#unconscious phantasy

[klein-archive]

Fear of influence – projective identification in love and work

20th September 2023

My last few blogs have focused on psychoanalytic technique. In them we saw Klein advising colleagues in relation to interpretation and the use of silence, and emphasising the need to be ‘self-critical enough’ and to ‘keep our minds and technique flexible.’ Here, I am changing tack slightly, and in the coming months intend to share a number of clinical vignettes, recorded by Klein, which she clearly felt threw light on various theoretical ideas.

The vignette I share here is from file B.98 of the archive, which is named ‘Theoretical Thoughts 1946’. As readers may know, Klein published her seminal paper on the paranoid-schizoid position in 1946, in which she discussed projective identification. This is the complex mechanism by which, in unconscious phantasy, parts of the self are located in the other for various reasons – such as to control or to harm – and with varying effects both on the self and the object. Klein clearly has this concept in mind as she explains the preoccupations of one her adult patients, ‘M’. Regarding this patient M, she writes:

...the influence the projective identifications have on sexual intercourse are seen quite clearly in somebody whose analysis has not been carried to any length yet.

M, Klein observes, is worried about ‘influencing and moulding’ the women with whom he becomes romantically involved. His specific concern is that he should influence them, ‘in such a way that they are greatly changed and become really like himself.’ Klein notes that M,

…saw with dismay that a girl he likes and who likes him had changed her style of dressing in the way in which he sometimes likes women to be dressed and he called this “the thin end of the wedge”.

Further, she records that,

He speaks with great concern about an earlier relation in which this [his influence] seemed to be one of the factors which made the girl too fond, too dependent on him… [The relationship] finished unsatisfactorily, because he cannot bear too great dependence in the woman.

Klein seems to have in mind here the way in which, in phantasy, M locates aspects of himself (such as his liking for women who dress in a particular way), in the women he is in relationships with. He then finds them changed as a result: more like him because they contain aspects of him. In M’s case, it appears that there is some continuing recognition of the split-off parts – hence his perturbation – although often, if the aim is to entirely disown such parts, one may feel absolutely disconnected from them in the other.

Another effect of projective identification in this case, is that M feels these women to be too dependent on him. One may surmise, however, that M himself felt very dependent on these women because they now contained parts of him. M seemed to respond to this experience by projecting his own feelings of dependency right back into these women.

Klein notes that M’s concern regarding his influence extends beyond romantic relationships, to professional ones. She writes,

Somebody said that he is apt to choose people (in working conditions) who are so receptive to his ideas that they will make a perfect staff. In referring to this influence he said: “They become really too much like myself and then I become very tired because I am not really so fond of myself and don’t want to see so much of myself about.”

Again, when one is projecting parts of oneself into others, one is apt to feel surrounded by these aspects – surrounded by oneself, as patient M observes. Klein notes that, in M’s case, it is relationships with women that are particularly affected, and that he ‘does not seem to feel having [sic] such powers over men.'

I think Klein was using this brief vignette to illustrate one particular impact of projective identification, namely the way in which a phantasy of having located parts of the self in the other can leave one feeling frighteningly powerful; worryingly capable of controlling or influencing the object. This is why M says that the girl dressing in a way that he would like, is just ‘the thin end of the wedge’; i.e., only the beginning. Another response might be that M feels quite trapped by these women into whom he projects. Perhaps this is also what he is getting at when he says that they become too fond of, or too dependent on him.

Klein ends her notes with a ‘Conclusion’ which, though it sounds very definitive, is to my mind more a postulation about what might be going on in M’s case. It’s not clear whether, or how, she put this to her patient, but it is interesting that she suggests M’s projection may lead him to feel rather less powerful, or potent, than he consciously fears himself to be. She notes the possible implications for sexual relations in this connection. She writes,

Conclusion: The penis being used as a controlling object, as an object to be split off, and then the mechanism of splitting is very active. Not only faeces are split off but parts of the body which are entering the body [of the other] and controlling it. Now the penis is then felt to remain inside in a controlling, guiding, et cetera way. That too must have a bearing on difficulties in potency, because if it is too much a sent out part of oneself it impedes the capacity…

The notes tail off at this point, with Klein highlighting the way in which the ego can become depleted by excessive projection. Her remark about the potential impact on sexual potency indicates that one may feel most concretely, the loss of a part of the body, such as the penis, following a projection. Readers interested in this aspect of Klein’s thinking can learn more in the Theory section of the Melanie Klein Trust website.

In April 2024, the British Psychoanalytical Society will host a conference in Edinburgh called ‘The Dynamics of Influence’. The aim of the conference is to provide a space to explore the ways in which analyst and patient can powerfully influence one another. The mechanism of projective identification, and the implications of its use, will likely be central to discussions.

[artmindlens]

Phantasy and Art: The Unconscious Bridge to Creation By Diana Yakobsson

In psychoanalytic theory, phantasy is a foundational element of the unconscious mind, influencing not only our dreams and desires but also the ways in which we engage with art. Far beyond idle daydreaming, phantasy is the engine of the psyche, a dynamic and ever-present force that shapes our experiences and expressions. When we examine art through the lens of psychoanalysis, particularly with an understanding of phantasy, we begin to see it as not merely an external object, but a symbolic manifestation of both the artist’s and the viewer’s unconscious.

Freud’s early work on phantasy linked it to the pleasure principle, suggesting that phantasies are unconscious wish-fulfillments—manifestations of desires that reality does not immediately satisfy. For Freud, phantasy provided an outlet for these desires, which are transformed through sublimation into higher, socially acceptable expressions, such as art. This sublimation is key to understanding why art resonates so deeply on a psychological level. It presents, in symbolic form, the very conflicts and desires that we carry in our unconscious, offering both catharsis and understanding without the need for direct confrontation.

Yet phantasy is not bound by the same rules as conscious thought. It exists in a timeless space, where past, present, and future intermingle. It is in this timelessness that phantasy connects so closely with art. A Renaissance painting can evoke the same emotional response in a modern viewer as it did centuries ago, not because of the historical context, but because it taps into universal unconscious themes—fears, desires, and conflicts that are timeless. In this sense, art is a medium through which phantasy is externalized, offering a way for both the creator and the viewer to engage with their unconscious in a safe and socially acceptable manner.

Melanie Klein, building on Freud’s concept, expanded the role of phantasy in her work with children, arguing that phantasies are present from the very start of life, shaping how we experience the world around us. In Klein’s view, phantasy is not merely a defense mechanism, as Freud initially posited, but a primary mode of psychic functioning. Phantasy, for Klein, is directly linked to our instinctual drives, operating alongside the mechanisms of defense that we use to protect ourselves from unbearable realities.

In this light, art becomes a way of working through these complex phantasies. A painting or a sculpture can symbolize repressed desires for love, autonomy, or power, while also representing fears of loss, rejection, or aggression. Even abstract art, with its lack of clear narrative or recognizable forms, speaks directly to the unconscious mind. The shapes and colors evoke emotions that are hard to articulate but deeply felt, allowing us to bypass the rational mind and connect directly with our phantasies. It is this connection that makes art so powerful and, for many, so therapeutic.

Art collectors, whether consciously aware of it or not, are often drawn to pieces that resonate with their own unconscious phantasies. A painting that evokes a sense of nostalgia or longing may reflect the collector’s unresolved conflicts, repressed memories, or unacknowledged desires. In this way, purchasing art becomes more than just an aesthetic choice; it is a way of externalizing and controlling the forces of the unconscious. The artwork serves as both a container for these emotions and a means of symbolic resolution.

The role of phantasy in art is not just one of creation, but also of interpretation. As viewers, we project our own unconscious phantasies onto the artwork, seeing in it reflections of our own inner world. This is why two people can have entirely different reactions to the same piece of art—because each is bringing their own unconscious conflicts, desires, and experiences to the encounter. Art, in this sense, is not something we merely observe, but something we feel, as it engages with the deepest parts of our psyche.

Freud’s notion of unconscious phantasy as a form of wish-fulfillment, and Klein’s extension of this idea to include even the most primitive and early stages of development, highlights the inextricable link between phantasy and creativity. Where Freud saw phantasy as a later development, closely tied to defense mechanisms, Klein placed it at the very heart of human experience, influencing not only our dreams and symptoms but also our thoughts, perceptions, and artistic creations.

In conclusion, art is a dialogue with the unconscious. It is a way of giving form to the formless, of externalising the internal. Through phantasy, the artist taps into the deepest layers of the unconscious, transforming raw instinctual energy into something tangible, something that can be shared and understood. And as viewers, we engage with art in much the same way—projecting our own unconscious phantasies onto the canvas, finding in it a reflection of our innermost desires and conflicts. This is the power of art: it is not just an expression of beauty, but a mirror of the soul, offering us a glimpse into the hidden phantasies that shape our inner world.

[eligalilei]

Precursors of the Symptom:

‘57 - Symptoms as communicative/semiotic

1. ‘Inscribed in a writing process’ (presumably dynamic, conversational)

2. Ciphered message

‘63 - The symptom does not call out, it is not addressed or conversant, it is an enjoyment

‘74 - "the symptom can only be defined as the way in which each subject enjoys [jouit] the unconscious, in so far as the unconscious determines him.

We might see this as an alliance, or axis, or administration of the domain of the Subject. It is about the internal economy of the Self, for itself. Perhaps it is, in fact, what the self does not surrender, rather than what it demands be heard.

Might then the symptom come with defenses? Is the symptom always a substitute satisfaction, or is it a way to hold on to a satisfaction that was never domesticated?

Here, as a manner of enjoyment, rather than interpersonal effect (or even intrapersonal?), the symptom/sign (what occurs with the disease, and cries out to the healer, the mother, the father… wearing whichever of their masks,) is established as sinthome: what allows one to live, presumably with-in the role-network of the castrated subject, who has lost the ability to express demand for love, itself a response to the trauma of birth. I use this word too much, but this would assert the sinthome as suture.

The sinthome is maybe, in some sense, then, regressive, or is a re-seizure of the lost jouissance… or is an umbilical link thereto? The symptom cannot be simply the sinthome exterrupted, derailed, or it would have no particular character; would only be… a return to polymorphous perversity.

(We have, then, the sign given by the Other, perhaps a demand, a cry for help, a magickal ritual, and, contrarily, private enjoyment, unsignified, mute, autistic.

Clearly, in stitching the orders together, this is insufficient, since it would put the sinthome outside )

If the end of analysis is to identify with the sinthome, this would seem to separate it from the sign-symptom/signifier. I could a psychoanalyst claiming that one need only listen to oneself, or grow such ears as to be able to hear inwardly, so as to only then be able to develop in the ego a model of the unconscious.

Does one, to retraverse Lacan’s pathway, begin with the phantasy that there is someone listening? And then, ultimately, just resign to dance while no one watches? (this sounds…. cliche-edly existentialist. Clearly enjoyment has been traversed, besmirched, encoded, by words)

Maybe Lacan begins with this loop, in the Freudian way, wherein the secret of the Other’s surplus can be returned to him, and the message can be made whole with-in the suffering subject. The Knowing analyst gives the analysand what he does not know he has, it is submitted in toto as a gift to the ego, and the whole is reconstructed by the education of the toxicosis of his lack (this is preliminary and falls flat, of course).

What is clear about the sinthome, is that it is not reducible to the orders RSI, but has rather to do with their (manner of) enbeing. Of course, one of the orders is itself characterized as an absence to intelligibility, so the sinthome must knit together representable and unrepresentable. It is a relation to the Other, and a tangling filigree on our hol(e)y recursive (inter)faces.

To return toward hinting at the, even spectral, shape of a banal summary, which never seems far from any summary of Lacan, one must ‘accept the sinthome’ - ‘accept oneself’. But is that to assume that the symptom is the same as the symptom? Or, is the symptom transformed in its reception? Is there, here, a conversation that needs to be heard? It seems foolish to assume the sinthome to be…. what… primeval autism?

If the sinthome is unanalysable, but productive of analytic satisfaction, is it, in fact, gnosis/tic?

