 24px;"></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 22px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;">
<span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 27px;">In his last decade, Freud<sup>8</sup>, on more than one occasion wrote to the effect that just like he worked upon the delineation of psychopathology from the angle of libido, somebody, who is freshly starting out and has the luxury of time on his side, which he (Freud) no longer does, should elucidate it from the angle of aggression. In this essay, I have tried to trace some of the vicissitudes of aggression, and its binding and neutralization through the reflex of smiling and laughter. While quite a few fresh observations on the nature of laughter have been presented here, two deserve special mention. One, that laughter is not so much signaling to others that one is experiencing pleasure due to perceiving <i>primary process</i> thinking or behavior but to soften the impact of aggression in interpersonal interactions. Second, that while the smile arose as a fear reflex to evoke the protective instinct of the newborn’s caretakers, it has evolved into a major conduit for expressing passive sexuality.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 22px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 22px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;">
<span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 27px;"> References:</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 22px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt 0.5in;">
<span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 27px;">1.<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 7pt; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 24px;">Freud, S. (1895). Project for a scientific psychology. Standard Edition. 1: 318.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 22px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt 0.5in;">
<span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 27px;">2.<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 7pt; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 24px;">Freud, S. (1911). Formulations on the two principles of mental functioning. 12: 218-226.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 22px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt 0.5in;">
<span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 27px;">3.<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 7pt; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 24px;">Freud, S. (1915). The unconscious. Standard Edition, 14: 159-204.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 22px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt 0.5in;">
<span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 27px;">4.<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 7pt; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 24px;">Freud, S. (1927). Future of an illusion. Standard Edition. 21:15.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 22px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt 0.5in;">
<span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 27px;">5.<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 7pt; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 24px;">Spencer, H. (1860). Macmillan’s Magazine, March 1860 pp. 395-402.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 22px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt 0.5in;">
<span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 27px;">6.<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 7pt; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 24px;">Freud, S. (1905). Jokes and their relationship to the unconscious. Standard Edition. 8.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 22px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt 0.5in;">
<span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 27px;">7.<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 7pt; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 24px;">Freud, S. (1927). Humour. Standard Edition.21.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 22px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt 0.5in;">
<span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 27px;">8.<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 7pt; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 24px;">Freud, S. (1933). The new introductory lectures on psychoanalysis. Standard Edition. 22: 105.</span></div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
<br />
<br /></div>
Surendra Kelwalahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17208258557612952541noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7318753641065692730.post-34172955785225432812018-05-16T20:02:00.000-07:002018-05-16T20:03:06.159-07:00The Psychology behind putting coins in Wishing Wells<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<br />
<br />
In dreams, the presence of an expanse of water - sometimes even the presence of the color blue - signifies the fantasy of rebirth. All living creatures have emerged from the water, and, even, though, for hundreds of millions of years we have been land-based, our intrauterine existence for nine months still occurs in water, where we float in our mother's womb. This long association between water and birth has left an indelible genetic imprint in our mind and the former often - in dreams regularly - symbolizes the latter. Because of this close association, seeing water provokes the wish/fantasy to be born again.<br />
Water also has an amorous draw. Life process is drawn into water reaching its maximum density in the rainforests. In India, the months of monsoon, with its bountiful greenery is celebrated in songs as the time for romance and making love. The songs usually go as to how in the month of Sawan (the month when the monsoon is at its zenith) a kind of fire begins to burn in one's heart. The fire being an allusion to romantic passion. Now we know the antithesis of water is fire. Burning passion of the man can ultimately be doused only by the wetness of woman's genital passage.<br />
In dream interpretation, rescuing someone out of the water, or, it's opposite, getting rescued out of the water by someone, is treated as a "symbol" of wishing a child by that someone. For we are rescued from mortality by being born again through childbirth (by procreating with another person). The other person is rescued from death too. So the act of procreation is symbolized equally well by rescuing somebody or getting rescued out of the water. For it is through birthing that we achieve a modicum of immortality.<br />
The close connection between water and the wish for rebirth is also strongly supported by the fact that religious rituals like baptism in Christianity and similar rituals in other faiths, and as to how conversion into Christianity from other faiths, is celebrated through the ritual of dipping/immersing the person in water.<br />
Now this association between water and impulse to procreate and be born again is not limited to its appearance in dreams and religious rituals but it seems to influence human behavior in many other contexts which at first glance seem to have nothing to do with sex and rebirth.<br />
When a man begins to find others, his rivals, doing better than him in life, to avoid facing the humiliation and narcissistic injury of finding one is not at the top of the pyramid, if of a jealous and phobic disposition, he begins to avoid situations and places like roads, malls grocery stores, churches, where he is likely to meet his rival, preferring to stay around his home, where he still is the king of his castle. Congregations and public venues, where the combined presence of others makes him realize his inferiority even more acutely, trigger panic attacks. As Freud put it 'behind agoraphobia lies failed ambitions'. The home becomes the mother's womb, where the agoraphobic wants to retreat to avoid facing those who have bested him in life.<br />
The phobia of water appears to have similar roots. Here the overwhelming wish is not to retreat to the home, but jump in the (purifying) water, and be reborn, to do a better job next time, after washing off and getting rid of all the 'baggages' of this life. However since rebirth also means the end of one's current life, the person develops the phobia of water to avoid fulfillment of the wish. As if in the two contrary wishes to die and be born again and to avoid death, the latter wish triumphs through the formation of the phobia.<br />
The phobia of crossing bridge, especially over a river or other expanse of water, arises to avoid the temptation to jump over and submerge oneself in water (to be born again). Higher the bridge greater is the temptation - for it assures certain death. Often temptation to have sex with somebody, which will be dangerous, is shown in dreams as trying to cross a bridge unsuccessfully. Being caught precariously trying to climb up ledges, or climbing up, or coming down the steps, or from the height of a building with great dread of falling down, or slipping, or not being able to hold on to the supporting structures, arises from the same complex.<br />
One of my patients, a married man, who was tempted to make love to a young girl, but who was of loose morals and black (he was white), he was plagued with a recurrent dream in which he saw himself wanting to jump off a bridge but horrified to do so by the fact that the water below was dirty and dark.<br />
The phobia of crossing bridges also symbolizes fear of intercourse, afraid one will not be able to reach the other side. The two sides symbolizing the two sexes, with the bridge being the penis which bridges the separation between the mates.<br />
It is interesting that in Zoroastrian religion, and Islam, after death the soul supposedly crosses a bridge to reach the afterlife. In Islam, this bridge is conceptualized to be as thin and sharp as a razor blade. Its symbolism appears to be conveying the message that to be reborn one has to traverse through a very sharp and dangerous bridge. The innate fear present in mankind of not being able to perform sex successfully the religious ideologies exploit it by preaching if one does not live a righteous life one will not be able to traverse the bridge from this life to the next.<br />
Now, how all this relate to throwing coins in wishing wells?<br />
To go into that we must first examine the interesting phenomenon which growing up in India I observed while traveling on trains. Whenever the train crossed a river, especially a holy river, and India being a very ancient civilization with every river having become holy over time, people, especially the devout ones, would take out coins from their pockets and toss into the water.. They believe it brings good luck. Rivers are anthropomorphized as Goddesses and the hope/wish that the goddess would return the favor by giving a million coins back for getting offered one.<br />
Doesn't the ritual/process sound quite like what we do when we throw coins in a wishing well?<br />
The process of being born again by entering into water is replaced by just throwing a valuable part of oneself (the coin, precious metal, money) into the water. But isn't that nothing more than a substitute for having sex with the river goddess?<br />
Wishing wells are not quite rivers but a man-made expanse of water, placed there by some clever entrepreneur. He makes money by giving outlet to this primal impulse of mankind to be aroused into a wish to have intercourse and be born again on seeing water. The greatest wish of mankind: to have intercourse/be born/and thus attain immortality over time has spread to lesser wishes, chief among them being the wish for all kinds of material gain. And thus when we throw a coin in wishing well, it is not just for the satisfaction of that great libidinal wish but also for lesser wishes.<br />
Over time a wishing well garners the same aura of holiness as Indian rivers have done, strengthened by the collective piety and wishes of the believers that putting in the coin there makes one's wish come true. The circulation of stories of some wishes have come true - whether imagined or in reality, for occasional wish does come true - becomes proof that there does exist some miraculous property in that wishing well.<br />
<div>
<br /></div>
<br /></div>
Surendra Kelwalahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17208258557612952541noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7318753641065692730.post-65374490896751589912017-11-10T20:42:00.000-08:002018-07-24T06:27:09.326-07:00 The underlying cause for seeing hallucinatory faces in a schizophrenic patient<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 13px;">A patient who is in her late fifties and has suffered from paranoid schizophrenia since her twenties, which, fortunately, for the most part, remains in remission, came to the session and reported that after her Primary Care Physician started her on Gabapentin (Neurontin) 400 mg. three times a day for peripheral neuropathy and knee pain, she started feeling miserable and began </span><b style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 13px;">seeing faces in everything she laid her eyes upon. </b><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 13px;">"I see faces in clouds, on my wall, on the patterns of my couch, the knickknacks on your windowsill, even the mug from which you are drinking your coffee."</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 13px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 13px;">"Are you just inferring faces from the random lines and patterns that are always present in these objects like one does in Rorschach test or are they actual hallucinations?" I asked her.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 13px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 13px;">"Well, I don't see too much difference between mistaking the patterns on objects as faces and </span>their<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 13px;"> popping up as pure hallucinations. And you know in the past I have had florid hallucinations so I know what I am talking about. Also when I close my eyes and try to go to sleep faces pop up then too without my looking at any objects. In fact, they are even more intense when they emerge while my eyes are closed; so intense they prevent me from falling asleep."</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 13px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 13px;">Now the purpose of all mental symptoms is to prevent one from getting out of control (going wild/going crazy). What looks like crazy behavior (madness) to an outside observer is actually a watered down (relatively harmless) versions of something totally unacceptable and violent behavior. When one's unacceptable impulses (internal world/id) become overwhelming and threaten to disintegrate the ego, or act against one's moral precepts (the superego/conscience) or come into conflict with others (the external world/reality) then one gives outlets to these impulses in form of bizarre behaviors (mental symptoms). By restraining one from acting out the impulses in their pure (directly destructive) forms, one protects oneself from the wrath of others and one's conscience. The agency that suffers by this seeking of refuge in madness is the ego which instead of seeing reality correctly, sees it in distorted forms, that make it easier for it to act out the destructive impulses in their displaced relatively harmless substitutes.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 13px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 13px;">Were these hallucinations there to prevent her from doing or thinking something unacceptable?</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 13px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 13px;">"Do these faces scare you and keep you from doing wrong things?"</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 13px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 13px;">"They are not scary but they do prevent me from thinking weird thoughts. I get so caught up with these faces, I can think of nothing else."</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 13px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 13px;">"What kind of weird thoughts?"