Tag: Henri Wallon

Synchro-spam

Synchronicity is orchestral. It orchestrates and has a way of re-shaping

identity,

experienced subjectively, perhaps, as a change of values or aspirations,

”The hallmark of the transpersonal is the experience of being acted upon.” Sylvia Brinton Perera.

Its also true, in a more lyrical way, that we can count on the brass section at the major crossroads of life while the woodwind section is a bit more gentle, everyday kind of thing.

Hopefully.

”Synchronicity is an ever present reality for those who have the eyes to see.”    C G Jung.

You might say that synchronicity was the Universe’s way of….

you are failing miserably to understand

Er,  what I was going to say was, how can we be more aware of..

The best way is to stop cursing yourself for nothing….

and so I thought, lets go looking for it.

Synchronicity will occur wherever I’m all riled up about something because the riteous prick in me will always stir stuff up from the bottom of the pond with some kind of reactive drama…

in need of compensation.

So what has me fired up?

You must contact your insurance/medical assistance business immediately if
you should be referred to a medical facility for treatment.

And its not what you’d think. To my shame its not world hunger or political corruption, its the spam on my blog, the bastard scamsters and hackers that slip under the radar and piggyback me through cyberspace for the sake of a mention. Piano lessons in Singapore, Maths tuition in Queensland.

keep up wrinting.

If you were to apply a little method and actually practice what you have been preaching about  the philosopher’s stone being found on the dung heap, then you could stop angrily deleting it all, but rather treat it as a waking dream and see what meaning might be found.

Perhaps my angst is that I insist on seeing these gremlins as parasites. And why shouldn’t I have a few parasites? Perhaps they could even be useful… the extent of my annoyance suggests it has more to do with me than I would like to admit, so there’s some gem in there…

To become identified with the fixed reference point of the separate self limits our freedom, entraps our creative potency and hinders our compassion.”             P Levy

The thought of approaching my spam as a lucid dream is exciting…. it’s like having a new role…

”and though the soul does not assume the lead by killing off the ego, the ego is demoted, one might say, and given a different assignment in the psyche, which is essentially to submit to the concerns of the soul.” Clarissa Pinkola Estés

Ok so, most of it is pretty standard, what you’d expect, paranoid delusional stuff about the end of the world, preparing for Armaggedon..

some appeal to my male insecurity…

you too can have a longer penis, build this Extender in the comfort of your own home…

Hmm, before or after building a fallout shelter?

Consider the size of your own.

I am, I am, its just that my attention is now on…

cheap wedding dresses.

lots of stuff about cheap wedding dresses, the appeal strangely riding on the premise that you don’t want your wedding to look cheap.

and keep those straps tucked in girls. A stray brastrap could ruin your big day.

What kind of heavy trip is that? You can see it now..

OMG, a brastrap, you’ve fucked up the rest of my life, you bitch.

But the one that really got me…

was an advert for anal bleaching.

What the fuck is this doing in my psyche? Still, not to worry, apparently its quite acceptable in discussion these days and no longer for just porn stars and bridesmaids….

For crying out loud, what is it with the bridesmaids? Since when might a bridesmaid consider having her anus bleached as part of her maidenly duties? And to what purpose? How might it sit in the collective psyche of the dearly beloved knowing such a thing?

I don’t want to play this anymore.

#If you quit, how are you here?

Ok, but it feels….. shitty.

And not just because of the pervy connotations of it, or even the objectification of women, but because this denial of body, this cut offness from sexuality and this weird alienation from self is given the twist of debonair sophistication.

Barbie is still our aspiration.

How long will it be before you can’t show your face in public because you haven’t had your monthly bleaching? Shaving and waxing are no longer enough. Now you have to peroxide your heiney as well.

The ability to combine analytical thinking with imaginative execution is extremely desirable.

Ok, so we’re mocking the superficiality of modern culture, but yet to get the symbolism of all this. The problem is deeper than depersonalisation.

Its about disgust, before it ever occured to you that you are a person…

who might be… depersonalised.