If the symptom begins as a trace, is it in fact a solution in utero (c.f. Gnosticism). Maybe the purpose isn’t to eliminate it at all, but align with it as a means of enjoyment. The sign is not a request, or even maybe a demand, but rather a thread, Wegmark, of Thelema? It is how the Subject/Self/Mind enjoys so far as it is determined by the unconscious and is not mastered by, nor masters, its constitutive enjoyment.

((moments of central holdure))

______

Simply put, the sinthome is at least a stable or metastable deformation and reterritorialization of the symptom, possibly by desire, and perhaps its enjoyment, perhaps constructed around analytic satisfaction and enjoyment.

Specifically, it can name the target of that process as well, as a process which guides processes.

Maybe a locus is this ego model, but one espousing another relation in the constitution of the models, one that turns it into a Klein bottle, so desire's traversals cross the exterior of discourse.

[enkisstories]

Rose: "Let's get you out of that coat now and put you into something lighter - there!"

Rose briefly wonders whether she'd been as comfortable touching her partner if he'd worn a standard First Order uniform.

Armitag: "You smell of forest... grass... wild herbs..."

Rose: "Stop right there or you'll guess the location of our hideout next!"

They laugh with the same old familiarity they have shared ever since the shipwreck. But then their hands touch - and Rose notices that Armitage isn't wearing the armband anymore. The armband she had gifted him, but that had in truth been a stealth handcuff with the purpose to shock Hux into unconsciousness at the uttering of a command phrase. Of course Rose had hoped to never need that function.

Rose: "Oh. It went off?"

Armitage: "Evidently."

Rose: "You're taking it more gracfully than I expected, though."

Armitage slowly walks to his desk, where he opens a drawer. It contains a single item: the armband, with the tracking- and shocking components removed.

Armitage: "Oh, some revenge phantasies were definitely involved."

Armitage: "But then - and by that I mean something like ten minutes ago - I realized that you had chosen a phrase so demeaning that you'd never be at risk of accidently tossing it at me. If I’d ever made you so mad that you’d be willing to yell that at me, well, then I’d had it coming.

Pryde, however, used the command phrase the first evening I was back "home". I'm sorry, Rose. The names I called you in my head should be reserved for Pryde and his ilk."

[devsgames]

Advantages of Working With References You Know Very Little About

(This post cross-posted from my Patreon. Please consider supporting for access to my unreleased game prototypes, devlogs and blog posts just like this one. It helps me pay rent and supports the work I do!)

One of my favourite quotes from one of my Game Design profs was "The best designers are those who either play every kind of game they can get their hands on, or those who play nothing at all".

The implication here is that the former has a huge subset of reference to pull from to create a wide variety of interesting designs across all genres, while those who play nothing don't have any preconceptions about how something "should" be designed and therefore will come up with new and interesting concepts as a result.

From my experience, I think this is largely true in most cases; many designers I know who split the middle and intimately fixate on one specific type of game or genre typically are the ones who tend to pigeon-hole themselves into very same-y designs and struggle to break out of their own mould they make, whereas the most interesting concepts come from folks who barely touch video games or play a huge variety of them.

I think the same general principle apply to making concepts and works informed by a specific theme or genre. Familiarity with a wide amount of media can help you pull pieces of those media into your work in a way that is unique or interesting to your style, and on the other hand having almost no familiarity with a piece of media means you're free to imagine and interpret that genre or media as you see fit without your direction being informed by already understood tropes or assumptions the genre makes, which I think is a huge asset.

When planning direction in a lot of my works I actively try to draw inspiration from media that I have limited experience with but are interested in or would like to emulate to some degree, because I think it incidentally makes the end product more genre-bending.

As an example: one of the biggest things informing the game I'm currently working on (a Mech Arena Survival Shooter) is Neon Genesis Evangelion. I know just almost nothing about Evangelion, and what little I do know is by way of proxy and have never experienced any of it myself. I know there's basically teenage angst, giant robots and evil angel things, and that it's leaven with questions on the human psyche as much as it is about giant robots fighting. I've seen screenshots and stuff, but aside from that I have literally no idea of what it really is or what the heck even happens in it, but thematically I'm just pulling from the vibe I get from it and what others say about it,and not from any working knowledge of the property itself. Another reference point for me visually is Dreamcast games; I never grew up with the Dreamcast and have only played maybe one or two titles from its library personally, but I know just barely enough about how it looks and plays from various sources to pull from it. I've seen footage of stuff like Phantasy Star Online or whatever here and there, but I'd never dare to claim I've internalized enough about it to have any idea about what makes it what it is.

And this isn't a bad thing! I genuinely think that if I knew more about it and committed to learning from these pieces of media more intimately for the sake of this project, there's a very real risk I would start unconsciously (or consciously) pull from them in ways that would push my work in a direction that is more informed by the media than it is myself. I could end up with themes that are less myself being 'inspired by', and more my work being 'derivative towards' that piece of media. It can easily be too tempting to say 'Well the mechs in Evangelion are [x] size large so I should make everything bigger" or "The Dreamcast can't make shadows like [y] so I shouldn't do that". Being healthily divorced from your reference points sounds counter-intuitive but can actually help a lot!

I guess the main idea here is that when it comes to informing your direction and generating concepts, in some cases what you think you know about a property or work can often be more effective directional tool than what you might know you know about it.

[electronicbreadpatrol]

Liberal academia discredits freud and lacan precisely because they have no solutions other than behavioralism and medication. They do not confront the unconscious; taking a medication is not a cure, it is precisely the opposite even if taking a pill is preferable to the suffering caused by x aliment/disorder.

So even if what they said was true blah blah mom blah blah stages of sexual development is a lie, even if we regard this as fact the hatred of psychoanalysis is nonetheless still pathological.

Taken directly from lacan, even if what the husband says about his wife is ture, she's no good, she cheats she lazy etc, his jelousy is still pathological in so far as it is indispensable; thats to say without jelously his world would fall apart.

Another; a man has a wife and a mistress, when he removes the veil of fantasy he loses them both, what he desired was to desire, in that he mistook her as fulfillment when she was merely an object of desire, a mere phantasy and when someone flys too close to the sun reality can itself become irreal. So for example when someone says "I want a nose job because it will make me happy" often times even after the procedure they are not more happy than before. I.e. a segway to the idea that language itself is made up of chains of repressed signifiers; words are relative, you know what happy means only because you know what happy is not.

Anxiety is taken today to mean exactly one thing, a disorder blah blah your brian is like a computer this typical sort of nonsense in which you are put on medication. Psychoanalysis understands anxiety as part feeling part disorder part repression of feelings & or memories. It is even accepted that psychoanalysis can and does help patients and if this is true and accepted by the psychological community why then is psychoanalysis not covered by insurance yet Xanax is, you can even be prescribed it via zoom which is almost the ultimate liberal betrayal in that it breaks a cardinal sin of psychoanalysis in which patients would report traumatic repressed memories. I don't know of many people confronting a traumatic anything on Xanax, frankly.

[apenitentialprayer]

Vitae Martini pseudoprophete: A Catholic tradition of polemical Luther biography

The most famous, and in many ways rightly infamous, detractor of Luther's character [was] the Dominican Heinrich Denifle, Sub-Archivar of the Holy See […]. For him such events as the fit in the choir have only an inner cause, which in no way means a decent conflict or even an honest affliction, but solely an abysmal depravity of character. To him, Luther is too much of a psychopath to be credited with honest mental or spiritual suffering. It is only the Bad One who speaks through Luther. It is, it must be, Denifle's primary ideological premise, that nothing, neither mere pathological fits, nor the later revelations that set Luther on the path to reformation, had anything whatsoever to do with divine interference. "Who," Denifle asks, in referencing the thunderstorm, "can prove, for himself, not to speak of others, that the alleged inspiration through the Holy Ghost came from above . . . and that it was not the play of conscious or unconscious self-delusion?" Lutheranism, he fears (and hopes to demonstrate) has tried to lift to the height of dogma the phantasies of a most fallible mind. [...] To [Denifle] he is an Umsturzmensch, the kind of man who wants to turn the world upside down without a plan of his own. To Denifle, Luther's protestant attitude introduced into history a dangerous kind of revolutionary spirit. Luther's special gifts, which the priest does not deny, are those of the demagogue and the false prophet — falseness not only as a matter of bad theology, but as a conscious falsification from base motives. All of this follows from the priest's quite natural thesis that war orders from above, such as the [Protestant apologist] assumes to have been issued to Luther, could only be genuine if they showed the seal and the signature of divinity, namely, signs and miracles. [...] Denifle is only the most extreme representative of a Catholic school of Luther biography, whose representatives try hard to divorce themselves from his method while sharing his basic assumption of a gigantic moral flaw in Luther's personality. The Jesuit [Hartmann] Grisar is cooler and more dissecting in his approach. Yet he too ascribes to Luther a tendency for "egomanic self-delusion" and suggests a connection between his self-centeredness and his medical history; thus Grisar puts himself midway between the approaches of the priest and of the psychiatrist. Among all of Luther's biographers, inimical or friendly, Denifle seems to me to resemble Luther most, at least in his salt-and-pepper honesty, and his one-sided anger. The Jesuit [sic?] is most admirable in his scholarly criticism of Luther's theology; most lovable in his outraged response to Luther's vulgarity. Denifle does not think that a true man of God would ever say "I gorge myself (fresse) like a Bohemian and I get drunk (sauff) like a German. God be praised, Amen" although he neglects the fact that Luther wrote this in one of his humorous letters to his wife at a time when she was worried about his lack of appetite.

- Erik Erikson (Young Man Luther: A Study in Psychoanalysis and History, pages 26, 31, 32). Italics original, bolded emphases added.

[feytouchedtwilight]

The studies coming out on psilocybin inspired me to do some research. I began to be curious particularly about altered states of consciousness and the historical use of psilocybin and other psychedelics. I usually connected these substances to the 1960s and the hippies and all that, but it turns out that humans have been using psychedelics for THOUSANDS of years, like tens of thousands or even millions of years, especially for the ritual purposes of connecting to ~the spirit world~ whatever that means for that culture. This seems to be a universal thing from around the globe. It makes me wonder- what was that like for them? What was it like to be so sure that the gods or spirits existed? what was it like to commune with them? (I’ve never had that experience...) What did they see? What did they hear? Why are altered states of consciousness and animism such widely experienced things for humans?

That research led me to this article which talks about the “evolved psychology of psychedelic set and setting”. A lot of it is anthropology that’s over my head since it’s not a field I’ve ever studied. But there’s a lot in here that’s absolutely fascinating! Here’s some bits I particularly thought were neat. (any emphasis is mine)

The article claims that psychedelics produce animism (which the article defines as “a view that that nature involves sentient entities that interact with humans”). It then talks a bit about how animism is a reflection of our inner selves onto the outer world, it is how we humanized and personalized the natural world “with traits (sentience, relationality) that derive from humans’ innate social and cognitive intelligences”. It was also important for human evolution- “Animism reflects operations of innate processing modules for “animacy detection,” for being hyper-sensitive to the presence of an animate agent. The religious presumption of an unseen agent, a hyperactive sensitivity and automatic tendency to project an active agent responsible for the cause of unexplained phenomena, reflects functions acquired for detection of predators and prey. These tendencies were expanded across human evolution because of survival benefits of detecting predators, and subsequently linked to other capacities to understand the most important and dangerous animals in the environment—other humans. Consequently, our animistic thinking also emphasizes human-like mental, personal and social qualities.” Which is an interesting to answer to the question of why animism is a universally human thing. 

It then talks about what psychedelics do the brain and how that has been useful for human evolution- “Psychedelic-induced visionary phantasy reflects a latent human cognitive capacity underlying all experience that manifests through the visual system used for organizing information in the external world. …[P]sychedelics … are unparalleled tools for examination of the phenomenology and operation of this intrinsic system of the human brain-mind and a source of unconscious cognitive processes. This visual thinking capability involves the innate intelligence of spatial-temporal reasoning, an ability to think though visualizing patterns and performing mental manipulations with them. The visual thinking provides the working space for organizing constructs, assimilating information and creating new ideas by synthesizing spatial information. This capacity was central to human evolution.”

