Big Brother or Black Brother? A psychoanalytic investigation of alliance parturition function and foreclosure and what that might tell us about human psychopathology
A significant portion of this writing came from Amber Jacobs’ 2007 book, On Matricide: Myth, Psychoanalysis, and the Law of the Mother. New York. Columbia University Press and is listed in the sources below. But first, let me start off with a brief discussion about the psychoanalytic roots of targeting and my personal experience being a targeted individual.
I am a targeted individual (TI). The last time I was sent to a psychic ward, which was on June 14, 2021, the psychiatrist assigned to my case was Dr. Shamilov who explicitly stated to me that “it was not my mother who was doing this to me.” First, I have to go on a bunch of assumptions here. Assuming of course that what Dr. Shamilov was talking about is the gang stalking with electronic targeted physical assaults and psychotronic torture I am experiencing. And then, assuming that somehow the psychiatric community is involved based on the fact that an authority in the psychiatric community, a medical doctor, knows what my personal case of gang stalking with electronic targeted physical assaults and psychotronic torture is all about. The next assumption is that this phenomenon is about experimental medical technology that manipulates the human brain or the authorities have uncovered my perpetrators.
Next, in this line of hypothesis, is stating the psychoanalytic truths that uncover the fundamental wrongful intent in the practice of gang stalking with electronic targeted physical assaults and psychotronic torture. This phenomenon eerily points to the indexical sign of incorporation as the means by which what is desired and envied is appropriated and taken to be one’s own. The psychopathological defense function of incorporation has a myth that is used to better understand its reason, causes, and purpose, like Freud’s Oedipus, in Greek mythology. This myth is known as the incorporation of Metis by Zeus. This myth, similar to Freud’s Oedipus, helps us to understand psychopathology. And it goes like this, Zeus swallows whole the pregnant body of his wife Metis. Then, Zeus and Metis’ fully formed fetus springs forth from the head of Zeus. To understand this myth, we analyze the narrative content of what is happening. I have stated one of the things that is happening is Incorporation. Incorporation of the mother and her subsequent disappearance/destruction form the process by which Zeus establishes his power. With the incorporation/swallowing/consuming of the pregnant mother. Zeus not only achieves the appropriation of the female reproductive capacity together with the “wisdom” of Metis, his wife but also effectively swallows and obliterates the mother-daughter relationship. Here, if we delve further, we uncover that Zeus himself possesses anxieties regarding his own mother. But how can that be? Zeus is the ultimate creator. He doesn’t have a mother and thereby debunks the entire system of an omnipotent fatherly diety and religion itself.
To further analyze, since the mother-daughter relationship has been destroyed with the disappearance/destruction of Metis, the fact that she has been swallowed whole into the belly of Zeus expresses Zeus now has infantilized Metis. Metis has now taken on the position of the fetus inside the male womb/brain. The appropriation gestation achieves the fusion of the mother into the daughter with the final product being Athena. Through his incorporation of Metis, Athena is born the motherless daughter, who will never become a mother herself but will remain a virgin daughter forever: an asexual, aggressive virgin, veiled, armed, synthetic, all artifice, seduction, and defense, a femininity created from the mind of Father Zeus. We can certainly come to understand how this explains some creative perversion of lesbian/transgender sexual/gender roles. But lesbians, nor do transgender people, do not normally pose a threat to the larger social order we live in. However, in the minds of some, unconscious fears surround gay and lesbian sexual orientations and these individuals are cast as phantoms, spirits, ghosts that frighten and threaten to annihilate us.
The myth of Zeus’ parturition functions to foreclose the question of the scar of the navel (belly button), the one indelible mark of the connection to and disconnection from the original maternal body. Athena becomes the precious proof that the father is the prime author of identity. She will represent this grandiose logic/phantasy and devote her work to endorsing and institutionalizing it as law in her court of justice, as dramatized in the Oresteia. Unaware of the story of her own mother, Athena will condemn Clytemnestra and declare that the mother will not be mourned. The murdered mother will signify no loss, and Athena’s culture will collectively deny that there has been any loss at all. It will become a buried loss that cannot be mourned, experienced, or represented. The name of Metis is shrouded in silence along with the eradication of the navel as a symbolic mark of the generative link between offspring and mother. Eradication of Metis via the incorporation defensive function sustains the parthenogenetic phantasy on which Zeus’ order is based. Athena, as Zeus’ perfect abstraction, represents the radical divorce of the patriarchal social symbolic order from its roots to the flesh of the maternal body and the violence committed against the mother. Metis the Titaness is ransacked, raped, pillaged, and eaten. She will then be eradicated from representation in the moment that Zeus’ order of democratic justice is established through his perfect creation: Athena and her court of law.
What are the implied probabilities to this kernel of psychoanalytic Truth that by its very nature represents proof or evidence? The possibilities are vast no doubt with a wide array of interesting case vignettes.
