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

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

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

 Are there other primal fantasies?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He drew the following:

The father at the bottom, with the patient on his back, with the mother behind the son, did not fit in with how father could copulate with the son while the latter was inside the womb. I raised this doubt  and the patient admitted that out of shame of showing himself being homosexually penetrated from the back  by his father he had, while drawing it for me, reversed his position in the womb to face him instead of being impaled by him as it really was in the dream.

Had he also shifted the position of the father below him instead of above him while drawing? 

No. the reversal of the position of the father as at the bottom instead of on top was the work of the dreamwork and not the work of his drawing it for me.   

The patient agreed when a further interpretation was made that putting the father down was revenge for the passive homosexual position he had to adopt in relationship with the father.  

Knowing that his paranoid relapses occur when while attending church blasphemous thoughts (visualizing kicking the pregnant Virgin Mary in her stomach or hurling abuses at the priest for the  endless praising of the virtues of Jesus) make a breakthrough into this psyche, I put forward the following construction : Putting  the father below him was a symbolic retaliatory castration of the father for the homosexual humiliation.   

At this point another fragment of the dream emerged out of repression as if to confirm the correctness of the construction. 

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

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

Based upon my previous knowledge of him, it was felt the squid replaced the whale to depict his elder brother with whom he lives (both are confirmed bachelors), and with whom he has strong libidinal ties  (though aim-inhibited, without any overt eroticism).  

But squid was also chosen because that is his favorite sea creature. He often uses the squid for his  cartoon drawings. Its multiple arms allows one to express so much more than one can achieve with other sea animals with no limbs at all but they also (akin to the special fascination humans have for  octopuses, spiders and multipedes) symbolize reversal of castration.  Instead of the dreaded missing penis there is multiplication of it though in the form of limbs. In this connection one cannot help but be reminded of how Hindu Gods are endowed with multiple arms and sometimes multiple heads.

When asked how many limbs the squid had, he stated: 6-8.

One cannot help but notice as to how the numbers chosen 6-8 to deny castration are similar to Wolfman's multiplying his 2 parents into 6 or 7 wolves though he drew only 5 of them. 

That the interpretation of the dream was correct was confirmed when the patient in the next couple of sessions brought in a string of dreams with the Primal Scene and castration as their main theme - a subject he had not touched despite decades of once a month treatment.  

I will give analysis of only one of the dreams and excerpts from others where the issue of castration is dealt with by the dreamer. 

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

The affect accompanying the dream was remarkably different from the whale dream where great dread was the order of the day. Here it was all bright and happy romping on the plane with just the mother being a little nervous till of course the bonhomie gradually got engulfed by the rising dread of castration. 

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

Fragments of other dreams during the same period are presented below. The theme of castration is unmistakable in them.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The last dream of the Primal Scene was of an attractive, flamboyant, always heavily made-up, histrionic, blond Irish girl, in her late thirties. She recalled that at around the age of 5, but it could have been 6 or 7, she was filled with forebodings that something ominous was going to happen to her and the author of it would be her stepfather. The forebodings had no clear content but she knew was related to something sexual as she had been privy to her parents sexual activities every now and then either guessing from the sounds coming out of their room but also perhaps having witnessed it outright while they were not too careful about hiding it. While anticipating and dreading for it to happen to her, a longing that was sensed both by her mother and her stepfather, and the fulfillment of which the mother facilitated, and the stepfather took advantage of. 

One afternoon the mother left to do errands.  The patient claimed that I could sense that my mother had left the house so my stepfather could take advantage of her, though without realizing (having insight) that that is what she (mother) was aiming at. She was literally handing me to her husband, so afraid she was of the world and so desperate for a man's protection that she wanted to keep him tied to her at any cost including sacrificing her daughter to his sexual appetite  The minute she had driven away, with the expression on her face that she was not returning for hours and is turning a blind eye to whatever is about to happen, my stepfather came after me. I ran but tripped on the threshold of the door between the living room and the kitchen and he did to me what he did being slightly confused as to what to do since I was so little and would not get off the floor.  She refused to give any further details of what actually transpired at that point adding only one detail that next day she tried to cook a meal for her stepfather by haphazardly mixing some cooking ingredients on the kitchen floor which brought tears to his eyes, for he realized that she was trying to be wife to him now that the act which bonds a woman and a man had been done by him to her and so it was now her duty to cook for him.