“Early hominins evolved traits from selection pressures for abilities to live in a cognitive niche” (the human adaptation to a knowledge-using, socially interdependent lifestyle) “for functioning and survival. Beginning with the incidental ingestion of psychedelic fungi in an opportunistic diet, and eventually their deliberate inclusion in rituals, our ancestors’ use of psilocybin could have contributed to the evolution of our unique survival mode by imposing a systematic bias on the selective environment via the enhanced visual information processing and integration induced by psychedelics. Psychedelic consumption thus could have had significant consequences on the selective forces that drove hominin cognitive and behavioral evolution.

These adaptations involving construction of new models of the environment were enhanced by psychedelic effects on visual thinking and globally integrated cognition. The enhanced availability of information is a central feature of psychedelic effects, a result of increased global connectivity in the brain that results from psychedelic interference with the integrity of the Default Mode Network (DMN). Disabling the DMN results in increased levels of functional connectivity between normally disconnected brain networks and more communication across the entire brain with very strong links and topologically long-range functional connections and a wider range of connectivity states. Psilocybin produces a new dynamic of coordinated oscillations across brain regions, with overall phase synchronization coordinating EEG across diverse brain areas and producing greater global neural integration.”

The next part is about what the article calls “shamanism” (which I have discovered is a term loaded with racism so I’m going to attempt to avoid using it in my own words). They’re defining that as ritual beliefs and activities which include “healing, divination, clairvoyance, acquiring information about group members, hunting, recovery of lost souls, communication with spirits of the dead, escorting souls of the dead, and protection against spirits and sorcerers.” They also mention that these ritual activities are a social institution to “manage the therapeutic and other adaptive effects that can be obtained by using psychedelics to integrate information in consciousness.“ 

The article then points out that these are universal things- “This complex of ritual activities and beliefs found worldwide in foraging societies establishes shamanism as an empirical reality of the premodern world. The cross-cultural distribution of the shamanic features reflects a cultural universal: all societies have ritual practices involving alterations of consciousness for spirit communication, divination and healing. …These cultural universals of ritual altered states of consciousness, spirit engagement, divination and healing reflect intrinsic aspects of human nature involving innate intelligences.” 

The next part is rather over my head, but it talks about how rituals developed and why- they promote social bonding through the use of song and dance and altered states of consciousness. It also “[increases] status and access to resources, and [provides] psychophysiological benefits from eliciting endogenous healing responses.” Furthermore it “also [represses] strategic reasoning and second-guessing of prosocial intentions of others while encouraging cooperation and positive regard in social relations.” It then goes into further detail about how music and dancing bonds people together. 

After that the article talks about how the use of psychedelics set us apart from other hominids. “A notable gap between hominid and shamanic ritual involves [altered states of consciousness] and spirit world experiences that are at the focus of communal shamanic healing practices. Notably, all three—communal relations, shamanic altered states of consciousness, and healing—are stimulated by psychedelics, exemplified in the concept of entheogens. Cultures around the world have expressed beliefs about the effects of psychedelics that are entheogenic—inherent sources of stimulating internal spiritual experiences. The empirical ability of psychedelics to induce genuine mystical experiences are attested to in double-blind clinical studies, meaning that we have to accept that spiritual experiences occurred when people ingested psilocybin-containing mushrooms.”

The article then talks about the scientific explanations for the altered states of consciousness and how we achieve them- with the psychedelics, the exhaustive drumming and dancing, etc. It’s pretty complex stuff ngl. It had this in particular to say about the unconscious/dreams: “Shamanism exapted an innate mammalian feature, using an adaptation for learning by producing memory associations during sleep and enhancing information consolidation. Shamanic activities accessed these innate dream processes by using ritual to blend waking consciousness (enhanced by extreme excitation) with dream processes to bring unconscious material into waking consciousness and manage unconscious personality dynamics. Shamanic engagement with dreams used its capacities for virtual scenario construction to engage processes for risk-free consideration of possible options.” It also had some interesting things to say on the effects of dopamine on human cognition and how that can lead to out of body experiences, although I didn’t understand most of it. 

The article mentions that death and rebirth experiences are common relative to the rituals and altered states of consciousness, that “a ‘death’ of their current identity (as a ‘normal’ but ill person) permits emergence of a new identity as a healer.” Which I found particularly striking. Idk about you but I see this all the time in the overlap between the witchcraft/new-age and the chronically ill communities. I always found it a bit disturbing honestly, the fact that a person has to suffer or be broken in order to heal others. I always related it to the very christian sentiment that “all suffering is for a reason”. Perhaps that was uncalled for? But also it’s objectively ableist for people to say things like “Lyme is a gift for the strongest of warriors” (a legit thing I heard someone say) or that autistic people are “starseeds” or “indigo children” meant to heal other people. It’s interesting to me that this a very human response to being sick or different. “These reformulations of the self are guided by innate drives toward integration derived from the psychointegration produced by [altered states of consciousness].” I have A Lot of Thoughts on this that I’m not sure how to put into words.

I also thought this explanation of animism and the spirit world was interesting: “Pre-modern psychedelic experience was entheogenic—an experience of spiritual beings activated by the plant and within the self. This encounter with an active social agent exemplifies functions of innate modular cognitive intelligences and cognitive operations that are at the core of shamanism. The animistic worldview reflects an enhanced sociality with a natural world imbued with human qualities. Shamanic relations embody the entheogenic perspective that external entities can enter the person and manifest as spiritual powers, as well as become guides and allies. Shamanism incorporated the influences from these spirits as fundamental to self, producing an ecopsychology based in perceptions of nature as personal, intelligent, spiritual and human-like. Shamanism and entheogenic encounters emphasize a set involving the incorporation of others’ as self, reflecting an extension of the social mind’s inference system beyond normal limitations because spirits are presumed to have fuller access to strategic information.” I’m… I have feelings about how absolutely human it is to perceive nature as human-like. Maybe that’s a bad way to put it just. Thinking of the thought processes of our distant ancestors overwhelms me. Like that’s how they made sense of their world, by reflecting themselves onto it. I like that. I like that a lot.

All in all, I enjoyed reading it. I think using science to uncover the mechanics behind it is neat and I don’t think it takes away any of the magic of it. Like science is just magic we can explain. and magic is just things science can’t yet explain. you know? It certainly answered my questions of why, why do altered states of consciousness work the way they do? why do psychedelics contribute to this? why are psychedelics and altered states of consciousness used for divination? why do the rituals always involve dance and drumming? why is this a universally human thing? I think I need to let this rotate around in my mind for a while before my thoughts on it fully develop. But gods I wish with all my heart psilocybin was more accessible and not illegal.

(the title is ”The Evolved Psychology of Psychedelic Set and Setting: Inferences Regarding the Roles of Shamanism and Entheogenic Ecopsychology” and the DOI number is 10.3389/fphar.2021.619890 if anyone wants to look it up)

[psychreviews2]

Object Relations: Melanie Klein Pt. 6

Epistemophilia

Melanie Klein had a system inside her mind, but she was resistant to organizing her theories. This is especially true since she was focusing more on which theories of Freud's needed to be updated as opposed to start from cart blanche. Klein instead found stages of childhood development appearing a little earlier than Freud believed was possible, while also adding in some of Karl Abraham's contributions. In Melanie Klein, Penelope Garvey summarized that "in the early oral stage the infant wants to suck and swallow goodness and then in the later oral sadistic stage when teeth are developing, he wishes to bite and also to destroy the loved object. The following early anal stage also contains destructive urges; during this stage the infant aggressively expels his faeces. In the second anal phase the infant attempts to hold on to and conserve the good within."

Infants observed under Klein's modality were already roiling with a desire to be free and unimpeded. "She conceived of the young child as alive with jealousy, envy and hatred of the parent’s creativity and filled with the desire to take possession of the mother and to banish and kill off the father and all rivals. Klein pictured these oedipal frustrations and urges as being fueled by oral and anal phantasies." For children to have these wishes and goals requires a desire to explore and understand. "She described the Oedipus complex as involving early oral and anal sadistic epistemophilic wishes; that is the wish to get in, to know about and to possess or destroy the contents of the mother's body. The child then fears that his mother or the united parents will get in and attack the inside of his body."

The desire to know then creates internal views of the world even at this early age. These "phantasies" were unconscious ones as opposed to regular daydreams. They would go anywhere, including into areas of darkness and evil that would frighten the child and make them fear retaliation from the parents. "Klein reasoned that the violent phantasies might lead to a fear of harming the mother, cause the child to become inhibited, leave him unable to be curious and lead to difficulties in learning." For example, anger released from repression in analysis could contain phantasies of revenge, which may then cause fear of punishment, and then those unethical desires would instill fear in oneself and low self-esteem for being so greedy and selfish. Already at an early age, the child is developing pathological secrets and starting to attack themselves. Like in my brief introduction to Klein in Sexuality Pt 5: Sadism, there are phantasies about getting the good from someone, without reciprocity, especially if you're a child with nothing to give back, while at the same time becoming more independent and warding off retribution. I used the example of treating people like a chocolate bar, enjoying the contents and throwing out the wrapper, but that exploited wrapper is what is left of the mother. "In Klein’s view the infant's oral, anal and oedipal desires drive the infant to want to phantasize about the experience of getting inside the mother, taking possession of her goodness and killing off the rivals."

Sexuality Pt 5: Sadism - Sigmund Freud & Beyond: https://rumble.com/v1gtssd-sexuality-pt-5-sadism-sigmund-freud-and-beyond.html

Some of this early sexual knowledge Klein felt was already innate, like in other animals that seem to know how to cooperate with the mother in order to survive. Klein said, "infants of both sexes experience genital desires directed towards their mother and father, and they have an unconscious knowledge of the vagina as well as of the penis." This knowledge wasn't the kind of adult knowledge mixed with words and language. "Klein thought that infants have an innate capacity to phantasize and that they are born with an unconscious knowledge of the body and bodily functions: 'The fact that at the beginning of post-natal life an unconscious knowledge of the breast exists and that feelings towards the breast are experienced can only be conceived of as a phylogenetic inheritance.'" Klein said, "analytic work has shown that babies of a few months of age certainly indulge in phantasy-building. I believe that this is the most primitive mental activity and that phantasies are in the mind of the infant almost from birth." This knowledge of course is before the child has yet to learn how to talk. "Although Klein described the infant's sensations and phantasies in words, she was aware that the experiences that she was describing are pre-verbal physical sensations rather than thoughts; words can be no more than an approximation of the sensation."

The world is also one with no demarcation or boundaries and the ego is just starting development. "Klein pictured the infant as being engaged in powerful emotional relationships right from the start of life. She concluded that the infant's first focus is the mother and that all his longings, impulses and curiosity are focused on her body which is believed to be full of goodness, rival siblings and the father. Klein had the view that the infant treats the world as though it is an extension of the mother's body. In this way, his anxiety about the power of his own destructive urges towards his mother, along with his uncertainty about her capacity to survive them, is crucial to whether he then feels safe enough to explore the world around him."

Birth and the Paranoid-Schizoid Position

Agreeing with Otto Rank, Melanie felt that the entrance into this world from birth leaves a mark in the unconscious that influences the individual from childhood into adulthood. "The first external source of anxiety can be found in the experience of birth. This experience, which, according to Freud, provides the pattern for all later anxiety-situations, is bound to influence the infant's first relations with the external world. It would appear that the pain and discomfort he has suffered, as well as the loss of the intrauterine state, are felt by him as an attack by hostile forces, i.e. as persecution. Persecutory anxiety, therefore, enters from the beginning into his relation to objects in so far as he is exposed to privations...Birth is the first anxiety because of the combination of helplessness and need."

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

On Narcissism - Sigmund Freud (Narcissism 1 of 4): https://rumble.com/v1gtgdl-on-narcissism-sigmund-freud-narcissism-1-of-4.html

From the beginning, there's a seesaw between stress and soothing that continues throughout life. The main source of soothing for the infant is the mother's breast. "The gratification and love which the infant experiences in these situations all help to counteract persecutory anxiety, even the feelings of loss and persecution aroused by the experience of birth. His physical nearness to his mother during feeding—essentially his relation to the 'good breast'—recurrently helps him to overcome the longing for a former lost state, alleviates persecutory anxiety and increases the trust in the good object."

