Month: September 2019

Putting Trauma Into Words

[NOTE: please read the second and third paragraphs from this post before continuing. Important–don’t skip reading them!]

In previous posts, I wrote of the dialectical nature of health and ill health, and every intermediate point, all of these being represented on a circular continuum symbolized by the ouroboros. The two extreme opposites meet where the serpent’s head bites its tail: at the head, feelings of self-love get excessive, bordering on pathological narcissism; at the bitten tail is the threat of (if not the realization of) fragmentation, a psychotic breaking away from reality that is often defended against through pathological narcissism, where the serpent’s teeth are biting. Everywhere else on the ouroboros’ coiled body is every intermediate point from the best of health, just behind the head, to the worst of neurosis, just before the bitten tail of psychosis.

To simplify, we can make three basic categories of mental health and ill-health out of this ouroboros as a symbol of the circular continuum: the biting head is the narcissistic world of what Jacques Lacan called the Imaginary Order, seeing an ideal self in the mirror, just as Narcissus, seeing his reflection in the pond, fell in love with himself; the bitten tail is the traumatic, inexpressible world of what Lacan called the Real; and the intermediate, relatively healthy world represented by the serpent’s coiled body is what he called the Symbolic Order, where we’re connected to society through language.

The expression of our feelings, through society’s shared symbols and signifiers (i.e., language), is the basis of our mental health. Bottling up our feelings, never venting them, leads to mental illness. A crucial part of giving expression to how we feel, though, is having people who will listen to us, who will validate us, who will contain our pain as a mother would contain the anxieties, fears, and frustrations of her baby, then transform those feelings and process them for it (since the baby has no mental apparatus yet developed for thinking and processing thoughts on its own), and return them to it in a form it can accept, thus pacifying it. We need people–friends, loved ones, therapists, etc.–who will perform that maternal role for us if we’re ill.

Wilfred Bion‘s theory of a mother containing her baby’s disturbed state (in maternal reverie) is replicated in the patient/therapist relationship, where the patient is in the baby’s role, and the therapist is in the mother’s role. Such a relationship is necessary when, overwhelmed by raw, unprocessed external sensory stimuli (beta elements) that become traumatizing, the patient has psychotic episodes and approaches psychological fragmentation, a terror of disintegration, a mental falling-apart.

This falling apart often happens because there is no one to help the sufferer contain and thus help to process his or her trauma; the therapist must step in and do the containing. This containing (similar to D.W. Winnicott‘s notion of a holding environment) allows the agitating beta elements to be processed and transformed into alpha elements, or thoughts acceptable to the patient. These alpha elements can go into the patient’s unconscious mind–which is structured like a language, as Lacan said–and can be used in dreams and as thoughts to be expressed in words.

Most of us, of course, cannot afford a therapist, due in no small part to the aggravation of wealth inequality over the past thirty to forty years; so we may have to make do with playing the role of therapist for each other. By this I mean being the empathic containers of each other’s traumas and anxieties; for the trauma of having suffered narcissistic and emotional abuse is such that, given no validation of our pain at all from the narcissist’s flying monkeys, we victims are like those crying babies in need of having those agitating beta elements (our trauma) transformed into alpha elements (processed, more soothing thoughts).

So how can we rank amateurs help each other? By listening to our fellow sufferers and validating (containing) the emotional effects of the abuse they went through. Similarly, we can vent our own pain (the contained) in as expressive and vivid a language as we can muster (Richard Grannon calls it ‘Emotional Literacy‘), while others (e.g., our communal online support on Facebook pages about emotional abuse) listen to and validate us. This is how we can move from the bitten tail of trauma (Lacan’s Real) to the upper middle of the ouroboros’ body (Lacan’s Symbolic Order, the realm of interpersonal communication).

I’ll start with some venting of my own pain, which I hope, Dear Reader, you’ll contain for me, then return to me with some soothing validation. (I’ll be willing to return the favour if you send me a link of your verbalizing of your traumas, your ‘contained,’ and I’ll reblog it here, as is my intention with the message given in this post.)

