Thoughts about Psychotherapy Session on August 21, 2017

The session opens with me attempting to present to the therapist

a letter critiquing the previous session. The therapist shifts the
focus to how I am feeling. I begin to talk about my feelings but
then refer to a writer (Thoreau) who promoted civil disobedience
-- that is Thoreau wrote an essay about criticizing the authorities.
This raises an issue of psychic determinism. The unconscious will
find expression for what it wants to express regardless of how the
individual in psychotherapy is censored. The unconscious will
find a way to express itself. Even though the therapist detoured
me -- I got back onto my psychic highway.

I then raise an issue relating to schizoid pathology. The schizoid

dilemma is described as a need for merger with others combined
with a fear of engulfment. If another person is emotionally
distant, the schizoid craves merger with that other person. If that
other person becomes emotionally close, the schizoid fears being
engulfed by the other person. I talk about my dual feelings about
my apartment, a walled enclosure. I express ambivalence. My
apartment is invested with ambivalent feelings. The walled
enclosure of my apartment is a protective presence for me. But at
the same time, it represents distressing confinement (merger
hunger/fear of engulfment). This duality is present in the
writings of Samuel Beckett (author of the play Waiting
for Godot and the novel Murphy). Beckett's writings present the
duality embodied in the symbol of the "room." Rooms offer
soothing "containment" but can also be suffocating. Beckett is
talking about his feelings about his mother symbolically.
On commentator writes:

This ambivalence towards life is predominant within the narrative-

self, manifested within the nature of the characters as ‘real’ people,
the imagery, flow and associations of the text, and, in the later
work, within the actual dynamic content of the narrator’s words
themselves. Murphy’s longing for this objectless state, which
contradicts his need for a deep and enduring love, Watt’s hunger for
containment and closeness to Knott, the images throughout the
oeuvre of rooms that serve the dual function of protection and
suffocation, these are all manifestations of this predominant self-
state. The intense condensations of ‘Fizzle 5’ demonstrate this state
quite poetically. It reveals a ‘closed space’ where ‘all needed to be
known for say is known.' It is a closure of the internal world to
others, who are all needed, since all that is needed for the self to be
is to be known by a loving other. But this is closed off in an internal
void, as all (needed ideas, others) are already known: ‘all needed […]
is known.’ The ultimate journey is lonely, a world filled with the
‘dead but not rotting,' as others, and the self, are neither alive nor
dead, held hopefully/sadistically in this neither world. The road is
‘just wide enough for two. On it no two ever meet.' The meeting
that never occurs for Beckett, which is the source of so many failed
endings, is a failed beginning, a failed meeting, a failed knowing
between mother and child.

Greenberg and Mitchell write further:

 the helpless and terrified infantile ego, overwhelmed by unrequited
longings and dread of abandonment, remains alive within the
regressed ego, in the heart of the personality […] In the face of the
constant threat of depersonalization and disorganization,
reasoned Guntrip, the ego continually struggles to remain attached
to life. All mental life and involvement with others, real and
imaginary, operates basically as a defense against regressive longing
[…] the concept of the ‘regressed ego’ becomes a conceptual black
hole, swallowing up everything else. Conflicted relations with others,
and masochistic attachments to bad internal objects serve as the
ego’s protection against regression. Oral, anal, genital fantasies
reflect ‘a struggle … to stay born and function in the world of
differentiated object-relations as a separate ego’.

When I talk about my apartment at this therapy session, I

am symbolically talking about my schizoid dilemma and my
infantile feelings about my mother. The therapist totally misses
all of this and remains stuck in my manifest report. She ignores
all the deeper meanings of my report.

Note my reference to Thoreau's protest against slavery. Slavery

represents the loss of freedom, the loss of identity and
constriction/confinement. Then I refer to Thoreau's
imprisonment -- again loss of freedom, loss
of identity and constriction/confinement.

Observe how the therapist ignores the transference. I am really

talking about my feelings about her. In my relationship with her
I feel loss of freedom, loss of identity and
constriction/confinement -- and a need to escape. Keep in mind
that psychotherapy takes place in a "room."