Babies learn most about themselves and the world before the self/other dichotomy opens up. They learn from their kinaesthetic experience, from mouth, smell, feel and how they are held, the visceral cues about whether the Universe is friendly or not.

 
Henri Wallon uses the term ‘confiscation’ (Wallon 1949) to describe the emptiness that seems to be, from a western point of view, an intrinsic part of the developmental process. Confiscation implies that something once present has been taken away and indeed it has.

Baby has yet to learn of Yahweh’s divine truculence with the Great Mother but soon does so from the non verbal cues intruded in the personal mother, the loss of her divine representation bound to translate itself as depression and ennui. Baby is then compelled to join mother in her impoverished psycho-spiritual framework and confiscation is the felt result.

‘The loss which lies at the heart of confiscation is no small matter. It amounts to a revolution of consciousness the crucial feature of which is the decision to mistrust the evidence of our senses.’ ie Nature.  Berman (1989)

 
Baby renounces the body as a way of knowing herself. The shared loss of the numinous feminine container which anchors and enrichens everyday mothering means baby is effectively born into an untrustworthy world which she internalizes, sacrificing her own capacity to apprehend reality.

Symptoms develop.

The obsessive’s preoccupation with ‘dirt’ is primarily a concern about how easily love can be lost, the panic of contamination a prelude to rejection and isolation.

The issues are disgust, tedium and whether or not love can be extinguished by diarrhoea. Baby does his best to fall in line by shamefully accepting that his pooh is intrusive, horrible and damaging. Perhaps even baby himself is intrusive horrible and damaging. What he does is still bound up in who he is.

Unmet needs in baby don’t go away. They manifest in adult life as a craving for instant gratification, passive entertainment, getting loved-up, the feeling of being owed a living and the expectation of having someone to take care of all eventualities.

The symbols are the lottery, the red carpet, celebrity.

In the meantime we are so regressed we have to be told what to do at every turn. Life’s simplest operations are governed for us, all the way down to serving suggestions on packets of salt, advice on how to remove a bottle top (twist!) and those oh so necessary instructions on a joint of beef to remove plastic wrapping prior to putting it in the oven.

This makes fewer resources offered to be robbed.

Sometimes we make apotropaic gestures to ward of feared expectations. Invariably, however,

‘the catastrophic expectation has already happened.” D Winnicott.

We project Armaggedon into the future. Its safer there. The Preppers are too late.

We’re facing the wrong way.

arse about face.

Which is perhaps why Jung once said to Marie Louise von Franz,

”I cannot confess to have solved the riddle of the coniunctio mystery”CG Jung

All of which goes to show how even the greatest minds are limited precisely by the mental identification to which they are bound to fall prey. Jung veiwed it as personal failure not to have figured it all out, forgetting that the hierosgamos, the sacred marriage, is not there to be ‘solved’ anymore than the bridesmaids are there to have their bottoms bleached.

The mystery is not a riddle to be surmounted or sanitised by man.

perhaps if the Unconscious could be approached from some vantage point other than being smart arse enough to suss it out then she would simply reveal Her treasures.

excellent listener.

and the bridesmaids might have their honour restored.

 

Loss and Shame .

The bottomless, shameful pit

of the unmothered child,

trying to claw whatever he can to staunch his wound…..

seemed to me to be best expressed recently by the aside in some article I read that Donald Trump had claimed to own 9 billion when he only had 4.

Only 4 billion?!

For shame!

And suddenly despite every fibre of your body screaming out against it you start feeling sorry for the man.

Only 4 billion..what an embarrassing out, dude.

His ability to make people sorry for him and the dramatic style employed by the man are narcissistically generated strategies of defence against shame or the prospect of shame. Like the flares released by fighter jets to put incoming missiles off the scent.

Problem is those flares are only partially effective..

and so you have to take evasive manouveres

alla time..

Shame is very different from Guilt. Guilt is about what you have done, so it can be atoned in some way. There’s always some possibility of redemption.

But developmentally deeper and more ancient than the Guilt and Atonement story is The Story of Shame and for feeling bad about what you Are, let alone whatever it was you did.