  • Back in the early 2000s, when my mother was prating on and on about my supposedly having Asperger Syndrome, or AS (I’ve never been diagnosed with it, and she didn’t even merit being called an amateur psychiatrist, let alone someone with any measure of authority on mental health issues), I grew increasingly agitated, frustrated, and exasperated with her. When she dismissed my legitimate objections, I just felt unheard, invalidated, and uncared for.
  • In the mid-2000s, when she rejected my wish to fly from Asia (where I live) to Canada to see my sister, J., and her terminally ill husband, rationalizing that I’m “different,” as well as “tactless and insensitive” (due, apparently, to AS–see Part 2 of this), I exploded with rage at her condescending, hurtful attitude, for which she’d never repented. I felt insulted, devalued, excluded, and unwanted.
  • When, not too long after, J. emailed me, telling me to stop complaining to Mom about her attitude, showing me she was 100% on Mom’s side, and trivializing my pain, J. made me feel like a ten-year-old; I frowned like a hurt child, though I was in my late thirties when I read that email. I felt humiliated, disrespected, and infantilized. Her not wanting me to reply made me feel silenced and voiceless.
  • By the 2010s, when I realized that not only was Mom’s talk about AS, but also her labelling me with classic autism when I was a child, all lies, I felt so betrayed and heartbroken, I thought of the whole family, who supported her in her fabrications, as a bunch of perfidious snakes! How awful it is to feel so alone, so isolated, and so unloved. I felt fooled, conned, cheated, deceived, and tricked. (See Part 3 here.)
  • As a child, whenever I got subjected to Mom’s wild rages, or the bullying of my elder siblings, I felt terrified, helpless, overwhelmed, and trapped. Mom’s indifference to, if not outright conniving at, all that bullying just increased my sense of loneliness, of separateness from society, of unworthiness, of inferiority.
  • During the 2010s, when I heard, in the middle of a long-distance phone call from Mom, that she said–after indulging in a spate of bad-mouthing of my youngest cousin, G., about whom she’d never said anything kind in her life–she thought he might have Asperger Syndrome, I groaned in a fury, knowing she was using this psychiatric label to devalue his worth in the family…just as she’d been doing with me. I felt a growing sympathy for my so-unjustly-despised cousin. See Part 4 here.
  • Later this decade, as it became more and more obvious that Mom (an RN, incidentally) was adamant about not wanting to help my cousin, S., who was manifesting paranoid delusions about me, I felt a growing hopelessness, a despairing of the family. No one else, including J., showed any interest in helping S., either: these were the same people who had preached to me for years about the importance of putting other people’s needs in front of your own…and they were now proving they were no better than “self-centred” me! Now, I felt a growing contempt for them and their hypocrisy.
  • When my mother told me a string of lies in the late summer of 2015, the year before she died, and I heard the most blatant untruth of them all–that I supposedly had sent my aunt a series of “over-the-top” emails (click here for the whole story, if you’re interested: Part 5–More Elaborate Lies)–I lay shaking in bed, shocked, unable to sleep the whole night (I’d received Mom’s email, with this lie, just before I was to go to bed). I felt disoriented, baffled, confused, and disconcerted. I had no idea who that family even was anymore.

As you read through my examples, note my use of ‘feeling’ words, especially those in italics: agitated, frustrated, rage, betrayed, etc. It is the use of words like these, carefully chosen and made as vividly descriptive–particular and precise in meaning–as possible, that is the key to processing your trauma. Get to the root of your trauma, and get it out of your system; share your words with people you can trust, people who will contain your pain for you, validate it, and send the energy back to you in a transformed way, to pacify and heal you.

The unconscious, as understood in terms of the Symbolic Order, isn’t the unconscious of an individual person; it’s rather a trans-individual unconscious connecting us with everyone else. The unconscious as the discourse of the Other (radical ‘otherness’: that is, all other people out there, not just someone we would narcissistically mirror against ourselves, as a baby and its mother looking into each other’s eyes), a conversation between the self and other, communication and connection between people in which they aren’t extensions of a narcissistic self, but coexist as equals.

As a rank amateur myself, with no formal training in the field, I tend to modify and adapt psychoanalytic theory as I see fit, so when I see a similarity between Lacan’s trans-individual unconscious and Jung‘s collective unconscious, I do so with an understanding that Lacan would probably wince at my conflation of the two.

My point is that it is in this place where all minds meet–a psychic state unified by communication, shared symbols and signifiers (‘language’ here has the expanded meaning of being a signifying system of differential relations–all interconnected ideas, just as our trans-individual unconscious makes us all interconnected), and listening empathically. I like to call it the Unity of Space, an infinite ocean where we can all heal together.