</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 13px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 13px;">"Like my son coming to harm. You know he acts as head of security for rock bands when they go on tours. He is right now with a rock band which is touring South America. I was </span>worrying<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 13px;"> about the crowds getting out of control and his security team unable to contain them, resulting in his and his people getting injured or even killed."</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 13px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 13px;">The patient who has been with me for over twenty years and therefore I know she suffers from great fears of harm coming to her loved ones (which is a </span><i style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 13px;">displacement </i><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 13px;">of harm coming to herself). She harbors, in her unconscious, very strong impulses to destroy the world and everybody in it. These wishes emerge in her conscious mind as fear of world falling apart and coming to an end (because of her). And the guilt over causing world-catastrophe, when it becomes too strong, emerges as hallucinations.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 13px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 13px;">I asked her "Who are the people whose faces pop up?"</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 13px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 13px;">"Faces of people I don't even know. Especially at night, when I try to sleep, the faces of people emerge who I have never seen before."</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 13px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 13px;">Now we know from </span>psychoanalytic<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 13px;"> study of dreams that people who we are very close to us, especially family members, to hide their identity, the dream-work substitutes them with faces of total strangers. So the fear of harm coming to herself was displaced on to harm coming to the family member - now we also know that irrational fears of harm coming to one's family members and altruistic worries about their safety is really </span>projection<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 13px;"> of fear of harm coming to oneself. - and the hallucinatory faces were of family members who were coming partly as a retaliation for thinking of harm coming to them and partly to prevent her from thinking such weird thoughts.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 13px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 13px;">At this point, she recalled that the faces started popping up after she had a very frightening dream. In this nightmare, a nuclear explosion had occurred. She was in her car trying to get away from its </span>after<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 13px;"> effects. She noticed as she drove that there were people all over who had been afflicted by the nuclear fallout and needed help. But she could not help them because her dead relatives and friends were there too, but now appearing alive, and were warning her not to touch or help any of the people on the road because they had been afflicted by the nuclear explosion and she would suffer the same fate as them if she touched them.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 13px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 13px;">The dream had woken her up in fright and from that time onward the hallucinations of popping faces had begun.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 13px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 13px;">Patient went on to say that besides what the gabapentin had done to her mental stability, the frightening exchange of words between Trump and the leader of North Korea about nuclear war that had triggered her fears of world coming to an end and which had triggered the nightmare and seeing on TV the devastation that had occurred n Texas and Florida due to hurricanes Harvey and Irma, they had all contributed to the emergence of the hallucinations.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 13px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 13px;">Then she remembered that </span>this hallucinations<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 13px;"> of faces had once before occurred and that time it was a premonition of some disaster happening and to her surprise a few days later 9/11 and World Trade Center collapse had occurred.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 13px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 13px;">Patient opined, "The faces were popping up as a premonition of what was to occur due to Hurricane Irma and Harvey. Just like in 2001 the same hallucinations occurred as a premonition of what was to happen on 9/11."</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 13px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 13px;">Patient lays great store by her ability to cause massive destruction by her thoughts.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 13px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 13px;">The patient added, "You know how I worry about the world coming to an end soon. I worry about going to sleep and not waking up (because in my sleep when I have less control over my thoughts I can cause world destruction). I have to pray in the night for God to make sure that I wake up in the morning with the world still there and I still alive. But all this happens when I am down and depressed. I think that gabapentin made me depressed and triggered my fear of </span>world<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 13px;"> coming to an end and the faces emerged to prevent me from doing so.</span><br />
<br />
<br /></div>
Surendra Kelwalahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17208258557612952541noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7318753641065692730.post-63057793916344290922017-09-17T13:47:00.000-07:002017-09-17T13:47:05.658-07:00A cause for lack of bonding between a mother and her newborn<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
A young mother, in her early twenties, who had the child just couple of months ago, complained that she cannot really bond with her baby.<br />
"Is it postpartum depression?" she asked me.<br />
She did not have quite the features of depression. But then these psychological concepts when used to complain about one's problem are so difficult to form a judgment upon. Depression is after all a word and words are shorthand for complex phenomenon. And while words convey information they can only approximate to what the other person has in mind and cannot evoke the exact image in the hearer. Every individual experiences his or her mental misery somewhat uniquely and they all get lumped under the rubric of depression. Of course there are certain features which frequently cluster together, and gives the core of what we clinically understand as depression, but sometimes there may be none of those core symptoms and patient can still be not doing well and may be having what should be looked upon as depression (which is best defined as <i>a general inhibition of functioning</i>).<br />
What exactly she meant by she cannot bond with her baby?<br />
She described it as that while as a mother she does take care of the baby, she does it mechanically. She is not drawn to the baby as the baby's father and baby's two grandmothers are, who get so excited when with they are with the baby, and cannot wait for their turn to have it because they get so much pleasure out of cleaning, feeding and playing with her, and go into raptures if the baby smiles or does something that they were not expecting her to do. <br />
Then the patient wondered if the baby will develop autism because of this lack of bonding with her (mother).<br />
While I agree that the etiology of autism may have similar origins, where the baby's caretakers are not quite in tune with the baby's emotional needs and may deal with the expressions of its emotions, especially aggression, without proper feel for it, suppressing instead of allowing them to blossom into age appropriate forms, forcing the baby's psyche to shove the manifestations of these aggressive drives back upon its own self, which will eventually find expression as autistic behaviors.<br />
I assured her that most likely the baby will not have autistic traits because she seems to be getting enough acceptance and nurturance from her father and the two grandmothers.<br />
"And you you may be overestimating your lack of emotional attachment to the child," I tried to be supportive.<br />
Then I asked the patient if she was breastfeeding the baby.<br />
It turned out she was not. She blamed it on some nutritional expert in the hospital who just after delivery came to teach her about breastfeeding but on hearing she was on Suboxone and Xanax immediately declared that it was not an option because Suboxone and Xanax will pass through the breast milk and will harm the baby's brain.<br />
I felt sorry for the mother and the child who were harmed for life because some expert, based upon a single variable that Suboxone goes into the breast milk, had ignored all the other benefits of breastfeeding which easily outweigh the little opiate going into the baby's system. It is better to be ignorant than to have half-baked knowledge.<br />
I asked her if she really wanted the child?<br />
She was not sure if she did. She had known the baby's father for just six months before she got pregnant. They were living together but not because of any strong bond. They just moved in without thinking through and because they could never plan anything beyond what was right under their nose. They both were good looking, so there was physical attraction. But the biggest thing in common was their opiate dependence and addicts like to do drugs together as if they seek courage from others doing the wrong thing. Their partnership had persisted in trying to give up opiate abuse too and both were in treatment with me getting Suboxone, and supporting each other to remain abstinent.<br />
There were couple of other points which held them together. She admired him as an exceptionally good tattoo artist, which he really was, and he once was flown in to Florida from Michigan to tattoo a famous basketball player and had been feted while he was doing the job by that celebrity, which had made her really proud of him, but overall she did not think of him as a husband material. She claimed he worked only when he felt like - which was not very often - and feared when married they will be more broke than secure. They were living together more for convenience in her mother's basement than anything else. Then she got pregnant and lacking decisiveness allowed the pregnancy to proceed till she had no choice but to go through the delivery.<br />
Then both of them dropped out of treatment.<br />
Six months later the girl's mother came for her own session to my office and told how her daughter was back doing drugs, and raising Cain. She was stealing, partying and hanging out with all wrong men. <br />
For all practical purposes she had abandoned the baby.<br />
So the lack of bonding with the child had a motive. If she had gotten really bonded to the child, it would have been a powerful counter motive to return to drugs and party all the time. With the child latched on to her, she could not have abandoned herself entirely to fulfilling her these pregenital primitive selfish drives.<br />
So what looked like a spontaneous failure of bonding was not all that spontaneous. There was a cause, a hidden motive, the pull of living wild, with no restraints on one's basic animal urges.<br />
One wonders too if postpartum depression does not just arise out of vacuum but has some similar hidden motive behind the profound dip in mood. If we go deeply into the psychology of Oedipal Phase of the female sex, one is left with no choice but to conclude that the compensation for the lack of penis, which at that age the little girl suddenly realizes will relegate her to second class status in affairs of the world all through life, is having an exclusive possession over her own baby child when she has one. What she was denied - the male genitals, which are so strikingly obvious in her male siblings and playmates - and the absence of which was most acutely felt during that phase was handled by fantasy of getting compensated on growing up via having a baby of one's own who will be completely dependent upon oneself. But in some women, rather in all women to different degrees, their birthing and having a baby over which one has complete possession is not felt as adequate compensation. The original<i> penis envy</i> and continued search for it through direct competition with men, which is manifested in all kinds of inexplicable behaviors which puzzles us to no extent, like entering into relationship to <i>trick/cheat </i>him into giving what he has to her (the woman's attitude on this matter is best explained by the saying, "What is mine is mine and what is yours is mine too", or through destroying him out of jealousy, often after falling in love with them and then once he becomes her life partner turning the relationship into a constant criticism of all his behaviors, or making his life miserable, governed by the illusion - unconscious of course - that this will hasten his destruction which will be equivalent to her getting what she has always envied and desired.<br />
Girls who are into wild partying instead of settling down with a mate and seeing the purpose of life in having and raising children are really into this alternate lifestyle. The motive being to steal from some unsuspecting man - in the chaos of wild relationship - the penis that is so badly desired. Women's love for clutter, confusion and goofiness in conversation also owes to the same complex: in the disorder and turmoil to steal what one so badly wants. The tumultuous relationships, the modern generations are having, prior to settling down - for they are brought up with so much indulgence with all their desires immediately satisfied so they want everything - also owes to the young girls not giving up the desire to have the penis directly by stealing from a man through a deceptive relationship than through having a child by him and postponing that wish to the next generation.<br />
And behind postpartum depression lies the same complex. "Let me kill this baby for it has not gotten me true parity with men and let me seek what I want not through marriage and playing with my child (the penis substitute) but through indulging in wild chaotic existence and changing places with a man. Even when these women come from socioeconomic backgrounds in which leading a wild sexual lifestyle is out of question just <i>the fantasy</i> of indulging in polymorphous perversions may act as sufficient counter motive to not take care of the baby to the point of even killing it; done under the delusional cloak of protecting him from evil (the evil itself being mother's own infanticidal tendencies). <br />
Does a lack of instinctive understanding of the aggressive tendencies of the child who has disposition to develop autism on part of the mother also arises from some counter motive?<br />
It is interesting that in the modern times as more and more information is being fed to people on how to be ideal parents paradoxically we are producing more and more obsessive/autistic children. It appears that more full of education, sophistication, and upper class one gets, greater is the chances for the child to turn autistic.<br />
Why this paradox?<br />
Perhaps all this acquiring of knowledge happens at a cerebral level and perhaps much of it as an overcompensation for lack of feeling of natural motherly bond between oneself and one's child. In olden times women had children in their teens and twenties, when they were nearer to being child themselves and thus instinctively understood their babies and could instinctively identify with their children's drives. They did not need any Dr. Spock's books or Child Protective Services manuals and parenting classes on how to be a good parent. They did take care of the child instinctively and <i>did not see themselves as separate from the baby.</i> Mother and child were a unit. Of course, they neglected and ignored the child much more than they do today and the child was exposed to dangers and harm far more than nowadays. Today the child is infinitely more protected and safe from physical dangers. But in earlier times while they had little time for their children, the time they did spend had far more emotional warmth and understanding than nowadays. And what the mother could not give emotionally, there were always siblings around picking up the slack, and acting as surrogate parents. Now with only one or two children in household, this substitute parenting role of siblings has disappeared.<br />
