Forever Becoming

Standing the Strain

In Steven Shainberg's Secretary we see an interesting and unusual relationship develop between James Spader's 'Mr. Grey', and 'Lee', played by Maggie Gyllenhaal. It's interesting for a number of reasons, but what I'd like to look at here is the way that Mr. Grey behaves towards Lee.

From early on we sense that Mr. Grey has feelings for Lee that go beyond the professional; that he is taken with her in some way. With this in mind his subsequent behaviour towards her can often seem bafflingly cruel. He appears to show little regard for her feelings, reprimanding her, dominating her, and belittling her. Yet we know that through this cruelty - beneath it - lies affection.

It reminded me of something I read in Adam Phillip's book on psychologist Donald Winnicott (Winnicott). In it he talks about Winnicott's conception of the 'True Nature of Home', and the idea that a child must be able to test his parents in order to trust and believe in them. This testing could, typically, take the form of 'bad' behaviour, with the child misbehaving in the hope that he will be forgiven - this forgiveness shows that his worst, his misbehaviour, has been seen and, importantly, accepted. By extension the child, in all his extremes, has been accepted. This routine allows for what Winnicott refers to as 'almost ... the child's most sacred attribute: doubts about self'. The child must 'test over and over again their ability to remain good parents in spite of anything he may do to hurt or annoy them. By means of this testing he gradually convinces himself, if the parents do in fact stand the strain.'

It is this 'standing the strain' that we see in Secretary, through Mr. Grey's continual bad behaviour, which we could now interpret as a kind of testing. In the way that a child may misbehave as challenge to the robustness of parental love, Mr. Grey's misconduct can also be seen as a way of verifying love. In testing Lee, Mr. Grey shows her his worst, and challenges her to accept him in the face of this. The film's exaggerated denouement, the final test, confirms that Lee has accepted him, despite his doubts about himself.

There is something of this in most relationships, a continual revealing and accepting, with the test of the strong relationship being whether it can, amongst other things, 'stand the strain'.

[...] at certain stages in the treatment, as one would find as the mother of an infant or small child, 'the analyst's hate is actually sought by the patient'.

Winnicott offers the analogy of a child from a broken home to reach the surprising conclusion that is the main point of his paper ['Hate in Countertransference' (1947)]:

"It is notoriously inadequate to take such a child into one's home and love him. What happens is that after a while a child so adopted gains hope, and then he starts to test out the environment he has found, and to seek proof of his guardian's ability to hate objectively. It seems that he can believe in being loved only after reaching being hated."

If he is not hated, if what is unacceptable about him is not acknowledged, then his love and loveableness will not feel fully real to him.

[Adam Phillips]
Winnicott, p.89

If knowing the world often enough means burrowing through complex swathes of self-deception, knowing oneself involves this even more.

Only someone unusually secure could have the courage to confront themselves in this way without either rationalizing away what they unearth, or being consumed by fruitless guilt. Only someone confident of being loved and trusted can achieve that kind of security.

Since fear is one of our natural conditions, men and women can only truly make themselves known to those whom they love or trust [...] only if one knows that one will still be accepted can one dare to encounter the truth of oneself.

[Terry Eagleton]
After Theory, p.137

A Woman Under the Influence (1974)

He is "bad": short-tempered, violent, aggressive. He says the "wrong" things

She is "crazy": "irresponsible", "unpredictable". She also seems to keep saying the "wrong" things.

And yet, despite their darkness, neither is cast out.

He knows that she is, by conventional standards, "crazy." And she can not be blind to his aggression; she feels his hand across her face. And yet neither is willing to condemn the other to being "bad"; neither is willing to to give up. Their bond - their world - contains them, with all their problems.

He says, "I love you", and she knows that he speaks the truth. Not only this, she knows that his "love" is not a deception designed to cover up or explain away "bad," that it is as honest as love can be.

Their love is an unconditional attachment, one that does not allow easy dismissals. It demands an understanding and a carrying. It says, "I see that you are weak, and I will carry you." Marriage becomes an archetype of the accepting environment, and a microcosm of the accepting community, the accepting society.

In this sense, to know love is to be on the path towards true citizenship.

To know that another person accepts one just as one is, unconditionally, is to be able to accept oneself, and therefore to be able to be oneself, to realise one’s own personality.

It seems probable that this irrational acceptance, this sense of being loved as a whole without reservation, is the basis of adult confidence in oneself as a person, and also of satisfying relationships with others; and that neurotic disharmony occurs as a result of real or imagined lack of acceptance.

[Anthony Storr]
The Integrity of the Personality, p.37, 74

A Safe Space

For Winnicott, and those who were influenced by his work, psychoanalytic treatment was not exclusively interpretative, but first and foremost the provision of a congenital milieu, a 'holding environment' analogous to maternal care.

... [a] setting in which the patient does not undergo authoritative translation - having his unconscious fed back to him, as it were - but is enabled by the analyst, as Winnicott wrote, 'to reveal himself to himself'.

