My favorite movies from when I was a kid.

I thought about my favorite movies from when I was a kid and why I
identified with the characters and stories. I saw the following movies
between the ages of about 7-13. The fantasies suggest a child who
experienced family discord, parental discord, invalidation, and scorn; lack
of maternal nurturance and protection; a child who retreated into an
internal mental world for safety and who struggled with loneliness, a need
for twinship, and a need for validation. Positively, the themes indicate
creativity, strong will, and independence.

I don’t think these are the fantasies of many boys. I am interested in the
way my unusual fantasy world corresponded to my alienation from most
other kids my age. Who did I have anything in common with?
Dr. Zhivago (orphan), The Egyptian, The Day The Earth Stood
Still, The Ten Commandments (orphan), The Boy with Green Hair
(orphan)

The world is a kind of nuisance. The real world is an intrusion. I

just want to live. Why can’t I just live? I just want to be left alone
to write. To think. To imagine. There is so much conflict in the
world. I feel that I am constantly getting caught up in other
people’s conflicts. I hate that. Why can’t people leave me alone?

I sometimes think there’s a civil war in my head. Two sides

battling it out. Constant conflict and chaos. But then I think that
goes on in the outside world as well. People are always fighting.
And then I get caught up in it. I wish I could escape from all that.
I feel like an orphan or an adopted child. My parents are not my
real parents. My family was not my real family. It’s strange, but I
feel I came from another family. I feel I belong somewhere else.
And the place where I am is not my real home. I always feel like
an outsider. It’s like I don’t fit. There’s a lack of fit between me
and other people. Like an extraterrestrial alien. I am stuck with
humans. I don’t want to be with humans. I want to be with my
own kind.

I think of myself as a rebel. At times, a stubborn non-conformist.

Someone who doesn’t go along with the crowd. I fight the
established order, if only covertly. I live underground. Like a
person in a totalitarian regime. In my mind and in covert
behaviors, I defy and fight against the Powers that Be. I would
like to crush them.

The Egyptian

I think I come to the attention of important people. Powerful and

important people. They take an interest in me. I don’t know why
exactly. A psychoanalyst said to me, “You must think you’re an
important person.” Maybe. I don’t know. I’ve had these thoughts
since I was a kid.

It’s as if I live in the real world simply to go back to my private

world and think about my experiences. Think about other
people. But the actual living is not an end in itself. I can imagine
myself as an old man living in exile, in a desert, writing my
memoirs. The story of my life. But I will have fulfilled my
purpose. Because my purpose in life was not simply to live life
and have experiences. My real purpose was to live, have
experiences solely for the purpose of creating fodder for my
thoughts. Fodder for my imaginative recreation of life in my
mind and in my writing. I could well imagine qualifying for a
profession and end up losing my license. But that would be OK.
Because then I could think about it and write about it.

Journey to the Center of the Earth, The Time Machine

You know, I have ideas about things, about the world. And these
ideas and perceptions of the world around me are not credible to
other people. No one understands what I’m talking about. They
dismiss me. They dismiss my thinking. I crave validation. But I
don’t get it. And I try to prove to others that the world I see is
real. And my attempts to prove these things, these private
perceptions of the world, only seem to get me into more trouble.

The Time Machine (original version)

The past is important to me. I worry about losing the past. It’s as
if I am tormented by the past just perishing from memory. I
struggle so hard to keep a memory of what’s gone on in my past.
Maybe that’s why books are important to me. Books are a record
of the past. As long as there are books, the past stays alive.

The Boy with Green Hair

I live in silence. I go long periods without talking. When I am

with people I’m lost in my thoughts. People say that about me.
That I never talk. I have to make an effort to talk because I’m
often not really aware of the presence of other people. I’m a
serious person. I think about serious things. I don’t think about
fun. Having fun in a conventional sense. I’m different from
other people. Kind of like a freak. I suppose some people
ridicule me.

I feel I have a message to bring to other people. Tell the world

something. I don’t know what that message is. But I feel like a
messenger with a message. I don’t think I would be a successful
messenger. No one accepts what I say. No one cares about what I
have to say. But I don’t stop. I’ll go on carrying my message.

The Birdman of Alcatraz

I feel like I have no freedom in the world. In the outside world,

it’s as if I wear a straitjacket. I retreat to my inner world. It’s
where I am free. I’m happy there. It’s as if it’s my private
playground of thoughts and satisfaction. I’m kind of happy with
my situation in the sense that I get so much pleasure from inside
myself. I forget about the outside world. But when I am faced
with the real world of other people then I get an idea of how
constricted I feel. But when I am in my private playground, I am
happy. I shut the world out. I’m able to do that. And I am
grateful for my ability to do that.

Christopher Columbus (with Frederick March)

I’m a strong-willed person. I will carry out a plan with great

determination. Even in the face of a lack of support from other
people. And despite strong opposition from other people. Other
people sometimes think I’m crazy. Some of the things I do are
crazy. But if I believe in what I am doing, I do it. I don’t care
what other people say. What other people think. I am only
concerned with carrying out my plan. Only my goals matter. No
matter how seemingly crazy or futile.