From that point onwards she became deeply bonded to the stepfather. The sexual activity ended when she got pregnant at age of 17 and left with the boy who had impregnated her. That relationship did not last beyond a few months. That separation and living on her own. It is at that time that the dream first made its entrance. But at times she claimed it was perhaps present from when she first experienced the sex with her stepfather. 

 The dream was made up of a single scene. 

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

The patient strangely had no significant  ill feelings towards her step-father,  or perhaps more correctly her feelings were admixture of anger and continued fondness for him. She still saw him when she visited her mother, which she frequently did and let them babysit her two children, claiming that she did not think he ever molested them. Her biological father had taken no interest in her and to escape child support had allowed her to be adopted by the stepfather when she was a toddler. She claimed her mother was devoid of any true maternal emotions because of  her high anxiety and if her stepfather had not taken interest in her she would have grown up without any parental love or guidance. The sexual relationship that went on all through her latency period and adolescence had bonded her so strongly to him that she derived no significant sexual pleasure or orgasm from all her subsequent relationships  She was married and divorced four  times and had many relationships in between those marriages. But she claimed that she did not feel much for any of them as if her relationship with the man who had seduced her at the age of 5 somehow interfered with it.  In fact one of her favorite songs was "hopelessly yours," the lyrics of which went:  " I love you, I hate you, I'd forget you, but I'm afraid to. You loved me or did you' I'll never be sure. But one thing's for certain .In spite of this hurtin' I'll always be Hopelessly yours. From laughin' to cryin' from livin' to dyin' from heaven to a heartache I know I can't cure But one thing's for certain In spite of this hurtin' I'll always be hopelessly yours. 

She frankly admitted that the song captured the complex love and hate relationship she had with the man who had made her love life so strange. While she did not have orgasmic sexual discharge with her husbands and boyfriends she always had to have sex with them as frequently as was feasible. In addition those men found favor in her eyes who would take her to Strip Clubs where she could satisfy her overwhelmingly strong scopophillic propensities and would watch pornographic movies with her. 

As for the dream, both the patient and I quickly concluded that it was the depiction of the Primal Scene. The two lions symbolized the parents. In Wolfman's dream the two parents were replaced by several wolves. In my lady's case the two parents were symbolized by the two lions, their number had not been altered. It could have been because the Wolfman dread was primarily of the father in whose hands he feared castration (depicted with aid of regression from genital to the oral phase of sexuality as fear of getting eaten up by the wolves) and to mitigate this fear he had not only changed the figure of the father from human to that of a wolf, but to many wolves, as if by increasing their numbers he was decreasing the fear of each individual one of them. Unlike the wolfman my patient was as afraid of the mother as of the father and with both parents equally feared, they both had found expression on equal footing, each being symbolized as a lion.

When she began treatment with me she was dreaming this dream every night. In fact, all through the night. She claimed she never really slept. As soon as she closed her eyes the dream would start and stay with her with lesser or greater intensity all night long, not allowing her full rest. She hated the dream and consequently the stepfather, who she held responsible for making it such an integral the part of her life in such a relentless way. Yet, she liked the dream. There was something hypnotically beautiful about those two lions staring at her like that with no movement or activity anywhere. As if the whole world constituted of nothing more but her and those two lions and endless dread. Even during the day a haunting fear of everything accompanied her which she rightly anticipated as emanating from that dream and those lions. Her eyes hauntingly beautiful dripped with fear of something ominous which was about to happen.  

