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LOOPING THE LOOP: THE CHOREOGRAPHING AND PSEUDO-POETICS OF CATASTROPHE
George Blair
Such familiar (and
familial) catastrophes exist to demonstrate that ‘at any moment the ordered and
reassuring world can suddenly capsize… disclose the hidden surface in order to
show that its other side is no more than a simple heap of garbage’.
John Calder, preface to the
writings of Claude Simon.
1.
The French writer Claude Simon, was born in 1913, the same year as Albert Camus, and became a prominent exponent of experimental fiction in the sixties, begun by Sartres and Camus in the previous decade; ‘in The Flanders Road Simon expands a mere ten minutes or so of real time into a complex and powerful work of fiction’ (Calder, 1986, p. 91). At first the statement above concerning ‘familial catastrophes’ appears ambiguous: where to locate the ‘heap of garbage’. Is it on the other side of the ordered world where the garbage is to be discovered, or the ordered world itself that is revealed as such by catastrophe? The word ‘simple’ makes it clear. The implication equates ‘familiar’ with ‘simple-minded’. But what of the ‘hidden surface’ – is it a more meaningful dimension that is demonstrated, or is it all in vain? Is Simon thoroughly pessimistic? Calder refers to the cynicism of post-modern writers, like Claude Simon, which portrays the role of the so-called order of civilisation as concealing a ‘grotesque detritus’ (Calder, 1986, p. 94). He cites Rilke as reflecting a dominant theme in Simon’s writing ‘to the effect that we are perpetually engaged in organising a chaos which engulfs us continually until we fall apart ourselves’ (p. 93). In the same way, David Carradine’s final overweening peroration on the myth of the superhero in Tarantino’s film Kill Bill declares that Clark Kent is Superman’s critique of the whole human race. It is the omnipotent’s judgement of everyday reality.
My use of this quotation above (ibid.) is to point up the futility of the psychic system set up to deny the significance of a primal blow. My statement is paradoxical since it is the failure to signify that results. Henceforth an artificial meaning is created to mask, and expel from awareness, a primitive condition that can be stated as the developmental failure of an enduring meaning, not, as the existentialists such as Simon claim, the fundamental meaninglessness of the human condition. It is tempting to think that for the existentialist writers of the nouveau roman the hidden (ravaged) surface is the sole truth on to which the collapse of artifice opens. In the latter view, the paradox that meaninglessness is the truth, is what is hidden in a civilised refusal to look nature in the face. My point is that it is the vicissitudes of the maturational system, ‘the whips and scorns’, that, by reaction, can lead to uneasy remedies and plausible camouflage. My interest is in the way that such systematic recourse reflects a subjective loss of meaning. The ‘hidden surface’, in being imaged, by whatever means and in whatever form this may be – however vicious – as a truth, and not relegated to the status of detritus, highlights the habitual and inadvertent means of disguising what may be ‘red in tooth and claw’, and may thus, by a seeming paradox, nourish the soul, by affording the feasibility of choice. By this I intend a modification of the meaning of the word ‘civilisation’. This does not rule out a case for pessimism. But it seems to me to be a consideration elided by the existentialist Claude Simon. Calder mentions as characteristic the Simonian ‘notion of cycle, of decay and regeneration: of tragic paradox at the very heart of things’ (ibid.), to the ultimate order of a dehumanised natural world, a phylogenetic view that seems to disregard the provenance of personal meaning.
According to Bion’s notion of catastrophe, the word might be applied to every change that occurs at a primitive level of experience. I will reserve ‘catastrophic change’ to indicate suddenness, as opposed to a gradual coming to, and linked to the notion of crossing a major threshold or in common parlance ‘rising from the ashes’. This may be thought of as analogous to Meltzer’s use of the word ‘massive’ to refer to degrees of projective identification, later modified as follows: ‘… I would no longer like to speak of “massive” projective identification, partly because it is too quantitative a term where quantity of phenomenology may be confused with quantity of underlying personality structures’ (Meltzer, 1992, p. 41). This bears on the importance of ‘shifts in the centre of gravity, at the moment, of the sense of identity without reflecting a structural shift’ (ibid.). It is none the less significant in the often very slow progress from common parlance thinking to the onset of a capacity to begin to work in the transference. In other words, catastrophe is endemic to change on the one hand, and on the other, to its aborting.
What I set out to do here
is to look at one well-developed and hermetic psychodynamic adjustment to
primitive catastrophe. The paper is based on my work with Gerry, a man in his
late thirties. The presence of catastrophe he disclosed by the mention of a
historical ‘irrelevance’ when he came into therapy. His therapy is conducted
twice a week on the couch. This paper represents the first two years of the
work.
In Bion’s thinking, in the primary context, all emotional-sensory events (beta-elements) are catastrophic and necessitate the use of projective identification as the primary means of communication. ‘Beta-elements are not amenable for use in dream thoughts but are suited for use in projective identification’ (Bion, 1962, p. 6). Without the metabolising by alpha-function, subjective emotions cannot be digested or meaning made of them. I shall try to show that the phenomena of Gerry’s linguistic expression indicates the absence of this epistemic function, and constitutes an attack on the couplings which would otherwise usher in a gathering of the transference. Thus does he ward off a return of the experience of catastrophe.
The apparent absence (or defection) of a metabolising object made it crucial to deny the advent of catastrophe by resorting to identifications, first as underwriter for a collapsing collective ego, and then as quasi-entrepreneurial rebel. What was imminent has become immanent. In sessions, Gerry persisted in wandering in a realm of abstraction, referring obliquely to an authorised version rather than being able to let himself down into his psychic reality. By his genteel use of ‘our commonsense discussion’ he arrives again and again at the futility of his therapy, each time ‘a topic has been covered’. His question: ‘What next?’ is the communication of his predicament, the transference of his catastrophe, to be read as exclamation: ‘What next!’ For all he intends this to indicate that matters have been satisfactorily covered. This affects me with a sense of the unbridgeable gap in his object, the endemic impossibility of his being heard, a bland unconscious communication of panic. His form of address, then, is a civil-isation of intolerable confusion, as opposed to a metabolic, epistemic process, by which it is given habitable shape. Indeed, although Gerry came into therapy showing signs of fragmenting, he has largely used his therapy as a palliative. This can be seen as a psychic retreat (Steiner, 1993), a place of evasion rather than of contemplation.
His transference communications are more of an intrusive nature, while he stands off and is isolated. On the rare occasions that he evinces relief at having his unconscious communication heard, the sense of it is short-lived and is quickly cut off. It is put into me as if I function as a family album, and an object of his envy, as if he were saying, ‘It’s all right for some’, but also as retaliation for my having perpetrated something on him which feels to him like a judgement of him, by which he is cut down. It indicates to me cumulatively that, for him being known, itself carries the dread of impending catastrophe.