Captain Horatio Hornblower

How would I describe myself? I’m painfully self-conscious. I’m

introspective. Hyperactively introspective. I’m intensely reserved.
Full of self-doubt. People see me as unhappy and lonely. I guess I
am. But I don’t think about being unhappy and lonely. I
experience these things, but don’t think about them. I’m full of
fears. I think of myself as cowardly, I suppose. Dishonest. I obsess
over petty failures and failings. But I think I have an ability to
persevere, think rapidly, and cut to the heart of a matter. I have a
strong sense of duty and I work hard work. But I’m guarded with
nearly everyone.

I wish I had a close friend. A comrade-in-arms, I suppose. A kind

of brother figure.

It Should Happen to You

I wish I were famous. I crave that. To be recognized. To be one of

the beautiful people. To be a celebrity. To be unique and famous.
It’s like the expression, “One day my name will be in lights.” I
think about that a lot. To be famous.

A Journey to the Center of the Earth, The Time Machine

I have a strongly artistic side. A sense of the sublime. A
veneration for the ideal. I experience a mix of emotions that are
confusing at times. Feelings of awe, but at the same time terror, a
sense of the sublime, reverence, and majesty in reaction to certain
things I see. A sense of glory and strength. And also fear and
fascination. At times disbelief and even horror. I can remember
having these feelings even in middle childhood.

garyfreedmansaid:

May 17, 2021 at 2:59 pm

I have a strongly artistic side. A sense of the
sublime. A veneration for the ideal. I
experience a mix of emotions that are
confusing at times. Feelings of awe, but at
the same time terror, a sense of the sublime,
reverence, and majesty in reaction to certain
things I see. A sense of glory and strength. At
times disbelief and even horror.

Phyllis Greenacre (1953, 1956) discussed the

experience of awe in childhood. She defined
awe as “solemn and reverential wonder,
tinged with latent fear, inspired by what is
sublime and majestic in nature” or “dread
mingled with veneration, as of the Divine
Being.” Greenacre argued that the
experience of the sublime arises in
childhood as a result of observation of the
father’s penis. However, she pointed out
that, before the child can respond to the
phallus, he or she must first have begun the
process of differentiation from the mother,
so that there is some understanding of
separateness—variations in body
configuration and size combined with an
increase in genital feelings. The encounter
with the penis (especially if it is erect) is felt
as a shock, and the child experiences a
combination of fear, fascination, and
admiration. However, the awesome nature of
the father’s penis is based not just on its
relative size, but also on the stimulation of
sexual fantasies that blend desire with fears
of harmful, even violent penetration
(heterosexual in the girl, homosexual in the
boy). This accounts for the highly charged,
internal state of “delightful horror”
associated with the sight of the penis. In her
1956 paper on awe in childhood, Greenacre
extended the source of the sublime from the
father’s penis to the child’s experience of the
father as a whole: “experiences involving
masculine strength, power, glory, virility, or
the phallus itself” (p. 79). Greenacre’s idea of
the origin of the experience of the sublime
in the encounter with the masculinity of the
father (concretely represented in its purest
form in the erect phallus) has important
implications for the notion of a paternal
aesthetic, which I will take up in the next
section.

Heinz Kohut, although not directly

discussing the sublime, linked experiences of
awe—and by implication, the sublime—to
aspects of the experience of the idealized
parental imago. Although in The Analysis of
the Self, he described awe as a part of the
symptom picture of narcissistic character
disorder, I believe it is safe to say that the
feeling of awe and the experience of the
sublime may form parts of experiences of
idealization that occur not just in mental
disorders (where Kohut notes that the awe is
often vague, fragmentary, and not associated
with a whole object), but also in states of
mental health (where the sense of awe would
be clear, encompassing, and associated with
a distinct object or sensation).

However, I would argue that the experience

of awe and the sublime would be most
clearly associated with the experience of the
archaic, idealized paternal imago, in which
there is also some disintegration associated
with empathic failure. This would account
for the balance between admiration and fear
that is part of the sublime. But the failure in
empathy and the resulting selfcrisis and
disintegration would not be severe enough
to lead to a neurotic or psychotic reaction;
rather, in the sublime, the capacity to
idealize remains intact, and the paternal
imago retains a high degree of idealization,
but the emergence of aggression invests the
idealization with a malevolent taint, and
hence a unique combination of terror and
admiration results.

I believe that Kris, Greenacre, and Kohut

offer a solid foundation for the theory of a
psychoanalytic sublime. First, it is a normal
state in which the ego and an idealized
object are experienced as powerfully linked,
if not at times merged; second, the
experience of the sublime originates in
middle childhood, when the differentiation
from the mother is being accomplished and
awareness of the father is beginning; third,
the sublime is linked to the child’s
experience of the father’s unique
characteristics: power, size, importance, the
phallus; and fourth, the sublime blends
qualities of idealization with aggression and
is an outgrowth of normal levels of empathic
failure associated with the child’s
relationship with the father.