I could not help but notice that the way the wolves on that walnut tree stared at the Wolfman, which was projection of his own strained staring at the parental intercourse, was so similar to my patient's two  lions staring at her. . 

That in the dream she derived sexual satisfaction that was denied to her in her relationship with various men in her waking life was conjectured based upon her claim that the lions staring her like that gave her fear but yet satisfaction. It was felt to be a hysterical condensation of all her sexual energy into the component of scopophilia, concentrated upon watching the parental intercourse. Looking at other people's beauty and sexual attributes and being admired by others for the same was the central feature of her life. The desire to exhibit had led her to become a singer and she successfully performed as part of a ban in nightclubs. 

She was convinced that her cure lies in the cessation of that dream, which was not just recurrent or even vehemently intrusive as it happens in PTSD, but something that was present with her every night, and always playing in the background, no matter how light or deep her sleep. 

To my great surprise psychotherapy did make a change in that direction. She reported lessening in the intensity of the dream and attributed it to the emergence of a third lion in the dream. She referred to him as a baby lion, who makes his appearance alongside the two big lions, towards whom she feels motherly, and who does not stare at her but sits with his back towards her. Because of that little lion, she claimed, she actually may even start liking her dream. On being asked what is about that little lion that is helping her get better, she said that she does not have to fear that he will eat her up. The patient soon reached the conclusion that that third lion was me, who had no sexual interest in her, hence had his back towards her instead of staring at her. That lion will grow up in size and chase the other lions away in time, she claimed.

Unfortunately, if her claim was correct, we did not get the opportunity to see it come to full fruition. The patient who was living the life of a celibate, having found religion, and was taking treatment as an attempt to conquer her out of control sexuality, met a man who was heavily in child pornography, and like a pied piper took her under his wing, ending her religiosity, celibacy, desire to heal, only to follow this man, living besides him in his Motorhome, out of the state, and out of treatment. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A dream that confirms that paranoid defenses are activated to control unruly homosexual impulses

 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. 

 Mellaril stabilized him.  

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.  

The dream:

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.

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.

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.

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.

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. 

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.

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. 

But what was the wish?

"Why Tim Horton's?" I asked him. 

The patient could not come up with any useful associations. 

"Why 4 dollars and 99 cents?"

"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. 

"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. 

"The wish had to be in relationship with the father," I told him. 

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.

"Why the father's pastry was bunny and yours cat?"

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. 

"Are you saying the bunny and cat are alluding to genitals like beaver did?"

"I think they do," the patient replied.

Suddenly a conjecture struck to me. Are you and your father eating together the pastries is symbolizing sexual intercourse between the two of you?"

"I never thought of that," the patient replied. "It is so far fetched."

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 negation 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.

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."

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.  

Fear as the basic cause behind reversal and skipping of letters while writing and reading

 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. 

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.  

"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." 

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.

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. 

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.

 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.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                             

Resistance towards vaccination - an unconscious wish for the Pandemic to continue?

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. 

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? 

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 impulses 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: “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.”

 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.

 "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 why we spin conspiracy theories, 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.  

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 karma with the aid of the still smoldering disease.

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 "reaction formation" 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.  

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 parental entities 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. 

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.  

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 he had done enough research 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 (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) 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.

 

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 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.   

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 hysterical anxiety 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 displaced 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. 

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 stubbornness. "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 high. 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.    

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.

 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 [thanatos] upon their spouse and children and then make up for the excessive aggression by the release of equally strong compensatory love impulses [eros]). 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.

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.

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.

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 researching 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 equity 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. 

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.

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.   

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Passionate Trumpism and Anti-Trumpism - two sides of the same coin

 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.   

While diametrically opposite in their outward political behavior these two groups are identical at heart. They are moved by the same cauldron of hatred. 

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?

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.

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.   

Americans now have only themselves to attack and triumph over. 

In the name of Trump, they are fighting with each other. 

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. 

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.  

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.