Nowadays the parents are full of knowledge of how to raise a child but the counter motive to be drawn by other demands of life: their career, their friendships, their hobbies, their need to excel with peers, their social obligations which are far more ingrained in them for these distractions were practiced late into their twenties and thirties, with childbearing postponed to the limits of one's biological clock, they all act against bonding with the child as the unsophisticated mothers of the past could instinctively do.<br />
Once I was severely castigated by a neurologist for suggesting that inadequate parenting may be responsible for autistic children not finding proper outlets for their aggression. She insisted that of what she see of the parents of autistic children they are more attentive, more concerned, and more devoted to their child than ordinary parents.<br />
I agreed with her but added that they may be more devoted and may be spending more time and may be doing everything as the book says they should do. But it is done more cerebrally than instinctively and spontaneously. Trying to heal problem of the heart with the carefully thought out solutions by the head often fail. These older aged mothers, who often become quite narcissistic, by postponing marriage and becoming androgynous for living by themselves rather than with a partner, try to bring up their children through doing everything right by the book instead of feeling emotionally one with the child. </div>
Surendra Kelwalahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17208258557612952541noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7318753641065692730.post-11436940855596261492017-06-11T08:53:00.000-07:002017-06-15T08:47:38.760-07:00Further dreams of escaping death<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
The patient whose dream of trying to pass his own aggressive illness upon the friend of his son - see blog entry of April 25 - in his next session reported further dreams of escaping death which may be of some interest to aficionado of psychoanalysis, especially since the dreamwork used typical dream symbols to cobble together the manifest content.<br />
<br />
Most of the dreams were chaotic and only a few fragments he could recall with reasonable accuracy. But since they all followed the same theme we could figure out what the dreams were trying to convey.<br />
<br />
The following dream he could recall with good amount of manifest material.<br />
<b><br /></b>
<b>He was out in a business area, running from one place to another doing errands, even though it was like 2 am and no businesses would have been open. [The dream had disregarded this anomaly.] He felt an urgent need to urinate while driving from one spot to another and stopped to relieve himself at a house which he had recently purchased but had still not closed upon. He had the keys to the house or knew the keycode of the lockbox. He assumed it would be empty so there should be no problem in his slipping in and out and relieving himself. To his surprise he found a hobo living there with two of his family members. They were squatters. They had eased themselves into the house illegally. In fact they were cooking something on the stove at that weird hour as if it was quite natural to do so with no concern the house did not belong to them and it was so late in night. He went out to find some legal authority to help him throw them out. A middle aged police woman happened to be around and came to his rescue. She ordered the hobo and his family out of there which, to his surprise, they agreed to without any protest. </b><br />
<br />
The house, where enroute, he had stopped, was his own body. Though he does possess many properties he had none in the area where the dream shows he had one. This falsehood conveyed the wish to deny his having the deadly disease. The occupied house/his body was taken over by the hobos (disease) but only in dream. But since dreams are fiction and do not exist in reality, the illness was fiction too and the disease did not exist. It was all a bad dream<br />
The hobo and his family were obviously the illness that were occupying his body illegally and needed to be gotten rid of.<br />
When he had the dream, it was actually around 2 am, and he did have an urgent need to urinate at that hour of the night. This need to urinate which was real need had been woven into the structure of the dream to escape getting up and getting rid of the need by actually going to the bathroom by dreaming of doing so in that house.<br />
Having a lot of unfinished business was an attempt to postpone death. "I have so many things to take care of that there is no way I am dying." One of the unfinished business was to find the hobo (the disease) in his property (body) and throw him out. The police woman stood for his mother who had got rid of all the childhood ailments successfully, whose image he was now invoking to do the same with the current disease. She had been transformed into a police woman to symbolize the legal system whose help he was taking to get rid of the disease. For the disease had no <i>legitimate </i>right to invade his body and he was getting the law enforcement to get the illegal aliens out of his body..<br />
The hobo and his family departed so easily was another wish fulfillment. The disease had gotten rid of in a hurry without any difficulty.<br />
<br />
In another dream <b>he saw himself in a bright and sunny day on a road which had a row of shops from one end to the other. He was supposed to catch a train after he went through those shops, primarily to find a restaurant to eat. Each restaurant he entered, he felt like he had been there before and the food in the past had not been bad. It looked like at every restaurant he stopped he could not make up his mind whether to eat there or not and kept on finding himself in the next restaurant doing the same thing. All this indetermination about eating and moving from one restaurant to the next was accompanied by anxiety that he will miss the train if he does not hurry up.</b><br />
<b><br /></b>
The train symbolized the last journey and exit from the world. Going to the row of restaurants was an attempt to go back to all the women from the past with whom he had had relationship and to get a fresh lease on life by impregnating one of them and starting a new family, which, because of the obligations incurred, would postpone taking the last journey (dying). Restaurants symbolized the girls from the past and eating there for having intercourse with them. But just like all these relationships had not ended in his having a child with any of them when he actually was having relationship with them, even in the dream this reality was preventing him from indulging in the fantasy that he was getting a fresh lease on life through having a family with one of them. The anxiety/fear of dying was shifted, for lessening its impact, from fear of dying (getting on the train) to just its opposite, missing the train (not dying); a reversal.<br />
<br />
Another dream a short one was of <b>confronting death itself which came in form of a hoodlum/animal dressed in black hoodie, that was challenging him in front of Burger King. Fear and darkness was the ambiance.</b><br />
<br />
Entering the Burger King restaurant was to eat food. Consuming food symbolized having intercouse, which would have given fresh lease on life through rebirth (having a child). But death, in the form of a frightening animal, was preventing it from happening. The animal also symbolized the Oedipal father, the deathly fear of whom had first appeared during the Oedipal phase for having sexual attraction towards the mother the pursual of which would have led to castration and death.<br />
<br />
There were a lot of other dreams, all vague, the common theme of which was that he was breaking the law and would get into trouble if caught. All of these dreams originated from the wish (which his conscience deemed illegal) to give his disease/fate to others. In one dream <b>he had invited somebody to one of his houses for some educational instructions. He noticed the invited person had parked his car<i> illegally. </i>It was facing the wrong way. <i>He felt the anxiety (guilt) of that man's wrongful action.</i> The man then began entering the house. He was watching this from a distance. But while the man was crossing the threshold of the door, its wooden frame suddenly developed gaping splits, giving it an eerie dilapidated look</b>.<br />
<br />
Doing something illegal was pushing somebody else into the jaws of death through transferring his own bad fate on to that person. Which his conscience was deeming illegal. However, the dream was pushing the blame for this unacceptable (illegal) wish by making the person who was getting pushed into death as the one who was doing the wrongful act (parking the car facing the wrong way). The dream however could not succeed in projecting the feelings of anxiety/guilt upon the victim and he still felt it, even though in the manifest dream it was not him but the victim who was doing the illegal parking. This proves Freud's rule that it is easier to reverse and change the visual content of the dream to suit one's wishes but the affect associated with it is much harder to block out.<br />
The house as well as the wood frame symbolized woman. Wood is a typical symbol of woman (matter/material). But as he entered inside her (house/wooden frame) instead of deriving pleasure from the act he met the fate of death. The gaps (gaping splits) that appeared in the wooden frame were symbol of the frightening aspect of female genitals (reminders of castration and death). <br />
<br />
Another set of dreams were about being poisoned. While in a hospital the nurse is trying to poison him through the IV, or a waitress is trying to poison through the food she is serving, or there is a bitter debate going on between him and the waitress over a credit card error. In all these the wish to poison the other person or put them on the wrong through giving them the disease and through such an action getting rid of it from one's own self is projected, reversed, and experienced as they are poisoning or harming him.<br />
<br />
<br /></div>
Surendra Kelwalahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17208258557612952541noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7318753641065692730.post-55609719546719292042017-04-25T06:31:00.000-07:002017-05-21T17:29:07.972-07:00A dream of escaping death by passing it to somebody else<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
A man getting up in age after a long healthy life, in which he hardly ever was sick, came down with a very aggressive illness and when told he may not live for too long, dreamt the following:<br />
<b><br /></b><b>He is in a house where a friend of his son is in great trouble. Some kind of legal trouble. A policewoman and a policeman are standing next to him to take him away. But the son's friend does not have proper black pants to wear which once he gets and puts it on they can take him away. The dreamer is offering the young man to take his black trousers - quite a few of which the son's friend is trying - but none of them are quite fitting him. It looks like he is purposely not trying on the right pants and in addition is doing some purposeless wasteful actions delaying everything instead of putting on those pants the way he should and leave with the police. This is making the dreamer angry that the kid is incompetent and will not amount to anything.</b><br />
<br />
The day before the dreamer had been going through his closet and had noticed how many of his black pants which were just lying there, never worn, because they were too tight, were now fitting him well and as an irony the ones which had been fitting him well, were now too baggy because of the weight loss and it had taken him some time to decide which pants to wear and while he was sifting through those black trousers the thought had passed through his mind that soon he will be wearing none of them.<br />
In the dream this process of deciding upon which black trousers to wear had been projected upon his son's friend and had been made a ground for accusing him of being incompetent and someone who will amount to nothing. Since black, as much as white, shroud/cloth often symbolizes death, the black trousers symbolized death, which the dreamer was trying to escape by pushing it from himself upon the young lad and getting angry and accusing him of incompetence for not readily accepting it.<br />
The two police were death itself, which had come to take him away but which the wish fulfillment had shifted it from himself to the young man. It is he who is in trouble with the police (death) not me. The accusation of incompetence was actually <i>reversal </i>of the realization, in service of the wish fulfillment, that the young kid is too smart to be pressured into accepting the fate of the dying old man upon himself.<br />
<br /></div>
Surendra Kelwalahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17208258557612952541noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7318753641065692730.post-63448777445816642572017-01-28T06:41:00.000-08:002017-03-04T07:17:58.643-08:00Psychogenic Impotency due to Misogyny <div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">A patient brought the following dream which he labelled as "A
dream of hidden erection." </span><br />
<div style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">"The dream lasted
almost all night long, or perhaps not, but it certainly felt that way. Every now and then I woke out of it, startled, to check if my penis was erect or not and then fell back into sleep and resumed the dream." <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-size: 18px;">The dream:</span></div>
<div style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;">
<b><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">In am on a long motorcycle ride. A cousin of mine is my companion. She is driving while I am in the sidecar. She is reaching out with her hand to my penis as if it is the motorcycle's pistol (accelerator) grip. There is a great effort going on my part for my not wanting her to know that I am
having an erection. I do want to have an erection but not because of her. The whole emphasis on the dream is to have an erection but for her not to know that it is there. I think when she reaches out to grip the pistol she does not find </span></b><b><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">erection.</span></b></div>
<div style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;">
<br /></div>
<span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">The patient has a huge number of cousins so I asked why this particular one was chosen by the dreamwork to take the ride with. The way he talked about <i>the long ride - </i>something that went forever, it left little doubt that it symbolized life journey, in which, by the way, he has been </span><span style="font-size: 18px;">unsuccessful</span><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;"> in that he is 38, unmarried, still lives with his mother, has no lasting relationship, has paranoid delusions and hallucinations when off Abilify (a dopamine blocking agent), and has great </span><span style="font-size: 18px;">difficulties</span><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;"> in consummating the sexual act if he does find a woman willing to sleep with him (he is good looking, but women after initial attraction can sense that he is not altogether there and break off with him) and has to resort to indirect and deviant fantasies and sexual positions to manage erection and emission. </span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: 18px;">"This question has puzzled me too," the patient replied. "But actually I know the answer. You will recall I have related to you a recurrent dream that I have been having for the last six months or so of another cousin in which I am trying to have sex with her. The most surprising thing about those dreams, which but for some minor details portray the same theme, is that the cousin who I lead into sexual intercourse is someone towards whom I have not a shade of sexual interest, for she is not attractive at all. From our youngest years I never thought of her as attractive. And even the sex in the dream never progresses beyond going through the motions of making love, for I have no feelings for her, and it is done without even taking our clothes off. </span><br />