Analysis of ‘The Time Machine’

The Time Machine is a science fiction novella written by H.G. Wells and published in 1895. The novella has spawned three movies and two TV adaptations, and the idea of time travel in general has inspired the premises of many popular sci-fi stories, films, and TV shows. His story is a warning that the future doesn’t necessarily bring progress.

Here are some quotes:

“There are really four dimensions, three which we call the three planes of Space, and a fourth, Time. There is, however, a tendency to draw an unreal distinction between the former three dimensions and the latter, because it happens that our consciousness moves intermittently in one direction along the latter from the beginning to the end of our lives…Really this is what is meant by the Fourth Dimension, though some people who talk about the Fourth Dimension do not know they mean it. It is only another way of looking at Time.” –The Time Traveller, Chapter I, pages 2 and 3

“Strength is the outcome of need; security sets a premium on feebleness.” –The Time Traveller, Chapter IV, page 36

“We are kept keen on the grindstone of pain and necessity and, it seemed to me, that here was that hateful grindstone broken at last!” –The Time Traveller, Chapter IV, page 39

“It is a law of nature we overlook, that intellectual versatility is the compensation for change, danger, and trouble. An animal perfectly in harmony with its environment is a perfect mechanism. Nature never appeals to intelligence until habit and instinct are useless. There is no intelligence where there is no change and no need of change. Only those animals partake of intelligence that have to meet a huge variety of needs and dangers.” –The Time Traveller, Chapter X, page 97

The novel begins with a group of men in the house of a man known only as “the Time Traveller,” who discusses the topic of his given namesake. Indeed, most of these men (except one named Filby) are referred to by their professions (“the Psychologist,” “the Provincial Mayor,” “the Medical Man,” etc.) rather than by their names: it’s as though their professions are somehow more important than who they are as people; since Wells was a socialist (more of a social democrat, really–contrast his notions of socialism with those of Stalin, with whom he would, decades after the publication of this novella, have an interesting conversation), his labelling most of the men by profession seems a comment on the social alienation inherent in capitalism.

The Time Traveller discusses the fourth dimension of time with the other gentlemen, speaking of time as if it could be measured on a plane: one can go up and down in length, or side to side in breadth, or back and forth in depth, on planes of the first three dimensions; but imagine going back and forth in time, or skipping points in time, instead of just following time forward, second by second, an eternal now emerging from the past and disappearing into the future, in only that direction.

The following Thursday, the Time Traveller is to meet with some of those men (including the first person narrator) and a few new ones (“the Editor,” “the Doctor,” “the Journalist,” etc.); but when he arrives, he walks with a limp, his coat is “dusty and dirty,” with a cut on his chin, “his hair disordered,” and his face is “ghastly pale…his expression…haggard and drawn, as by intense suffering.” (page 15) He’s just returned from the remote future, a harsh world in which he’s had some traumatizing experiences. Therefore, when he tells the men his story, we must keep in mind how distraught he is; and so his emotional state, among other things, will distort his perception of the events of the future.

The men are incredulous, of course, but willing to hear his story. So, the first-person narrator is giving the account based on his recollection of the Time Traveller’s words.

Frequently, if not typically, a first-person narration is unreliable, at least to some degree, since the narrator is incorporating, consciously or unconsciously, his own biases; but here we have the first person narrator (seeming to be socialist Wells: recall his enthusiastic remark, “To discover a society…erected on a strictly communistic basis.” [page 6]) giving an account based on another first-person narration, so in this story we have not one, but two biases!

These biases seem to be contradictory opposites, one with communist beliefs, the other with anti-communist leanings (those of the Time Traveller). In fact, a major theme of this novella is dualism, or a conflict between contradictory opposites. These include above/below, metaphorical heaven/hell, metaphorical gods/devils, light/darkness, and forward in time vs. backward in time.

The Time Traveller describes the great discomfort he feels from shooting forward in time (page 21; also briefly noted on page 100); this could be seen to symbolize the displeasure often felt by reactionaries when social progress is made; also, the discomfort from this forward movement could symbolize a fear of facing the uncertain future.

