2. According to my understanding of Bion, the mechanism of projective identification functions in terms of our need to have others process emotional material into a digestible (and communicable) form for us.

    "I cannot tolerate this state of mind -- you have it," is the preconscious motive governing projective identification. Actually it is only a part of our mind that we require the other to have, the part that arouses anxiety. To complicate matters further, the specific (and often idiosyncratic) nature of our anxiety is itself a product of the way we have been nurtured -- our social conditioning.

    So, we require that others use their minds, or sometimes their bodies, to process that which we fear we cannot. We require them to use their minds in such cases as when we are leaning upon them for support -- then they become the processing "container" for our undigested thoughts (or Beta elements, to use Bion's term). We require them to use their bodies to remove our anxieties from us when we treat them as a scapegoat, and label them with the negative qualities that are in us, actually or potentially, which we do not wish to face.

    Projective identification needn't take an extremely severe or pathological form.   Rather, it is incredibly common in milder formulations, where people engage in deeper conversations than talking about the weather. Whenever we look to another to corroborate a feeling or perspective, we are requiring them to process more thoroughly our thoughts for us -- ie. turn Beta elements (unexpressed intuitions) into Alpha elements (ideas that make sense.) This involves projective identification of the other as one who can take on the burden of our intuitions for us, and make sense out of them.

    In the exact same way, whenever we are in need of processing our Beta elements into Alpha elements, we are in the process of moving material from its undigested form in the Paranoid-schizoid to the Depressive field (the comparably less exciting state of mind that accepts that others have their own sensibilities, that may differ in many ways from yours).

    Artists are the same as everyone else, in that they follow this pattern whereby the pendulum of their awareness swings between Ps D. The only difference is the swing of the pendulum, for artistically aware types is more extreme than is statistically normal. Also, rather than using others for their projective identification, the artist uses his or her art as "container" -- a means to give public form to his or her privately held questions about existence.

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  3. According to Erich Rhode [On Hallucination, Intuition and the Becoming of "0"], who refers to the expertise of the psychoanalyst, Wilfred Bion, the psychological reduction of human experience to the contexts defined by space and time is a defence mechanism against knowledge (the gaining of which does not sit comfortably with the body’s sense of satisfaction) ( p 43):

    The Kantian conception of experience as grounded in the grid of space and time is one of the systems by which mind defends itself against the impact of truth. People unable to use space and time as modes of defense, who keep slipping out of the skin of being a personality in “their own day and age” are most prone to catastrophic change and possibly to be creative. ( pp 43, 44)
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  4. The schizoid element in the personality [..] “dreads emotional experience” […].He/she asks, “What is the point of railing against your lot when it will (apparently) do no good, and when nothing will change?” This meeting [that Job endures] with what seems like the insuperable power of the other/reality is what destroys the individual. […]

    [Later Job], has “stood up like a man”. It is not, a question, ultimately of right or wrong, winning or losing, Job has gained not because he triumphed over God – he has not (he “repents in dust and ashes”)—but because he has become congruent with, and has integrated, his emotional core. [Marcus West, Feeling, Being and the Sense of Self, p 229, 230]


    I see this destructive encounter with "God" as shamanistic, for it renews the psyche/soul.
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  6. I did a few rounds of padwork today and felt good about it. It was good to move around the ring, whilst kicking and hitting full force. I'm feeling good in general about things, although a little weak, due to seasonal allergies (which are just beginning to subside). I need to develop my general base of fitness more than ever now. I have been working hard and am consolidating my wins. I have new ideas of starting and living on a hobby farm. A part of me yearns for rural life. I read books about Kleinian theory today, and once again concluded that Wilfred Bion upholds the least static paradigm of the healthy human mind. My general sense is that those psychoanalytic approaches that view emotional states as suspect do not tend to promote a healthy constitution, but invite too many constitutional compromises with thanatos.
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  7. It seems to me that the purpose of the psychological concept of "the feminine" (--I am always wondering what that is--) is to create a definite gestalt (foreground-background outline) for feminine figures. The conceptual characteristics of "the feminine" are initially sought for, in the preliminary wandering of the eye over the field. Finally, once they are alighted upon, the outline of a "feminine" character comes into view. This is reassuring, since one has found what one was looking for.