The difference between being in the womb and relying on a breast, is that the womb provides instant gratification, a human form of heaven, whereas the breast's availability is more intermittent. This already is a demarcation of Freud's Pleasure Principle followed by a need to accept the Reality Principle. The child's Id is already prepared to react with more or less patience. Those reactions are influenced by the life and death instincts, which for Melanie, all reside in the Id, but she treats the death instinct as more of a fear of death compared to Freud's Nirvana Principle of desiring to be free of tension in morbid repose. "This relation is at first a relation to a part-object, for both oral-[craving] and oral-destructive impulses from the beginning of life are directed towards the mother's breast in particular. We assume that there is always an interaction, although in varying proportions, between [craving] and aggressive impulses, corresponding to the fusion between life and death instincts. It could be conceived that in periods of freedom from hunger and tension there is an optimal balance between [craving] and aggressive impulses. This equilibrium is disturbed whenever, owing to privations from internal or external sources, aggressive impulses are reinforced. I suggest that such an alteration in the balance between [craving] and aggression gives rise to the emotion called greed, which is first and foremost of an oral nature. Any increase in greed strengthens feelings of frustration and in turn the aggressive impulses. In those children in whom the innate aggressive component is strong, persecutory anxiety, frustration and greed are easily aroused and this contributes to the infant’s difficulty in tolerating privation and in dealing with anxiety. Accordingly, the strength of the destructive impulses in their interaction with [craving] impulses would provide the constitutional basis for the intensity of greed. However, while in some cases persecutory anxiety may increase greed, in others it may become the cause of the earliest feeding inhibitions."

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

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

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

The paranoia in the Paranoid–Schizoid Position, involves anger and impatience that the baby has towards the breast and there is a fear of retaliation from the mother because of the baby's negative attitude and how it is so dependent. "In the paranoid-schizoid position, anxieties are connected with survival, with fears of persecution, annihilation and suffocation; being taken over or swallowed up." The main defense in the paranoid-schizoid position is that of schizoid splitting. The confusion about female breasts for the infant is in their potential to gratify or frustrate. The life instinct attaches to good experiences that make up good memories of periodic satisfaction. These memories are internal objects, and in this case a part-object, the breast. As time goes on the child is able to expand the breast to memories of a whole-person, the whole mother. The death instinct is afraid of abuse or neglect and attaches bad experiences with the breast as a separate "bad breast." Like with black and white, or all or nothing thinking, that type of thinking is needed in certain situations where survival is paramount, but needs to be relaxed when the environment is safe.

Because the child's ego is so undeveloped at this time, there is strong splitting with alternating experiences of being soothed and desperation. The ego is developed by memories, both good and bad ones. It starts with incorporation, or a sampling of experience. Introjections follow as preferences chosen from an array of sampling, and identifications are strong habitual tendencies developed from repeated imitations. You could say that each introjection becomes a re-introjection as experiences repeat and become predictable. If re-introjections are mostly positive, it creates a sense of trust that overcomes splitting. To add more detail, psychological splitting also has sub-defenses. "Klein links the life instinct with the good ego (good object relationship) and the death instinct with the bad ego (bad object relationship). She also comes to distinguish ordinary healthy binary splitting of this sort from pathological splitting or fragmentation, where the good as well as the bad object is attacked and broken up, often through envy or fear of retaliation: [paranoia]."

For Klein, splitting is necessary in all periods of life, but it's pathological when it cannot move beyond the paranoid-schizoid position. Repeatedly being unsatisfied, frustrated, neglected, or abused, leads to fragmentation. With abuse or neglect, fragmentation in splitting is experienced by the infant as a lack of integration and a feeling of falling apart and going to pieces. A loss of survival. When the breast and mother appear hostile, the infant is trying to annihilate the "bad-self" in relation to the "bad-object." Because the self requires memories and stories to hang reality together, there is a learning in identification when the mind copies behaviors based on external experiences. So the internal memories, stories, or ego, provide opportunities for adaptation, which connects the internal and external worlds with a sense of stability, but if there is a mental poverty, due to a strenuous environment, the consequence is a "bad-ego," where adaptation fails and resorts to fragmentated defenses. It makes sense that if good experiences are sparing or not at all, the ego cannot trust the world and finds good object relations in others as mysterious.

If the infant is stuck in fragmentation, there isn't enough good experience to provide an oasis in memory to trust in and rely on as an anchor to explore the world. The effort to hold experiences together into something understandable then gives up, but leads to a confusing world with repeated attempts to escape, where no escape is possible. "When bad experiences predominate, the individual may repeatedly resort to fragmentation. For bad experiences that threaten to overwhelm, the only defence may be to fragment the mind and break the bad experience into small pieces. Klein's daughter, Melitta, thought that fragmentation reduced the power of the bad experience. Klein agreed and wrote that 'the ego in varying degrees fragments itself and its objects, and in this way achieves a dispersal of the destructive impulses and of internal persecutory anxieties.' A fragmented individual is weakened and no longer has the mental capacity that is needed to piece things together and make sense of his experience. Some individuals whose lives are dominated by bad experiences may repeatedly resort to fragmentation."

In extreme cases, this kind of fragmentation can lead to Schizophrenia, a loss of connection with reality, especially with constitutional pathologies that already lean in this direction before birth. It's always a mixture of genes and environment, and the ego cannot split the object into all good and all bad without splitting itself, and its ego potentials, in the same way. This process leads to different pathologies depending on the child's genetic inheritance. If the mind develops in this direction, without Schizophrenia, the result is a fragmented goal orientation where bits and pieces of phantasy are challenged by the patient with fabricated successes, plans, and goals, to create a false sense of calm, mixed with repeated troubles arising. The other sense of calm comes from taking unwanted "fragments" of the personality and projecting blame externally. The mind is trying to find a way to feel better that works only temporarily. The unwanted parts of the self have to be understood and integrated via adaptation to a life that is a mixed bag between good and bad: Whole objects.

Fragmentation has been attributed by Melanie to many disorders, including hypochondria resulting from internal persecution. "Klein looks at loneliness in schizophrenia. Excessive projection and fragmentation leave the sufferer 'hopelessly in bits', and unable to internalize his primal object, [the mother.] He feels alone with his misery, often confused, and surrounded by a hostile world. He withdraws from people in a vicious circle of loneliness and isolation...The manic depressive patient is less fragmented but still cannot keep 'an inner and external companionship with a good object', because hatred and thus paranoia continue to intrude. Loneliness here is characterized by a hopeless longing to restore things, and in severe cases Klein comments that this can lead to suicide...Withdrawal to an inner world occurs through the fear of introjecting a dangerous external world; but such withdrawal brings not peace but heightened fear of internal persecutors. This vicious circle in turn can lead to a state of overdependence on the external representative of one's own good parts, as in situations where the mother becomes the ego-ideal to a point that the ego is weakened and impoverished...Klein had encountered the developmental connections between schizoid [splitting] and depressive positions in patients who, filled with self-reproaches and unable to surmount the anxiety of having destroyed their good object, slip back into a state of panic about their inner tormentors. That there is a connection between manic-depressive and schizophrenic disorders she recognized only as a 'tentative hypothesis' at this point..."

Since fragmentation involves continuous splitting with external and internal objects, the fear of introjection described above is connected with negative empathy, or projective identification, related to the fears of one's own potential for harming others and the potential for external figures to retaliate in the same way. The internal representatives of external people make predictions of retaliation and torture the patient to prevent them from acting on those impulses in reality. "Rosenfeld gave a good working definition of projective identification: 'Projective identification' relates first of all to a splitting process of the early ego, where either good or bad parts of the self are split off from the ego and are as a further step projected in love or hatred into external objects which leads to fusion and identification of the projected parts of the self with the external objects. There are important paranoid anxieties related to these processes as the objects filled with aggressive parts of the self become persecuting and are experienced by the patient as threatening to retaliate by forcing themselves and the bad parts of the self which they contain back again into the ego."

When things tilt out of balance, it's the positive relations, external and internal, that are attacked, leading to ever more intrusive thoughts of guilt that impair normal reality testing. "The psychotic ego attacks the idealized object with envy, oral neediness and sadistic demands. In the paranoid-schizoid world, the idealized object is unable to withstand this and is destroyed, only to return as a vengeful enemy. Many psychotic patients suffer with this type of primitive guilt for attacking the object. It is a persecutory guilt in which 'I will suffer and die for my sins'. This unbearable guilt engenders more and more paranoid defences and brings out phantasies of annihilation. The intrapsychic experience of killing off the object needed for survival combined with the belief in 'an eye-for-an-eye' retaliation results in ego fragmentation and psychosis." This becomes painstaking work for psychoanalysts to deal with when they are bombarded by negative accusations and criticisms that defy logic. If there is a pattern to fragmentation, it starts off as a trauma of some kind in infancy, or even more likely a repeated trauma. A projection of the world as unsafe is absorbed. Then there is a fear of introjection, because the world feels dangerous, but keeping in mind that the world may not in fact be as dangerous as the patient thinks. Afterwards, there's a projection that wants to attack the dangerous world, when in reality the patient's inner world is more dangerous, and that's why it's a projection, and then this is followed by an inhibition from the internal world to stop the attack, for fear of retaliation from the external world. The patient ceases to function properly for good situations in the external world. Rinse and repeat. In a manic situation, idealization of a good object leads to omnipotence and zeal for experiences without repression or suppression. When boundaries are violated, the guilt leads to a deep depression. With denial, the escape from depression is another manic episode. Rinse and repeat.

"Segal also noted the capacity of psychotic patients to experience guilt. However, she noted that the paranoid-schizoid ego becomes fragmented by the guilt and through projective identification puts the despair and grief into the analyst. Countertransference depression and confusion are therefore common with this patient group...This fight between love [idealization] and hate [devaluation] produces the moral conflicts so classic of neurotic, depressive patients. In the paranoid-schizoid position, however, the ego is not dealing with moral issues, but survival issues." So when external figures are exposed to this pathology, they also become depressed and confused. The patient may feel better when placing the blame on the analyst or other external figures, and this feeling better can be a dependency where the self is scaffolded on the therapist, which is a kind of parasitic exchange. Their internal justifications make them feel better, but the analyst is exhausted. Part of the exhaustion is that the mind of a healthy person tends to entertain lies and accusations from others as having some partial truth, which is a toxic introjection from the projection or suggestion from the patient. It takes effort to recollect and say "this is not me!" Lies also increase energy draining anger in the target being slandered. Therapists will also show counter-transference to the patient based on their past negative experiences and how they responded back then.

In Fragmentation, persecution and primitive guilt, Waska describes Doris' experience where she laid out her horrible childhood and how dangerous the environment was. With idealization she would contradict these dangers with denial by talking about family members and the environment as being ideal and harmonious. At times she would be helpful in the community but her idealization led to homeless people, that she was trying to help, taking advantage of her and robbing her, in one example. She had fears that she would kill in retaliation alongside intrusive thoughts of internal persecution preventing her from applying normal boundaries that are assertive, but not too aggressive. Without boundaries she would fear dependence on others, including therapists, which included foreboding projections onto them and the world. This is why having a strong core good object in the mind allows one to be more independent and capable of self-direction. Self-direction is possible when you know where all the good things are. "She felt independent thought caused her mind to spin out of control and 'talk to itself.' Doris had to split off and project her feelings. This led to her being plagued by panic attacks and phobias...She felt too that having her own thoughts and feelings was equivalent to being alone, trapped, in danger of attack and 'crazy'. She feared she would 'fall into the black hole for ever', which was her way of describing a terrifying experience of fragmentation and disintegration. These anxieties led to loneliness, desperation and hopelessness. Fear of losing the object was analogous with loss of self." Projection was so intense that when Doris was in the therapist waiting room she said "I can tell from the vibrations in the air what everyone is thinking. There is a lot of negativity here and that must cause you a great deal of stress. You could be so stressed out that suicide might be an option."