2
The Loop
And he sensed percolating from the kitchen, humble, squalid, time-marking human thought, marking time in one spot, always in one spot, going round and round, in circles, as if they were dizzy but couldn’t stop... the way we bite our nails.
Nathalie Sarraute: Tropisms
In working with Gerry there is a notable absence of a sense of catastrophe, only a deadly continuousness; the blow persists obliquely, refracted in the characteristics of his dialogue, and is coordinated by the detailing of what he calls his loop. This ‘loop’ constellates a deeply buried traumatic memory. My hypothesis is that it consists in his experiencing himself to be unbearable, both as an unconscious conclusion to parental defection, and as a consequence of his resultant rage. At root it embodies a grievance that he has not received what was owing to him. This paralyses his motivation, while, by a self-deprecating rationalising, he perpetuates early deprivation. This in turn is projected into his everyday situation, creating the irritating belief that ‘nothing is ever good enough’ and ‘why does it always happen to me?’. This builds until he turns on others and erupts, leaving himself with the sense of having destroyed the links he has tried in good faith to build up with others. This is approached analogically and drives an inveterate ambivalence. Danger is toyed with in terms of a constant series of risky deals where ostensibly only money and reputation are at stake and which serve to strengthen the sanction of his defences against his failure to image himself. This constitutes a failed manic defence, manic in the sense of its heroic and prestigious context in an arena of dog-eat-dog, failed, while still addictive, in that his fortunes and reputation continue to spiral downwards. It thus stands as symbol of aspiration to a less defended existence.
As his destructive outbursts were one of his presenting problems, I have the sense of the contamination of an aborted adolescence. His natural aggression and the gathering of a nascent manhood had to be suppressed in face of the catastrophic break in continuity at a critical point in his development, and the consequent premature act of reparation. Thus the role proper to the parental part, namely that of bowing to the inevitable supplanting by the offspring’s achieving independent adulthood, is projected into the unlikely host of the highly competitive milieu of the popular music industry, an environment that, as I have heard it said of the Irish, hugs you to itself only when you’ve made it. Under this manic defence, however, I detect a schizoid defence, where concepts have become evacuated of affective content. Thus failure here, and conversely the chink, is the sense that in the ‘risk-free’ aspect of the sole trader – the ‘one-man band’ or ‘just me and Linda’ – he is more acutely threatened by the spectre of a soul-destroying ‘mediocrity’ which returns him to the meaningless parent-child environment that is often the butt of an apologetic contempt.
I will consider the material under those heads – the order in which they dawned on me – before proceeding to the consideration of his narcissism.
A colleague who works in a medical practice referred Gerry to me. The
notes informed me that his attendance at the six sessions offered had been
unreliable, that he had no proper job, that he lived free with a girlfriend Linda,
who had a responsible, very well paid job, and of whom he was envious. Some
doubt was expressed as to whether this man would be able to benefit from
analytical psychotherapy.
He is a good-looking youth of a man in his mid-thirties. He started his
therapy in late spring two years ago – not with a whimper. He at once conveyed
his craziness to me. His ability to keep to the frame was minimal. He evinced
signs of being scattered and disorientated and was frequently late. He was
evidently close to dread, distracted, but not delusional. He would get on to
the wrong train and phone me halfway through his time, saying he’d gone in the
other direction and would see me in ten minutes. Or it was that he’d got off
the train ‘somewhere’ and was getting on again. Perhaps he had ‘got waylaid
with emails’ or was ‘muddled’ about the arrangement. His manner was surly and
he carried himself in a louche, offhand way, which I read as his unwillingness
to be there. Even when very late in showing up he would spend time in the
consulting room, checking his mobile for messages before switching it off. This
acting out gave way in time to a more regular attendance. Interruptions,
however, continued from time to time, for example, a series of untoward events
that seemed to be down to the ill will of his car made it ‘necessary’ to miss
sessions. But his more regular attendance combined with his uniform quality
of voice, for which I used the term ‘gentlemanly’, seemed to
indicate that the terrors were passed simply by virtue of his turning up, and
that I had been tamed.
In the very first session, I elicited the following information. When he was seven, his mother ran off with his father’s best friend. He and his sister were taken out of school and whisked off to the new place. Some weeks after this, the father took the children back. Abandoned as he was, the father was unable to cope. He went back to stay with his mother, taking the children – Gerry and his young sister – with him. There they all lived in one room and shared the same bed. The father would lie in bed sobbing and his son, aged between seven and nine, held him to try and comfort him. Before he had developed either a capacity to be alone (in the presence of the mother), let alone a capacity for concern, his mother had departed and left her boy with the only means of holding himself together, namely by requisitioning an embryonic reparative urge, and projecting his need on to his father. This he recounted without feeling, as though it were irrelevant. Two years later, as he put it, ‘she returned and the family was reconvened and continued as before’ [my emphasis]. Throughout the interregnum and after the return of the mother, his schooldays were miserable. He felt ashamed and isolated and, inherent in his psychic injury, there was no one to whom he could adequately convey his feelings; his reflections of school indicated he had no conception of what it meant to be met, an abiding feature of the de-signified structure of his language. Nor could he overcome a profound sense of inertia with regard to learning.
The implication of the commonplace in recounting his history created a picture of a profound isolation and emptiness that, to some extent, obviated despair, and for that reason alone things ‘continued as before’. Although he spoke about all this in an offhand way, the story relates a severe shift away from a belief in his being looked after towards mobilising a primary carer in himself, calling upon resources that had not yet formed. I argue that Gerry was born into a parental lack that predated the refracted trauma of the maternal defection and predisposed him to severe psychological disturbance. It became clear that at best there had been only a faulty metabolising structure and presence. This atmosphere was not so much volunteered by him as interpreted by me. It was, in other words, nothing out of the ordinary.
This dynamic
shows up in his account of family statics. In line with his genteel
considerate role, he promulgates a version in which he had a good upbringing, in
which everything was provided. This alternates with statements that his parents
were awkward around him and did not know how to treat a son. It is also as if
his young sister does not exist4. His mother and father seldom
contact him, offer him well-meaning advice, and when he is with them, either on
the phone or in person, he is aware of his mounting impatience and resentment
towards them. He experiences them as bumbling and complacent. At the same time,
he is in the grip of a harsh superego, arising from the projection of the
mother’s inadequate maternal responses, and chides himself for his contempt.
This leads into a conflated poisonous mood in which he become incommunicado and
takes it out on his girlfriend, a situation she refers to as ‘doing a Gerry’.