He stops the forward movement at the year 802,701. He gets out of the time machine and sees a giant white sphinx. Since he gets the impression that there has been great neglect in the care of his surroundings (e.g., “a long-neglected…garden,” and “suggestions of old Phoenician decorations” that were “very badly broken and weather-worn,” page 30), this sphinx is symbolically comparable to that of ancient Egypt in that this future world seems to be the end of a former great civilization. Great eras of history seem to rise and decline in cycles. (Also, that sphinx will contain the riddle of where his time machine will be moved, when he later discovers it missing.)

Further proof of such a civilizational decline, in his opinion, is when he meets the Eloi, small, curly-haired, simple-minded, childlike people who live in idleness, eating only fruit. He has expected great advances in civilization, knowledge, technology, and strength; but it seems the world has gone backward in many ways.

For the Time Traveller, intellectual growth is driven by the need to survive; the easy living of the Eloi has made them complacent, lazy, and weak. The large, palace-like buildings he sees them living in–with no small houses characteristic of England–suggest the communal living of communism (page 34), of which one suspects he disapproves (Having sat–at the novella’s beginning–with his middle-to-upper-middle class guests in the comfortable chairs he’s invented, and with a housekeeper, Mrs. Watchett, among other servants in his home, the bourgeois Time Traveller would naturally be opposed to socialism.). Elsewhere, he notes how the Eloi seem to have little differentiation in terms of sex, symbolizing the future equality of the sexes.

There’s more to this utopia, this Spenserian bower of bliss, than meets the eye, though. First, after having left the time machine for a while, he returns to where it has been left, only to find it missing! Someone took it? Who? The Eloi are too small to have moved such a heavy machine. Will he be trapped in this strange world forever?

After searching fruitlessly for it in the bushes and elsewhere, he concludes that someone must have hid it in the White Sphinx. Since it cannot have been the puny Eloi who have moved it, there must be another people he hasn’t encountered yet. He also notices wells, connections to the underworld, where he’ll find those other people.

Here, we’ve encountered the main dualism in the story: that of the opposition between the Eloi living above and the Morlocks living below. Their names are puns on, respectively, the Hebrew Elohim (gods), and the pagan god Moloch, this latter god requiring child sacrifices. In other words, the Eloi are being represented as the angelic ‘good’ people, and the Morlocks are being represented as the devilish ‘bad’ people. Given the Time Traveller’s obvious bourgeois liberal biases, however, we shouldn’t be too sure about the accuracy of his portrayal of these two peoples.

At first, he associates the Eloi with the privileged capitalist class, in their indolence and easy living; similarly, he associates the Morlocks with the oppressed proletariat, since they make all the things the Eloi need to live. The emphasis of such a perspective could be due to the biases of the socialist first-person narrator who is recording the Time Traveller’s account (and who could be Wells himself–that is, if he isn’t Hillyer, possibly one of the Time Traveller’s servants, for all we know).

Such a perspective could also accord with the Time Traveller’s initial impressions of the Eloi and Morlocks, though he would judge such a situation with far less sympathy for the Morlocks than Wells (as I’ll call the first-person narrator, for convenience’s sake). For it won’t be long before the Morlocks are portrayed as savagely evil.

The Eloi live up in the light, in their near-Edenic, would-be paradise. The Morlocks live down in the darkness, fearing the light as any demon would. The Morlocks’ underground abode is easily characterized as a symbolic hell. The Eloi are like sweet children of God, for “unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.” (Matthew 18:3)

It is only natural that a bourgeois liberal will portray the members of his own class as good, even if flawed morally (recall the Eloi failing to rescue one of their own, Weena, from drowning, thus making the Time Traveller get her out of the water [page 50]). Similarly, the bourgeois will characterize their class enemy, the working class, as dangerous or at least morally inferior. Accordingly, the Time Traveler cannot bring himself to think any kind thoughts about the ape-like, but mechanically-minded Morlocks (Chapters VI and VII, pages 61, 67, and 69).

Recall his judgement of the Morlocks here: “…I longed very much to kill a Morlock or so. Very inhuman, you may think, to want to go killing one’s own descendants! But it was impossible, somehow, to feel any humanity in the things.” (page 82)

Even the names of the two peoples I have doubts about with respect to the Time Traveller’s representation of them. He claims to have learned a substantial amount of the Eloi’s language to know the names of the two peoples; but his brief sojourn in their world can only cause one to doubt that he’s learned all that much. So his learning of the peoples’ names, as with all else about them, can easily be tainted by his personal biases.