<span style="font-size: 18px;"><br /></span><span style="font-size: 18px;">"So this new dream may be just a new version of that recurrent dream. For this cousin is the sister of the cousin with whom I have been making love to, without having any attraction towards, for the last six months." </span><br />
<span style="font-size: 18px;"><br /></span><span style="font-size: 18px;">Now this recurrent dream we had subjected to analysis in a previous session and had concluded that it expressed hostility towards women, with the cousin representing his mother. The sexual act in it was less an expression of union (eros) and more an assertion of aggressive masculinity, with an intent to humiliate, the essence of which could be summed up in the phrase "I am screwing you." However the fear of getting too aggressive had watered down (repressed) the act by limiting it to just going through the motions of sex, without any feelings, and doing it without taking off clothes. </span><br />
<span style="font-size: 18px;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: 18px;">We could not solve in the analysis of that earlier recurrent dream as to why this particular cousin was chosen by the dream-work to express his hostility towards women. </span><br />
<span style="font-size: 18px;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: 18px;">The patient now claimed it was really the cousin in the current dream that was the object of his hostility and her sister had been replacing her because he must have been scared of expressing his hostility towards the one with whom he really had an ax to grind. </span><br />
<span style="font-size: 18px;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: 18px;">"And what was your beef with her?"</span><br />
<span style="font-size: 18px;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: 18px;">"This cousin is 44 years old now. And I am 38 so she is 6 years older than me. Now when we were young, I was about 10, </span><span style="font-size: 18px;">for almost a year </span><span style="font-size: 18px;">I had to sleep in the same bed with her, because we were living with my aunt, her mother and there was not enough space in their house. I was afraid of the dark. I am afraid of the dark even now. As tough as I am, and fear nothing, I am still afraid of the dark. Even now I cannot fall asleep without the TV on, and my mother hates that - patient lives with his mother - and she comes to my room and cuts it off as soon as I fall asleep. </span><br />
<span style="font-size: 18px;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: 18px;">"My cousin had a similar attitude towards me when we were sharing the bed. She would not let me keep the light on. And I would be so afraid of the dark I would go and be up against her and she would not like it. She thought so little of me she never faced me so it would always be like ever increasing 'spooning' as night would progress. I would often get erection and she would then push me away. </span><br />
<span style="font-size: 18px;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: 18px;">"And that would make me so mad. Especially since I had no interest in her, for she was as ugly as her sister, so full of acne that I thought of her as pizza-face."</span><br />
<span style="font-size: 18px;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: 18px;">"Then why would you get erection?"</span><br />
<span style="font-size: 18px;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: 18px;">"Thats a good question. It must have been that I would fall asleep and then the erection would occur not because of her but because of the things I was exposed to during the day. I had access to playboy magazines, a lot of them, they were hidden in a closet, and Marvel Comics and there was one particular comic character, Linda Carter, the wonder woman, whose tight clothes and semi-nude body in pictures would get me so aroused. So the excitement from those sexually exciting objects from the day I must have been transferring to the cousin who I found not at all unattractive because of sheer physical closeness as I would drift into sleep, where distinctions between one person and another kind of melts.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: 18px;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: 18px;">"In fact in the dream I do want to have an erection but not because of her and that is what I want her to know when she reaches out to check for erection that it is not for her but for others. Yet in my attempt for her not to feel my erection I think <i>I am sabotaging my ability to have erection altogether and ruining my ability to make love normally.</i> I grew up getting put down by my mother and all the women and girls that were always around me. I have so many cousins and aunts. And my inability to perform well as a man with women arises from this anger at them for treating me badly."</span><br />
<span style="font-size: 18px;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: 18px;">"How do you know this is the cause of your sexual difficulties?"</span><br />
<span style="font-size: 18px;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: 18px;">"I have been reading a lot lately about misogynists and there they tell you that they hate women because of bad relationships with their mothers. Verbally or physically abusive mother will turn you off towards all women."</span><br />
<span style="font-size: 18px;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: 18px;"> </span><br />
<span style="font-size: 13.5pt;"><br /></span></div>
Surendra Kelwalahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17208258557612952541noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7318753641065692730.post-654873292021165442017-01-07T08:56:00.001-08:002017-01-07T20:48:12.591-08:00An exhibitionistic dream<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
A prolific dreamer brought this dream to the session.<br />
<br />
<b>I went to Susan and Gary's house. Gary was alive [In reality he passed away last part of the year]. I was surprised that he was alive. Gary said he would show Susan around and then left me alone. I put on one of his t-shirt and I was going to put on some underpants, but it was a pillowcase. Larry then said "Can't we leave you alone" and I said "probably not". Susan then came in. I felt embarrassed and humiliated. I said I will wash everything and bring it back.</b><br />
<b><br /></b>
When asked for associations it turned out that the patient thirty years ago had dated Susan, but only a few times. His mother, whose strong influence had prevented him, despite being an exceptionally good artist and a highly intelligent man, from ever getting married, had put a block to his budding love for Susan through making a statement that one should go out only with someone who has a lot in common with oneself. Since Susan is Jewish and he a Catholic, he had given up on her.<br />
He did admit, after some reflection, that this explanation is a superficial one and the real reason he did not pursue Susan further was because she was very popular when young and was going out with a number of boyfriends at the same time that she was dating him, and it was his fear of competition that had held him back. He rather defer in favor of others than face the dread of defeat. He was bullied as a child and has deep fear of other men who he rather placate than fight when confronted. He has very little confidence in himself and admitted that his dreams are often about his bungling and making other mistakes at work and elsewhere inviting wrath of others. These inadequacies and lack of self confidence were interpreted to be symbolic representation of his lack of confidence in performing sexaully, turning him into a man who had never made love to anybody. "I am not good enough for anybody," is how he put it.<br />
"You think you are at their house to resume your relationship with Susan now that Gary has passed away?"<br />
"I no longer have interest in her. Yes I was interested in her when she was 18 but now I feel no attraction towards her. But you are the doctor."<br />
The last sentence confirmed that my conjecture was right. The repressed wish could not be acknowledged but indirectly; imputing that he is not conscious of this rekindling of interest but I, as his doctor and with my superior medical knowledge, had guessed it correctly.<br />
<b>Gary said he would show Susan around and then left me alone</b> could only be interpreted as wish fulfillment that Gary was exhibiting Susan and <i>making her available</i>. Leaving him alone perhaps alluded to his being permitted by Gary to pursue her but only in onanism not in actual physical contact. <br />
Wearing of Gary's t-shirt and attempting to wear his underpants by pulling them up was interpreted to be his taking Gary's place with Susan.<br />
"But why pillowcase?"<br />
Patient said it was perhaps a wish to sleep in Gary's bed putting his head on his pillow.<br />
I wondered if pillow was symbol of female genitals, a place to rest head (penis) not unlike how the man's most restful place is inside the vagina (when making love) and finally in mother earth's womb (eternal rest).<br />
Patient said the interpretation was quite likely correct and then added, "You know why I am pulling up the pillow case, because it is the opposite of pulling down the underpants."<br />
Was it then 'reversal', a technique so often used by dreamwork to distort the true state of affairs, in this case to hide his pulling down the underpants, a preliminary step one must take before intercourse.<br />
"Where is the humiliation part coming in from?"<br />
Patient then confessed that he had hid this part of the dream when first telling it to me for it was so ridiculous.<br />
The pillowcase came into the dream because it has no opening at the other end and so his legs could not go through and he was unable to pull it up higher than his knees <i>and was thus forced to expose himself.</i> It was this exposure/exhibitionism which was giving rise to the embarrassment and humiliation. <br />
"How do the exchange of dialogues <b>'I cannot leave you alone</b>' and '<b>probably not' </b>add to the meaning of the dream?"<br />
It is accusation by Gary that I cannot be trusted with his wife and I am agreeing with him. It is no different than how when I get really paranoid the security guards start appearing at the windows of my house and how black cars follow me when I am on the road to keep a tab on me."<br />
Patient all his life has slipped in and out of paranoia.<br />
"Why are you promising them that you will wash the clothes and bring them back?"<br />
"It is washing away the guilt of wishing to have sex with Susan. Though it hardly goes beyond my exposing myself." patient concluded the analysis of the dream.<br />
<br />
<br />
<br /></div>
Surendra Kelwalahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17208258557612952541noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7318753641065692730.post-81595625099275425612016-10-31T04:09:00.000-07:002016-11-01T18:10:15.042-07:00Conflict between "Sweet Release of Death" and "The Continuing Lure of this Wonderful World" <div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
A divorced man in his forties,who lives a secluded lifestyle after he readily and truthfully cooperated over his marijuana use with the law enforcement, instead of refusing to answer questions and getting a lawyer to lie about it, which caused him to go to jail, leaving him with a deep distrust of society's way of conducting its affairs with honest people, especially by those who are in charge of arresting, prosecuting and judging, and spends most of his waking hours tending after his business, of which he is the owner, and who comes to me primarily to pick up a prescription of Seroquel 100 mg. for his anxiety, insomnia and bouts of depression, for he rather be working than be in my office, suddenly volunteered, which is quite unusual for his reticent self, that he has <i>recurring</i> <i>dreams</i>, and since he has nothing better to report he might as well tell them to me, not because any good will come out of doing so but to fill up the 45-minute session.<br />
<br />
<b>The dreams have the same theme though their form changes. I have to be somewhere for something important, like to take an examination, or go to do a difficult job, but I cannot reach there because of obstacles like I cannot remember where I parked the car, or the car itself is missing if I do find the place where I had left it, or if the car is not missing the keys are. I may even visualize where I had left the keys but don't quite know how to get to them. As for taking the test, I make it to the school but I cannot find my way to the classroom. Or I am on the dock for family vacation but there is no boat. I wait and wait for it to show up. Or my body itself fails upon me. My feet get heavy and my body feels so tired I can hardly move. Or I fall down with no strength to get up. I crawl on all fours to be at the spot where I have to be but without success. </b><br />
<b>All of these dreams are very scary. My heart beats real fast. I feel all amped up, confused and clenched. My body feels like it is ready to fight. It usually happens in early morning. Especially if I have been waking up through the night. </b><br />
<br />
The patient always inhibited did not volunteer any associations.<br />
So with nothing to go on I decided to tell him the psychoanalytic theory as to why we dream of being back in school and being examined and not doing well on it and how it is classified as a <i>typical dream</i> (typical dreams are those that uniformly occur in all of us). We dream of being back in school and dreading to take a test lest we fail when we have something important to do the next day, the worry of which tries to wake us out of sleep. The aim of the dream is to reassure the dreamer - so he can continue to sleep - that don't worry about tomorrow's important thing that you are all hyped up about. Don't lose sleep over it, For you did same kind of worrying over facing examinations in school which the next day you would do quite well on. So just like in the past all that worrying was for naught, your fear over tomorrow's difficult situation will be over nothing too. Freud pointed out that one always dreams of getting tested on a subject that one did quite well in the school not on a subject in which one failed, or at least on one which was not one's favorite.<br />
But patient rejected the interpretation and claimed that nothing about next day's job, or other challenges of life, bother him anymore, for he is too old for all that, and that could not be causing him to go back to school and worry about taking tests in his dreams.<br />
But, then, after a hiatus of time, he said, may be as a young man he did get quite uptight over situations he had to face the next day and would worry whether he will be able to get the job done right or not. "But as I have aged, I can talk myself out of being anxious by telling myself that you have always succeeded in whatever difficulty you have had in the past so why worry about tomorrow today."<br />
So he now talks himself out of the worrying instead of letting the dream do it after falling asleep. <br />
So he did confirm the correctness of Freud's theory of "examination dreams".<br />
When pressed to try and scour in his mind for more associations however faint or far fetched they may seem to him to the other elements of the dream, the only one that came up was to his being stranded on the dock and how his family would go to St. Clair Shores (part of the Great Lakes) every weekend and how they were the happiest days of his life. But in the dream the dock is on a ocean not where the family dock was. And in the dream the family is not around, or was there before but no longer, or they have already left for vacation and waiting for him to join them or they keep coming in and out of the dream picture but so faintly that he cannot be sure what role they are playing. "It is all very hazy."<br />