The Cure - Disintegration: https://youtu.be/MNZxs0TWz8s?si=YB8ADNhuFy5_r3Ew

On the other hand, when the child has positive experiences re-introjected more consistently, the negative experiences warded off by splitting provide that core trust that there are more good experiences to come. This comes about with idealization, which is an unconscious desire to rate experiences that are only satisfactory at the heightened level of instant gratification found only in the womb. Of course, these experiences aren't at that level of security, but it has the effect of increasing patience for the infant if they are capable of believing in abundance and that more good experiences will repeat. Good objects build from reality, so an adult mind can thread one good, but not ideal, experience after another and fill out in the mind a map that is more realistic. "It is characteristic of the emotions of the very young infant that they are of an extreme and powerful nature. The frustrating (bad) object is felt to be a terrifying persecutor, the good breast tends to turn into the 'ideal' breast which should fulfill the greedy desire for unlimited, immediate and everlasting gratification. Thus feelings arise about a perfect and inexhaustible breast, always available, always gratifying. Another factor which makes for idealization of the good breast is the strength of the infant's persecutory fear, which creates the need to be protected from persecutors and therefore goes to increase the power of an all-gratifying object. The idealized breast [comes after] the persecuting breast; and in so far as idealization is derived from the need to be protected from persecuting objects, it is a method of defence against anxiety...The idealized mother thus becomes a help against the persecutory one." In this case, the good object is not attacked or confused with the bad object.

Melanie felt that the process of idealization and the internal phantasies related, were hallucinatory and based on denial. We have a conscious short-term attention span that can handle fragmentary quantities of information at one time, so putting the attention on phantasies of future gratification keeps the mind distracted from memories of bad experiences. Denial is a distraction of attention focused on something positive, and one can glean a sense of ownership, possessiveness, and a belief in property with good objects, when reading Melanie Klein. "In wish-fulfilling hallucination, a number of fundamental mechanisms and defences come into play. One of them is the omnipotent control of the internal and external object, for the ego assumes complete possession of both the external and internal breast. Furthermore, in hallucination the persecuting breast is kept widely apart from the ideal breast, and the experience of being frustrated from the experience of being gratified. It seems that such a cleavage, which amounts to a splitting of the object and of the feelings towards it, is linked with the process of denial. Denial in its most extreme form—as we find it in hallucinatory gratification—amounts to an annihilation of any frustrating object or situation, and is thus bound up with the strong feeling of omnipotence which obtains in the early stages of life. The situation of being frustrated, the object which causes it, the bad feelings to which frustration gives rise (as well as split-off parts of the ego) are felt to have gone out of existence, to have been annihilated, and by these means gratification and relief from persecutory anxiety are obtained." Essentially a successful distraction.

Because this is only a temporary relief, and because new experiences continue, some of them will not be optimum. There needs to be a gradual acceptance of reality where trust and patience in the good experiences predict more to come. "In this state, frustration and anxiety derived from various sources are done away with, the lost external breast is regained and the feeling of having the ideal breast inside (possessing it) is reactivated. We may also assume that the infant hallucinates the longed for pre-natal state. Because the hallucinated breast is inexhaustible, greed is momentarily satisfied. (But sooner or later, the feeling of hunger turns the child back to the external world and then frustration, with all the emotions to which it gives rise, is again experienced.)"

The oasis of the good breast may become as reliable as a stream or river, so the energy in the mind to put together reality and to gradually increase in detail, begins to develop adaptive skills in the child's ego. "[If there is] a mitigation of the fear of the bad object by the trust in the good one and depressive anxiety only arise[s] in fleeting experiences, out of the alternating processes of disintegration and integration develops gradually a more integrated ego, with an increased capacity to deal with persecutory anxiety. The infant's relation to parts of his mother's body, focusing on her breast, gradually changes into a relation to her as a person."

For Melanie, life is a never ending experience of integration and disintegration, where ideally the integration makes up most of the individual's lifespan. Periods of disintegration can easily occur, like in the example above of a diagnosis of schizophrenia, or less destabilizing experiences of divorce, for example, or a loss of meaning, or extended periods of stress and depression. Ego-integration involves learning, adapting, and trusting in what is good. Trust comes from predictable routines that are positive. As the child develops in the positive direction, there is a "growing sense of reality and a widening range of gratification, interests, and object-relations."

The Super-ego and the Depressive Position

In infancy, skills aren't good enough for negotiation and integration when there are excessive environmental pressures. With more experience, new skills gradually reduce the intimidation of persecutory anxiety so that the depressive position can take place. Now, it isn't always a smooth ride to the depressive position, which Klein believes first appears within the first 3 or 4 months, because as the definition suggests, there are many humbling feelings that have to be tolerated in order to perceive more reality. There is also more development internally. With the mother's interactions with other intruding family members, especially the father, "oral frustrations release the Oedipus impulses and the super-ego begins to be formed at the same time."

So at first, there's a rudimentary ego supported and energized by the life and death instincts of the Id. "I see the formation of the ego as an entity to be largely determined by the alternation between splitting and repression on the one hand, and integration in relation to objects on the other." Because these two instincts are opposed, the ego cannot remain the sole operation outside of the Id. "In my view, the splitting of the ego, by which the super-ego is formed, comes about as a consequence of conflict in the ego, engendered by the polarity of the two instincts. This conflict is increased by their projection as well as by the resulting introjection of good and bad objects. The ego, supported by the internalized good object and strengthened by the identification with it, projects a portion of the death instinct into that part of itself which it has split off—a part which thus comes to be in opposition to the rest of the ego and forms the basis of the super-ego. Accompanying this deflection of a portion of the death instinct is a deflection of that portion of the life instinct which is fused with it. Along with these deflections, parts of the good and bad objects are split off from the ego into the super-ego. The super-ego thus acquires both protective and threatening qualities. As the process of integration—present from the beginning in both the ego and the super-ego—goes on, the death instinct is bound, up to a point, by the super-ego. In the process of binding, the death instinct influences the aspects of the good objects contained in the super-ego, with the result that the action of the super-ego ranges from restraint of hate and destructive impulses, protection of the good object and self-criticism, to threats, inhibitory complaints and persecution." The use of the word deflection has to do with the binary opposition between good and bad where good cannot exist without knowledge of what bad is. Good adaptation or bad disintegration in the ego results in commentary about what is good or bad coming from the superego, behaving as representatives of the life and death instincts.

So the good in oneself as well as the bad is knowledge of one's potentials, and because there isn't any knowledge that goes beyond experiences in the environment, that same knowledge is used to predict, or project, the good and dangerous aspects of the environment. It takes one to know one. Repeated experiences lead to hardened worldviews that are maladaptive for adults when they enter safe environments that appear subjectively hostile. The voices of the good super-ego or the bad, can be strengthened with repetition or weakened with inactivity: Re-introjections and re-projections. It's easy to see that we need to recognize something. If activities are occurring, or not, and they aren't recognized as such, it's the current limit for projections and predictions. Projection: "Something of the ego, [knowledge or past experiences,] is thus perceived as occurring in someone else."

Internal conflict is increased depending on the balance between imitations for helpfulness, criticism or self-sabotage. "The super-ego—being bound up with the good object and even striving for its preservation—comes close to the actual good mother who feeds the child and takes care of it, but since the super-ego is also under the influence of the death instinct, it partly becomes the representative of the mother who frustrates the child, and its prohibitions and accusations arouse anxiety. To some extent, when development goes well, the super-ego is largely felt as helpful and does not operate as too harsh a conscience. There is an inherent need in the young child—and, I assume, even in the very young infant—to be protected as well as to be submitted to certain prohibitions, which amounts to a control of destructive impulses. The infantile wish for an ever-present, inexhaustible breast includes the desire that the breast should do away with or control the infant's destructive impulses and in this way protect his good object as well as safeguard him against persecutory anxieties. This function pertains to the super-ego. However, as soon as the infant's destructive impulses and his anxiety are aroused, the super-ego is felt to be strict and over-bearing and the ego then, as Freud described it, 'has to serve three harsh masters', the id, the super-ego, and external reality."

Because the internal world is just developing at this time, the mother's helping attitude and care, or neglect and abuse, is at first attributed to the breast, like it has a personality of its own. It can appear alternatingly helpful or persecuting. The infant also is becoming more aware of its effect on the mother by his or her hostility, and her retaliations. The internal desire for hostility can turn into hostility to suppress one's hostile actions, an inner hostility against external hostility. Freud originally said "the prevention of [a satisfaction of craving] calls up a piece of aggressiveness against the person who has interfered with the satisfaction, and that this aggressiveness has itself to be suppressed in turn. But if this is so, it is after all only the aggressiveness which is transformed into a sense of guilt, by being suppressed and made over to the super-ego." This craving initially is oral sucking for Melanie, who was influenced by "Abraham [who] thus contributed materially to our understanding of the origins of anxiety and guilt, since he was the first to point out the connection of anxiety and guilt with cannibalistic desires."

The infant is beginning to notice the cause and effect of their own intentions on the mother. There is a desire to control external actions as well as internal attitudes. "The early processes of introjection and projection lead to establishing within the ego, side by side with extremely good objects, extremely frightening and persecuting objects. These figures are conceived in the light of the infant's own aggressive impulses and phantasies, i.e. he projects his own aggression on to the internal figures which form part of his early super-ego. To anxiety from these sources is added the guilt derived from the infant's aggressive impulses against his first love object, both external and internalized." One can feel guilt even if the threats of violence are only thought about, and not acted on.

In projection, the child is actively being hostile to the breast for its perceived bad behavior and it's also hostile towards it's own aggressive behavior out of fear of retaliation from the persecuting breast, which acts as the external representative of the death instinct. By the infant imitating the punishing aspect from the mother to control his or her attacks on the breast, there can be an identification with an oppressor introjected and re-introjected again and again. External bad experiences create memories and predictions, or projections, about future bad experiences. Defenses arise as a pre-emption to ward off any impending threats to reduce anxiety. "Any danger threatening from outside intensifies the perpetual inner danger situation. This interaction exists in some measure throughout life. The very fact that the struggle has, to some extent, been externalized relieves anxiety. Externalization of internal danger situations is one of the ego's earliest methods of defence against anxiety and remains fundamental in development...The child feels himself to be bad and he attempts to escape from guilt by attributing his own badness to others, which means that he reinforces his persecutory anxieties." And if one falsely blames another, there will naturally be a fear of retaliation leading to the said paranoia.

There ends up being a fear of external bad objects, a fear of future external bad situations, and a fear of one's own power to hurt others. To keep from disintegrating into fragmentation, the child needs craving for positive experiences and actual experiences of satisfaction to increase their patience and strength to make navigation in the environment smoother. Remember, pathological projection is going to happen when fears about an environment are unjustified, because the memories are so negative. "For while the infant's aggressive impulse through projection plays a fundamental part in his building up of persecutory figures, these very figures increase his persecutory anxiety and in turn reinforce his aggressive impulses and phantasies against the external and internal objects felt to be dangerous." If we take this last sentence and revise it towards positivity it would show us the direction of integration. For while the infant's helping impulse, through introjection, plays a fundamental part in his building up of helping figures, these very figures increase his feelings of being supported and in turn reinforce his helping impulses and phantasies that support the external and internal objects which are felt to be encouraging. The child is either helping itself and others or destroying itself and others. Another description for this comes from The Versatility of the Kleinian model by Daniela Carstea. "For the knowledge of a whole object to be kept in an integrated way in the mind, a lack of splitting or of automatic projections of the displeasing aspects, good or bad, is needed, which constitutes, alone, a fixed and loving attachment...Object relation[s] makes conscious the price paid..." for negative reactions like envy and paranoia..."The diminishing of the self is manifold: it is deprived of a connection with the good object and likewise deprived of those prized elements of itself [one's own good potentials] which were placed in the object by projective identification."

