PSYCHONEUROTIC: A somewhat accurate description
This weekend I took advantage of a seven-day free trial of STARZ and finally watched a movie I always wanted to see but never had the time, Girl Interrupted. The main character, Suzanne Kaysen, portrayed by Winnona Ryder in the movie was facing a major change and a decision-making process. She graduated high school and was facing a new life ahead of her. She begins to experience symptoms of mental illness and she makes a suicide attempt by trying to down an entire bottle of aspirin with an entire bottle of vodka to make the symptoms “stop.” She was diagnosed with the following:
Psychoneurotic Depressive Reaction, highly intelligent but in denial of her condition. Personality pattern disturbances, resistant, mixed type. R/O undifferentiated Schizophrenia
DIAGNOSIS: Borderline Personality Disorder
This led to my personal investigation into finding exactly what “psychoneurotic depressive reactions” are and how they may be defined.
Psychoneurotics are classified by many different symptoms. A psychoneurotic reaction could be defined as a young girl developing an eating disorder (anorexia/bulimia) after a boy rejects them in young adolescence. Psychoneurotic behavior is self-harming and masochistic in nature which opposes psychotic behavior. The most common sign of psychoneurotic behavior is attempted suicide. Somatic delusions can be one symptom of a psychoneurotic’s condition and Anorexics are one group that make up the class of psychoneurotics that may require hospitalization because of their long-term denial of food. As was the case of UK Big Brother TV star Nikki Grahame who just passed away at the age of 38 after her long-time battle with Anorexia. Other definitions of psychoneurotic have included the inability or difficulty to respond to stress or stressful events and situations that are otherwise considered part of everyday normal life experiences. These stressful episodes may even “trigger” patients after they’ve achieved recovery. It is characterized as a person’s level of anxiety and response to a stressful event that is not in direct proportion to their environment. Usually, psychoneurotic individuals are living with some type of past trauma where benign events can pose real threats to their well-being. In my case, one of my psychoneurotic responses was excessive exercise and I believe the electronic targeting and electronic targeted assaults to my mind and body may be due to some veiled identity trying to control my behavior from expressing itself again.
Psychoneurotics are neurotics that experience some type of psychosis or break in reality. Neurotics can be identified, especially, when based on the emotional conflict in which an impulse that has been blocked seeks expression in a disguised response or symptom. This is often seen in cases where the impulse has been cut-off or denied by a person or event like in the death of a loved one. A psychoneurotic response may be expressed as the behavior known as “cutting” when a person feels anxious or stressed. It can also be expressed as a form of hysteria in the form of a conversion disorder. Breuer and Freud (1957) in their book, Studies on Hysteria, characterized hysteria by the conversion of psychic excitation associated with an unacceptable idea into a physical symptom. The need to perform some ritualized behavior, activity, or it can manifest as a physical symptom (tummy ache or headaches). Conversion of the psychic excitation associated with an unacceptable idea (castration, rejection, abjection) can turn psychic energy into excessive physical activity as one mode of its expression. The reason hysteria has disappeared from the psychiatric literature is that there are many different diagnoses today that would have fallen under the heading “hysteria.” To better understand each diagnosis and how they are different from one another, psychiatrists now have various subheadings under the umbrella term “hysteria.”
Speaking on the compulsion to repeat the trauma re-enactment and revictimization in masochistic neurosis, Alfred Adler wrote in New Principles for the Practice of Individual Psychology:
“Thus, the neurosis and the psyche represent an attempt to free oneself from all the constraints of the community by establishing a counter-compulsion. This latter is so constituted that it effectively faces the peculiar nature of the surroundings and their demands. Both of these convincing inferences can be drawn from the manner in which this counter-compulsion manifests itself and from the neuroses selected.”
One key difference between the neurotic and the psychotic is that the neurotic holds the possibility for the introjection of castration while the psychotic is in complete foreclosure against the castration. When a neurotic turns psychoneurotic the foreclosure is usually against the self.
Aspects of psychoneurotic symptoms include, but are not limited to; suicide attempts, successful suicide attempts, suicide ideations, schizophrenia, clinical depression where the person cannot care for themselves, seclusion, cutting, and other somatic delusions which may not only be expressed as anorexia (self-starvation). In other words, alternate body dysmorphia issues. That is, some other fixed false belief the individual has about their body, a body part, or body organ, etc., that makes the individual believe their body or some part of their body is somehow grossly deformed. People who carry out excessive plastic surgeries to correct a body part that is somehow always “too big” or “too crooked,” constantly putting themselves under the surgeon’s scalpel may be considered psychoneurotic.
NEUROTIC PATIENTS are likely to be thrown off balance by external stress and strain which can exacerbate symptoms and worsen outcomes. (e.g., gang stalking, electronic targeting, and electronic targeted assaults by sociopaths/psychopaths which the police are unable to help individuals defend themselves against in what has been termed gang stalking). External stress that is persistent and evenly applied can wear down even normal patients and cause depression which, in the neurotic patient’s case, can lead to suicide attempts, other self-harming behaviors such as drug use, alcohol consumption, or successful suicide. Seclusion and feelings of inferiority or worthlessness may also be experienced as a result.
NORMAL PEOPLE under normal circumstances do not usually think of suicide as a solution. Even in the presence of hostile environments normal people can usually work through the problem or find a solution with which to resolve or eliminate the problem. Psychopaths can create even greater obstacles for psychoneurotics who are already at a disadvantage at working through problems. As a result, the psychoneurotic may try and commit suicide or they may worsen into deeper symptomology.