With no associations emerging, I fell upon the psychoanalytic theory once again, and conjectured that all these dreams have the same theme: not being able to reach somewhere you want to be so badly because of obstacles. That place could only be the final resting place, the mother earth's bowel, your mother's womb where you felt safe and happy. It is a wish to be dead and free from life's tensions.<br />
However, this greatest wish of all is naturally accompanied with such fear that you recoil from it and start thinking of all the other less fearful things in life that you rather face than die. These are counter-wishes, the wishes that will be fulfilled by staying alive, the pull of life (<i>moh/maya</i>), the enticement to be eternally entangled in life's obstacles and frustrations instead of dying. And the fear of dying in torn out of context and displaced upon the fear of living (life's vexing and frightening problems) exaggerating its strength, making them look insurmountable, waking you out of sleep in panic.<br />
Patient said this makes lot of sense but proudly declared that he has no fear of dying. and then added, "It is injury that I fear." Obviously the fear of death had been <i>displaced,</i> to lessen its terror, to fear of getting injured. And then further confirmed that we were on right track by saying, "On the other hand my father has great fear of death. He is a very tough man. Hard as a nail, always on task. But whenever he has an ailment he gets very worried. If it is a cough it got to be lung cancer. For me death holds no fear. For I reason if death comes you won't know it, you won't be aware that you are dead. Death is not being in pain anymore, no longer to worry about anything, the final checkout. So I have no fear of death. My feet will no longer hurt from neuropathy that wakes me out of sleep. No suffering will affect me because I will already be dead.<br />
And I must confess doctor that when I have real bad day, a real tough day, I calm myself that 'sweet release of death' will fix it. And it is on those nights that I have these dreams from which I wake up in such a panic. And by the way these dreams are very very vivid. I see everything in color. I see every detail. All the surroundings of whatever I am dreaming of, the trees, the building, they are all so vibrant, the car is brilliantly red, the key shines like silver. Why everything becomes so life like, so colorful? "<br />
"Because they are temptations to lure you back to living. They seem to say when it is such a vibrant, wonderful world why you want to die?"<br />
<br /></div>
Surendra Kelwalahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17208258557612952541noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7318753641065692730.post-56204571216962631242016-08-14T20:58:00.001-07:002020-03-21T09:56:32.267-07:00Muscle Cramps in athletes a form of nervous tic <div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
I recently came across an article "Spicy End to Muscle Cramps" (Tuesday, July 12, 2016) in Wall Street Journal about a problem that athletes unexpectedly develop and which, because of crippling pain and stiffness, forces them to withdraw from the competition, ruining years of their efforts in matter of seconds. <br />
The article describes how two neurobiologists with excellent credentials - one of them, Rod Mackinon, a Nobel prize-winner in Chemistry and the other, Bruce Bean, from Harvard - have finally put to rest the standard thinking on the matter, which was universally accepted by sports doctors and other experts, that muscles go into spasm because of some problem in the muscle cells like dehydration, electrolyte imbalance, microtears in its fibers, or simply fatigue.<br />
The standard thinking had flaws. For one thing, athletes developed muscle cramps out of the blue, sometimes at the very beginning of a marathon, when they are adequately hydrated and their electrolytes were in good shape, and sometimes they did it while in bed, resting, where there can be no question of fatigue, microtears, and dehydration. So the neurobiologists reasoned that the culprit may be the nerves that control the muscles rather than the muscles themselves. <br />
The article states that the two scientists hypothesized that the problem lies in the misfiring of the nervous system. While the article does not state it explicitly, I assume what they mean is that something happens in the nervous system which sends signals to the muscles to contract in such a rapid fashion that it locks them in a continuous contraction (tetany), preventing them from doing their job in a coordinated manner.<br />
As to why the nervous system starts misfiring they have a curious explanation. They think the misfiring - which really should be excessive firing - has no advantage to the organism. Nothing like the pain that makes us pull away from a hot stove, and the phenomenon has not evolved to prevent injury and help us survive, but it happens because the human body isn't a perfectly advanced machine. In short, there is no rhyme and reason for this unnecessary muscle cramps happening other than to ruin an Olympian's chance of getting the gold medal.<br />
But does it not sound weird, especially coming from a Nobel Laureate in science, that a phenomenon has no cause, but is just a freak imperfection of the human body!<br />
Their error lies in an inability to look beyond the physical, as opposed to the mental when it comes to looking for the etiologies of human problems. Granted they went a step above the pure physical in recognizing that it is not some form of gross malady like a muscle tear, dehydration or fatigue that results in spasm but nerves, but they did not take the next logical step of examining what causes the nerves to go into that disadvantageous mode, simply chalking it to the imperfection of evolutionary process. <br />
Now we know that anxiety causes muscle spasms. In Anxiety Neurosis (Generalized Anxiety Disorder) the whole body stays in a state of tension, all the muscles getting geared up into mini spasms. Perhaps much of the diseases of arthritis, back pain, even autoimmune disorders where chronic muscle tension causes break down of muscle components (mini rhabdomyolysis) which are treated by the immune system as foreign bodies, may owe their existence to chronic anxiety.<br />
An observation whose worth we will soon see is that muscle tension in anxiety is not always uniformly distributed. In somatic anxiety, it may appear in patchwork, as isolated neck or back spasm, or stomach cramps, or in lower intestines as various manifestations of colitis, or in the respiratory tract as asthmatic attacks, or in the detrusor muscles as in urinary frequency. In extreme anxiety, the spasm may get so uncoordinated that the whole skeletal system becomes a firework of fasciculations.<br />
Could the sudden appearance of muscle cramps (spasms) in athletes be a manifestation of somatic anxiety?<br />
It goes without saying that sports are a venue for the discharge of surplus aggression. What humans - a highly aggressive species - cannot discharge upon each other for fear of causing actual injury, which will trigger retaliation, they do so in play and in sports. But even in play and sports, there is always surplus aggression left, generated by extreme competitiveness, that cannot be discharged upon the opponent and in the game, but must come out in obsessive rituals. Obsessive rituals themselves being nothing but acts of symbolic aggression followed by symbolic undoing of it; the two motor acts - aggression and its reversal - blended together. This explains why so many athletes suffer from obsessive-compulsive traits, many of them compelled to do their obsessive rituals, including superstitious acts and magical mental mantras, before the start of the game. If they do not discharge that excessive aggression in obsessive rituals then they would not have the optimal level of aggression in the game. For a good game requires just the right degree of "killer instinct". Too much or too little of it, instead of killing the opponent's game, will defeat one's own. <br />
But it is not always we can bind all our aggression with obsessions. Some of it can still exist in the form of raw anxiety which can lead to tensing up of the muscles. It is really an attempt to make a fight or flight with whatever is oppressing one's being. And then we see a whole range of pathological muscle activities which are variants of obsessions and compulsions: tics, throat clearing, spitting, Tourette-like use of foul language, and what is dreaded by the athletes, a crippling muscle spasm.<br />
So it is the anxiety over confrontation - for sports are nothing but an organized way of confronting the competition to show who is better - that gives rise to muscle spasms, whose purpose, self-defeating of course, is to take one out of the game. It is kind of disqualifying oneself to avoid confrontation.<br />
How does one explain then people who while swimming in isolation suddenly go into muscle spasms and die unable to swim? They are not in competition therefore it cannot be unleashing of some great aggression that translates into locking up of the muscles to produce one's own death? Or can it be? Often we discharge aggression not at the site where it was occasioned for it would be inexpedient there, but at some other venue totally unrelated. In our bedroom, when relaxing, and when it is safe to do so, or in our dream where the danger is imagined and not real, and perhaps in water when the lure to submerge oneself in that intrauterine like state forever, away from the strife of existence, may feel so tempting.<br />
The two scientists cure for muscle spasms is interesting and throws light upon the etiology. They overload the sensory system of mouth and stomach by pungent tasting food or drink. They think "the strong sensory input causes inhibition of the motor output." And they proved the correctness of the hypothesis by showing that pungent food like juices from pickles, beets or sour berries, made it harder to induce spasms with electric impulses.<br />
But does an increase in sharp sensory input really numb the motor response? Or if we recall our physiology from college days, does it actually increase it? Now we know that sensory input because of the reflex arc causes the motor response not suppresses it. When we go to sleep we deliberately put a block on all sensory input in order to get the body into total quiescence, with no motor output, so we can into the immobility of sleep. <br />
So if pungent food increases the motor activity why does it lessen the skeletal muscle spasms?<br />
Perhaps what happens is that the pungent food causes a spike in gastrocolic reflex with the reflex motor output getting directed to the intestinal muscles. The excessive aggression then finds discharge in involuntary muscles, sparing the discharge upon the skeletal. Both are controlled by acetylcholine, the neurotransmitter that causes the muscles to contract and is undoubtedly the main conduit for the discharge of aggressive instinct. Release of aggression (acetylcholine mediated neurotransmission) through non-skeletal muscles upon one's own self frees the person to have a more modulated competitiveness towards one's sport rivals. The process is perhaps not too dissimilar as to how vagal nerve stimulation in depressed patients unfreezes their brain from acetylcholine's straitjacketing. Discharge of aggression at one point lessens it at another. Causing pain and irritation in the esophagus and stomach with the resulting spasms in the intestinal tract, unfreezes the spasm in the skeletal muscles. <br />
<br /></div>
Surendra Kelwalahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17208258557612952541noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7318753641065692730.post-73145513831293875592016-04-30T11:14:00.001-07:002016-07-10T17:44:04.236-07:00Psychology of Crying<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
I recently ran into an article in Time Magazine on "Why we Cry" (March 7 2016), and was surprised to learn that it is a very active field of study. More intriguing was the claim that nobody really knows why we weep and experts consider it a confounding mystery. In fact the article laments as to "the surprising dearth of hard facts about so fundamental a part of the human experience." Per that article only humans cry for emotional reasons. Other animals tear up too, but as a reflex reaction to pain or irritation.<br />
Now for a long time I have been convinced that quite a few physical illnesses, in which mucosal secretions are central to the pathology, are a form of crying. As a child when we get helpless and see no possibility of escaping out of our distress but through the intervention of our caretakers we cry. But as we grow older and helplessness and dependency upon others becomes acknowledgment of weakness we increasingly lessen crying from the eyes and instead do so from mucosal surfaces that are hidden from the view of others. The ones that are contiguous with the eyes are of course the most preferred for this <i>displaced </i>crying, and sinuses, along with other parts of respiratory tracts, are the surfaces most used for it. However, intestinal and genitourinary tracts, even skin as in weeping eczema, also secrete unnecessary flood of mucus when one is under stress as a displaced form of crying. <br />
Now what is common among all these catarrh, whether they are secreted from the lining of the respiratory tract as in bronchitis, or from stomach as in hyperacidity, or from colon as in Irritable Bowel Syndrome, or from bladder as in interstitial cystitis, is that they are all in response to some irritation. They are all attempts to drown a foreign (irritating) object in a seaload of mucus and flush it out of the tract.<br />
While the original irritants, which initiated this evolutionary adaptation, were purely physical in nature, over time, psychological irritants could also provoke the same response. In the latter it is a physical counter-irritant (displaced) response undertaken to lessen the psychological pain. When somebody, acting as an irritant to our psyche, is causing us emotional pain, disturbing our mental harmony,<i> but</i> <i>who we cannot flush out off our mind/consciousness,</i> an attempt is made by the body to search for some physical irritant in our sinuses, respiratory or intestinal tract etc. and pick the one that is genetically most sensitive in one's self and already has some organic problem, and start secreting mucus in it, way more than what the physical irritation already existing there justifies. This divides our attention between two sources of irritation, physical and mental, bringing relief to the latter. Furthermore this process of flushing out the physical irritant sends signals to the brain that <i>something is being done to get rid of whatever is irritating one, which is felt as across-the-board relief from tensions</i> and increases the sense of one's overall well being (perhaps through secretion of dopamine). Doing something about anything is better than doing nothing. The process is not too dissimilar from how psychological irritant which is causing unrelenting pain in the mind, and which is constantly activating the need to do something about it, such as memory of sexual abuse, rage at an abusive husband, constant pressure of a deviant sexual impulse, is relieved by self-cutting or getting some body part like nose or tongue pierced or getting tattoos impaled upon oneself. This viewpoint of mine was further strengthened by a patient who I evaluated yesterday. She suffers from the disorder of scratching herself till it bleeds. It started after her younger brother was shot to death in South West Detroit. They never found the culprit. Then her mother died of brain aneurysm. The two things made her lose control of herself and she started doing things that she would not have done if she had better control of herself. She divorced her husband without good reason, and got married to someone without sufficient justification.. The second husband was verbally abusive and while she was driving with him to their lake cottage her husband began what she termed as relentless bitching. "I could not stop him. I could not jump out of the car. I could not tune him out. And so I began scratching myself as if to get him out of my skin, and then it bled. The relief was immense. From that time onward I found that whenever he bothered me beyond a point, or the memory of my dead brother and mother came back and got more than I could handle, I resorted to scratching and scratching till I bled. It is no different than how teenagers cut themselves. They cut, I scratch. The purpose is the same. It substitutes one pain for the other. The second pain feels better than the first because I have control over it. One is the author and not at its mercy as happens with the first pain, the mental pain".<br />