The external mother is doing her duty by feeding the infant, but the infant begins to think that it's also being rewarded for having good behavior, and being cooperative. The infant is dependent and feels the need to cooperate in order to survive and has no modern conception of social work and observation by the community towards the mother to reinforce her sense of duty to raise the child properly. The infant feels it's in the wild and totally helpless and must negotiate with the independence and power of the mother. "One comes to know that one's mother, for example, has her own separate relationships, indeed her own mind and private thoughts, that exclude oneself. This realisation, essentially a perception of the oedipal situation understood in its broadest sense, provokes a keener sense of need, dependency and loss, and a shrinking of omnipotence. It is also likely to provoke envy and jealousy. These elements are difficult to experience and they are likely to give rise to defences against the depressive position." Stephen A. Mitchell, in Freud and Beyond, symbolizes this split between good and bad as a projection that "the shit people will overwhelm and bury the delicate flowers...The flowers and the shit people can be integrated only if [the subject] can believe that the flowers will emerge from underneath the shit."

As the child introjects experiences, preferences, and identities, and projects or predicts future behaviors in the mother, a familiarity and trust develops so that predictability reduces anxiety. The child can empathize with an imperfect mother. "The anxiety relating to the internalized mother who is felt to be injured, suffering, in danger of being annihilated or already annihilated and lost for ever, leads to a stronger identification with the injured object. This identification reinforces both the drive to make reparation and the ego's attempts to inhibit aggressive impulses." Repeated introjection and projection is re-introjection and re-projection. Routine feedings, bathing, quality time, etc., is a sign of a stable external world and it produces a stable internal world for the infant. As the world expands, a mother's routine builds in the mind of the infant where the internal mother is now less idealized or devalued. The imperfections are tolerated when development is going well and a desire for reparation builds up for the infant to lovingly cooperate with the imperfect mother, which makes routines more pleasant and smooth. The child needs to see their way out with adaptive choices so that craving for accessible activities can takeover and calm down persecutory impulses.

Part of the weaning process is progressively the child seeing themselves being of more help to the mother as they age. Stressful situations that are unexpected and beyond what the child can handle can start off a domino effect of regression to the paranoid-schizoid position. Depending on the child's constitution and how unstable experiences are in the environment, periods of disintegration manifest. These positions can oscillate back and forth, especially when there are jarring changes to routine or threats arising that even parents cannot control. "Constitutional factors cannot be considered apart from environmental ones and vice versa. They all go to form the earliest phantasies, anxieties and defences which, while falling into certain typical patterns, are infinitely variable. This is the soil from which springs the individual mind and personality."

Mourning for Klein, which is similar to weaning, is the depressive position encountered again and a reestablishing of the lost external object inside of oneself (memories and imitations). With an actual death of a parent, the mind needs strong enough impressions made up from positive experiences of the past so that the child can learn to emulate and take with them those positive character traits of the lost parent and ward off feelings of emptiness or feelings that the parent was like a forgotten stranger. The depressive position is like mourning and weaning from old stages of development that have died. Failure to face those feelings leads to escape back into reuniting with paranoid-schizoid ghosts.

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

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

The Psycho-analysis of Children by Melanie Klein: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780860682387/

Melanie Klein Her Work in Context by Meira Likierman: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780826457707/

Melanie Klein (The Basics) by Robert D. Hinshelwood: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9781138667051/

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

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

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

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

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

Waska, R. (2002). Fragmentation, persecution and primitive guilt. Psychodynamic Practice, 8(2), 147–162.

Carstea D. The versatility of the Kleinian model. Melanie Klein’s theory and formulations of morality and forgiveness. J Psychol Clin Psychiatry. 2023;14(3):82‒86.

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

Freud and Beyond - Stephen A. Mitchell: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780465098811/

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

[klein-archive]

Patient H: An acute worry about urination

7th March 2024

I have resumed my explorations in the Melanie Klein archive this month after a short time away. My latest find comes from the B files, which contain Klein’s clinical notes on both adult and child patients. Here I'm sharing some excerpts from file B.69, which contains notes on a male patient, ‘H’, from 1940. The file is fairly large, running to some 67 pages, so I am picking out some particularly thought-provoking fragments here. If you want to read more of this material, you can do so at PP/KLE/B.69 on the Wellcome Library website.

The file opens with Klein describing patient H’s ‘acute worry about urination’, which is connected to fears he has about his penis. She writes,

‘…from an analysis many years ago, he knows much about castration fear, and has evidently stabilised himself in localising his fears in this way.’ [image 3/67]

Klein writes that H’s worry about his penis and about urination is connected to a fear of ‘internal trouble’ or disease, and of cancer specifically. She links these preoccupations to a concern that arose during H’s adolescence, related to his enthusiasm for collecting butterflies and insects: namely, a presentiment that the cabinets in which the creatures were displayed would become disarranged. Klein describes the rituals by which H tried to ensure the cabinets were not tampered with, and records that he could eventually no longer bear the strain of his anxieties and gave up collecting altogether.

She writes, ‘his fears about internal disaster…actually, the fears about the inside, the cabinets, and the penis, are alternating…,’ and also that his, ‘fear about the penis [is] obviously over-emphasised in order to keep away from these internal fears’. [image 4/67]

‘Abundant dream material’ follows from Klein’s connection of these things, and she records that,

‘the butterfly, a very much admired and loved object to begin with, in a dream changed into another insect with mutilated wings, much less good, and also much less attractive, and then into the insect which paralyses another insect.’ [image 4/67]

Klein’s notes show her interpreting H’s dream in light of his dread of homosexuality, which he feels ‘would be somehow disastrous for his penis’. H associates to catching a butterfly with a white net, and Klein says this highlights H’s longing for a good penis, and that the net represents, ‘the mouth by which he took in the penis of the father, a good object, [which] changes instantly into a more and more dangerous one as soon as it is inside.’ In association, H recalls,

‘…feelings of being insincere towards his mother, who seemed to think that he was a paragon of virtue, beyond temptation, as it were, and he knew, when she said something of the kind…that he was interested in other boys’ penises. This interest was quite conscious. He took it that it was mainly to compare them with his own, which, in childhood he had felt to be inferior and damaged. He feels also that in his frequent urination the penis has shrunk, and he must see it and make sure that it is still there. That is one of his conscious feelings about the obsession to urinate.’ [image 5/67]

Feelings of insincerity follow, Klein writes, from H’s sense that he has robbed his mother of father’s good penis, represented by the butterfly he tries to catch.

H’s father, Klein notes, is a frightening figure felt to be violent and dangerous. Whilst H recalls feeling little warmth for his mother, he does bring a memory of clinging to her bedsheets when he was terrified of going to kindergarten. Klein notes that,

‘…he was so terrified that his only help was to stand there with closed eyes, which seem[ed] to relieve some anxiety, as if he would see something awful if he opened his eyes…he feels the terror was that he left his mother behind in danger.’ [image 6/67]

H also remembers,

‘…that when his parents had not come up from the evening meal by eight o’clock – which had been a ritual – then he started to yell, so that it could be heard all over the house. If they came up by eight then it seemed to be all right. We understood that some awful danger was to happen to them at night time, and that this was shifted on to this definite hour at which he knew that the parents were at a meal with the people there as well.’ [image 6/67]

On 19th March 1940, H tells Klein that he feels peaceful. He is reluctant to admit any improvement, lest things go wrong again (Klein thinks that he is referring here to intercourse), but there are no symptoms to speak of, no indigestion or urination trouble. H then reports a dream, a fragment of which I will share here:

‘A man drove him in a very fine car to someplace which he thinks must have been a scientific meeting. (This man has been a very important person in his own line of work. In the past he looked up very much to him and would also have liked this man to take notice of him and be interested in him, but that was not the case. Now of course the situation is altered. This man has retired, and H feels that he can triumph over him because he may quite easily get ahead of this man’s former work.) In the dream it seemed quite a…[word missing] that this man drove him there, but then both the man and the car seem to have gone, and H was trying hard to find them. He had already taken notice of landmarks to remember the way back…as if he himself would have to find the way.’ [image 15–16/67]

Klein tells H that the man who drove him had clearly helped him, and meant something to him. He was important too, and has a very fine car. She notes H’s great wish to have a car of his own. The situation of being driven by an important man, Klein says, ‘points to the internalised father’, and she connects H’s admiration of this man’s work to his admiration of his own father, who built a harbour in a place where they spent summer holidays. She suggests,

‘…there may have been great admiration in [the] early days for the potent father, the father who owned mother, who made children, who had skill and power, etc. Great desire and longing to be on good terms with his father, to be taught by him, to be introduced into sexuality, to share with him mother. I suggest that the fine car stands for mother.’ [image 17/67]

Klein also writes that,

‘H was in the dream trying to undo the loss of the important and good father and the mother, wishing to have the two with him and united in a good way inside him. At the same time the wish to become independent of his internal figures, the landmarks he made because he was going to find the way himself…In this hour as well as in former ones, much work about the repression of his love and admiration for his father, actually there is only one friendly memory so far, when his father had him on his knee, and offered him a chestnut, which H very much liked, but could not accept it, and told his father he could not accept it because he had to find chestnuts for himself. He thinks his father was very angry.’ [image 18-19/67]

To learn more about Klein’s work with H, readers should go to PP/KLE/B.69, and start from image 19/67, where the notes reproduced here end. I will certainly be doing this, and in my next blog post may bring more about H, or perhaps another of the patients who appear in this fascinating file. I am struck that, in the brief excerpts I have shared, Klein is once more grappling with the way in which the patient’s conception of a parental couple powerfully influences both his sense of himself and his relations with others. She clearly feels it is part of her role to help H uncover the better memories of his parents, which she perceives in his material – though often deeply buried.

[denisearef]

Sand Man

Male gaze

The "male gaze" is a concept coined by feminist film theorist Laura Mulvey to describe the way visual arts and literature depict the world and women from a masculine point of view. In this perspective, women are typically portrayed as objects of male pleasure, desire, or fantasy, often emphasizing their physical appearance and sexual attractiveness. The gaze positions women as passive, often inviting voyeuristic or objectifying looks from the viewer. This concept highlights how traditional media and culture have been shaped by and for male audiences, reinforcing gender roles and inequalities. The male gaze can limit women's agency, reducing them to mere objects to be looked at rather than fully realized individuals with their own perspectives and experiences.

Analysis

In Neil Gaiman's "The Sandman: A Game of You," the chapter "Slaughter on Fifth Avenue" opens with a representation of the male gaze. This cover introduces Barbie, sleeping on her bed just wearing underwear.

This cover operates on two key principles of the male gaze. Firstly, it positions the viewer as a voyeur. As Laura Mulvey states in Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, "The determining male gaze projects its phantasy on to the female figure which is styled accordingly. In their traditional exhibitionist role women are simultaneously looked at and displayed..." [1]. By showcasing Barbie in a vulnerable state, asleep and partially undressed, the image invites the viewer to objectify her. Her body becomes the focal point, divorced from any narrative context.

Secondly, the cover reinforces the power dynamic inherent in the male gaze. Barbie's state of unconsciousness strips her of agency, making her a passive object for the viewer's gaze. The choice of revealing sleepwear further amplifies this dynamic, suggesting her body exists for male pleasure, even in a private moment.

In conclusion, this cover prioritizes aestheticized femininity over plot development or relevance to attract a primarily male audience. This approach undermines the potential for a more nuanced narrative and reinforces the dominance of the male perspective in storytelling.

To-be-looked-at-ness

"To-be-looked-at-ness" is a term that complements the concept of the male gaze and was also introduced by Laura Mulvey in her influential essay on visual pleasure and narrative cinema. It refers to the passive role assigned to women in visual media where they exist primarily to be observed and looked at. She states, "In their traditional exhibitionist role women are simultaneously looked at and displayed, with their appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact so that they can be said to connote to-be-looked-at-ness. Women displayed as sexual object is the leit-motiff of erotic spectacle: from pin-ups to striptease, from Ziegfeld to Busby Berkeley, she holds the look, plays to and signifies male desire." [2]. This concept emphasizes how women are often depicted in a way that prioritizes their visual appeal and objectification, rather than their agency or individuality. In the context of "to-be-looked-at-ness," women become objects of the gaze, serving as passive spectacles for the active male viewer. This term captures the idea that women are often framed and presented in visual media to fulfill a voyeuristic or fetishistic desire, reinforcing traditional gender roles and power dynamics. It underscores the reduction of women to mere visual objects, neglecting their complexity and relegating them to a subordinate position in narrative and representation.