The Gnostics preserved some ancient fragments of the pre-biblical Myth of Sophia. They are an allegory of the degradation of the Goddess.

”She fell into the hands of bad men who passed her between them. Some raped her. Others seduced her with gifts. She became a prostitute. Overcome with shame she no longer dared to leave her abusers.” The Exegesis of the Soul

When the sacred feminine at the back of mothering ceases to be collectively honoured, what will the way she holds her child communicate to that infant?
What a baby experiences of its mother is what baby takes itself to be. If the mirror is  seen ‘through a glass darkly’ then what can baby make of its own reality?

The dishonour to the feminine becomes baby’s dishonour. His shame.

An’ yo 4 billion will NEVER be enough.

Balint calls it ‘the basic fault’. This gives rise to RD Laing’s ‘Divided Self’ or Lacan’s, ‘paranoid alienation’ all of which needs soothing with Winnicott’s ‘transitional objects’.
But not all cultures experience this. Liedloff (1986) describes the child rearing  of the Yekuana Indians in Venezuela and notes,

‘they grow up not experiencing any gap or having any empty space in themselves. They do not spend their entire lives, (as we do) trying to prove they exist or making up for the missing sense of self.’
Crucially for the Yekuana, Wanadi, the sky God, has a good relationship with his consort, the Goddess of the Nadir who lives in the bowels of the earth. She is symbolised as a four headed snake crowned with horns. Four-foldness represents wholeness. As snake she is eternally self replenishing and her horns denote divine power.

This earth goddess animates Nature.  The Yekuana  experience all acts of Nature as participating in the body of the Goddess. Motherhood and being with children is a sacred communion with Nadir. And so they do not experience paranoid alienation.
We are tempted to describe certain phenomena, alienation, paranoid anxiety, anomie, bad breasts and the like as though they were of universal significance rather than the culturally specific expression of something now passed out of memory but still so faithfully acted out over time they seem intrinsic to human nature.

In my view they are  outcome of  deep and profound spiritual loss. Yahweh  banishes Hokmah/Sophia  from the divine stage just after the time of Solomon (3000BC) and this is the last time in Judeo-Christian literature that we hear of Her without the new bride’s curses being thrown at her heels.

Given Her place in our imagination for the eighty thousand years or more before that and we’re scarcely over blowing our noses.

Of course the stamping of  ash and bone into the sacred places to eternally desecrate them was a bit unfortunate.

And the, you know, all the hacking down of stuff.

Yes, and the, you know..

killings

We are the children of cosmic divorce who now live with daddy. We don’t see mummy anymore. And nor do we have feelings about it.

But we do hit each other a lot..

and break each other ‘tings..
At the same time as Yahweh was tipping Sophia/Hokmah into the sea the Assyrian God Marduk slays the Goddess Tiamat and the Sumerian Enlil deposes the goddess Nammu. It happened so long ago we are only dimly aware of it, but like the early and forgotten traumas of our own individual childhoods we still collectively experience the consequences at a symptomatic, visceral level. We collectively mistrust the body and demonise the instincts formerly championed by Sophia/Hokmah.

Henri Wallon uses the term ‘confiscation’ (Wallon 1949) to describe the emptiness that seems to be, from a western point of view, an intrinsic part of the developmental process from true to false self that is a substantial region in the underbelly of western civilisation. Confiscation implies that something once present has been lost or taken away and indeed it has. Baby has yet to learn of Yahweh’s divine truculence but soon gets wind from the non verbal cues of shame and rejection intruded in mother. And like all babies he holds himself responsible for the split he experiences in mother and begins to identify with her  humiliation.

Confiscation is the felt result. ‘The loss which lies at the heart of confiscation’, says Berman (1989), ‘is no small matter. It amounts to a revolution of consciousness the crucial feature of which is the decision to mistrust the evidence of our senses.’ ie Nature.
Baby renounces the body as a way of knowing herself, sacrificing her own capacity to apprehend reality for one now rooted in shame.

With the loss of the continuum  to the divine feminine, not only is the Universe suddenly unsafe but we ourselves cease to experience ourselves as trustworthy and have to compensate for it to the point of parody.