The eyes were the first to evolve as a counter-irritant surface to deflect attention from emotional pain to the physical one and for the following reason. They being extremely important apparatus for survival, the mucosal secretion in them for even the slightest irritant is immediate and copious and hence most easy to provoke. Furthermore their location on the face made them most suitable for catching the attention of those who could lessen the baby's emotional pain. So emotional crying seems to have the same nature as self-cutting, or banging one's head against the wall: deflection of attention from mental to physical anguish. <br />
Now it is not necessary that the emotional irritant has to be that of pain or suffering. Anything overwhelming, whether physical or psychological, that upsets the body's homeostasis beyond a certain point will trigger crying. So sudden success, even of others, with whom one can identify, can trigger tears of joy. It is as if too much joy in oneself will provoke attack from adverse forces/one's rivals/competitors, and hence one must put restraints upon one's joy by crying in order to not make others too envious.<br />
The psychology here is a little complicated but it works this way: if only my rivals can see my success it will cause them so much pain that they will start crying. And while enjoying one's success (or the success of someone with whom one identifies; which explains why we cry tears of joy at other people's success too) one also identifies with the rivals' suffering and does the crying for them. So the two contrary emotions are felt at the same time: the pleasure of triumph and the suffering of the rivals. It is like doubling up of one's achievement, expressing not only one's happiness but the enemy's defeat as well. Anyway basically it is not triumph and joy that triggers the tears but always pain and suffering that lies behind crying. <br />
So the tears are always a reflection of pain. And since the function of pain is for us to withdraw from whatever we are engaged at, it behooves us to examine whether the behaviors which one typically associates with crying are not a reflection of our attempt to withdraw from the world. The article in Time give a number of motor behaviors that occur in crying. A scrutiny of them shows them to be components of behaviors that one undertakes to run away from a situation, disengage from the world. <br />
Let us see what the Time article lists as behaviors that accompany crying: forcing your eyes shut, pressing your lips, touching your eyes, wiping, pressing your lips, swallowing, blowing your nose, self-soothing touches, quivering of lip, sighing, hiding your face, making sudden jerky moves, gazing up.<br />
Forcing your eyes shut, gazing up, hiding your face are clearly acts of withdrawal, refusing to see what is happening. Pressing of lips can be interpreted as refusing to imbibe, finding the situation unpalatable.<br />
Wiping eyes and blowing nose is part of the flow of mucus and a natural response to keep one's appearance clean and presentable, and perhaps counter-moves to negate withdrawal and once more be attractive to the world. .<br />
Jerky movements of the head may be a component to attempt to run away from the stressful situation - a kind of tic. Tics being a small component of complex motor action that a person wants to undertake either to fight or flee away from the frightening situation but which has come under repression with only that small component managing to find expression, discharging the entire energy of the complex motor response through it. <br />
Quivering of the lips also appears to be part of fear response and can be looked upon as a form of tic; uncoordinated motor activity where individual muscles want to break through, seeking their own discharge instead of working in coordination, as happens in severe anxiety where fasciculations may replace purposive goal directed motor movements.<br />
Sighing in crying appears to be taking a deep breath to abort the desire (a counter-move) to stop breathing altogether and die - the ultimate withdrawal from the world. <br />
The article also raises the issue of how anger and grief can trigger emotional crying and it is not hard to interpret why. Anger is a sign of frustration and helplessness. We get angry when we can do nothing about something that is bothering us. Well, we can of course attack the jerk who is making us angry, and this is what happens a lot in those whose prefrontal cortex is unable to put restraints upon physical aggression, but a lot of times the realization that giving vent to that anger in physical aggression will lead to even greater problems, we are left with no choice but to deal with it with helplessness and tears, especially in women who because of their frailer built have less option to resort to violence when angry. So tears that flow down their cheeks when angry are really a reflection of helplessness.<br />
In grief we cry so the departed person can see our tears and end his absence and return once again to do for us what we were accustomed to receiving from him. It is no different than a child's crying for its parents. Crying in grief for the dead person must be distinguished from crying that is often accompanied by loud wailing, and other exaggerated manifestations of sorrow, that one often sees in funeral home and which is more a drama to hide one's feelings of triumph at having scored one over the dead person, outlasting him. The exaggeration is to prevent the signs of pleasure making it to the surface and if they do come up as laughter over some subject unrelated to the death it can be quickly covered by the loud wailing and crying. But often these "crocodile tears" are admixed with genuine tears of grief so one should not look down too harshly upon human beings tendency to feel pleasure at others death. We are a highly ambivalent species <br />
Grief is mostly about working out of one's system the ambivalent feelings one has had towards the dead person. Often the crying that accompanies grieving is because the departed person has not just done us good but done us harm as well and we hopelessly cry for him because the possibility of getting even with him is now lost forever.<br />
We may also do the dead person's crying for him. We reason how sad he must feel, with his disembodied spirit watching, as we go on doing our usual things which he is no longer part of. And we cry to show him how much we are not enjoying this lovely world but are crying and being miserable and with this we hope to not arouse his wrath over our having fun of which he is not a party.<br />
Our crying over somebody, who once was a commanding figure in our life, like a parent or a mentor or a great hero, but who due to ravages of time has now turned frail and decrepit, barely able to move, unable to even hold himself up let alone command us, is out of deference, showing pain and suffering at what he once was and what he has now become. It is an attempt to preserve his higher and our subordinate position despite what it really is in reality. The crying is an attempt to envelope him in one's tears and wash away all his frailties and restore him back to his strong and proud self that he once was.<br />
There has always been a peculiar fascination with crying being means to secrete out toxins from one's system - the chemical theory of crying. The article attributes its popularization to William Frey in 1985. But I was first confronted with it by a friend of mine, Mary Ganguli, who while visiting Detroit, all the way back in 1982, at a social get together, wondered aloud, as her infant son began to cry, if the functions of tears was not to get rid of some toxin in the body, and if only one could bottle that toxin and find some antidote for it it would be the most unique and efficacious antidepressant. In fact it was this comment of hers which set me to start thinking as to why we cry.<br />
The chemical theory of crying is only partially correct. For while it is highly doubt that tears actually secrete inimical molecules (toxins) out of the body and thus lessen its load, for the volume of body fluid is so great and the quantity of tears so minuscule, the theory has psychological merit. Crying does not get rid of some biochemical poison out of our system but the psychological irritant whose presence is felt by the psyche as a toxin is lessened. It is catharsis of negative emotions not toxins.<br />
The article devotes a substantial number of words on people who never and attributes them all kinds of properties. However, the explanation may be simpler than it seems. People who don't cry have learnt that others are more likely to take advantage of them if they appear helpless than help. Such people become more self-reliant, using their intellect uninfluenced by emotions, to guide them and are less connected feelingwise with others, seeing the world as more predatory than helpful. That is one reason why real men don't cry. Because if they cry in presence of other men they are quickly viewed as wimps who can easily be subjected to aggression and dominated. The woman however has no such great conflict over getting aggressed upon, given her passive biological role, and may even use her vulnerability and tears to attract a man to her aid and for mating. At this point I am reminded of a man who took great pride in never crying, This man grew up with a father who was completely into raising his sons as ones who showed no weakness when subjected to aggression. In fact he forced his sons to pick up fights with kids much older than them so as to make them tough fearless fighting machines and when they would get beaten and cried would take a belt and beat them mercilessly for being cowards. And would whip them even harder if they cried when getting beaten by others. As a consequence, this man, Mr. James Trudeau, who came to see me for psychiatric problems when he was in his fifties, told me that his tears dried up when he was 7 or 8. For if he cried when older boys would beat him, he knew his father would beat him even more. And he claimed, he felt no pain whatsoever, and never cried either, whether he was getting beaten by other kids or by his father, no matter how severe was the beating. For tears meant more beating and more pain. Interestingly he came to see me for excruciating back pain, which no amount of surgeries by orthopedicians and neurosurgeons could cure. One day he abruptly left treatment sensing some weakness in the tone of my voice while I was on the phone making a business deal with a contractor where I was trying to cajole some concessions out of him thus acting more feminine, placating and manipulative than masculine. "You are a coward," he declared, "Who can teach me nothing, for there is nothing to be learnt from somebody who is not a true man. You were sucking up to him." And he walked out of my office, never to return. He brooked no trace of submissiveness in man. It should not surprise us that he was a total loner, and of a highly independent bent of mind. He had dropped out of high school after physically assaulting his teacher who had challenged his manhood. It is interesting that I too can never cry. <br />
Now we come to the most difficult part of our essay.<br />
The Time article gives a slight insight, as if in passing, into what the ancients thought was the purpose of crying. The ancients thought the tears originated from the heart. The Old Testament describes <i>tears as the by-product of when the heart's material weakens and turns into water.</i> And in this epigram may lie the crux of why we cry. Crying is an attempt to dissolve oneself into pieces and become part of the aquatic world from where all living organisms arose. The ultimate
withdrawal is cessation of living. And crying is the most
primitive step towards cessation of living. Its earliest origin must have begun
with the process of dessication so common in the lowest organisms. When
environment becomes hostile, lower organisms like algae, fungi, nematodes shed
all their fluid, curl up into a ball, and become as if part of the dust
(inorganic world). They are for all practical purpose dead to the world
just awaiting for more favorable circumstances to come and nurture them back to
life. <br />
All forms of catarrh, whether originating from the
intestinal tract or respiratory tract or from the lachrymal glands are a
form of desiccation. It is like under inclement weather or adverse
circumstances lots of plants and small animals shed all their fluid, go
into hibernation, and become practically dead, but with the purpose of
once again imbibing water and blossoming when
circumstances become hospitable, crying is an attempt, of the baby
especially, but also of the grown ups, to withdraw from a hostile and
inclement world into temporary non-existence. <br />
Now we know the
fantasy of being reborn is most frequently represented in dreams by
drowning in water or being rescued out of water. It is like the
recreation of intrauterine existence, a return to the womb in order to reemerge,
be reborn more resplendent in better circumstances. Crying appears to be creation of a layer of water upon
one's eyes and a mini-creation of intrauterine existence - a recreation
of <i>the return to womb</i> fantasy. So the baby cries with its first breath
as if to say, "What did I do to deserve to come into this world which
will be endless series of dealing with the inclement and cold
environment, full of painful irritants, I rather go back to my mother's warm wet nurturing womb," recreating a piece of it through the tears.</div>
Surendra Kelwalahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17208258557612952541noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7318753641065692730.post-27711467363922427512015-12-20T14:12:00.000-08:002015-12-20T14:12:10.204-08:00 Adderral stopping Restless Leg Syndrome and acting as hypnotic<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
A single woman, in her late forties, who had too much unwanted sexual attention paid to her as a child because of her blond hair, very fair skin, delicate frame and attractive features, all of which give impression of vulnerability, and as a consequence of which she developed a hysterical fear of men, told me in her psychotherapy session that often in the night she develops Restless Leg Syndrome (RLS) which keeps her awake, and only when she takes Adderall does she get relief from it and can fall asleep. <br />
Now we know that hysteria is running away from the demands of genital sexuality. When the body and mind are not yet ready to meet the challenge of genital sex, if the child is sexually irritated (sexually abused), or even if the over-stimulation is done without actual physical contact (seduction from a distance), she reacts with great fear to any future demands of genital sexuality and becomes anesthetic to genital sensations (sexual frigidity). In such women non-genital components of sexuality become hypertrophied. Most of the sexual bombshells like Marilyn Monroe owe their sexual appeal to this overly expressed pregenital sexuality over the genital. There is hysterical suppression of the latter.<br />
This patient loves to come to my office with her yoga mattress, which she puts on the floor and starts her yoga stretches, ostensibly to treat her body aches and pains (fibromyalgia due to childhood sexual overstimulation) but which are thinly veiled hysterical seductive actions, in which non-genital aspects of her sexuality is displayed in the guise of yoga postures.<br />
What is most noticeable about this behavior is how she jumps up with fright at any noise, or anything startling, while she is doing this yogic behavior, as if she fears getting caught doing something forbidden and naughty.<br />