Analysis

The scene of Foxglove waking up naked in bed blatantly illustrates the concept of "to-be-looked-at-ness." Her nudity is gratuitous, adding nothing to the conversation with Judy or the general plot. This prioritizes her physicality over narrative purpose, turning her into a visual spectacle.

Furthermore, Foxglove's startled reaction positions her as a passive subject caught off guard. This aligns with "to-be-looked-at-ness," where women lack agency and exist to be observed. The focus on her breasts further objectifies her, reducing her to a sexual object.

The scene's perspective, positions, us, the readers, as voyeurs. This reinforces the power imbalance of the male gaze, where the reader enjoys the "privilege" of gazing upon a vulnerable, undressed woman.

Ultimately, this scene prioritizes Foxglove's "to-be-looked-at-ness" over her character or story role. It reinforces the idea that female characters are defined by their bodies and exist for the male viewer's pleasure.

Women as spectacles

"Woman as spectacle" refers to the portrayal of women in media and culture primarily as visual objects to be observed and admired. In this representation, women's value is often equated with their physical appearance and how appealing or desirable they are to the viewer, usually from a male perspective. This concept ties closely with the idea of the male gaze and "to-be-looked-at-ness," where women are positioned as passive recipients of the gaze, existing primarily for visual pleasure. When women are presented as spectacle, their agency, emotions, and experiences are often overshadowed or ignored in favor of their visual appeal. Laura Mulvey explains in Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, "The presence of woman is an indispensible element of spectacle in normal narrative film, yet her visual presence tends to workagainst the development of a story line, to freeze the flow of action in moments of erotic contemplation." [3]. This portrayal can perpetuate stereotypes, objectification, and inequality by reducing women to superficial characteristics and limiting their roles to those that cater to or satisfy male desires. The concept critiques the ways in which media and culture prioritize and commodify women's bodies and appearances, often at the expense of their autonomy and individuality.

Analysis

Within The Sandman, the panels showcasing Rose's dream state exemplify the concept of "women as spectacle." There's no narrative justification for her complete nudity. This choice prioritizes the visual display of her body over the dream or plot itself, reducing her to a spectacle within the fictional world, again, likely catering to a presumed male readership.

The scene's focus on her body largely intensifies by depicting Rose's nudity from multiple angles. This excessive focus on her naked body overshadows any potential exploration of her subconscious or the dream narrative. It reinforces the notion that her value lies solely in her physical appearance, feeding into the concept of female objectification. This emphasizes the power imbalances within the male gaze and highlight how female characters primarily serve one purpose in narratives like these, which is to entertain men and function as spectacles. Ultimately, this approach reduces Rose to an object defined by her body rather than her character or role in the narrative.

Gender norms

Gender norms are societal expectations dictating behaviors and roles based on perceived gender. These norms define how men, women, and non-binary individuals should behave, dress, and interact, often reinforcing binary distinctions of masculinity and femininity. Butler in Gender is Burning explains, "Identifying with a gender under contemporary regimes of power involves identifying with a set of norms that are and are not realizable, and whose power and status precede the identifications by which they are insistently approximated" [4]. Traditional norms can be restrictive, enforcing stereotypes and limiting individual expression. Masculine norms might expect men to be strong and unemotional, while feminine norms might prescribe women to be nurturing and appearance-focused. Challenging these norms is crucial for promoting gender equality and inclusivity, recognizing diverse gender identities and expressions beyond traditional categories. Breaking free from rigid gender norms allows for greater self-expression and acceptance, acknowledging the complexity of human identity.

Analysis

The dialogue between Barbie and Little Barbie in "The Sandman: A Game of You" illustrates traditional gender roles and expectations. During Little Barbie's monologue, little boys' fantasies are described as complex and varied, involving power, intelligence, and adventure. They dream of being heroes, facing challenges, and earning admiration through remarkable deeds. These fantasies encourage agency, ambition, and a sense of adventure, reflecting societal expectations for boys to be assertive, strong, and successful. On the other hand, Little Barbie's description of girls' fantasies is more simplistic and limiting. According to her, girls often fantasize about being princesses, awaiting rescue or recognition. This fantasy reinforces traditional gender roles where girls are passive, dependent, and defined by their relationships to others, particularly men. It perpetuates the idea that happiness and fulfillment for girls come from external validation or rescue rather than personal agency or accomplishment. The contrast between these two sets of fantasies highlights the rigid gender roles and expectations imposed on children based on their gender. It underscores how societal norms shape and limit the aspirations, dreams, and self-perceptions of individuals from a young age.

Positive images

Positive images refer to representations in media and culture that promote diversity, inclusivity, and empowerment, challenging traditional stereotypes and biases. These images showcase individuals from diverse backgrounds, abilities, genders, and orientations in a respectful and authentic manner. They highlight strength, resilience, and individuality, celebrating the unique experiences and contributions of each person. Positive images play a vital role in shaping perceptions and attitudes, fostering understanding, empathy, and acceptance. By portraying a range of identities and experiences in a positive light, they help break down barriers, combat discrimination, and promote social justice. Positive representation in media and culture can empower marginalized groups, inspire change, and contribute to building a more inclusive and equitable society.

Analysis

In the graphic novel, this particular panel featuring Wanda's conversation with the old lady offers a refreshing example of positive representation that challenges traditional stereotypes and biases surrounding older people. Wanda's admission about her identity as a trans woman and the old lady's response create a moment of understanding, acceptance, and empathy.

Instead of resorting to ageist stereotypes where older characters might react with bigotry or misunderstanding, the old lady responds with openness and kindness. She shares a personal experience about her "grandson" transitioning and her daughter's supportive perspective, which brings Wanda a sense of validation and happiness. This interaction counters Jack Halberstam's claims in Looking Butch where he argues that, "Positive images... too often depend on thoroughly ideological conceptions of positive (white, middle-class, clean, law-abiding, monogamous, coupled, etc.)..." by portraying a mentally unstable older lady as capable of acceptance, and understanding [5].

In essence, this panel exemplifies positive images by showcasing a respectful interaction between the old lady and Wanda. By presenting this positive representation, the graphic novel contributes to fostering a more inclusive and equitable society that doenst discrimination solely due to older age.

Works cited:

[1] Mulvey, Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, 715.

[2] Mulvey, Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, 715.

[3] Mulvey, Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, 715.

[4] Butler, Gender is Burning, 339.

[5] Halberstam, Looking Butch, 185.

[mayaswells]

Holy Hollywoods Meaningless Transfixions.

_____________________________________

Human Being as Grim Reapers of Ash.

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A Plea For The Sterilisation Of All Liars.

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Let’s Give Death A Chance, Peace Will Follow.

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To Pronounce the Name of God; is to Pronounce that God as (not just) Dead —- but to Pronounce that God, as Usurped, or at least Dethroned — and Not-God; as merely “Thrown” like the rest of Being amongst the all-inclusive contingency of the Named, as Immanently material to us —- and thus paradoxically, all Man’s Naming instincts — which is revealed particularly here by his attempts at naming God —- are the practice effectively of a kind of Taxidermists Practice —- a movement inherently always ‘put-out’ of Theology and unto the sphere of Anthropology.

One can go a step further, in regards to Identity, Power, Naming and here in the idea of Pronouncement —- by also admitting the Murderous, or inherently Suicidal and Ashen act of engaging with Pronouns altogether, in gendering the Godhead, they are in that very moment split of from themselves —- and the possibility of their own ultimate wisdom and benevolence —- and effectively the Revelation of an engagement of the Taxidermists Table of which is effectively Hegels “Sluaghterbench” —- making all Gendering a dissection of the Living, or what could also be seen as a kind of transplant of Death, which may very well identify the inner nature of all identity itself — onto Life — in such a way that, it’s very Livelihood is always-already necessarily Murdered, or killed in what is technically Manslaughter —- by Human Beings, In Life’s very identification *as* Life.

Bare Life, in its truest sense, is merely a foolish Judgment of Dress-Codes and Phantasies made all-too-evident —- in the only truly Bare Life being the Life-form, firstly without our linguistically mediated sense of self-consciousness —— and secondly; as an observed phenomena, one whose Spirit leaves the Visionary or Witness, essentially Speechless —- in an absolute immanence, in apprehension without any a-prior, and in a sensuous experience of that Life-form whose essence is entirely Awesome, technically speaking — in truly inspiring nothing but the Speechless Awe of its Spirits Life left Living — revealing the Gravity which is essential to the nature of Death —- and to unconscious value hierarchies (which themselves are the surgeons structuring of Death, as metaphysically built into the projection of Ontology itself, if not to the spectre of an Absolute Ontic —- whose Impossibility slips into the very Impossibility of Ontology itself.

This Gravity of Death, reveals firstly all Life as appearing in the phenomenology of the Ephemeral and within of Subtlety, whose Sublime nature requires an Apprehension of Awe also, if not to be the Apprehensions of the mere Walking Dead, no matter what Zealousness is present —- showing the inherent Lie in all enactments of Persuasion and the attempts at Convincing, which is always a Conspiracy and a Conniving sort of sordid one at that —- whilst also presenting us here with the basic structural aspect of Creation, necessarily prescribing it’s own necessity as always Self-Creation -- with the very Tabletop Bench inherent to the structure of Man’s Created enactments of Creativities, as especially in relation to the Technical; and thus half of the Spirit of all Scientific endeavours also —- requiring such Bench’s to be supplemented with the most Religious of Reverences, In order for them to functionally produce any “Understanding” whatsoever.

The atheist scientist must always acknowledge his bloody handed white gloves, which are stained always be the Blood of the Murdered Godhead — whom, in a form of cosmic joke; reveals the idiotic impossibility of the strange sterility of which one might guess the Catholics left over as a Hauntological spectre, from their nature, In the Sterility inherent to their fallacious and hysterically repressed attempt at repressing the Crucified Christs Genitalia necessarily inherent to the Gendering of which his enfleshed embodiement seems to really demand for the fullest richness of significance to flow unabated as such.

The Scientist repressed the nature of his Agenda in dealing with the study of Nature —- which inherently exists along with the Gendering inherent to enfleshed embodiment —- as the Scientist hysterically repressed and attempts to sterilise the possibility for his own Agenda — using the same Ideological trickery of which the Church endlessly uses —- it is simply here a manner of realising our Naked Emperor today wears no Labcoat or Gloves, not merely costume and show — and so Science was always a Stillbirth from the beginning, in being born dead or has and always has only dealt thusly with the Dead — with its own Mythologically structured and organised Images, just the same as the hypocritical Religious-Man has long been accused of —- it is merely a game here of musical chairs and changes in outfitted Glamour and in terminological evolutions and advances in the very Language itself, rather ever than with an actual Understanding of anything ‘beyond that language’ or ‘outside of it’ —- and so Language is alike a Vampire, Living on sucked blood, and remaining out of direct sunlights revelatory potential.

Language as Death, may very well be a kind of “Virus from Outer Space” - as William Burroughs humorously put it —- and could well kill the potential of all Awe and Life for Human Beings, if they are not to consciously realise what their Languages do —although Communicationis itself an inscrutable aspect fundamental to Life — it must Communicate Content, of which is always the Dead Carcasses of its Hunted Prey —— necessitating Prayer to any People with the Good Sense of retaining the mysterious phenomenology of Speit and Awe in their Lives even worth any longer Communicating —- as despite of the absurdly Holy nature of the Spritof Communication itself —- Human Beings still require a sense of Authoirty in order to Authenticate the Real provisions of the Enthusiasms by which their most acutely beautiful Comunication and Conversions, or Dispellings and Dissolutions

, may ever occur — and so Communion must always wisely acknowledge the Death within of its Ephemeral Desering of Natures Dissution —- of the delicacy involved in Languages Sublation of Life into the ethereal and essentially immortalised, seemingly as Spectre and as Ghost, however Holy, or merely Hollywood.

I myself, as the writer of this document —— do not formally exist in any way but as the phantom necessity retroactively produced by itself he appearance of all Writting; as inferring to us falsely all SpaceMarks Virtually necessity for the Genie like Virtuoso who Acts *as* the personality of the Writer, who actually engaged in its writing —- as if the Heraclitean River was never crossed at al, and yet neither was it acknowledged as a formal limitation upon all of our Human Affairs and Doings.