    Supposing, however, one sets out in anticipation of discovering a feminine object. One perceives, in the field of vision, certain characteristics that roughly align with denotations of "the feminine". Yet, ultimately, the outline is not firm, the characteristics keep wavering, the object of vision seems to continue to shift. Would not the failure of the potential "feminine object" to stay within the lines of conceptual demarcation of femininity produce the sense of a "part object" rather than a whole object? The failure to encounter a "whole object" through the conceptual lens of "femininity" (the search for the feminine object) is likely to produce persecutory anxiety, as perception of part-objects refers the mind back to the paranoid-schizoid position of early childhood.

    Is it possible that the inherent structural failure of the concept of "femininity" to return to the perceiver a pure enough feminine object, leading in turn to perscutory anxiety as one is left with only a "part object" (the parts of the object that remain feminine), is the cause of misogyny? The failure of the object to appear consistently with the characteristics expected of it produces a shattering of perception, which is threatening to the would-be perceiver of the complete feminine object. This is starting to sound a lot like castration anxiety, but I believe it is only partly related to that -- since here the mechanism of "castration" is in the faulty conceptualisation of "the feminine" as well as in the faulty anticipation of it.

    Anyway, my experiences tell me that I'm onto something here. Those who do not encounter an outline of the object, which consistently represents "feminine" qualities, in a way that since the gestalt is firm, would be soothing, tend to encounter a Medusa instead, and this is not because of anything that women are doing, but due to a faulty conceptualisation of "the feminine".


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  		8. YELLOW

    You are very perceptive and smart. You are clear and to the point and have a great sense of humor. You are always learning and searching for understanding.

    Find out your color at QuizMeme.com!

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  10. http://home.iprimus.com.au/scratchy888/PAPER%20FOR%20PRESENTATION.htm
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  11. Ehrenzweig speaks of those who cannot descend to a state of psychological dedifferentiation because they have an aspect of the self that has crystallized at the surface level of the psyche. He mentions the aesthetic "mannerism" that he perceives the schizophrenic to be dependent upon, for his sense of normality. A natural counterpart of this aesthetic mannerism would be the tendency to treat reality through a lens of stereotyping vision (we can raise such issues here of gender and race).

    Maintaining predictability on the level of normal social discourse is key in preventing the tenuously stable person's descent into psychosis. It is as if such people wanted to dive deep into the psyche, but part of them remains buoyant, as if a leg-rope on a buoy tugs their ankle, forcing them to rise again (or risk going crazy by attempting refusal to come to the surface -- a brave position for some to take indeed).

    Psychological formations can cause one to become attached to representational normality as if it were a matter of one's sheer survival to keep oneself anchored to them. In his book, The Shadow of the Object: Psychoanalysis of the Unthought Unknown, Christopher Bollas describes a condition of "Normotic illness", whereby people are out of touch with the subjective world. He quotes the following from Winnicot on page 135:
    [T]here are [those]who are so firmly anchored in objectively perceived reality that they are ill [in the sense of] being out of touch with the subjective world and with the creative approach to fact (Winnicot 1971).
    This is an extreme example of being trapped by surface accretions, whereby the surface "known" always stands in place of subjective possibilities governed by the sphere of the unknown (which could be made manifest via the intuitive imagination to the conscious mind).

    In any case, the ability to dive down, to deflate ego as if it were a diving vest that needed to be emptied, is for the few.

    I don't see why we cannot call these few the "shamans" of the intellectual subconscious.
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  12. Key to Marechera’s "shamanism" was his ability to gain astounding insights whilst cognitively undergo a level of ego deflation (which, of course, he relates to us in a state of mind that is moderated by cognitive maturity). This is a useful state of mind employed by artists, that Anton Erenhzweig terms “dedifferentiation” (and which pertains, in psychanalytical terms, to the "pre-oedipal" field -- the strange sense of power dynamics that one locks into in early childhood).  At the most primal level of this infancy stage, thing melts into another, whereby male and female, black and white identities do not yet exist. Once all the solid elements of reality have been reduced as part-pieces of a primeval “oneness”, the hidden relationships between these elements can be explored.