In the movie Girl Interrupted, the character portrayed by Angelina Jolie, Lisa, was a sociopath/psychopath who pushed the hand of two other patients toward committing successful suicide. She does not take responsibility nor see that her words can truly affect people. She’s the dangerous liaison. She’s the one who deceives you while enticing you to play her little games. Everyone loves Lisa’s character. She can provide the force of life pulsing through the atmosphere of an otherwise boring party. Her influence holds the potential to make others believe their life, without her, will be so much more BORING and vacant. But in reality, what she does is unwittingly distract and deceive these individuals through cunning seductions, manipulations, and witty sarcasm that indulge her desires with psychopathic enjoyments while distracting others from achieving their full potential and a lifetime of success. She has no remorse and her heart is as cold as a corpse’s hand. She enjoys pushing people’s buttons and then watching them cave in the theatrical stage she just set up for them. Sadly, many psychoneurotics/neurotics may find themselves attracted to people like her.
It has been postulated that psychoneurotics symptoms may be the result of maternal depravations. In this light, the psychoanalytic theory that most aptly applies to the psychoneurotic would revolve around theories pertaining to matricide. Amber Jacob’s in her book “On Matricide: Myth, Psychoanalysis, and the Law of the Mother” referred to the paranoid-schizoid splitting as belonging to a “dereliction from the maternal breast” in the desire we have to be truly loved and accepted by this Being but being abandoned by it, turns us out into madness:
“All desire is connected to madness. But apparently one desire has chosen to see itself as wisdom, moderation, truth, and has left the other to bear the burden of the madness it did not want to attribute to itself, recognize in itself. This relationship between desire and madness comes into its own, for both man and woman, in the relationship with the mother. But all too often, man washes his hands of it and leaves it to woman — women (Jacobs, 2007, p. 144).”
Two of the psychoneurotics in the movie Girl Interrupted, Jamie and Suzanne, both had issues with maternal depravations in identification with Lisa’s character. Both characters found themselves attracted to her personality. When Lisa left them, Jamie completed successful suicide while Suzanne fell into an even deeper depression. These two patient’s connections to a psychopath (Lisa) with worsening outcomes cannot be understated.
If we consider Julia Kristeva’s book Black Sun she makes quite a few points. Firstly, she posits the existence of a matricidal drive. Secondly, she equates the loss of mother with matricide. Thirdly, she asserts that, if the mother is not killed in the service of individuation and development, melancholia and depression will be the result, in an attempt to turn the aggression against the self. In other words, one either kills/damages the object, or the self. This view seems to be in accordance with the theory of the death instinct and with Freud’s theory of melancholia and the superego. It does not examine ways in which aggression and destructiveness can be worked through or transformed. The choice is, basically, to turn the aggression either towards the object or towards the self.
For man and for woman the loss of the mother is a biological and psychic necessity, the first step on the way to becoming autonomous. Matricide is our vital necessity, the sine qua none of the individuation, provided that it takes place under optimal circumstances and can be eroticized … The lesser or greater violence of matricidal drive, depending on individuals and the milieu’s tolerance entails, when it is hindered, its inversion on the self; the maternal object, having been introjected, the depressive or the melancholic putting to death of the self is what follows, instead matricide. (Kristeva 1989, pp. 27–8).
For a paranoid-schizoid male, this might mean making the projection onto a woman and then carrying out the sorted little details. Since little boys retain the phallus and identify with the idealized/powerful father, killing or damaging the maternal object is more likely to take place as projection. For the paranoid-schizoid female, this might mean killing the maternal object within through a variety of self-destructive acts, but more potently suicide.
Sources:
Lowery, Lawson Gentry (2006). The Insane Psychoneurotic. American Journal of Psychiatry, 163(4) https://ajp.psychiatryonline.org/doi/abs/10.1176/ajp.75.1.53
Cramer, P. (2019). What Has Happened to Hysteria? The Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, 207(9), 705–706.
van der Kolk, Bessel A., MD (1989) The Compulsion to Repeat the Trauma Re-enactment, Revictimization, and Masochism https://borderlinepersonality.ca/repcompulsion.htm
Jacobs, Amber. (2007) On Matricide: Myth, Psychoanalysis, and the Law of the Mother. New York. Columbia University Press. Jacobs refers to Luce Irigaray’s work very often in this work. Jacobs wrote, “Irigaray frequently refers to Greek myth as the place where “traces” of a powerful and benign mother-daughter relation can be found, reclaimed, and used to rectify what she terms women’s “dereliction” …. part of the vast simulacrum of manifest mother-daughter relations that are produced by the male imaginary …. cannot be effectively used for feminism unless they are decoded and restructured according to an approach that is concerned with moving out of the realm of description and/or projection and into that of theory. It is not enough to go back to myth and describe and promote the apparently once harmonious mother-daughter relation before the patriarchal order effected its violent obliteration (pg. 137).”
Irigaray, Luce, “The Bodily Encounter with the Mother,” in The Irigaray Reader, ed. Margaret Whitford (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991).
Kristeva, J. (1989) Black Sun. New York: Columbia University Press.
Wieland, Christina. (1996) Matricide and Destructiveness: Infantile Anxieties and Technological Culture. British Journal of Psychotherapy 12(3), pp. 300–313.