The horrific thing we learn about the Morlocks is that they apparently practice cannibalism–they come up from underground at night and eat any Eloi they catch. The absence of animals in this future world means that food has become scarce. This is why the Eloi eat only fruit; but why don’t the Morlocks just steal fruit from them at night?

Deprivation of food over long periods can drive anyone to resort to cannibalism. The Time Traveller changes his original position, from that of the Eloi as the capitalist Haves and the Morlocks as the proletarian Have-nots, to one of oppressed Eloi and oppressor Morlocks: that is, the latter provide for the former only because the latter are, as it were, farmers raising the former to slaughter.

While we know of the Morlocks attacking and giving their prey little bites, we know of no explicit evidence that the Morlocks are eating the Eloi, apart from the Time Traveller’s discovery of a meal of flesh underground (page 65). Could it not be the flesh of animals that he, during his brief stay in this future world, has never had the time to find? Those Morlock bites could just be attack bites rather than attempts to eat. Again, his biases against the Morlocks could easily be warping his perception of events.

One possible interpretation incorporating Morlock cannibalism (in a symbolic way) is in Hegel‘s master-slave dialectic. This interpretation fuses the Time Traveller’s (and Wells’s) original capitalist/worker conception with this new ‘farmer/livestock’ one. The Eloi were the masters originally, and the Morlocks were the slaves. Through the Morlocks’ ceaseless work, though, they have gained power, while the Eloi have grown dependent and indolent, causing the power imbalance to reverse itself.

The Time Traveller himself concludes similarly: “I felt pretty sure now that my second hypothesis was all wrong. The Upper-world people might once have been the favoured aristocracy, and the Morlocks their mechanical servants; that had long since passed away…The Nemesis of the delicate ones was creeping on apace. Ages ago, thousands of generations ago, man had thrust his brother man out of the ease and the sunshine. And now that brother was coming back–changed! Already the Eloi had begun to learn one old lesson anew. They were becoming reacquainted with Fear.” (page 70)

The Morlocks’ rising from underground at night can be seen to symbolize a proletarian uprising; they apparently eat the Eloi, just as the poor and deprived will one day have no other recourse than to eat the rich. The Time Traveller, as a bourgeois, naturally sympathizes with the Eloi; he criticizes them only because of their having backslid into apathy and laziness. He sees the necessity of strength, and strength coming from necessity. Such an attitude, of favouring competition over mutual aid–the former forcing one to adapt and to be strong, while the latter (so it is believed) causes one to be weak and complacent–is the conservative underbelly of liberals, which exposes itself whenever their class privileges are being threatened.

The Time Traveller fights off the Morlocks with a club, and uses his matches to build a fire to protect himself and Weena from them. The problem is that the fire he’s set causes a forest fire while he sleeps. In this story, fire–his weapon against the Morlocks–symbolizes civilization and technology; and as we can see, there are both good and bad sides to these two things we tend to regard as only good. Weena seems to have been killed in the fire; he prefers this fate to her having been possibly eaten by the Morlocks–though he doesn’t seem to give much thought to the fact that it is his fire that has killed her. Also, we can see fire as representing how bourgeois civilization and technology destroy the environment. Wells really seems to have seen the future…our real future.

The Time Traveller gets inside the Sphinx, and uses his time machine to escape and go far off into the future. He stops at a time with a black sky, a “salt Dead Sea” (page 103), an “air more rarefied than it is now” (page 102), reddish “monstrous crab-like creature[s]” (page 102), and a “sense of abominable desolation” (page 103). He goes ahead a hundred years from then, and sees “the same dying sea,” feels “the same chill air,” and there is “the same crowd of earthy crustacea creeping in and out…” (page 103)

He goes further and further into the future, by thousands of years, to discover ultimately no signs of life except for a “green slime on the rocks” (page 104). After Wells’s allegory of class struggle and violent proletarian revolution, we see the end not only of human and animal life, but of almost all life. Though Wells, of course, wouldn’t have known anything about nuclear war or global warming back in 1895, he seems here to have had the prescience of a time traveler; for he knew that we would have either socialism or barbarism, a world of social justice or our mutual destruction–more dualism.