It is not surprising that this excessive fearful response, partly innate (inherited), partly due to sexual overstimulation in childhood, which was always accompanied by fear of getting caught and punished for it, persists during the night and emerges as Restless Leg Syndrome.<br />
Restless Leg Syndrome appears to be running away from life's troubles (dangers) even when one is in bed and safe from actual harm. One cannot fall asleep because one is anxious and all aroused to run away from the anticipated harm. The thought processes are busy making up scenarios in which one is protecting oneself from impending harm. And in some this is the extent of their motor response to anxiety. However, in some the thoughts alone are not able to deal with the fear. In them the motor response spills into actual physical action of running away though an aborted one. They run but only through the restlessness of their legs.<br />
How does Adderall, an amphetamine salt, a psychostimulant, reverses this fear response? Amphetamines release dopamine in the brain. A chemical that is released on receiving signals that happy things are happening, something good has fallen in your lot, or is about to fall in your lot, for there is a relaxation of your muscle tensions, and drop in the level of brain activity, because there is good and not danger around you. <br />
Receiving this message that all is good where you are, and therefore there is no need to run away out of your bed, the mind at last takes a sigh of relief, stops worrying, stops sending orders to the body to prepare for running, the racing thoughts and restless legs cease, and one falls asleep. </div>
Surendra Kelwalahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17208258557612952541noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7318753641065692730.post-44648350104430625992015-05-18T06:17:00.000-07:002015-05-18T06:17:27.550-07:00A typical Oedipal Dream<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
A woman in her mid fifties who lives by herself upon her disability income, and depends heavily upon an older man, who is in his late seventies, for transportation, and for bailing her out every now and then with small sums, half way through the session declared that she went to bed with this benefactor of her's. <br />
Though she started treatment less than an year ago, and sees me only once a month, due to successful analysis of a few of her dreams, has shown a good improvement in facing up to the shackles of her agoraphobia, and had actually come to the session driving all by herself for the first time in years. <br />
In the session initially she talked about her boyfriend - who is different from her benefactor - and how she is finding him more and more unappealing because he is a control freak who constantly judges her, finding faults with whatever she does. Their relationship is not that deep. They met only a few months ago, and she feels that he, who was divorced a couple of years ago, is using her as stop gap girlfriend till he finds somebody better. But lacking confidence in herself she has been unable to leave him.<br />
She triumphantly declared that while her benefactor's wife went to Florida, he invited her to his house to stay overnight and they ended up making love. And though he is much older than her, she declared that the sex was highly satisfactory. When asked if he could perform to her satisfaction, considering he is in his late Seventies, she said sexual satisfaction and dissatisfaction has less to do with how one performs than how one feels about the person one is making love to. Pleasure and unpleasure from sex is all in your head. <br />
Then after talking some other things she suddenly brought up the following dream.<br />
<br />
<b>I am setting up a party event at of all places in the White House. Obama and I sneak around and we make love in a corridor. But Michelle was catching on to it. For she looked as if she was wondering as to why Obama would like to hang around so much with a help.</b><br />
<br />
Patient added that she feels no sexual attraction towards Obama, so it is weird that she was making love to him in the dream. Now we know that kings and queens, presidents and celebrities, are used by the dream-work to represent parents. So behind Obama stood her father and behind Michelle her mother. Her Oedipal wishes towards Obama (father substitute) being hindered by the spying Michelle (mother substitute).<br />
<br />
Confident that this Oedipal dream was sparked by her making love to her benefactor while his wife was away in Florida, I asked the patient if the dream occurred immediately after the event.<br />
<br />
Patient said no. The dream had occurred a few days before that.<br />
<br />
But after talking a few other things she went back to the dream and said, "The dream occurred before we made love because I knew that is what is going to happen. The dream occurred on the night when I first heard she was going to Florida, and the thought had flashed through my mind whether it will land up in our making love. I did not give much attention to the thought and actually till that night we made love, I did not think it was going to happen because I respect his wife. But may be unknown to me the wish to make love to him must have been aroused in me when I first heard that we will be alone together and it was that wish which saw its fulfillment, before its actual occurrence, in that dream." </div>
Surendra Kelwalahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17208258557612952541noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7318753641065692730.post-70158044509712640932015-04-04T17:28:00.000-07:002015-05-17T20:28:46.255-07:00Mall Phobia and Returning to the Womb Fantasy<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
A single woman in her mid- thirties, who lives a rather solitary life, and almost never ventures more than 2 miles from her house, brought in the following dream, and, because in it she was driving a car inside a mall, declared it to be weird.<br />
<br />
<b>I am driving in a mall. The only detail about the mall I can recall is of there being a bathroom in it. The stores are indistinct and the whole place is painted in a peachy-tan color. Also I don't think there were any people. Just my car. In the dream it did not feel strange driving a car inside a mall. </b><br />
<br />
When asked for associations to the mall she said she hasn't been inside one in years; they provoke panic attacks.<br />
Another association to malls was her fear of not finding her way out of them; they curve and twist and one gets confused as to which way is to the entrance and exit. Another concern about malls was not finding the car in the parking lot on coming out.<br />
She then expressed her skepticism about the value of the dream. "How could a car have gotten inside the mall?" <br />
As to why the dream showed a bathroom, she could tell nothing. She was not sure if she had used it or not, but remembered that it too was painted inside with the same peachy-tan color so she had at least perceived it from inside. <br />
She added that it was her car that she was driving because she distinctly recalled its color being red. <br />
All these associations did not immediately throw light upon the problem and we drifted in to exploring her fears in general. She fears crowds and avoids public places especially where she anticipates running into more than two or three people hanging out together.<br />
She has not driven on highways in 7 years. She drives to work early in the morning when roads are empty, and reaches there 45 minutes before the starting time. Though she does not get paid for putting the extra hours, she likes doing it because that way everything is in order when the doors open for business. This reasoning appeared to be a superficial <b>rationalization (false explanation)</b> for the deeper motive of avoiding rush-hour traffic.<br />
She then expressed anger at customers who come 10 or 15 minutes earlier than 7 and try to make her work before the official opening time just because she is there. <br />
When asked how far is her workplace from her house she said exact two miles.<br />
She then talked about how her fear of malls does not quite extend to Target [Department Store] and Kroger [Supermarket]. They are large but not quite as big as malls. And in them she knows where everything is, including the entrance doors, and thus can get out quickly if<i> the need arises.</i> And both the stores are within her self-imposed 2-mile-limit. Even at these stores she is in and out, picking only couple of items at a time which she knows beforehand she needs. And she goes there in the mornings, on Sundays, when hardly anyone is in the store and on the roads.<br />
She then talked about her going to the Target to buy incense sticks which she loves, and getting disappointed at not finding them. Her <i>wish</i> to go to the mall perhaps arose from this frustration. For she does not know where she will find those incense sticks now. Target use to carry them but not anymore. She was hoping the incense sticks will be available in some mall because that is where the specialty shops that carry such items exist. <br />
Now per psychoanalytic theory what one is currently fearful or phobic about is something which was once dearly loved. Our current fears are our former desires. The oedipal love for mother becomes the greatest taboo of mankind. People who once loved getting behind the wheel and enjoyed taking long drives are the ones who usually come down with agoraphobia. The repression targets our strongest suits. The libido tries to find outlet through those functions which we favored the most and were most proficient at. It is the child with great desire to look (hypertrophied scopophilic instinct) that develops eye tics.<br />
So I asked her if she loved going to malls before she came down with her phobias. And she said, "Oh yes, that was my most favorite thing to do. I loved it as a child and I loved it as an adult. But when I moved to this town, away from my old neighborhood, 7 years ago, the fear crept in."<br />
Now I know this patient for some time, and I know too that her agoraphobia was precipitated by two very abusive marriages. She had developed a fear of going out which perhaps had at its root a desire to escape meeting men and getting in to another relationship. Getting involved with men she now had begun to believe invariably turn abusive. So her psyche was thrown into a dilemma. The libidinal wishes implored her to go out and seek men, while the memories of the physical and emotional abuse provoked fear (panic) over fulfilling this desire. <br />
Knowing how much she seethes with anger towards her ex-husbands, and because of it towards mankind in general, I asked her if the peachy-tan color was not derived from feces. Her fear that she may inadvertently defecate all over the mall to express her anger towards the world. The bathroom was there to lessen the fear that if the impulse to <i>shit upon others </i>becomes overwhelming there is an escape. Encopresis in children, and various forms of colitis in adults, are often expression of undischarged anger. In non-verbal mentally retarded, unhappiness with the way things are is often communicated through smearing the walls with feces. <br />
She did not quite agree with this interpretation, but did confess that whenever she leaves the house she immediately has to worry about going to the bathroom. She wondered if she does not go beyond 2 miles of her house because she fears she may not find a bathroom in time. She added that when she comes to my office the first she thing she does is to go to the bathroom. <br />
But when asked if this worry to find the bathroom is for an urgency to urinate or to defecate she said to urinate.<br />
But it was not clear if she said this because there is greater embarrassment in humans about defecation than urination. Also she may have hidden the real state of affairs because she could sense the hesitancy in my voice when I was trying to search for the right words to convey correctly what I had to say regarding the use of <i>excremental functions</i> as a means to express rage. The patient goes only as far in revealing about herself/himself as the analyst is capable of handling.The analyst has to be completely comfortable with his own body functions before his body language will convey to the patient that he or she can talk about these matters without resorting to distortions and allusions. <br />
She added that the fear of not finding the way out of the mall is similar to her fear of getting lost when driving. She does not trust the GPS. "The voice tells you to turn right or left but only after you have passed the turn."<br />
"Any other association to the peachy-tan?"<br />
"They are the color of your pants." I was wearing khaki pants that day. "And now I know where that color is taken from and why. In Target the employees wear peachy-tan color pants. So the dream was lessening the fear of the mall by showing it also as the Target which does not frighten me as much. And those employees along with tan pants wear red shirts which made the red color of the car noticeable in the dream."<br />
"Was the absence of people in the mall also an attempt to lessen the fear?"<br />
"Yes. I wanted to go to the mall but I am afraid of people. The dream therefore did away with people. And I go there in a car so I can be in and out in a jiffy. The shops were of one color and looked alike for the same purpose. I am scared of malls because it has such a variety of stores and they are on two or three levels. Variety sparks the fear that I will get lost in them and never find my way out while sameness lessens that fear."<br />
"Is going inside and never finding one's way out, derived from the wish to go back to your mother's womb and never leave its security?" <br />
"Sometimes I wish I had never come out of it. For life is so painful and men are so nasty."<br />
So here was the confirmation of the rule that a formerly desired entity is what changes into a phobic object. It was in our mother's womb that we felt most secure and free of all dangers.* Under the spell of phobia it becomes the most dreaded place to seek refuge.<br />
Her fear that she will not find her way out of the mall/womb was a "signal anxiety"/warning that the security of intrauterine existence (death) would be so alluring it would be impossible for you to return back into this stressful world.<br />
<br />
* This pull of the intrauterine existence where all our needs were taken care of and where we felt completely safe may lie behind as to why the Las Vegas casinos are huge cavernous entities where all one's needs are taken care of and getting out of which is not an easy affair. The casinos are designed to create the illusion of being in a completely safe place and where fulfillment of every bodily need is immediately guaranteed like it was in the womb, which encourages the gambler to take greater chances with his/her money.<br />
The way IKEA stores are designed, where finding one's way out is so difficult, and where one is tempted to be lost in shopping from one section on to the next, appears to utilize the same human wish to return to the womb. <br />
<br /></div>
Surendra Kelwalahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17208258557612952541noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7318753641065692730.post-74400714474578589342015-02-08T19:15:00.000-08:002015-02-22T02:17:22.692-08:00An incest dream<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
A man in his late thirties, who still lives with his mother, came to the therapy session and talked about his love for everything old, like classic cars, vintage comic books, turn-of-the-century houses with their turrets and other castle like features, and recalled how as a young man he took a friend of his to the Boston-Edison Historic area that has some of Detroit's most magnificent mansions, and his friend got mad at him for dreaming of living in such high places, given that they were black and thus not entitled to such uppity lifestyles, and the patient laughed at his friend for being so dumb as to not see that now only bums and prostitutes lived in and around those houses, and they were so run down and abandoned that in all probability they could be purchased for virtually nothing. Then he added that recently houses have been coming a lot in his dreams. On being asked to give an example he narrated the following: <br />
<br />