What
could not be overlooked was how this information was delivered without any
emotional resonance whatsoever; it was of the order of things, and had largely
to be elicited. None of this, the apathy, his reported unruly temper tantrums,
those early humiliations and isolation, his desperation, entered tonally into
his voice, which remained steady and monotonous. It seemed astonishing to him
that this could have any relevance to his present plight. Even to consider it
he regarded as an interruption to his project of solving his current situation
with regard to his work and, in that context, his reported counter-productive
outbursts.
The
absence of any access to the formation of meaning meant that the trauma was
buried and replaced by the language of pseudo-adult understanding and fashioned
in a profound accidie1. The inertia at the root of this man’s
inability to make anything of himself is constantly expressed in an arid,
carefully articulated form of speech, underlying which is the implication of
complete passivity and the forlorn expectation of magic, the perseverance of
infantile omnipotence out of and around which a contempt leaks, expressed not
only in his body language and acting out against the frame of the sessions, and
his disregard of interpretation, but also in his exploitation of Linda, his
girlfriend, who, and he considers it strange, doesn’t seem to mind.
3
The failed manic defence
Gerry
built up a manic defence that symbolised what it was that he had lost, or was
absent, and that would nullify the sense of the loss. Since his early twenties
he has been involved in the ‘music business’, hanging out with bands and DJs
and arranging events. At once he fell in with aspiring musicians and took on
the job of managing them. At first he enjoyed a brief success, raking in the
money from his activities. Some he promoted went on to become successful,
ditching Gerry in the process. This was not, as it might be thought, the sign
of an ineffectual personality; Gerry has an ongoing record of alienating
colleagues by his unprovoked outbursts or through flirting with other men’s
girls, flirting, because his interest in sex is usurped by his use of
pornography. Although he had started off with a bang and made a lot of money
from his brand, he steadily and surely laboured more and more under the
reputation as a pariah in the industry. His associates, more fiercely motivated
and single-minded than he, left him behind. He was, as a result, dropped with
no part any more in the project he had been instrumental in setting up, while
the project went on without him to become a money making success. His sense of
being taken advantage of cut him to the quick. His profession hit the buffers,
and he evinced little appetite to do anything else. Increasingly he was on the
run from his ghosts.
His
focus in session after session was the inertia. He felt prevented from doing a
proper job of work in the world. This he saw to be at variance with the special
sense he had of himself. Thus, to be ordinary was mediocrity on a par with the
life led by his parents. He did not acknowledge his refusal. It was left to me
to coax him and for me to fail. He preferred the role of misunderstood and
flawed impresario, a soi-disant role that still usurped his time. This
obsessive hobby of his he referred to as his ‘work’. It was, however, at the
same time a bugbear, a source of mounting desperation and repeated let downs
and fallings-out. In contrast, the speculative nature of his carefully
constructed monologue masqueraded as calm reflection. This consisted in
building up a sequence of alternative phrases as though nothing had any
grounding in felt reality. There was always another name for things. Behind
this was the complaint laid at my door that he was getting nowhere. He was
representing his ‘loop’ for me.
Before
moving on to his schizoid defences I want to take up the phrase I emphasised
above, by which he referred to life after the return of his mother to the fold,
namely ‘continued as before’. A feature of this man’s pathology is the absence
of discreteness. The concept of a loop is apt. Nothing is sequential but
continues without pause, or a pause gives no evidence of processing having
taken place, instead only the points are changed, it all goes round and round
and ends up where it started. In addition there is a haphazard amorphous
quality to his presentation. Thus what
had been and what was then ‘reconvened’ in childhood would appear to have been
devoid of reverie. Bion’s choice of that word to carry forward his
thinking of Freud’s ‘cathexis’ (Besteztung) may aptly evoke the sense of
‘an openness to what is to be attended to… an openness to discriminate between
what is worth attending and what is not’ (Fisher, 2007). Gerry’s characteristic
narrative gives every sign of someone who does not know, and has no image of,
what it is to be attended to.
4
The schizoid defence
The way Gerry
used words gave me an eerie feeling. As he spoke, and he invariably set in as
soon as he lay down, I had a growing sense of neither of us being there2. How to describe his monologue – the language of insignificance,
eloquent evacuation, sign language ‘signifying nothing’? His use of language
functioned as an alternative to the development of personal meaning. I was, in
my counter-transference, commanded not to listen to him, but rather to
engage is discussion. His projective identification, which rendered me blind to
his identity, was powerful. It led to my phoning him, much to my embarrassment,
one evening when I was away for the weekend in the complete conviction I was
phoning a man who had a key I required, and for whom I had no number. It
was, however, a breach that ostensibly carried no significance for Gerry.
He referred to
‘our sessions’ as ‘these discussion’
and as ‘the various points raised or topics covered’ or ‘solutions and actions
I’m determined to make’. His phrase, ‘that’s it really’ implied that we had
covered everything and left nothing further to deal with. He is a man who has
mastered meaninglessness. Thus in the non-communication of himself he
communicated most forcibly. My dilemma was my sense of not having the key to
breaking through the language barrier. And thus I was experiencing great
frustration. That this was a sign of his being without energy or desire became
clear, and its function in masking his extreme frustration. At one point while
he was using phrases like ‘boxes ticked’, ‘points raised in our discussion’, I
expressed the sense that his mode of address, his pseudo-philosophical musing
was as if he were present at a board meeting at which the minutes of the last
meeting were being passed. Gerry was tickled by this, the brief laugh he
emitted I felt to be in spite of himself. It may even have indicated a certain
relief that an entangling web of words had been for a moment cut through – an
ephemeral hope of being heard.
He
described his actions and feelings as existing in that ‘loop’ A setback
precipitated a kind of chain reaction. It did not remain as a thing in itself
to be processed. He spiralled down until the defence was engaged and the
speculative system swung into action. It was the nature of this mannerism,
rather than the speculative content, I set myself to try to understand. I
thought of there being in the cadence and conjunctions, the tone and the
tangents, a sign of an inner signifier that he was unable to touch upon. This
may well do as a statement of transference. The sheer blanket nature of his
communication conveyed a sense of an impermeable membrane. Any intervention was
headed off. The points were changed to allow the sentences to rush off on
another line with no variation in their tenor. It masqueraded as a kind of
engrossing philosophical discourse
studded with a regress of alternatives – the ponderous ‘or’ penultimate (even
ultimate) in every statement, opening the way to a choice of synonyms which
added nothing and was topped off by the pseudo-reflective ‘really’ that tailed
off into thin air. To him this was a plausible use of time, yet it never got
him anywhere. Where he stood in terms of initiative was hard to discern. To use
the term ‘agency’ here is paradoxical; yet to get nowhere was where he led. His
was a bland narrative of absence from himself, in the generating of which
inertia and evacuation were closely allied.