The Time Traveller returns to his time in that physical and mental state of disarray already noted, such that we should be cautious in assessing the reliability and accuracy of his account. Only those withered white flowers from the future (symbolizing Eloi sweetness and innocence), given to him by Weena, indicate any truth to his story.

The Time Traveller uses his time machine again, never to return to his present. Has he gone into the past, or the future again? Has he returned to the Eloi and Morlocks, perhaps with a hope of either saving Weena from the fire, or avenging the Eloi and killing the Morlocks? Or have they killed him? Since, in his bias against the Morlocks, he’s chosen to resist proletarian revolution, we can see why he no longer has a now.

H.G. Wells, The Time Machine, Bantam Classic, New York, 1895

Narcissistic Envy and Jealousy

[NOTE: please read the second and third paragraphs from this post before continuing. Important–don’t skip reading them!]

The development of pathological narcissism can in some ways be connected to the irresolution of the Oedipus complex, for as Don Carveth has noted, this complex is a narcissistic trauma. Still, we must first clarify what the Oedipus complex really is; a brief explanation of other psychoanalytic concepts helpful in understanding narcissism (a more detailed exploration can be found here, if what’s written below is frustratingly obscure) will be made below, too, before I get into a discussion of how my family conflicts can be seen as an example of narcissism based on Oedipal envy and jealousy.

The best way to understand the Oedipus complex is in a metaphoric sense–far more than just Freud‘s literal, primitive conception of wanting to remove the rival, same-sex parent and wanting to possess the opposite-sex one (or, in the case of the negative Oedipus complex, children loving the same-sex parent and hating the opposite-sex one). The desire for the one parent doesn’t have to be sexual, incestuous; and the hostility to the other parent doesn’t have to involve murderous phantasies. The child simply doesn’t wish to share the desired parent with a rival; he wants that parent all to himself.

Furthermore, as I’ve touched on elsewhere, the desire and hostility don’t each have to be reserved for only one parent or the other; a child typically has a love/hate relationship with both parents, based on his or her acceptance of what Melanie Klein called the “good” and “bad” mother and father aspects of both parents, understood when the child has developed a sense of ambivalence for them, derived from the depressive position, a resolution of the black-and-white splitting from the earlier paranoid-schizoid position.

Anyway, the Oedipal situation is best understood as a narcissistic relationship we all, as little children or infants, had with an idealized parent and the rival other parent, who annoys the child by drawing Mother’s attention away from him or her. Usually the ideal parent is the mother, idolized by little boys and girls–these latter kids during the pre-Oedipal phase–because the mother usually has more access to, and (unfortunately, due to sex roles and the patriarchal family) responsibility for, the babies than the father has.

This narcissistic period occurs in what Jacques Lacan called the Imaginary Order, sparked by the mirror stage, when an infant sees his or her mirror reflection for the first time, then conceives him- or herself as a coherent, unified being (as opposed to the spastic, fragmentary body the infant otherwise perceives himself to have). The reflected image is an idealized self–just as the mother’s smiling face, which the baby sees as a metaphorical mirror reflection of itself, is the face of an idealized person the child imagines to be an extension of itself, rather than an independent being in her own right, with her own needs and desires.

The notion of the mother as an extension of the baby is intensified since, as Wilfred Bion observed (and expressed with his idiosyncratic terminology), the baby needs the mother to provide her ability to think for it and process its outer stimuli (beta elements), because the baby doesn’t yet have a developed thinking apparatus. The mother is a container, holding all the upsetting, frightening external stimuli for the baby (the contained) in a state of maternal reverie, then transforming the baby’s pain, anxiety, etc. into a pacifying form it can accept (alpha elements), and returning it to the baby.

This, according to Bion, is how Knowledge (K) develops for the infant, a transferring of energy back and forth, from infant to mother and back again (container/contained), via projective identification; acquiring knowledge, however, may be desired or feared. (Bion observed this of Tiresias in the Oedipus myth, when the blind prophet was reluctant to tell King Oedipus that he was responsible for his father‘s death, and that he had married and committed incest with his mother. Read more here, pages 45-49.)

