Theaters of the Mind: The Psychic Theater and the Psychoanalytic Stage (Part II)
“Fundamentally, the themes of the psychic theater vary little. According to the child’s own inborn and acquired creative possibilities, the traumatic events that have molded each individual psyche lead to an infinity of psychic inventions, all intended to deal with the calamities of separation and otherness, of sexual and generational differences, and finally of aging and death. Each I must construct scenes capable of containing these dramatic situations in order to achieve psychic survival.
The psychic scenarios presented here are all linked to the discovery of the parents as a sexual couple, to the wish to be the only child, and to the desire to possess the mother entirely for oneself in narcissistic fusion. These banal [so lacking in originality as to be so obvious and boring] wishes and their non-fulfillment are part of the experience of every child. What distinguishes the solutions to psychic pain and mental conflict? With regard to their fundamental exposure to universal traumas, nothing except the form of self-cure that each child-artist created. Why one solution rather than another? It is too simple to say that all is the “fault” of the parents. This question will never receive a satisfactory response, even though each new psychoanalytic adventure tends to reconstruct a coherent hypothesis to explain it …. (pg. 63–64).”
We need to assess the mind’s I’s . …. “Little is left to chance in the dramas that make up a human life. Yet we often prefer to believe we are the playthings of fate, obliged to perform unrewarding tasks that present themselves as essential and to fulfill obscure desires that we do not recognize as our own. Unaware of the hidden choices that direct our decisions, we are rarely coherent in accounting for our choice of partners or professions, or for the mixture of success and failure that each choice may bring us. We do not escape the roles that our unconscious selves intend us to play, frequently using people in our lives today as stand-ins to settle problems of the past. It is only when we try to re-create everyday scenes upon the psychoanalytic stage that we often discover to our dismay that we are in full performance yet totally ignorant of who the real characters are or what the story is about (pg. 6).”
“Each secret-theater self is thus engaged in repeatedly playing roles from the past, using techniques discovered in childhood and reproducing, with uncanny precision, the same tragedies and comedies, with the same outcomes and an identical quota of pain and pleasure. What were once attempts at self-cure in the face of mental pain and conflict are now symptoms that the adult I produces, following forgotten childhood solutions. The resulting psychic scenarios may be called neuroses or narcissistic disorders, addictions or perversions, psychoses or psychosomatoses but they originate from our childlike I’s need to protect itself from psychic suffering (pg. 7).”
Psychosomatoses — dealing with psychosomatic responses (of a physical illness or other condition) caused or aggravated by a mental factor such as internal conflict or stress.
“Let us take a closer look at these repressed scenarios of which symptoms are only vestigial remnants. All drama, tragic or comic, reveals the struggles of men and women, confronted with violent instinctual forces in a world that offers little support in solving conflicts. Swept by storms of love and hate, seeking as much to please and to seduce as to punish and to destroy those closest to us, from childhood on we all have to compromise with two fundamental aspects of external reality: The Forbidden and the Impossible. These form the inescapable framework from which our personal identity is constructed. Helped or hindered by the demands of the “Others,” the people who brought us up and the society to which we belong, each of us attempts to find solutions that satisfy the exigencies of our forbidden libidinal longings and our impossible narcissistic desires [in theories that comprise psychoanalytical literature of Object Relations and Intersubjectivity] (pg. 8).”
The psychoanalysis of this type of fetish is dominant and submissive. The same type of sexual sadism found in sadomasochistic sex play and bondage. This is a primary theme in many attempts to influence people to become “large” or “Big Beautiful Women” (BBW). The BBW fetish also may include aspects of another type of fetish known as feederism.
The act of squashing by Big Beautiful Women (BBW) is a re-enactment of the humiliation received by a female. Aspects of wanting to be squashed are primarily for erotic asphyxiation, but there may be other conscious fantasies at work too. This display of the desired re-enactment of human male weakness. It is similar to the male who desires to play the submissive emasculated woman in re-enactments of sexual dominance in sexual relations. Other conscious fantasies at work may be desires to humiliate the female by disfigurement. Analysis of the roots of these sexual desires requires an in-depth psychoanalytic evaluation.
“By definition, the Forbidden is potentially realizable. It is theoretically possible, for example, to commit incest or parricide. That such acts may be considered impossible arises from the barrier of repression that makes such guilt-laden wishes unthinkable. The true Impossibles, on the other hand, are connected to inevitable narcissistic wounds that beset the human infant from birth onward, beginning with the wound of being severed from fusional oneness with the mother. These are markedly less accessible to verbal thought and require counter investments and compensations of another order.
The psychic repertory of the Forbidden comprises, in the neurotic theater, endless variations on the oedipal theme in both its homosexual and its heterosexual orientation. Instead of enjoying the adult right to sexual and love relations and the normal narcissistic pleasure afforded by work and sublimatory activities, the I draws inward in an attempt to hold on to these precious rights. Meanwhile, the distressed child hidden in the adult sacrifices pleasure and satisfaction in exchange for compromise solutions that lead to the creation of neurotic symptoms and inhibitions. These compromise solutions, constructed to protect sexuality or to satisfy it in roundabout ways, are camouflaged in an atmosphere of interdiction, anxiety, and guilt.
“The Forbidden, as its etymology implies, is always related to what the child has been told. Its repertory is therefore composed of highly condensed verbal texts that recount storms and obstacles in the odysseys of desire. The first three “scenes from psychic life” recounted in chapter 2 illustrate the alternating forces of attraction and repulsion of the Forbidden (pg. 8).
When the curtain rises on the psychotic stage, we have the impression that the stage manager has destroyed the setting and instead is allowing the public to witness the disorder behind the scenes. Without the coherent lines of the players through which neurotic scenarios are communicated, we are often puzzled by the story that is presented to us. Psychotic plots, like those of neurotic creation, are made of words and ideas, but the meaning of the words has been reorganized in such a private way that it is difficult to grasp their underlying significance. Delusions, structured like dreams, are nevertheless lived as an implacable reality by the minds that have invented them (pg. 9–10).”
What forces could be powerful enough to drive such men to “give up their place in the world,” ie: dominant male status? These individuals seek the experience of the excitement associated with the masochism of having breasts through their penis. Behind the choice of femininity on the part of men lies their fascination with playing the subordinate role of “woman” for the sexual satisfaction of masochism that it offers. Transgenderism of men, and woman, needs to be understood as originating in a socially constructed sexual fantasy rather than constituting a biological condition. They pursue femininity because it represents the subordinate opposite of masculinity and offers the delights of masochism. Transsexualism's “first cause” then is the political idea that there should be two distinct genders that found a patriarchal society.*
(1) Joyce McDougall. Theaters of the Mind: Illusion and Truth on the Psychoanalytic Stage. New York. Basic Books. (1985).
*Different body theaters of this kind have been analyzed and theorized about by other authors in other books. One of the most in-depth works was written by Louise Kaplan entitled Female Perversions: The temptations of Madame Bovary published a few years after Theaters of the Mind in 1991. Desires: The Fetish Fantasy of Body Inflation and Expansion — Proclivities’ Principle Wisdom (wordpress.com)
