Tag: projective identification.

The Poor and the Paranoid.

Many years ago I was best man at a friend’s wedding. Thereafter things got difficult for the couple and my friend would come over and unburden himself whilst I filled up on all his indignation. Eventually, much calmer now, he’d leave while I paced and fumed at what I assumed were my own feelings.

After a while he broke off our friendship on account of the ‘negative attitude’ I had towards his missus. Years later we met by chance. In a bid to repair things whilst naming what had happened we found a quiet spot to talk and I made the joke that as best man I had had to carry way more than the ring on the day of the wedding…

He agreed and yes we’re mates again..

The human psyche is like Plasticine. The individual colours can get rolled into each other. People can be made to participate in other’s lives as if they were their own. We have this weird capacity to both disown and re-home difficult aspects of self in order to avoid the dissonance of inner conflicts or the troubles of which real life is made.

In the trade it’s called ‘projective identification’, stuff you’re sold as though it were simply being returned…

If only it were no more than uncomfortable feelings being made homeless. In fact entire sets of attitudes can be made to migrate from one demographic group to another. Sometimes whole continents are needed to shoulder these projections, e.g. the ‘shit-holes of Africa’.

President Obama made a joke recently, asking, ‘Why are the Republicans so angry? They have the Senate, the Supreme court, the Presidency… yet still their angry.. how come?’.

The answer is that if you identify with an ever narrowing band width of piety you have to work all the harder to get ordinary folks to buy your narrative and shovel your shit.

Having foisted their bad conscience on you, Great Power then heaps up all the angry recriminations against bad conscience that you would expect..

which is quite a lot…

given that the bad conscience of White America is rooted in a history of lynching and genocide… The moral tirade bound to follow, once the attribution of all this murder and rape to third parties has safely taken place, is of a proportionate scale…

i.e. off the chart.

This splitting off from everything that contests the utopian dream of Benevolent White Capital, dark shards of the Collective Self which strive for inclusion with all the instincts of roosting rooks, is currently symbolized as the dangerous and contagious Caravan threatening to breach the inadequate defenses of nationalist fragility.

And so the desperate huddled masses, hungry, barefoot and tired, are magically transformed by the toxic alchemy of shadow projection into chunky Isis members, very bad guys, who somehow got lost in Honduras on their way from Saudi Arabia to Syria but not before traipsing through the thirteenth century where they picked up diseases officially declared eradicated by UNESCO.

No doubt they will stop in Sodom and Gomorrah to recruit further leprosy ridden Jihadi bum-boys before assaulting the five times greater force of professional soldiers sent to meet them with their flip flops.

If a private individual suggested to his friendly neighborhood psychiatrist that a force greater than that deployed in Afghanistan should be set in readiness against unarmed refugees still 900 miles away because they somehow threatened his way of life with their hollow frames, he’d have a prescription for Mogodon written out before you could say ‘paranoid delusion.’ Yet somehow this elite white tribe of supremacists hope for their electoral endorsement on the strength of it.

In the process Mr Trump has declared a symbolic equivalence between rocks and rifles in order to circumvent the noisome reality that this shuffling mass of human misery is somehow a worthy adversary and perpetuates the delusion that the caravan is a secret deployment of ninja warriors who can take over the pre-eminent nuclear country in the world with no more than their wily kung fu..

This old testament fantasy might have been better thought through. After all, last time an impoverished peasant went up against a trained warrior five times his size with no more than the pebbles at his feet it ended badly for the pollsters.

 

Moab is my Washpot.

Moab was a large tract of land, a country with its own king just outside Canaan., in which his Fantasticness would deposit his…leavings.

Yahweh dump him shi’ on Moab..

Yeees… a bombardment of shadow.

Moab, in ancient times, had

”become so utterly contemptible as to be likened to a washpot or basin in which men wash their feet. More than this, however, may have been intended—nay, we feel sure was intended by the expression.”

Thankyou, Phil of the Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit who, I’m afraid, has no time to answer any questions about the geneology of his family, so that queue will have to disperse.