[pattern-recognition]

@uraandri I think there’s several intersecting impulses behind this mode of this mode of thinking (including me inventing a guy to get mad at) and i’m not at all holistically codified in my philosophy towards architecture and art, beyond general disdain for profligatism, wastefulness, and the insustainability inherent to capitalist consumerism. Of course there is never going to be a single style of object, building, or dress universal to anything outside of the purview of the small scale, just as there can never be a universal income, language, or worker. However, I think a lot of people are unable or unwilling to interrogate the bourgeois biases inherent to their aesthetic preferences and phantasies, of the future, of labour, and of living (we’ve all ran across the “i do not dream of labour” or the fully-auto-luxury-space-communism types).

One of the first assumptions is that minimalism is inherently bourgeois, and with a cursory analysis this isn’t entirely without merit because much of what is visible in the media that’s labeled as minimalism are luxury products and homes crafted especially for the bourgeois, and much of this is uninspired, regressive, garbage. However, first and foremost these objects are commodities, and must be analyzed based on their position within a capitalist economy, with all of its vices hidden yet present. A $50 Hasami porcelain mug is a commodity fit for bourgeois hands, yet if made in a socialist context, what would be so damning about unadorned tableware? If the same article was made in the USSR, Cuba, the DPRK, etc, it would be admonished by capitalists for being a representation of ostensibly soulless communist conformity and restriction of expression, yet in the extant context it’s celebrated for execution of intent.

Furthermore, as I’ve stated before, the pairing down of ornamentation in favor of the form of an object is nothing new, it’s been a protracted endeavor in western art since the Renaissance. Scientific socialism does not exist outside of the western canon, and that is not a disqualifier for its veracity. Before us lays the epoch of communism on the horizon, and it’s impossible to think that it will visually resemble the forms of the past, a past gilded by exploitation and anachronistic thought.

On the other hand is a failure to grasp the current trends in commodity production, and an unwillingness to address what a planned economy might entail or necessitate in the future. The thought that minimalism and austerity are bourgeois might lead one to come to the conclusion that their corollary, maximalism, is proletarian in nature, or at least some representation of a vague working class populism. This is pure fantasy, divorced from both historic truth and contemporary experiences. It smacks of pastoralism and the perceived nobility of the peasant, of a peaceful Jeffersonian cottage adorned floor to ceiling to appropriately “authentic,” wether that be in adherence to a national mode of decor or the orientalist’s drive to taxonomify everything foreign, patterns and motifs. This is bourgeois thought filtered down to the unconscious worker, born from boredom with decadence. The handicrafts of yore were adorned as they were because the mode of manufacture was completely different: non-industrial, unplanned, predating both capitalism and the socialism that will supplant it. There is no time nor the resources in an industrial economy to make sure that every bannister in an apartment bloc is hand carved, that every sleeve hand embroidered, that every little trinket and bauble made with a watch marker’s eye for inscrutable detail. Furthermore, the obsession with an overabundance of things to hoard is both a symptom of capitalism’s modus operandi of ceaseless accumulation and of the imperial core’s privilege of cheap consumer goods, made from the sweat of those in the periphery.

None of this entails that under socialism we will have bad things, though it will, and I dare say should, entail that we will have less things. Less cars, less plastics, less waste, less advertising, less garbage, less consumption, less regurgitation. A planned economy necessitates that resources, of which are inherently finite and only growing more scarce as the leviathan of capitalism swallows more and more, be put towards addressing the most rational needs.

For example, there is an almost global housing crisis unfolding as we speak; the most rational way of recourse is to construct great, large-scale community housing projects, not single family homes in the suburbs. There is a epidemic of loneliness and alienation, both of labor and of mind, and simultaneously the service economies the west have evolved into are bereft of jobs that are actually societally productive; the answer is to increase urbanization, bring people together in cohabitation instead of atomized wehrbauer competition, and reinstate production in close proximity to communities instead of parasitically siphoning the production of outsourced factories. People need clothes, food, transportation, and he is not a communist who does not think these things should be handled with the greatest benefit to the collective of workers in mind.

Finally, one of the most common refutations I hear is that “But what if I want things to be pretty?” To that I say look at the USSR, China, any other socialist project. If you cannot find beauty in these places, the beauty in revolution, in collectivisation, and in the things they made, then you might not be as radical as you think.

whenever i see “leftist” or progressive language critiques of architectural or use-value object design philosophies, interior and exterior, like brutalism, minimalism, or anything with a mere touch of austerity and criticism of excess, they’re always written by someone who’s concept of a poor person’s domicile looks like a studio ghibli painting

[apas-95]

It is supposed to be the teaching of Marxism that art for art’s sake is an illusion and that art must be propaganda. This is, however, making the usual bourgeois simplification of a complex matter. Art is a social function. This is not a Marxist demand, but arises from the very way in which art forms are defined. Only those things are recognised as art forms which have a conscious social function. The phantasies of a dreamer are not art. They only become art when they are given music, forms or words, when they are clothed in socially recognised symbols, and of course in the process there is a modification. The phantasies are modified by the social dress; the language as a whole acquires new associations and context. No chance sounds constitute music, but sounds selected from a socially recognised scale and played on socially developed instruments. It is not for Marxism therefore to demand that art play a social function or to attack the conception of ‘art for art’s sake’, for art only is art, and recognisable as such, in so far as it plays a social function. What is of importance to art, Marxism and society is the question: What social function is art playing? This in turn depends on the type of society in which it is secreted. In bourgeois society social relations are denied in the form of relations between men, and take the form of a relation between man and a thing, a property relation, which, because it is a dominating relation, is believed to make man free. But this is an illusion. The property relation is only a disguise for relations which now become unconscious and therefore anarchic but are still between man and man and in particular between exploiter and exploited. The artist in bourgeois culture is asked to do the same thing. He is asked to regard the art work as a finished commodity and the process of art as a relation between himself and the work, which then disappears into the market. There is a further relation between the art work and the buyer, but with this he can hardly be immediately concerned. The whole pressure of bourgeois society is to make him regard the art work as hypostatised and his relation to it as primarily that of a producer for the market.

- Christopher Caudwell, Studies in a Dying Culture, 1938

[zololacan]

Sexuality as a discourse is, like political economy (and every

other discursive system), only a montage or simulacrum which

has always been traversed, thwarted and exceeded by actual

practice . The coherence and transparency of homo sexualis has

no more existence than the coherence and transparency of

homo economicus .

It is a long system), only a montage or simulacrum which

has always been traversed, thwarted and exceeded by actual

practice . The coherence and transparency of homo sexualis has

no more existence than the coherence and transparency of

homo economicus .

It is a long process that simultaneously establishes the psy-

chic and the sexual, that establishes the "other scene," that of

the phantasy and the unconscious, at the same time as the ener-

gy produced therein - a psychic energy that is merely a direct

consequence of the staged hallucination of repression, an energy

hallucinated as sexual substance, which is then metaphorized

and metonymized according to the various instances (topical,

economic, etc.), and according to all the modalities of secon-

dary and tertiary repression . Psychoanalysis, this most admira-

ble edifice, the most beautiful hallucination of the back-world,

as Nietzsche would say. The extraordinary effectiveness of this

model for the simulation of scenes and energies - an extraor-

dinary theoretical psychodrama, this staging of the psyche, this

scenario of sex as a separate instance and insurmountable real-

ity (akin to the hypostatization of production). What does it

matter if the economic, the biological or the psychic bear the

costs of this staging - of what concern is the "scene" or "the

other scene" : it is the entire scenario of sexuality (and psy-

choanalysis) as a model of simulation that should be questioned

[xjmlm]

Quotes from Seminar XI about Freud’s Wolfman case:

“What, for the analyst, can confirm in the subject what occurs in the unconscious? In order to locate the truth—I have shown you this in studying the formations of the unconscious—Freud relies on a certain signifying scansion. What justifies this trust is a reference to the real. But to say the least, the real does not come to him easily. Take the example of the Wolf Man. The exceptional importance of this case in Freud’s work is to show that it is in relation to the real that the level of phantasy functions. The real supports the phantasy, the phantasy protects the real.” FFC p. 41

“If you wish to understand what is Freud’s true preoccupation as the function of phantasy is revealed to him, remember the development, which is so essential for us, of the Wolf Man. He applies himself, in a way that can almost be described as anguish, to the question—what is the first encounter, the real, that lies behind the phantasy? We feel this throughout this analysis, this real brings with it the subject, almost by force, so directing the research that, after all, we can today ask ourselves whether this fever, this pressure, this desire of Freud is not that which, in the patient, might have conditioned the belated accident of psychosis.”

FFC p 54

“For the moment, it is our horizon that seems factitious in the fundamental relations to sexuality. In analytic experience, it is a question of setting out from the fact that the primal scene is traumatic; it is not sexual empathy that sustains the modulations of the analyzable, but a factitious fact. A factitious fact, like that which appears in the scene so fiercely tracked down in the experience of the Wolf Man—the strangeness of the disappearance and reappearance of the penis.”[his witnessing of coitus a tergo] FFC p.70

“This is why the butterfly may—if the subject is not Choang-tsu, but the Wolf Man—inspire in him the phobic terror of recognizing that the beating of little wings is not so very far from the beating of causation, of the primal stripe marking his being for the first time with the grid of desire.” FFC p.76

“It is the mapping of the topology proper to our experience as analysts, which may later be taken in a metaphysical perspective. I think Merleau-Ponty was moving in the right direction---se the second part of the book, his reference to the Wolf Man and to the finger of a glove.” FFC p.90

“It is there. then, that Freud intends to set up the bases of love. It is only with activity/passivity that the sexual relations really come into play.

Now is the activity/passivity relation identical with the sexual relation? I would ask you to refer to a passage in the Wolf-Man, for example, or to various others scattered throughout the Five Psycho-analyses. There Freud explains in short that the polar reference to activity/passivity is there in order to name, to cover, to metaphorize that which remains unfathomable in sexual difference. Nowhere does he ever say that, psychologically, the masculine/feminine relation is apprehensible otherwise than by the representation of the activity/passivity opposition. As such, the masculine/feminine opposition is never attained. This is sufficient indication of the importance of what is repeated here, in the form of a verb particularly appropriate in expressing what is at issue—this passivity/activity opposition is poured, moulded, injected. It is an arteriography, and even the masculine/feminine relations to not exhaust it.” FFC p. 190

“This enables us to conceive what is materialized in the experience. I would ask you to take up one of Freud’s great psycho-analytic cases, the greatest of all, the most sensational—because one sees in it, more clearly than anywhere else, where the problem of the conversion of phantasy and reality converge, namely, in something irreducible, non-sensical, that functions as an originally repressed signifier—I mean the case of the Wolf-Man. In the Wolf-Man, I would say, to give you the thread that will guide you through your reading, that the sudden appearance of the wolves in the window in the dream plays the function of the s, as presentative of the loss of the subject.

It is not only that the subject is fascinated by the sight of these wolves, which number seven, and which, in fact, in his drawing of them perched on the tree number only five. It is that their fascinated gaze is the subject himself.

And what does the whole case show? It shows that at each stage in the life of the subject, something always arrived to reshape the value of the determining index represented by this original signifier. Thus the dialectic of the subject’s desire as constituting itself from the desire of the Other is correctly grasped, Remember the adventure of the father, the sister, the mother and the servant-woman Groucha. So many different stages that enrich the unconscious desire of the subject with something that is to put, as signification constituted in the relation to the desire of the Other, in the numerator.

Note what happens then. I would ask you to consider the logical necessity of that moment in which the subject as X can be constituted only from the Urverdrängung, from the necessary fall of the first signifier. He is constituted around the Urverdrängung, but he cannot substitute anything for it as such—since this would require the representation of one signifier for another, whereas here there is only one, the first. In this X, we must consider two sides—that constituent moment that sees the collapse of significance, which we articulate in a place to its function at the level of the unconscious, but also the return effect, which operates from this relation that may be conceived on the basis of the fraction. It must be introduced only with prudence, but it is well indicated for us by the effects of language.” FFC p. 251