This
stalled quality of life in face of his need to expedite a career for himself
was a focus in session after session. By his own admission, at the age of 35,
life had not begun. He would listen politely to my attempt to get below the
surface, declare it interesting, tell me that I had lost him or that he had
drifted off while I was speaking. While his language and the legend functioned
to propose the maddening futility of practical solutions, it did at the same
time suggest that practical solutions were the only conceivable options.
Underlying this was an extreme frustration predicated on the ineluctable fact
of its incommunicability. It was inconceivable and even quite pointless that I
should begin to understand this. And in the wealth of ideas that I was
producing he had me hoist on the petard of his projective identification – to
negate meaning as a cooperative endeavour – out of dissimulated envy.
Thus he had mastered a form of pseudo-speculation the achievement of which was self-delusion. This was his diatribe. While he thought he was in communication with another, he manipulated a verbal system that did not convey a personal meaning, and he was thus able to elude the extremity of his alienation. The syntax of this language interested me above all else, the abortive conjunctions, the way that the word ‘really’ read as the opposite –‘not really’ – or indicated a loose end. It neither hung together as a coherent strain of thought nor did it reach a conclusion, rather it consisted of a multiplication of hypotheses. Here is an example of the kind of monologue with which he started one session. It lasted for the first twenty minutes without any intervention from me. It constellates his ‘loop’:
‘not much change in my day to day life.. really… don’t know if it’s my lifestyle habits, but as life has got more enriched I was expecting to lose some of my bad ways… that is difficult – maybe because… to do with a routine, but it’s beginning to concern me, because I want to change certain aspects and part of the push it takes to make the changes… I suppose the frightening thing is the contentedness to stay in the patterns…’
Here,
in this prologue, he is referring to his ineffectual and addictive manic
pastime as a brand consultant which he terms his work, but which earns him no
money and usurps his time and brings him into bad odour with those with whom he
deals, his horror of the idea of ‘a proper job’, but also his indolence, his
addiction to pornography, the lack of intimacy in his relationship. But he is
asking for it. The original idea I had for a title for this paper was ‘The Man
Who Shot Himself In The Foot’. Sexual intimacy gives him the creeps. He
‘prickles’ at his girlfriend’s touch. His Oedipal triumph was a plaster cast, a
broken pot. But he trades on his sexual attractiveness. He is the trickster.
Chasseguet-Smirgel (1985, p.70) ‘dwells on the putative pervert’s attempt to
substitute an immature sexual organ for a grown-up one, and describes the dishonesty of trying to pass a little penis off for a
daddy one, without bearing the pain of passing through the Oedipal complex and
coming to terms with one’s limitations and ambivalence’ (Young, 2003). Gerry’s
solution is to dignify his isolation as ‘going it alone’. It is a false
position that sets up a false dichotomy between dependence and independence. He
lives between the Scilla of being cut down to size and the Charybdis of the
humiliations of trust. It is the either/or of severe isolation. He continues:
‘… it slightly scares me… perhaps I am realising there has to be a big effort from myself rather than things change around me. What am I actually talking about? I am still sitting at home with my laptop with loose routine, still organising parties and I suppose I feel a bit imprisoned by that routine… I dunno. All came about because I find myself in the same routine and would have found myself strong enough to get a job somewhere else. I get the feeling inside me – whether it’s a knowing or a voice or… anyway something tells me to stop everything to do with music and just concentrate on trying to get a job. It feels like the only way I am going to achieve that. It comes in for a fleeting moment and disappears and things we have talked about so many times before... what is the rest of that sentence? It brings me back to where I started… really. I am repeating, kind of going over the same things and same feelings, identifying an area that needs to be changed or… but obviously don’t want to.’
I
sit overwhelmed by the staleness and feeling slighted by the way he does not
take account of my presence, while the work of months is beneath his contempt.
In
its repetitiveness the diatribe continually fetches up against a brick wall. To
thus metaphorically constellate a space, his chatter suggests it is a space
akin to Sartre’s existentialist play Huis Clos (1944, translated into
English as No Exit). This disjunction reaches right into the
words themselves, the nouns and adjectives are never conclusive, but exit as a
fugue, they open the door to a number of alternatives (‘feelings or thoughts or
decisions which have to be made or boxes ticked, formulations which have some
weight behind them, really…’ = nothing to lay hold of). And I am aware of the
mindless little boy lying in bed and holding a sobbing father in the night – a
place of extremity on the brink of madness. No one was there to be with in the
disconnection with his dependence. Such disconnection is not to be thought.
There were no words because no reception was afforded by the parental culture
for the processing of such catastrophes that might have led to the forging of
sentient words, to symbols. Things suddenly just happened to break things up.
It made no difference. Something ‘always happened’ to him to indicate he was on
the wrong track.
Such
was the content being played out in the form of his narrative. It reminded me
of the film directed by Mark Jonathan Harris about the Kindertransport.
Throughout the film, Alexander Gordon speaks of his experience. Having been orphaned in Poland,
he was sent to England and subsequently arrested and, during his deporting to
Australia, survived the torpedoing of the HMT Dunera. ‘It was terrible’, he said, ‘but it
happened, but it is as if it happened to someone else.’ (Harris, 2000). No
doubt such experiences would have been too awful for an orphan to process. And
in reaction to any assault on his word
skein, Gerry protests in all seriousness that he has come to his sessions ‘to
regurgitate his feelings’, as if this was our mutual understanding of the
process. The implications of this statement were that I was there to lap them
up. Inadvertently and contemptuously he was referring to the failed process of
projective identification.
On
one occasion I referred to his obliviousness as a ‘belle indifference’ = a
defensive apathy. He seemed to give this his consideration, yet before the end
of the session he gave evidence of wanting to progress to the manic defence. He
had reverted to reconsidering yet again the feasibility of his career as
impresario so fundamentally problematic to him, as if it were that I had
suggested.
In
the following session two days later, I misread the time and was half an hour
late for our meeting. I could not believe that I had made this mistake, and
retracing my thoughts, saw that I had remained impervious to my errors in
checking the time. I realised that I had become disorientated, and that this
had a direct bearing on the glimpse he had had of the old dread, so successfully
put away, to enable him to maintain a timeless existence. By this clear
projective identification, by which the deep confusion that had momentarily
surfaced in the previous session and been so promptly expelled when I had
interpreted his disillusionment, had been transferred to me, I was being
informed that my hypothesis had been correct. I spoke to him about the
transaction and sensed it made sense to him. But I question the use of the word
‘disillusionment’. Because his predisposition reverberates with shock and seems
devoid of transitional phenomena, I doubt whether Gerry has much capacity for
illusion. It isn’t disillusionment; it is apathy.