    Facing them in their relatively molten state of cognitive “dedifferentiation”, Marechera is able to see new alignments of the dynamic forces that constitute identity, and to reintegrate the elements at will, into his artistic and Utopian political vision. What is shamanistic about this is that he appears to see, as it were, the spiritual counterparts of concrete social and historical identities, as being more than fixed in the solidity of the Rhodesian world, in terms, for instance of the crystalline identity of the white master and his black servant. Instead, Marechera’s viewpoint is inherently redemptive (politically and artistically), for he views those he comes across in terms of their creative but repressed potentialities and not just in terms of their limits within the historically contingent reality.

    One’s identity in the primal field is also a product of probability – as in the novel, Black Sunlight.  If 'wave theory is unto particle theory as the unconscious is to the conscious mind,' a shamanistic turn might be wave theory is to particle theory as is primal self in relation to its actualised fact (and contextually limited actuality). Work produced on the basis of a cognitively dedifferentiated sense of the world, may be grasped by the reader not logically -- that is in terms of cause and effect, or in terms of a subject and his field -- but intuitively and holistically at a subliminal and visceral level.

    Marechera’s contemporary shamanism is creative as well as being politically purposeful. It evokes  the three stages of artistic process defined by Anton Ehrenweig. There is first the breaking down of reality, by deliberate cognitive dedifferentiation, next is the rearrangement of the elements of cognition in a new artistic pattern (did the ancient rock painters engage in this same process?). Finally, Ehrenweig points to a stage of reassimilation of the features created in the work of art, under the guidance of unconscious processes, into the conscious awareness of the artist who created the work. This final stage lies behind the paradoxical outcome of the shaman’s psychological “great health” (despite his obvious maladies) as well as the artist’s higher level of insight compared to others.

    Ref
    Godwin, Robert W 1991. Wilfred Bion and David Bohm: Toward a Quantum Metapsychology. . Psychoanalysis and Contemporary Thought 14 (4):625-654



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  14. Unless my studies have deceived me, our collective and individual intolerable anxieties are the progenitors of morality. Of course, viewed on an individual level, we all have different breaking points, different points whereupon anxiety becomes intolerable -- and we have different experiences, too, some bound to impress upon us a feeling that they are more or less tolerable that others.

    Morality, however, tends not to be so much individually determined as it is conventionally instituted by various arms of society, governing social order. Convention thus creates "fault lines", or, if you prefer, predetermined 'paths of least resistance' within society, through which collective and individual anxieties can be discharged.

    Convention has developed a system of patriarchy, which may have had practical value in earlier times, in terms of co-ordinating a division of labour based on gender lines. These days, there is little need for such a system of gendered division of labor -- nonetheless gender ideologies still prevail and there are still those who get to pull the strings, and those who must dance -- patriarchy now fulfils a role of permitting those who have the greater share of power to discharge their anxieties. Of course others will have to pay for proclivities of those who cannot tolerate a higher level of anxiety than they are used to.

    Those whose nervous systems are relatively delicate will break-out in a fit of moral fervor after a very low level of outside stimulation. Others will be different and make a few guarded remarks only at the highest levels of anxiety whilst they seek to manage reality's effects.

    Interesting how most modern day "Nietzscheans" choose to be insulated by patriarchy's little moral buffer, finding automatic reprieve from social anxiety through embracing a conventionalised system of morality aimed against women. I'm sure they feel no anxiety at all, because it is already pre-emptively dealt with for them, thanks to the predominant value systems of Judeo-Christianity that are, fortuitously for them, ready to be invoked. Yet one doesn't admire these latter day patriarchs for their particular mode of anxiety reduction.

    ***

    Note:

    1) It isn't wrong or even a sign of weakness to experience anxiety. It's what you do or do not do with that sensation that is telling.

    2) It's not necessarily wrong or a sign of weakness to go to war if someone is constantly infringing on your space, which causes you ongoing anxiety. It is the best management of anxiety, sometimes, to use your nervous energy to defend your mind and body. Just don't do it in a way that pretends you are doing something different -- i.e. domestic abuse is a sign of inner weakness, so don't abuse others just because you are anxious.  
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