Vampires have little energy to sustain their emotional lives, and thus lean on others to energize them. As they lean, however, they extract the energy of that other life.

This leaning can be very subtle. Those who try to extract some of your energy by leaning will often, quite literally, lean in towards you, if they happen to be standing nearby. If they are walking, their path will meander closer towards yours, until they almost collide with you (and yet seem oblivious that they are doing so!) Such people are used to drawing energy from those around them, and they are used to producing very little energy that could drive them to settle and reflect upon their lives.

Many many be wealthy and yet try to create the sense of their emotional victimhood to draw your energy from you.   They will make out that everything is actually going against them, that the flow of life shows no sympathy for their urgent needs.

Psychological vampires leave you feeling weaker and less certain upon their departure. In their tendency to take a shape in relation to their attraction to power, they absorb energy and form but do not give any back. Yet their leaning allows them to adopt the forms that would be easily associated with convention and normality, perhaps whilst attributing to you the notions and identity of their irregular self.

Psychological vampires seem to be giving something by their very gestures, but actually they are taking something -- warmth and life. The psychological vampire, whilst outwardly successful, has no inner life of his own.

The inclination to bring disadvantage to women in order to look relatively good, and to gain power over women has always been a key part of patriarchy and how it functions. Consider the female genital mutilation that has been practiced in extreme versions of Islam over the centuries, and you will get an acute picture of what I mean. As I say in the post below:

Instead of people looking to the nearest woman and thinking, "If I take away your peace, your pleasure, your ability to achieve, I will make myself very masculine," what if there were males who thought, "Let me see what I can make of myself, and let me have the guts and the confidence to do it on my own."

It is regrettable that this strategy of patriarchal power has not been well enough understood or analysed until now. Those who rise to the top on this basis are not the most well deserving and the best but the most craven and dishonest in terms of acknowledging what their power is actually based upon -- the deprivation of liberty of the Other, along with a false self representation that one has achieved success on the basis of one's own effort.

Under the rules of patriarchy, one has merely stolen the success of another to pass it off as if it were one's own. Her deprivation becomes your source of power -- but what sort of power is that? It is temporarily dazzling, but insubstantial and ultimately unsatisfactory. The ongoing descent towards greater and greater brutality and criminal oppression of women is the only thing that will satisfy one who has become addicted to patriarchal mores. Since his achievements are objectively of no worth, he must continue to convince himelf of his superiority at a purely subjective level, by taking more and more from women.

I have just glanced at something written by Herr Nietzsche, who is, of course, wrong that avoiding pity will allow for a natural order or hierarchy of human values to take the place that had been left by the ostensibly Christian morality of pity.  One might well understand that being drawn into another's ongoing lamentations about the evils besetting the world ultimately leads to nothing except more sensitivity to pain and further whining.  On the other hand, many do not read his writing as polemic, or hyperbole and instead wander toward a dangerous binarism.  Since patriarchal mores offer such a dazzling array of strategies for extremely decadent people to take control of those who are by no means their inferiors, there is no reason to think that Darwin offers a better ideology to advance humanity than does the most regressive type of Christianity. Both approaches in fact guarantee that decadents come to the top.

Who, in social Darwinistic circles, can resist the opportunity to beat up a woman and to take from her that which is hers? Who can pass by that opportunity for animal superiority, when nobody else is looking? It seems to be so ready for the taking by those who delude themselves that regressing to the level of raping and pillaging marks them as the fittest.

 Is this decent into bronze age morality, this brutal, but automatic outcome of a social Darwinistic creed equivalent to the level of intellectuality that Nietzsche proclaims as being the opposite of Christianity and its values? The two approaches are at root the same thing -- self deception dressed up as higher values, the demeaning of humanity and its prospects dressed up as its salvation.

I realise that I am at the end of an era with a certain section of my writing. It is good to move on. I am looking forward to a very interesting conference in a few days time.

I've researched so much, and I've found that despite what I had learned, perhaps incorrectly, in my undergraduate days, it is possible to take a standpoint outside of ideology. One can do so if one regresses far back enough, into one's previous states of consciousness, from which point it is possible to rebuild one's awareness, and even, to some lesser degree, perhaps, one's sense of identity. I agree with Wilfred Bion that the splitting of one's psyche and personality is something possible from events in adulthood. I think it is the basis for our capacity to creatively adapt actually. So it is not all bad, or pathological, even.

But I'm so finished with the topic of the pre-Oedipal for the time being. Donald Meltzer wasn't wrong when he referred to it, in its pathological aspects, as The Claustrum. To regress too far is to risk entering the Claustrum, perhaps never to return fully. That is why shamans are masters of, among other places and things, the "underworld", and have to train to know its risks. But I don't want to be a shaman, not in this sense of deep dabbling in the Freudian unconscious. I have another life to live.

This one.

And so I turn to better and brighter things. I turn to training, and to the feeling of the sunlight, since summer is arriving.

I've explored more than most people would, on a nefarious subject.

Now, let's see what else is out there.

My initial studies of the works of Donald Meltzer and Wilfred Bion give me the greatest certainty I've ever had that people who operate at the level of moral feeling impose upon others the antithesis of actual cooperative group ethics.

Identifying me as a nefarious social element because of where I'm from has the same psychodynamics as the latent homosexual going out to beat up some gays. I never have been racist (Note for Freudians: this doesn't mean I am racist; it's not a confession that I am racist, which would mean I am not racist, unless I'm concerned about being called racist, in which case I am, or I'm deliberately ignoring the issue, in which case I also am) however, it assuages some people's consciences (and concern that they, in fact, might be implicated in racism in some way) to treat me as if I am. And nobody says anything or intervenes. Obviously it such a good way for too many people to relieve their self-doubt and stress that it inhibits them from seeing that any victimization is not ethical.