A narcissistic mother, already lacking in empathy, may not be all that willing to help her babies grow in knowledge through reverie and Bion’s notion of containment, thus causing the babies’ anxieties not to be processed and soothed, but rather to be turned into a nameless dread; the frustrated baby thus, in self-defence, limits its acquiring of knowledge (-K) from what it perceives to be the “bad mother.” The narcissistic mother would rather have her children dependent on her than be independent in knowledge.

This building-up of knowledge exclusively through the mother (or, by extension, the infant’s Oedipally-desired, male or female primary caregiver), can thus be a bad thing if this desired caregiver is the baby’s more-or-less only window to the world, barring the intervention of a third party (Father, or by extension, the rest of society) to round out and give nuance to the child’s experience of the world. The child thus never matures or fully leaves Lacan‘s narcissistic Imaginary Order to enter the Symbolic Order, to acquire fluency in the language and shared symbols of society, and thus fit into society.

In a similar vein, Heinz Kohut wrote about how the infantile narcissistic state is composed of two poles: 1) the idealized parental imago, an image of the loved parent (what Kohut called a self-object to satisfy narcissistic needs, or to validate and affirm the ego’s narcissistic self-image), which is introjected and felt to be an internal object inside the child’s mind; and 2) the boastful grandiose self, which can be related to Lacan’s narcissistic ideal-I from the mirror stage. If these two poles’ effectiveness in building psychological structure for the child are compromised (e.g., because of an unresolved Oedipal conflict), he or she could develop pathologically narcissistic traits as an adult.

Since the mirror doesn’t have to be a literal one (i.e., the infant–looking at his mother’s loving face [see Homer, page 24]–can see a symbolic mirror reflecting both his ideal, grandiose self and his idealized parent, an extension of himself via projective and introjective identification [container/contained]), we can see how Freud, Lacan, Bion, and Kohut can be fused. This is the self/other dialectic, the human personality as understood in a relational sense with other people, the psychic bridges between us all.

So, the Oedipal relationship with (usually) the mother is one of mirroring narcissism back to the child and of giving narcissistic idolatry to the desired parent. The problem for the child is that this two-way, mirroring relationship can’t last forever. As the child gets older, he or she must come to accept that the prized parent has desires for someone else (the other parent, a boyfriend/girlfriend, etc.). The parent can’t belong exclusively to the child, and this traumatizing disappointment must be gotten over.

Most of us can get over this, to at least a reasonable extent, hence our infantile, childhood narcissism is let down tolerably, bit by bit (optimal frustration), and reduced to socially acceptable levels by the time we reach adulthood. Some people, on the other hand, because of some arrest in their childhood development, never sufficiently resolve this Oedipal trauma; these people grow up with pathological levels of narcissism, and throughout their lives need people to mirror their grandiosity back to them in the form of narcissistic supply.

I believe my mother suffered such unresolved traumas when she was a child, having been born in England two years before the Blitz, which–even if the bombings hadn’t happened in the city or town she, as an infant, had been in at the time–at least would have exposed her to a great level of parental stress in her immediate environment.

More significantly for her, though, would have been the death–several years later–of her father, to whom she’d have had a great Oedipal attachment, him being her metaphorical mirror when she was a little girl in the 1940s. Finally, her move with her widowed mother to Canada, by the 1950s, would have ripped her away from the–to her–idyllic, Edenic world of her origins, and put her in a strange new world she’d have found difficult to adjust to at such a tender, young age.

Because of these disruptions in her childhood development, she would have needed to fill in the voids where empathic mirroring was supposed to be. I believe she would eventually use my dad, my siblings, and me to fill in those voids, either to mirror her grandiose self back to her (i.e., my sister, J., her golden child, her idealized self), or to have people onto whom she could project the hated parts of herself (me–the scapegoat, or identified patient–and her nephews, L. and G., and eventually S., too, as I’ve explained in previous posts). To an extent, even my dad got scapegoated (whenever he displeased or disappointed her, which was frequent); so when he took me under his wing when I was a kid, the rest of the family blackballed me all the worse.

If Dad and I were mirroring each other, Mom was getting all that much less of a mirroring from me, causing her narcissistic injury. Narcissists are known for their wish to hog all the attention to themselves, so anyone taking any of that coveted attention away is seen as a rival to be envied. A key personality trait of people with NPD is envy: envy of others as well as a perception that others envy them, something easily interpreted as projected envy.