There
is a welter of material to show how, time and again, he takes the emotion out
of his equation. ‘I don’t know what I want to talk about today’ is one sign of
it. His notion of what it means to be grown up he stated as ‘not to have enter
the mind immature tendencies – such as aggression – they don’t come on to the
radar, they are not considered’, and again, ‘I don’t go down that avenue in
myself. What good is it to go down that negative path? There are no real
problems. It gets in the way of my thought process. I am aware of this
well-versed thought process when I am with my parents.’ For Gerry maturity is a
sort of absence.
But
there came a brief glimpse of his having tapped into a process other than his
shallow terrorised circular system. It was the first time in almost two years
that I sensed a breakthrough, short-lived though it was. As he entered the room
I saw his black resentful look. He began to speak about his inertia and said he
felt I would dismiss it as an excuse. He said ‘You think that I am not getting
to the centre.’ I said I thought he put this into me and that he was closer to
the centre in his inertia: ‘what’s the use in telling anyone, it’ll just be
dismissed’, I said. He replied to my impersonating him by saying he hadn’t been
going to bring it up. I replied to this by saying I thought he had been in
touch with himself, but what was the point – no one listens. ‘When I put this
back to you’, I said, ‘you don’t listen to yourself. It becomes a matter of
“try harder” – that voice takes over and you feel a mounting desperation, your
inertia, your “loose ends” This ‘dismissal’ of yours is itself exhausting.
You can’t afford relief and belief.’ Then came the very important rejoinder:
‘but I am behind!’ This struck me as meaningful, but what did it mean? I
reverted to his statement: ‘what’s the use in telling anyone!’ ‘That thought’,
I said ‘cuts off the time you can spend (in your sessions, listening to
yourself). It feels to you as if there is nothing left but going to sleep.’
Gerry sometimes talks about ‘living in the lounge’. I suggested that perhaps
this was the lounge, too, where the hour gets used up for nothing. I told him I
thought that, back then, he had been direct with me. He replied that he was
resentful when he came in. I said, ‘I saw it’. The session ended there. Had he
suddenly glimpsed something beyond the veil?
Gerry
missed the following session. I was left to contemplate my sense of how
impossible for him it was to believe that he is heard, and how ambivalent he
might feel were he to glimpse the possibility. That experience was what was
being serially destroyed.
When
he returned late two days after the missed session, he started by saying he had
experienced something new, a feeling of strength and feasibility. This he
described as ‘a small window’. I said I thought that by being late there were
two things he was telling me about being heard. It is a new and unfamiliar,
perhaps unwelcome, experience, but the window closes on it and depression
ensues. He was thus faced with the rudiments of a choice. Subsequently, I took
opportunity by recalling the experience to point to this dynamic in the
transference, and by drawing his attention to the relief he may have felt in
the experience of being heard which brought up with it such mixed emotions –
resentment and envy.
Another
approach to understanding the schizoid defence is to note that his agreement to
the notion of an apparent conflict – that between inertia and desperation –
resolves into a cynical committed attack on mindfulness, mine as well as his.
Quite evidently his envy is at work in this. I am thinking here of the point
Ronald Britton makes about his patient’s hostility to his analyst’s ability to
think inventively as if in coital relationship to another. ‘If I turned to
something in my mind later on, when things were not so primitive, they felt I
was eliminating my experience of them in my mind’ (Britton, 1989, p. 88).
Emotionally Gerry is at a primitive stage. Should parental intercourse force
itself in an intrusive way on the child’s mind, ‘it appeared to be felt to be
annihilating the child’s link with her mother both externally and internally’ (ibid.).
Gerry exists on the edge of a callous indifference murderous of intimacy; in
his case, exclusion from parental intercourse would seem to have been
thoroughly obviated by prior exigencies and their desperate remedies –
exclusion from no intercourse, no father to service the mother’s depleted
reserves of maternal preoccupation. Behind his extirpated sources of meaning he
appears simply impervious. His longing changed quickly into self-pity and a
sense of futility. The traces were not laid hold of.
5
The Curse
Did you ever think
your life in El Paso was ever going to work?
The Snake Charmer’s sixty-four thousand dollar question:
Quentin Tarantino: Kill Bill
Gerry
usually never remembers what he talked about last time, or rather, how it could
be distinguished from the time before and the time before that. To put it his
way, it had already been dealt with and, he wonders, is there anything else we
haven’t: ‘maybe there is nothing else left to deal with and I do feel a lot
better’, etc. A recent session began and continued in this way. Some way into the session he mentioned how
he felt he wasn’t pulling his weight in his relationship, and how he found it
strange that his girlfriend was no longer being confrontational. He respected
her for it, he said. I said I thought he might be using that in the session to
ward of confrontation. I thought it also true that he was ambivalent and that
he read my silence as containing my loss of interest in him. He repeated his surprise
at this ‘good thing’, at which I pointed out his instant diversionary
tactic.
Rosenfeld
(1971) notes that Abraham (1919) ‘found in these patients3 a most
profound narcissism and he emphasised the hostility and defiance hidden behind
an apparent eagerness to cooperate. He described how the narcissistic attitude
attached itself to the transference and how these patients depreciate and
devalue the analyst and grudge him his analytical role representing the father’
(p. 242). Rosenfeld goes on to develop
a theory of the gang in the mind. ‘The destructive narcissism of these patients
appears often highly organised, as if one were dealing with a powerful gang [in
the mind] dominated by a leader who controls all the members of the gang to see
that they support one another in making the criminal destructive work more
effective and powerful’ (p. 249). The aspiration to get better is experienced
as an attempt to escape from the clutches of the leader. ‘To change, to receive
help, implies weakness and is experienced as wrong or as failure by the
destructive narcissistic organisation which provides the patient with his sense
of his superiority’(ibid.).
This formulation suddenly came to mind in a session some time ago. At a point in the session he excused himself.
‘I was having trouble following you.’
‘Yes, because to follow or struggle would be getting closer to something you are committed to avoid.’
‘I don’t like silence and I go on to something else. I don’t understand my feeling.’
‘Yes, let’s not go there!’ I parodied a hypothetical collusion between us. ‘You were as a child utterly dependent and that led to catastrophe, that is resonated again now and immediately headed off.’
‘So I must think back to the younger years, or apply what happened then to the present.’
‘No! It is there when you are in danger of responding to another part of yourself and want to be reciprocal and better about yourself, with Linda, for example. The dialogue may go like this – ‘It’s time to acquit myself.’ – ‘You dare! Just you try and see what happens. We’ll make your life a misery. Think you can escape?’