To demonstrate the significance of Zeus’ incorporation for the sake of argument, let's reiterate Levi-Strauss’ point that in order to understand one myth one needs to explore its relationship to other myths. The Metis myth is matricidal. It inextricably relates to the Oresteia yet is only visible in the latter through the figure of Zeus’ perfect abstract creation, The Court of Law of Athena. Athena’s motherless status functions to secure her royalty to Orestes. In this way, the Oresteian myth conceals within it the story of the incorporation of Metis. If we reread the Oresteia in relation to the myth of Metis, we are able to discover what I consider to be the defensive function of the Oresteian myth. That is to say, the Oresteian myth distorts and reworks the myth of Zeus’ rape and incorporation of Metis in such a complex way that it functions to keep it concealed beneath its manifest content. The Oresteian myth conceals this matricidal myth of Metis as part of the desire of the masculine cultural imaginary that seeks to eradicate the process and the memory of the mother’s exclusion (parturition).
Therefore, in this way, the Orestreian myth effects censorship of the Metis myth for the purpose of consolidating and further sustaining the paternal law of the father. This paternal law depends on the foreclosure of a generative matricide. Yet the myth, like the dream (phantasy), reveals the traces of its censoring process through distortions, blanks, and alterations, which if analyzed properly can lead to the reconstruction of the original censored elements. Rereading the Oresteia in relation to the myth of Metis serves to restore a vital link between these two matricidal myths, whose severance hitherto has resulted in an incomplete analysis of the Oresteian myth and, further, has led to the situation in which matricide becomes a non-concept that cannot deliver its underlying structural law.
What is striking about the myth of Zeus and Metis is its representation of the violent primitive process of oral incorporation as the means by which what is desired and envied is appropriated and taken to be one’s own. To demonstrate the significance of this incorporation we must refer to Abraham and Torok’s distinction between incorporation and introjection. In their essay “Mourning or Melancholia: Introjection Verus Incorporation,” Torok and Abraham identify incorporation as a phantasy and introjection as a process; both are psychic mechanisms that attempt to negotiate the loss of a loved object. In the case of Metis, a loved maternal object.
Big Brother or Black Brother? A Psychoanalytic Investigation Into Human Psychopathology
Entertaining a theoretical dialogue using the incorporation of Metis by Zeus myth, we uncover psychoanalytic clues in this season’s version of Big Brother. In this new season, a new alliance group has been formed known as “The Cook Out.” This new alliance group is comprised primarily of black house guests. This alliance systematically annihilated and voted out all the white male house guests and they are now working on all the white female house guests. This suggests an unconscious defensive function of at least one of the black house guests, the leader running the alliance of “The Cook Out.” We can surmise that because of the actions taken, those actions identify an incorporation phantasy as a psychic defense that attempts to negotiate the loss of something once loved. But what was it that the leader of “The Cook Out” once loved so dear, that they are basing an “all-white expulsion of house guests?” And the myth we use, in psychoanalysis, to uncover the obscured wound is the incorporation of Metis by Zeus myth in Greek mythology. To describe and understand this psychopathology, the “kicking out” defensive function acts like Metis’ parturition function by Zeus to foreclose the scar of the navel (belly-button), the indelible mark of connection to and disconnection from the original maternal body. But the “original maternal body” can also be represented as the intimate space once enjoyed with someone once romantically loved or the intimate space of brotherhood once enjoyed between business associates or gang members.
The psychic mechanisms of introjection and incorporation both pertain to taking something inside, but incorporation is not a process, For Abraham and Torok, it is a phantasy that blocks the possibility of transforming the loss into symbolism. That is to say, transforming the loss into personal symbolism. Incorporation defends against the process of introjection in whole object relations. In the process of introjection, the loss of the loved object is acknowledged and mourned, allowing the loss to be converted into words. It is through the process of introjection that the loss becomes generative. Incorporation, however, is a phantasy that functions to deny the fact that there has been any loss at all: Failing to feed itself on words to be exchanged with others, the mouth absorbs in fantasy all or part of the person — the genuine depository of what is now nameless. The crucial move away from the introjection to incorporation is made when words fail to fill the subject’s void and hence the imaginary thing is inserted in the mouth in their place.
Incorporation is a refusal to introject loss. Incorporation results from, those losses that for some reason cannot be acknowledged as such. In this way, the incorporated object is rendered as unspeakable, unknowable, unable to be mourned or replaced with a substitute. Incorporation is the annulment of figurative language and allows for the fantasmic destruction of the action by means of which metaphors become possible. The phantasy of incorporation functions in the active destruction of representations. Thus, the clues are rendered as active destruction of the metaphorical through incorporation (parturition). Secrecy is imperative for survival and since incorporation is an eminently illegal act it must hide its face even from the ego.
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