I believe that my mother’s envy of Dad’s ‘usurping,’ if you will, of some of that attention was part of her motive to fan the flames of jealousy that my brothers, R. and F., felt when Dad seemed to favour me over them. Their jealousy would have been a manifestation of their unresolved negative Oedipal feelings toward Dad; the same would apply to my sister, J., in her Oedipally-inspired jealousy. The Oedipal situation is all about narcissism, family rivalry, competition for love, and therefore, jealousy.

Jealousy differs slightly from envy, in that the former involves a fear of losing someone’s love to another person (this was my siblings’ problem); whereas envy involves irritation over one person having some kind of advantage, something or someone the envier lacks, thus making the envious one want to hurt the object of his envy (Mom’s problem).

I believe Mom envied the attention I gave to Dad, so she set up two camps in the family: those who were ‘loyal’ to her (my three siblings), and those who were ‘disloyal,’ Dad and me; this division into camps was the basis of much of the needless conflict in our family. While much of my father’s grumpy, authoritarian nastiness was due to his excess adherence to conservative values (his slavery to tradition), I believe a lot of his adversarial nature came from his bitterness in having married a narcissist, all while lacking the psychological vocabulary to give expression to his frustrations (one of Dad’s many bigotries was his hate of psychiatry, which he believed spawned many social ills).

So, by pushing R., F., and J. to focus their attention on Mom, to mirror her grandiosity back to her, and by punishing them if ever they failed to do so, Mom was causing my siblings to have–at least to a significant extent–an insufficiently resolved Oedipal conflict, a conflict she exploited to her advantage. They idolized her, felt a guarded hostility to Dad (criticism of him was allowed to a point; criticism of Mom was taboo, with rare exceptions), and tormented me for daring to do what they’d been forbidden to do: to have roughly equal proportions of affection and hostility for both parents.

I’m not saying R., F., and J. felt only negative feelings for Dad: a certain, circumscribed amount of affection for him was seen by Mom as not only acceptable, but appropriate and expected (after all, we had to maintain the public image of being a ‘good, loving family’). A similarly limited love was doled out to me by all of them, ‘as appropriate.’ J., as the golden child, was especially obligated ‘to love’ me.

The conflict that my mother promoted was also meant to stay within certain ‘acceptable’ limits. Mom was at least partly responsible for having failed to resolve the mid-1970s conflict between Dad and teen R. over the relative triviality of his bad grades at school. I speculate that she may have, in fact, helped escalate the conflict leading to teen R.’s leaving home; it’s all described in more detail here–scroll down about a third to halfway into it; read there also about his ranting to me, years later, of Dad supposedly loving J. and me more for having gotten better grades in school…Oedipal jealousy. Mom thus had to be careful not to let family fights escalate into physical violence, or into any of us, still underage at the time, running away from home.

Hence, Mom tolerated anyone verbally abusing me, but drew the line at physical violence (i.e., when she knew F. had perpetrated it); also, Mom’s use of the autism lie on me (read about that here) could have been partially motivated by a wish to ensure I’d be too scared to run away from home, she having implied that I was ‘too mentally incompetent’ to be able to take care of myself.

The family was fond of scorning me as some kind of overgrown child. But if I’m right about this repressed, unconscious Oedipus factor as the basis for so much of my conflict with Mom and my siblings, as well as their conflicts with each other and with Dad (all those unresolved Mommy and Daddy issues), we now can see who in my family, deep down, were the truly childish ones.

R., F., and J. were in a perpetual competition to see who was the ‘worthiest’ of Mom’s love, never realizing that conditional love isn’t love at all. They based their (and my) worth on how much of Mom’s love we had ‘earned’ (in earlier posts–some of which are among the links given above–I gave many examples of my siblings implying they’d ‘earned’ a love I hadn’t). Their sense of emotional stability, self-confidence, and ability to function normally in the world was based on the comfortable, flattering illusion of that love. I saw through the family’s bullshit, and they shame me for daring to have that Tiresias-like insight, Bion’s K, which they are probably still too afraid to uncover.

Wilfred R. Bion, Learning From Experience, Maresfield Library, London, 1962

Heinz Kohut, The Analysis of the Self: A Systematic Approach to the Psychoanalytic Treatment of Narcissistic Personality Disorders, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1971

Sean Homer, Jacques Lacan, Routledge Taylor & Francis Group, London, 2005