I asked him had he seen the film A History Of Violence or Goodfellas.
He’d seen the latter, but, he said, ‘I’ve lost the thread’, and with
that, the session ended.
In contrast to the usual opening remarks, Gerry started the following session by saying, ‘I have been
thinking about the analogy of last time.’ I noted that I had spoken directly
about his repeated pattern and he took flight; it was something of a tribute to
him that he was back. He indicated he would like to ‘apply’ it. (‘It was useful
but how to use it!’) However, he went
off as if it had just been a throwaway remark. What insight had been gained
other than a matter of interesting speculation? Here I am reminded of Rosenfeld’s observation that negative
reaction intensifies the narcissistic system following a breath of freedom that
is full of dreaded repercussions. He returned to the usual theme of either
persevering in his hobby as an entrepreneur or getting a job. I asked him to
describe in detail what was involved in licensing a brand. In the course of
this, he made the curious statement: ‘I am not punching below my weight’. But
he referred to ‘the vulnerable part’ by which he meant the reputation he has
acquired as a result of ‘the fate of previous working partnerships’. When I
reflected on this, I glimpsed the proportions of an internal struggle that
involved grievous punching and wounds, a bloody scenario underlying his
affected sangfroid. Exploring the devil in the machine of his
entrepreneurial self-image I was to discover the fly in the ointment.
Objectively speaking these are shark infested waters he attempts to swim in.
‘It is important to know what it is in you messes up. I think you may have got
a whiff of this in the “analogy” of Goodfellas.’ It was then he said:
‘It rears its head as cocky – cocksure’, and I am thinking of
Chasseguet-Smirgel’s observation, mentioned above, indicative of the failure of
the Oedipus Complex, namely ‘his own magnified phallus which, for lack of any
adequate identification with the father, can only be factitious... this process
may also be detected, whenever we come across any sizeable failure in
identification on both sides of the Oedipus Complex’ (Chasseguet-Smirgel, 1985,
p. 70). I am thinking how the phrase ‘acting like a prick’ indicates an
upstart, a word applicable to Oedipal triumph and the supplanting of the
father.
The takings from his club nights were undeclared at the time,
though settled since. As in The Sopranos, where the ill-gotten gains of
the mafia activities were not banked, his earnings were stashed away, not like
Silas Marner hiding it under the floorboards, but under his father’s mattress.
By trusting his father with this and making him his accomplice he cynically
used him. Untouched, the money remained a millstone, but effectively operated
as a cushion allowing him to remain comparatively impervious to the need to
become responsible, as opposed to a means of enabling preparations towards a
meaningful life. It was a shady deal, for thus, in a superficially reparative
act, he projects into (deposits with) the father a spurious trust, and,
respectively, the father colludes in the crime – that of condoning his son’s
refusal to grow up. It is an expression of his Oedipal triumph where the filthy
lucre stands for the imitation faecal phallus with which he pays off the father
while arrogating the father’s phallus to himself. ‘Therefore we may say that
“falsehood” passes itself off as a phallus, as a penis able to provide
narcissistic achievement, but which actually is, in all cases, an anal phallus…
“Falsehood” is built up taking the equation, faeces = penis, literally’ (Chasseguet-Smirgel, 1985, p.75). Thus the father is smeared.
Here,
then, was the admission of the phallic takeover from the ineffectual and failed
father, with the avenging father imago projected into the wild dogs of the
music industry. We went on to talk about how dependence is anathema and the
addiction to being the cock of the walk leads time and again to his being cut
down to size by the vengeance of the father. The last word was Gerry’s: ‘So you
don’t have a back-up.’ At this point I thought of how I harboured anger towards
him for the way he systematically set aside my interventions, came late to
sessions, missed sessions on a number of pretexts, his attack on the father,
the process, and the pseudo reparative approach to retribution.
In Scorsese’s film, unflinching images contrast the high life of the gangster with the dirty underworkings that lead to grotesquely fascinating displays of violence and mayhem. In this film as in others, notably Newel’s Donnie Brasco about the Mafia, Foley’s At Close Range in which Christopher Walken impersonates the seductive and ruthless gang leader, Cronenberg’s A History of Violence and Tarantino’s Kill Bill, the theme of the lure of gang membership and the fatal consequences of attempting to leave are explored. Each of these films shows vividly how all but impossible it is for a crime gang member to break away. The leader of the gang is a sociopath whose desperation is greater than that of the members of the gang who are drawn to the leader to express a less extreme drive. In Tarantino’s movie, the motivation is made more explicit. Bill, played by David Carradine, says of the cruel elderly martial arts master Pai Mei that he is a bad guy, but like all bad guys when they get old they are lonely. As a killer and godfather Bill expresses eloquently in his seasoned Mephistophelean wisdom that the ultimate mortification is that of being deserted. The engine of the story is The Bride’s attempted escape to live conventionally and Bill’s gang’s slaughter of the members of the wedding. It would appear that behind the unpardonable defection lies the horror of the isolation endemic in evil, and, in the Tarantino movie at least, the origins of this struggle against fate is clearly traced back to degradation. Rosenfeld’s metaphorical treatment of narcissism as a gang in the mind increasingly vibrates in my thinking about Gerry. The terror of loneliness is a driving force behind the mind of the censor, the psychopath and the dictator. It is represented in the tormentor’s motivation to make the other as himself, and, just as the pervert is unable to emulate and make his own what he does not possess, he lives to dissolve difference, the source of his deadly envy, because otherness, another’s separate existence, unsettles his omnipotence with the dread of isolation.
Briefly
I want to return to what Gerry’s language construction evinces and to do so
retrieve the scene of the final showdown between Bill (The Snake Charmer) and
Beatrix Kiddo (The Bride) in Tarantino’s film.
Bill: Now we come to the sixty-four dollar question. He comes and sits portentously across the table from Beatrix. Why did you run away from me, my baby?
Beatrix (after a preamble) because I was going to be a mother… once you knew you would claim her and I didn’t want that.
Bill: Not your decision to make. Beatrix: Yes but I made it for my daughter She deserved to be born with a clean slate…
Bill: Let’s get literal. I’m a killer. I’m a murdering bastard. You know that. And there are consequences to breaking the heart of a murdering bastard…
Beatrix: I never thought you would or could do that – to me.
Bill: I’m really sorry, Kiddo, but you thought wrong.
Beatrix: You and I have unfinished business.
Bill: Baby, you ain’t kidding. They cross swords and Beatrix administers the coup de grace with the five-point exploding heart punch. Bill realizes too late that Pai Mei had taught it her and says so.
Beatrix: Of course. Bill: Why didn’t you tell me?
Beatrix: (tearing up) I don’t know. I’m a bad person.
