psych bits

[masterofminds]

To what extent do those who have "gone mad" from pain, that is, those who have departed from the usual egocentric point of view, become able through their special situation to experience a part of that immaterial reality which remains inaccessible to us materialists?

The Clinical Diary, Ferenczi, 1988

[masterofminds]

These two unconscious forces - ego-ideal and Daimonion - combine to form the unconscious conscience (superego). Daimonion uses the ego-ideal's exaggerated infantile claims of all-power and grandiose achievements, constantly asking the unchanging question: "Have you achieved all the aims you promised yourself as a child?" If the answer to this question is in the negative, the result is guilt (Bergler, 1959). Bergler's idea that the "Daimonic" voices of the superego *use* the ego-ideal's images to create a more demanding perfectionism which only further persectures the edo, finds corroboration in much current clinical literature. Marion Woodman (1982) has attributed most eating disorders to an "addiction to perfection" and Sidney Blatt (1995) has shown persuasively how many contemporary suicides committed by seemingly healthy, accomplished people derive from a form of "neurotic perfectionism" in which the self-critical, often overly-self reliant individual is "stalked by his own impossible standards or perfection." The harsh, punitive superego is indeed a terrible "force" in the psyche of men and women across the spectrum of psychological adjustment and maladjustment.

The Inner World of Trauma, Kalsched, 1996

[masterofminds]

The outer events are not in themselves determinative of trauma. The problem comes from the fact that to her ego, these outer events seem like proof that the devastating conclusions she has drawn about her own loathsomeness and 'abnormality' are true. This is what Henry Krystal means when he says that trauma is not just overloading the circuits. It is related to meaning (Krystal 1988) - in this case the negative and distorted meaning that Kaye made, as a little girl, out of her suffering.

The Inner World of Trauma, Kalsched 1996

[masterofminds]

...when the psyche is ready, a dream can bring together affect and image to create meaning, which in turn makes further suffering possible - this time meaningful suffering - suffering that can be incorporated in the deep narrative history of an individual's life. Here is the transcendent function, the capacity for imagination restored, the renewed possibility of a symbolic life.

The Inner World of Trauma, Kalsched 1996

[masterofminds]

[Pragmatism:] Study what interests and is of value to you, study it in the different ways that you deem appropriate, and use the results in ways that can bring about positive consequences within your value system."

"Mixed Methodology: Combining Qualitative and Quantitative Approaches," Tashakkori and Teddlie 1998

[masterofminds]

Archetypal defenses, then, allow for survival at the expense of personality development. Their "goal" as I have come to understand it, is to keep the personal spirit "safe" but disembodied, encapsulated, or otherwise driven out of the body/mind unity - foreclosed from entering time and space reality. Instead of slowly and painfully incarnating in a cohesive self, the volcanic opposing dynamisms of the inner world become organized around defensive purposes, constituting a "self-care system" for the individual. Instead of individuation and integration of mental life, the archaic defense engineers dis-incarnation (dis-embodiment) and dis-integration in order to help a weakened anxiety-ridden ego to survive, albeit as a partially "false" self.

The Inner World of Trauma, Kalsched 1996

[masterofminds]

Repeated exposure to traumatic anxiety forecloses the transitional space, kills the symbolic activity of creative imagination, and replaces it with what Winnicott calls "fantasying" (Winnicott 1971). Fantasying is a dissociated state, which is neither imagination nor living in external reality, but a kind of melancholic self-soothing compromise which goes on forever - a defensive use of the imagination in the service of anxiety avoidance . . . this self-soothing really amounts to a self-hypnotic spell - an unconscious undertow into non-differentiation to escape conscious feeling. Here a retreat into 'oneness' replaces the hard work of separation necessary for 'wholeness.' This is not regression as we like to think of it in the service of the ego, but "malignant regression" -- regression which suspends a part of her in an auto-hypnotic twilight state in order (so her diabolical figure thinks) to assure the survival of herself as a human person."

The Inner World of Trauma, Kalsched 1996

[masterofminds]

[For the baby] the feeling of the mother's existence lasts x minutes. If the mother is away more than x minutes, then the imago fades, and along with this the baby's capacity to use the symbol of the union ceases. The baby is distressed, but this distress is soon mended because the mother returns in x + Y minutes. In x + y minutes the baby has not become altered. But in x + y + z minutes, the mother's return does not mend the baby's altered state. Trauma implies the baby has experienced a break in life's continuity, so that primitive defenses now become organized to defend against a repetition of 'unthinkable anxiety' or a return to the acute confusional state that belongs to disintegration of nascent ego structure. We must assume that the vast majority of babies never experience the x + y + z quantity of deprivation. This means that the majority of children do not carry around with them for life the knowledge from experience of having been mad. Madness here simply means a breakup of whatever may exist at the time of a personal continuity of existence. After 'recovery' from x + y + z deprivation a baby has to start again permanently deprived of the root which could provide continuity with the personal beginning.

Winnicott, 1971 in "The Inner World of Trauma: Archetypal Defenses of the Personal Spirit" by Donald Kalsched (1996)