When I talk about the meticulous work of the FBI tracking down
the Unabomber following all the leads and clues, am I not talking
about my identification of the FBI with the work of the
psychoanalyst? The FBI tracks down the fugitive-in-hiding. The
psychoanalyst tracks down the deeper aspects of the individual
"hiding" in the unconscious. Am I not talking about my desire to
be in psychoanalysis rather than in supportive psychotherapy?

When I talk about psychological testing I am talking

about introjective depression. In introjective pathology the
individual is concerned with identity definition (a concern for
psychological "profiling") rather than relational concerns. The
FBI employs psychological profilers. Think of the TV
drama, Criminal Minds.

One psychologist writes: “Individuals with an introjective, self-

critical personality style may be more vulnerable to depressive
states in response to disruptions in self-definition and personal
achievement as opposed to anaclitic concerns centering on
libidinal themes of closeness, intimacy, giving and receiving care,
love, and sexuality. In anaclitic depression the development of a
sense of self is neglected as these individuals are inordinately
preoccupied with establishing and maintaining satisfying
interpersonal relationships. Introjective depressive states center
on feelings of failure and guilt centered on self-
worth. Introjective depression is considered more
developmentally advanced
than anaclitic depression. Anaclitic depression is primarily oral in
nature, originating from unmet needs from an omnipotent
caretaker (mother); while introjective depression centers on
formation of the superego and involves the more developmentally
advanced phenomena of guilt and loss of self-esteem during the
oedipal stage. Patients with introjective disorders are plagued by
feelings of guilt, self- criticism, inferiority, and worthlessness.
They tend to be more perfectionistic, dutybound, and
competitive individuals, who often feel like they have to
compensate for failing to live up to the perceived expectations of
others or inner standards of excellence. What is common
among introjective pathologies is the preoccupation with more
aggressive themes (as opposed to libidinal) of identity, self-
definition, self-worth, and self-control. Research suggests that
such individuals may have histories of parental rejection and
excessive authoritarian control early in life. In the pathologically-
introjective, development of satisfying interpersonal relationships
is neglected as these individuals are inordinately preoccupied with
establishing an acceptable identity. The focus is not on sharing
affection—of loving and being loved—but rather on defining the
self as an entity separate from and different than another, with a
sense of autonomy and control of one’s mind and body, and with
feelings of self-worth and integrity. The basic wish is to be
acknowledged, respected, and admired.” Kemmerer, D.D.,
“Anaclitic and Introjective Personality Distinctions among
Psychotherapy Outpatients: Examining Clinical Change across
Baseline and Therapy Phases.”
I speak of my personality as a gallery of characters. We see this in
creative persons. The psychoanalyst Margaret Brenman-Gibson
has observed that the personalities of creative individuals
characteristically encompass a diversity of identity elements and
that creative persons show an unusual capacity to identify, or
empathize: “The gift of empathizing, central to such diverse arts
as psychotherapy and playwriting, is little understood. The special
kind of imagination that permits one person to put himself ‘in
the place of another’ involves at the very least some experience
of incompletion on the part of the ‘I,’ with some hope of closure
by way of identification with the ‘thou,’ thus often thought of in
Western culture as a feminine quality. But there is more than
this. There is a diffusion of identity to accommodate--as
[playwright] Odets put it--an ‘inner gallery of characters,’ and
there is a detached witnessing of the entire process. Put to
creative use, such a ‘gallery’ may issue in the career choice of
writer, actor, playwright, or any other artist. Given different
dimensions, the outcome may the practice of
psychotherapy.” Brenman-Gibson points out, however, “with less
good fortune, a self-effacing, indecisive chameleon emerges with a
chronic sense of weakness, suggestibility, fraudulence, or
hypocrisy. Odets would ultimately know all of these uses of his
extraordinary capacity to empathize.” Brenman-
Gibson, M. Clifford Odets: American Playwright - The Years from
1906 to 1940, at 630 (Atheneum: 1982).