She looks with sorrow at her one time mentor about to die – precursor of the
joy that was to burst out in her.
First
there is the arrogant pretentious diction of Bill, used all his life to
sanction his fell deeds. Behind it, almost out of sight, is the menacing
intent. Its ambivalence resides in its exalting of evil as a code of honour.
The dignity is eventually meretricious and maudlin. The mammoth
life-threatening task of breaking the code of bondage in order to live and give
freely is tinged with sorrow, a sorrow that has been walled up until dedication
to the task has become thoroughgoing.
Gerry’s
speech has the ring of a man in bondage to a snake charmer. It is arrogant in
its bland disrespect and dissimulated contempt. It is pompous in its posture of
seeking a truth. He cries, he tells me. His tears are not those we imagine on
Beatrix’ cheeks, but are rather the self-pitying signs of omnipotence spurned
before it has become ripe to be set aside. Bill’s accusation – that Beatrix is
a liar, so that nothing she says can be believed – which is a prelude to the
penultimate scene in the film, highlights the underlying mendacity and distrust
of all who are caught up in the mentality of the mafia.
Rosenfeld’s
analogy can be summarised along the line of the following polarity: belonging – comfort and strength –
omnipotence = rewards, as against not belonging – weakness and isolation –
helplessness = retribution; betrayal and defection > retribution swift and
ruthless. The ‘rewards’ are pseudo-independence (wariness of dependence).
Retribution is fired by envy of the aspiration to independence, a freedom that
distinguishes beneficent from malignant dependence; envy does not allow for
what is new or flowing. This presentation represents an extreme entrenched form
of the paranoid-schizoid position.
Rosenfeld draws a vivid picture of this ruthless delusional state of arrested infantile omnipotence, and further, points to how it becomes more entrenched when some progress takes place. ‘When narcissistic patients of this type begin to make some progress and to form some dependent relationship to the analysis, severe negative therapeutic reactions occur…’ (ibid.). This is apparent in my patient’s returning almost automatically to his loop (the word ‘loop’ being amenable to a connotation of ‘network’ or ‘neighbourhood patois’ or ‘bush telegraph’). The hegemony produces a state Rosenfeld describes as resembling primary narcissism. ‘He may lose his interest in the outside world and want to stay in bed and forget what had been discussed in previous sessions. If he manages to come to the session, he may complain that something incomprehensible has happened to him and that he feels trapped, claustrophobic and unable to get out of this state. He is often aware that he has lost something important but is not sure what it is’ (ibid.). Reading this I was so struck by its correspondence to the plight of Gerry in his adjustment to catastrophe. I will come back to this when I come to describe what was to transpire.
۩
Narcissism
The Treasure
Petkutin did not know how many days had passed before he realised where the theater’s exit was. He wandered around the stage around the dead fire and the remains of dinner until something invisible picked up his mantle from the ground and threw it over its shoulders.
The empty cape came up to him and addressed him in Kalina’s voice…
‘Tell me,’ Petkutin said to Kalina, clasping her in his arms, I feel as if some terrible thing happened to me a thousand years ago...'
‘What is the difference between a moment ago and a thousand years ago
when things are the way they are now.’ Milorad Pavić, Dictionary of the
Khazars, The Female Edition. pp. 40 – 41.
۩
Dreams
and a rumour of flashbacks provide a richer vein of material redolent of
indigestible catastrophe. Gerry had spoken of what he called ‘wake-up calls’. These took three
forms. He’d lost his temper with a representative of the record company he was
negotiating with, and thus spoiled his chances of a successful outcome. Or
there’d been a row with Linda over the weekend. He would come to his session
wanting to turn over a new leaf. Similarly, when the clutter of unfinished
business threatened to overwhelm him, he felt the need for ‘detox’. In these
circumstances he shifted the waking up on to practical measures. For
instance, he addressed his body’s tendency to put on weight or display allergic
reaction, or it would be a statement about a change of occupation. The second
category was the flashback. This was a new one on me, a word I hadn’t heard him
use before. And thirdly, the dreams. Gerry had mentioned waking from sleep,
suddenly precipitated into waking by a vivid dream. Usually, however, he had
forgotten the dream by the time he came to his session. Until latterly I had
heard this word ‘wake up call’ as something that fitted snugly into his loop as
justification for getting that proper job which was, at the same time,
perennially postponed, and the impetus of which was parried by a manic flight
into a string of impractical solutions to obviate the fated mediocrity. One
such occurred when Linda took him off for an exotic beach holiday that
occasioned his missing four sessions. He described how, being taken out of his
routine, he had experienced several days of high optimism when he had quite outstripped
in imagination the scope of his girlfriend’s successful career.
In my mind his reference to his flashbacks (the
re-emerging of a petrified traumatic memory) were more symbolic and more of a
piece with the content of his dreams, only more monolithic. I began to notice
the beginning of a trend. What I saw unfolding was, to an extent, the result of
our work of analysing his impervious language structure. I knew he wanted me to
‘lay off’, and that he blamed me for making him feel uncomfortable. I interpreted
this as his attributing to me the cause of his extreme frustration and
hopelessness. This enabled him to admit he felt trapped, a word which he later
adopted as having great force for him.
An example of this ‘onslaught’ on his loop occurred
in a session that began with the usual reference to ‘our conversations and
points raised’. This was leading to ‘a short bullet point list of my strengths’
to justify the virtues of working alone, presented as a step forward, ‘at least
in the right direction anyway’. I saw this to be his attack on my suggestion
that he was keeping his uncomfortable feelings to himself, and that really he
felt these were not ok and that he preferred to pretend to be someone else
(without such feelings) in peer groups, at home and in sessions. This he
associated with his family culture. His grandfather was ‘no nonsense, stiff
upper lip, no sympathy wasted’. I commented that it sounded like a despairing
heritage leading to the virtue of being alone. To this he reacted by saying
that ‘isolation’ was a judgement; he had been referring to his strengths. I
said that one way of thinking of isolation was as an absence of empathy. Making
a virtue out of working alone was confusing his actual predicament and was a
deflection from his deep sense of isolation. I said that I thought there were
very powerful feelings behind his attitude of ‘just getting on with it’
and these he didn’t want to know about: ‘“no way!” – let your father get on
with it in his deeply mediocre way’, I parodied. His bland disregard for my
interpretation was instant: ‘Perhaps it is just wanting to avoid that routine’,
and just as instantly, and by that token, suspect as my collusion in the
standoff, I come back with ‘as you did by becoming an entrepreneur’. He
smoothes it over (and makes the point) by replying, ‘back to the start, really,
and now I have an opportunity to move forward. A simple decision is what is
required’. I feel the infuriating frustration and interpret that ‘these
underlying feelings I spoke of a few moments ago have now been put into me to
feel as if that is really what you want me to know, and that you can’t stand
them yourself. It would be simple but for these uncomfortable feelings, this
destructive rage you assume is a simple matter to get rid of. In his rejoinder
he used a puzzling phrase. ‘I understand where they come from, but I am
behind them, they are not so strong now.’ Again that emblematic phrase. Was
he saying he was on to them, or that they were behind him now? Or was he saying
that he enacted them in the sense that they represented a more authentic
dimension of himself?