<b>The dream was about this most incredibly beautiful house. It belonged to an older man who is planning to turn it into a church. But I swindle him from doing so by giving him some money. There is lot of guilt associated with this trickery as if I should not have done that to him. The house is on Detroit river. In fact the river comes right to the house, waves coming over that green grass to the back door and then receding rhythmically. There is a steamer on the river, an old river boat, red in color. What is so remarkable is that I can see every part of it distinctly. It is a showboat with the twin wheels rotating under the water, which I see so clearly. I can't tell you enough as to how vivid the dream was and how much in detail I could see every aspect of it. I think there was a cruise ship too in the dream. Or maybe the riverboat got replaced by the cruise ship. It had endless number of rooms, the ship was gigantic. Even in the dream I was thinking if it is put alongside a skyscraper no doubt it will be taller than the skyscraper. And there I go again thinking of majestic houses - for skyscraper is in the same category as houses, just a grander version of it. </b><br />
<b>Also in the dream I was a seaman, about to go into the water and the river. I was building a boat to do so or maybe I was already on the boat, or doing something of the sort, something a seaman would do. </b> <br />
<br />
Patient was asked for associations to the house. He said, "<b>It is a white house, a barn house, ranch, very elegant. I walked around it from the back to the front, admiring its beauty. The walls are beautifully carved with round projections that are so pleasing to the eye.</b>" <br />
<br />
These associations strengthened the impression that the beauty of the house which he could not praise enough was beauty of some woman, and considering how the dream revolved around old majestic mansions, the woman whose beauty he was appreciating was no other than his mother as she must have appeared to him when he was very young. But this presumption did not bring us any closer to the essential 'dream-thoughts' that lay behind the 'manifest content'.<br />
<br />
Then the patient recalled a detail that puzzled us greatly. The house was not constructed like regular houses are, which are rectangular in shape, but at an angle. When asked to draw to explain how the rooms were not straight but at an angle he drew the following.<br />
<br />
The slanted lines which are disjointed in the blog entry because of my inability to draw diagrams using a computer were not broken but continuous in his drawing. <br />
<br />
\ \ \ \<br />
\ Dining Room \ Living Room \ Kitchen \<br />
\ \ \ <b> \ \ </b>Front Door<br />
\ \ \ \<br />
<br />
The association that the patient gave as to why the house was at an angle was rather strange. He said for years his penis was not straight but bent because he had fallen upon his penis while wrestling in high school. But the problem had recently cleared up and his penis was fine now.<br />
<br />
This association was clearly connected with the castration complex and his sense of inferiority about his sexual organ. It is an inferiority complex that no man escapes from, and which impels so many to fall for ads that promise a bigger and better penis with creams, pills and pumps etc. It has its roots in the oedipal phase when one is confronted with the inferiority of one's organ in comparison to the imagined, and thus greatly exaggerated, size of the father's. This contrasting of one's potency with that of the father's perhaps was responsible for that element of the dream where he is thinking that if he puts the ship next to the skyscraper it will be just taller.<br />
<br />
When asked if his penis was really bent, or he just had a feeling that it was so, he admitted that it was more in his head than in reality and there was no objective evidence there was anything wrong with it and none of the women he had had sex with had ever mentioned that there was anything wrong with his penis. <br />
<br />
The association threw light on his poor self esteem about his ability to make love, but did not help in coming closer to the basic meaning of the dream. And since there was limited time available to analyze the dream, and also because I was quite familiar with the patients problems and the complexes around which his illness, schizophrenic breakdown occurred, I took the step of making the following construction: "We know that behind your fascination with these old statuesque houses lies your fascination with your mother. Could it be possible your swindling and buying that beautiful house from the old man so he could not turn it into a church was symbolic of your buying your mother from you father so you could fulfill your aims with her instead of letting him continue to have his will with her." This conjecture was based upon his buying the house to prevent it from becoming a church. Now churches, temples, mansions, statuesque houses are typical symbols of the mother, but that version of the mother which is common property of all men (God's/father's house ), best symbolized by Madonna and thus sexually unapproachable. <br />
<br />
The patient first objected to this <i>conjecture</i> on grounds that the man was Caucasian and his father was Black but then immediately added, "My grandmother was as white as any Caucasian lady and I always put her and my father in the class of Whites."<br />
<br />
Then after a few minutes in which he talked about things unrelated to dream he spontaneously volunteered the following, " I now know why the house is at an angle. My mother was very pretty and thin. And as you know he was a player who had children and relationships with other women besides my mother. So he was in and out of our life. But when he would come to our house I would be afraid that when he would have sex with her, his penis would go right through her body because she is so thin. But then I would tell myself that his penis <b>will be bent</b> and go upwards at an angle and not through her."<br />
<br />
He was asked to draw the angle in which his father would have sex per his childhood imagination. He drew a very erect penis, almost vertical, with one testicle, which surprisingly was not dangling below the root of the penis but projecting upwards over it. <span id="yui_3_16_0_1_1423199108097_68447" style="color: black; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;"><span id="yui_3_16_0_1_1423199108097_68446" style="font-size: x-small;"></span></span><br />
<br />
"How did you know about erection and yes about sex itself at that age?"<br />
<br />
"I knew about sex and erection as early as when I was 5. Perhaps earlier. I already was having erections then. There were also two boys in the neighborhood, who had access to Playboy and Penthouse, and we would look at those pictures at their house. Also with my cousins, who were slightly older than me, I would sometimes play games in which we would show each other our private parts. I remember how intensely curious I was about their bodies."<br />
<br />
"Is your seeing every part of that ship so vividly, a continuation of this sexual curiosity which you were already exhibiting so strongly at that age?"<br />
<br />
"That makes sense. I do know that when I first started having sex with women, which was pretty late in comparison to other kids that I grew up with, I would be so curious about their bodies that they will say, 'oh no, you are more interested in examining me than making love. You are supposed to make love to me not examine me like a doctor. "<br />
<br />
As for there being so many rooms in that ship, on theoretical grounds, I conjectured that it was an allusion to marriage as well as its contrary: to have sex with endless number of women (symbolized by rooms). It was depiction of his utter fidelity to his mother and always choosing her over all others, and yet it depicted its contrary: a desire to spite her by having liaison with endless number of women.<br />
<br />
But the patient swiftly rejected the latter part of the 'construction' claiming that that is how his father was: a player. But he is just the opposite of his father in this respect. He believes in having children only after marriage, and never having affairs.<br />
<br />
Multiple rooms on the ship stood for marriage. It was depiction of marriage by showing all other women that one must give up <i>for the sake of one</i>. The comparison of that ship with a skyscraper also, perhaps, was his comparing other women to his mother and finding them short. It is interesting that he has never been able to make a break with his mother. And though the two are always complaining about each others shortcomings and continuously squabbling, all attempts by him to live by himself or with other women have failed within no time. The fact that he is her only child, with his father dying when he was just 12, also has contributed to his inability to give up his love for his mother and find an extra-familial object.<br />
<br />
When asked as to why the walls of the house had beautiful projections that were pleasing to the eyes, he could come up with none and rejected my suggestion that it was an allusion to his mother's breast countering it with, "if it was symbolic of any body part it would be testicles and not breasts." When I asked him if he was being sarcastic he said, "No. That is the association that popped up in my mind." I wondered if it was compensation for the lack of penis in a woman by covering the defect with endless beautiful projections (a phallic mother; testicles through displacement substituting for the penis).<br />
<br />
As to why the dream was trying to show him as seaman, patient said - as only a schizophrenic can do, who often seem to have a gift for seeing through dream symbols - that it must allude to semen.<br />
<br />
When asked why he said, "Because the water that was coming up to the backyard of the house was shaped as the shaft of a penis, with the advancing tide broad like a penile forehead. And you know what backyard on the street means. So the dream must be my attempting sex with my mother in that fashion. Though it is so strange that the very thought of such a deed during my waking hours would fill me with utter disgust. I have no attraction towards my mother whatsoever." <br />
<br />
<br />
</div>
Surendra Kelwalahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17208258557612952541noreply@blogger.com9tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7318753641065692730.post-13759557363774020922014-12-31T21:35:00.000-08:002015-02-22T02:27:31.107-08:00Three dreams of an agoraphobic<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
A woman who suffers from advanced obsessive compulsive disorder, numerous touch phobias, and barely leaves home because she has to dress and undress repeatedly, and do other cleaning rituals, before she can step out, brought in the following three dreams. She prefaced it by saying that when she was young her dreams were pleasant, but as years pass by they have become increasingly frightening, and now they wake her up almost nightly. <br />
<br />
<b>1. I have to go to work at the store at 3. My mother who also works there is pressing upon me to go or at least to tell them that I will be late, but I cannot find my key, or the phone and anyway I am still in my pajamas. </b><br />
<b><br /></b>
<b>2. I am being chased by bad people. I am running through streets. </b><br />
<b><br /></b>
<b>3. My brother comes to my house with his girlfriend, and destroys everything inside.</b><br />
<br />
<br />
For the first dream the patient stated that she did work at that store but 30 years ago, when she was 18, for 3 or 4 years and then had come down with her illness and had stopped working altogether. Her mother had worked there too at that time. What was different in the dream was that the store now was at a different location. The store where they had actually worked no longer exists.<br />
<br />
So the patient who during waking hours is virtually a cripple from her agoraphobia, was attempting recovery at night and seeing herself as cured and working again. Alas only in dreams. For the illness was at the heels of the cure, and her neurotic fear of leaving the house was finding excuses to not be at work by still being in pajamas, not finding the car key, not finding the phone etc, despite the support she was receiving from her mother to overcome her phobia and show up at work.<br />
<br />
From psychoanalytic theory I knew that agoraphobics avoid going in to public
places afraid that while not in right mind they may do something [sexually] inappropriate. And I wondered if this expectation will be fulfilled by further associations.<br />
<br />
And to my pleasant surprise this was confirmed when the patient had following to say about the second
dream on being asked why those bad people were chasing her.<br />
<br />
<br />
"They wanted to have sex with me. I had landed up I don't know how [the typical dread of agoraphobic that in a state of amnesia, or by some other inadvertence, they may land up in a sexually dangerous situation] in a bar or club or something like that. Those bad people were there. Along with some shady women. They were all like hanging together. And looked as if they were expecting me to join in whatever lewd thing was about to start. I think they belonged to a motorbike club or something like that for they ruled the town and nobody could challenge them. They could do whatever they wanted to. When I took off, they came after me, trying to find me. I ran in to the trailer home of a middle aged woman. But instead of giving shelter, she said, why don't you submit yourself to them. It will be so much easier. It will save you all this trouble of running away. All of us in this town do whatever they ask. They are so powerful. In fact I am going to that orgy myself. I have been there many a times."<br />
<br />
So being chased and subjected to violence in the manifest content of the dream, which one would simply look upon as running away from ordinary aggression, also had an underlying layer: running away from sexual temptation. The patient agreed to the<i> construction </i>that the middle aged woman was her mother. And just like in the first dream she had come in to the second dream to help her overcome her agoraphobia. Here she was trying to help her get over her illness by telling her not to disown her unacceptable sexual impulses and run away from them but to give in to and thus be able to face the world again. <br />
<br />
I wondered in my mind how the third dream would fit in with the other two. Was the coming of her brother into her house was continuation of the bad people chasing her right in to the house to enforce sex upon her? And was his destroying the house another representation of sadomasochistic sex - the house representing herself? But I could not tell any of this to the patient to avoid influencing her associations. Instead I asked her as to what thoughts occur to her in connection with her brother.<br />
<br />
To my astonishment the patient said, "My brother is no different that those bad people. Given a chance he would destroy my peace of mind as those bad guys. You know when I was in my twenties, he one day came to my house and forced sex upon me."<br />
<br />
"Did he rape you?"<br />
<br />
"No, it was not quite rape, for I did not protest. I was so stunned I just went through the motions. You know I grew up in a very chaotic household. There was no order, discipline, or sense of right or wrong in it. My parents did drugs and let us run wild. Anything we did was OK with them. So when my brother came upon me like that I could neither say yes nor no. But when he tried to do it more than a few times I told him to get out of my house and never come back again. In the beginning I felt sorry for him, because he looked on verge of nervous breakdown, and I thought he will go over the edge if I did not let him have his way with me. But I quickly realized that allowing him to do such a crazy thing as to have sex with his own sister could not be good for him, however disturbed he was. So I put a stop to it." <br />
<br />
"Did you stop working at the store after your brother enforced sex upon you. Was that the beginning of your agoraphobia?"<br />
<br />
"No. I had phobias and fears even as a child. Even when I was a teenager it would take me forever to leave the house, so afraid I was of the world."</div>
Surendra Kelwalahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17208258557612952541noreply@blogger.com1