Moab was the kid in the playground that got dumped on, that Yahweh deposited his imperfections and various bits of nail and hair and mank into.

These days we call it projective identification. It describes the process by which unconscious material can be effectively disowned by one party and claimed by another as if it were their own.

The dominant model that we have of the psyche, which we inherited from Freud, finds this phenomena a little embarrassing and hard to account for because the theories of that paradigm are intrapsychic, you fucked yourself up, rather than interpersonal, whereby one person might well pass on their ‘stuff ‘ to another.

Did you pack this suitcase, Sir? Has it been with anyone else since the time it was packed? Could some low down sonofabitch slip their shi’ in your stuff and make out like it was, you know, your shi’? make you carry it for them…so they can swan through, or by, or over, or around, and let you take da muddafuggin rap?

When Freud, as a young turk, tried to suggest, before the collective might of the Viennesse Psychiatric Society, in his ‘Aetiology of Hysteria’, (1896) that the cause of mental disturbance lay in the way people were treated as children, he was entirely shut down…

Wot do you call a bunch of psychiatrists?

Is this a joke? not now for chrissake,

No, but its interesting.. would it be a ‘dourness’, or maybe a ‘bowtie’, or a

be fucking serious will you

Perfectly serious, serious business, I mean it must have been like the inquisition for poor Sigmund..

Except that he recanted and went back to his, ‘you only imagined it’, theory..

And were his friends, friends with him again?

Yes.

And did he get his stuff back?

Yes.

And the badges, and the twizzly bits?

Yes, even the twizzly bits.

Bonza

So, the notion that projective identification even exists is a social faux pas in certain cirles, marking you out as a believer in the myth that parents burden kids and hits straight on the nerve of how people go crazy.

Projective identification works like this; You depend on me for your life. Don’t forget that. But I don’t have what you need. Do forget that. We’ll have an arrangement, a covenant. Instead of what you need, which you now can’t remember, you will be special, instead.

Good here, innit?

And for this grand prize… of specialness, which is really top notch, you will fufil certain… conditions, expectations, a subclause of which, in tweeeeeeenzy print will be, ‘and carry my shit while I suck out your heart through a straw.’

It doesn’t matter. You just sign it. The ‘Dependence for life’ proviso at the top of the contract renders the rest of it all academic. You sign.

Anyhoo, yes, the grand prize, and our little arrangement…

One of the things that earmarks a narcissistic encounter is the use of projective identification. You get to feel as though someone just crapped inside you. Or made you feel that you deserve no more.

Their avid fortifying and walling off of some prefered, though highly defended self image, is hard work. Its easier to get some other poor bastard to take charge of all the incongruous stuff in life. The hidden painting in an attic solution tends not to work too well. Neither does walling it up. No, give it a host. Someone who’ll just walk away with your shi’ , now gnawing on their innards rather than your own.

Sounds like a plan.

One person passes another a piece of themselves, or a gritty solution of all their…dirt, under the table, without anyone noticing. And if you are unlucky it will be yours forever unless you can palm it off on someone else.

You’re it!

They get to be grateful, need you, miss you. You can be their special little guy. And their whore.

Moab was Yahweh’s bitch.

And so God washes off his pollution onto….people, just across the river, and we, like dutiful lambs, having learned by divine example, have each other.  Oh frabjous day!

And so, oh great and mighty spoon of my heart, whilst you maintain all that fine PR with regular sousing of the people with your leavings your use of Moab as a washpot is so much less evolved than acceptance and dying and renewal. You get that lovely, fluffy bunny, freshly laundered smell that says, ‘mummy loves you’, rather than… ‘washpot’ which is so…frikkin…washpot.

ITS DONE OF YOUR DAMNBUSIBESSMJHGKVRYEDJDYKULYBLIUK

Well, actually, it is, oh great mountain of corpulence, because who is Moab other than me and mine?

THEN YOU WILL BE MY WASHPOL<YRFVHHGGYIFGUYGFUGY

We already are oh jewelled heap of my bowels, and its starting to piss me off.