I think of Abraham’s phrase, paraphrased by
Rosenfeld (1971, p. 242) referring to ‘the hostility and defiance hidden behind’
the apparent cooperation (‘our discussions’) [my emphasis].’That is the real
me’, he would seem to be saying. Was this his inadvertent message about the
real driving force, a sign of his grandiosity. Or could his assertion ‘I am
behind them’ evince his helplessness, the sense of being a prisoner, wistfully
contemplating some means of escape, and powerless to break free? I was not
fully conscious of these layers of meaning when I replied, ‘You have found a
way of not having them. Who would choose to open up a can of worms!’ I was
thinking back to the session some weeks previously when I picked up signs of
the disgruntlement he evinced on entering the consulting room. Then, he had
felt a relief in being heard and had talked, in the following session, about
feeling empowered, a state of mind he had not remembered feeling before. Things
had suddenly felt feasible. ‘Empowered’ was a word he had used when he had
‘blown his top’ with the record company. He had realised that his anger had
contained an appropriate aggression. After a long silence in which he had superimposed
his false optimism he said, ‘I don’t understand why that should be related to
being here again, hopefully it won’t be that way again’. I attempted to
interpret as follows: ‘It is what you are doing here, with me, making it sound
easy, looking for an ally when it is not at all easy, and eliding the
humiliation, the sense of being unequal, a pariah and full of rage. Because you
keep these powerful feelings out you feel depleted, odd, a loner and, being
stuck in this way, you are always trying to turn it into a virtue, the Lone
Ranger, the rational conversationalist.’ For this, however, I was to be blamed:
‘I feel uncomfortable now’, he said. I translated this in my own mind as his
saying in pique, ‘we have nothing to discuss’. And I thought: ‘yes, when the
talking stops…’ and said, ‘You blame me for making you feel that way and you
hate me for it’. But that he quickly turned away from: ‘I feel more
uncomfortable with myself, really…’ and there again is that qualifier which
signifies its opposite.
He missed the following session, the first of the
new week. He contacted me to say that his car had been towed away. In the
following session he admitted that he had not needed to go to redeem it as an
alternative to having his session.
In the session following, there was an introductory
account of having been confronted by his girlfriend. He had been aware of the
way he had attempted to mislead her to cover up depressing thoughts about his
sense of failure in face of her accusations. He then reported the following
dream: Linda is interested in someone else and it seems likely that she will
leave him. I interpreted by suggesting that that someone else was himself, that
he was confronted by a threatening image of himself that isn’t allowed to
flourish, and towards which he feels envy. To this he responded by saying he
wanted to be like that other. I said, ‘the question is – how much does it
matter?’ To this he replied, ‘Very
scary!’ and indeed, the resistance, to which Rosenfeld refers, is no wonder
when the inveterate evil grip of the dread of existential loneliness, with the
hopelessness of its ever changing, is glimpsed. Yet here was a decisive moment,
one not to be forgotten. And indeed Gerry’s last remark was followed by ‘What
is the point of putting myself in an uncomfortable situation?’ I said, ‘Your
manic defence has come a cropper’, and I used his expression: ‘a wake-up call’.
‘This is very different from the tone of a business meeting’, I said. At this
point, he gave me the last line of the dream: ‘I paid him off with my car.’ He
recalled being in bed and pushing Linda away in the night. Now this could have been a reference to the
missed session where the car was used to palm me off and to let me know that I
was not worth turning up for, in other words, all we deal in is surface and
pretences. But it also clinched my
sense of his serial dismissal of his aspiring self and the tricky disrespect
that joined him and his girlfriend. ‘I
used it (the car) as a tool to show that’s all she was to him, were he to accept
my offer’, he added. This very subtly condensed image seemed to me almost
sacred; I said nothing. And almost straightaway he reported another dream.
This, he said, was very lucid, very upsetting. He dreamed he was in a sex shop,
and a young female customer bought a pornographic video. She wasn’t as sharp as
other people, ‘dumb’, ‘thick’. He befriended her in order to take advantage of
her, and he remembered her sensing he was uncomfortable about it and he excused
himself. He went on to say he recognized himself being alive in the dream and
wanted it to go on.
This second dream, occurring on the same night as the first, may be thought to carry on the sense of an aspirant living part of him that turns to his unconscious and is rewarded with valuable insight. The cynicism of the first dream in which each person in the triangular relationship is depersonalised to the monetary value of a beat up car as archival as the stash under his father’s mattress, and which has figured as an alter ego or accomplice, is present here too. There is a direct reference to his use of pornography into which his entire libido is channelled. Meltzer presents ‘a definition of pornography as a calculated attack on the internal situation and integration of the self in other people’ (Meltzer, 1973, p. 170). In this sense his sessions are cast. And in the context of a case study of a schizoid patient, Meltzer writes that, ‘I had been able more convincingly than ever before to show him that his masturbation damaged his internal mother and that her lifeless state inside him was the cause of his complaint of inability to take an interest in anything’ (p. 174). It was certainly something I felt to be filed away in view of Gerry’s ambivalence around the lifeless state of his parents and his horror of a castrating intimacy. To him Linda is depersonalised (dumb, exploited); she is his victim, kept alive only by his plausible placating. Such dread of the vagina Gerry rationalised in terms of ‘the norm’ (how men go off women after a bit), also invoking low libido, and a woman’s ‘unfair demands’. The description of his flirtations represented the Oedipal or pre-Oedipal urge to possess the mother by infantilising her. He said that he liked to ‘crack’ a cold woman who is the possession, or has been, of someone else. By exalting so-called ‘friendship’ over intercourse – he claims to have no sexual interest in Linda whatsoever – ‘the destructive part of the self has taken control over the whole libidinal aspects of the patient’s personality’ (Rosenfeld, 1971, p. 250). For him distaste is a matter of not being with the right woman, but the polar opposite of disgust, which functions in perversion, namely adoration, is nowhere to be found. In place of that, there is the sense that she is appealing to him to be looked after. Thus he simulates his non-existent resources and puts himself on hold, fuelling the vicious circle of estrangement. A catastrophic disappointment is constellated. For this is not the n