The risk was that interpretation in analysis would be formative in a way that actually pre-empted the patient's own half-formed thoughts and feelings. Interpretation could be merely a way of hurrying - on the analyst's behalf - and analysis, like development, was, for Winnicott, about people taking their own time.

The therapist must have 'a capacity ... to contain the conflicts of the patient, that is to say contain them and to wait for their resolution in the patient instead of anxiously looking round for a cure'.

Cure was not something that the therapist did to the patient. In his consultations with children Winnicott found that the significant moment was the one in which the patient surprised himself.

In fact the development of a capacity to be surprised by oneself could be said to be one of the aims of Winnicottian analysis.

[Adam Phillips]
Winnicott, p.11, 12

................................................................................................................................................................................

Psychotherapy is at bottom a dialectical relationship between doctor and patient. It is an encounter, a discussion between two psychic wholes, in which knowledge is used only as a tool.

The goal is transformation - not one that is predetermined, but rather an indeterminable change, the only criterion of which is the disappearance of egohood. No efforts on the part of the doctor can compel this experience.

The most he can do is to smooth the path for the patient and help him to attain an attitude which offers the least resistance to the decisive experience.

[C.G. Jung]
Psychology and the East ('Foreword to the Introduction to Zen Buddhism'), p.171

................................................................................................................................................................................

An important tool in this process is the Gestalt experiment.

The client (individual, team or organization) is invited and encouraged to “try on” behaviors that feel alien, frightening or unacceptable within the secure container of the intervention.

The Gestalt experiment seeks to draw out and stretch the habitual self (or system) boundary by allowing the client to experience what a new way of being or doing, and to experience a different outcome as the result.

In co-constructing the experiment with the client, the Gestaltist aims to create what Polster and Polster call a “safe emergency,” -- a minimally-threatening boundary-challenging situation within a supportive container of contact.

[Herb Stevenson]
'Paradox: A Gestalt Theory of Change'

................................................................................................................................................................................

Related posts:-
The Colour Wheel
Entertaining Ideas
Negative Capability
Fiction from Fiction
My advice? No advice!
Holding the Conflict Within
Reverie
What do you think?
Boxed Off
Walk a Straight Line
Fucking in Ritual Space
Firm Foundations

Masculine / Feminine

Masculine         - Feminine
Order                 - Chaos
Active               - Passive
Give              - Receive
Assertive           - Receptive
Creator              - Consumer
Red                - Blue
Death                 - Birth
Known               - Unknown
Authoritarian      - Decadent
Fascism              - Nihilism
Day                   - Night
Stability              - Plasticity
Negative - Positive

Differentiation - Equalisation

Within every living thing there is a tug of war, consisting of the the pull towards life, and the pull towards death. The life urge is conservative, the death urge expansive.

Life is defined by the process of limitation; a thing is only a thing because of all the things it is not; from a sea of infinite possibility certain characteristics are chosen, at the expense of others. Infinity is bounded.

Death is the return to infinity; the unbounding of what has been bound. If life is synonymous with 'limited', then death is synonymous with 'unlimited.'

As humans we have an urge towards expansiveness - the need to constantly explore new territory - that must be balanced by the imposition of limits. A lack of boundaries allows us to adventure to far flung places, full of mystery and novelty - but whenever we travel to extremes we also dance with death.

We mothers do what we can to keep our sons from the grave. But they do seem to yearn for it.

['Oleanna Tyrell']
Dialogue from 'Game of Thrones'

Dumont: No. My thinking was that today's spectator is so well-versed in film language that all theories about suspense, as argued by Dreyer and Hitchcock, on what makes you scared in cinema, can be ditched.

It's the spectator, finally, who's going to construct the menace and the fear.

In Twentynine Palms because supposedly nothing is happening, it's impossible, something has to happen. What I discovered during the editing was that a dramatic tension emerged [between the scenes] that hadn't been there during the shooting.

indieWIRE: Yes, but that's partly the result of your very precise mise-en-scene.

Dumont: Maybe, but the more elaborate your narrative, the more the spectator shuts up and listens obediently. And if the filmmaker keeps quiet, the spectator will himself project his own assumptions and sentiments onto the screen.

[Bruno Dumont]
Interview with indieWIRE, full text here.

In the Jungian way, Neumann sees the creative man as "bisexual," even "feminine," because of his high "receptivity."

[Camille Paglia]
'Erich Neumann: Theorist of the Great Mother', p. 13

At the broadest level of description, variation in human personality appears to reflect engagement and restraint of behavior.

The first metatrait ['Stability'] is thought to relate to the need to maintain a stable organization of behavioral and psychological function.

The second metatrait ['Plasticity'] has been hypothesized to relate to an individual’s basic need to incorporate novel information from the environment.

These two metatraits have been theoretically linked to the functioning of the serotonergic and dopaminergic neurotransmitter systems, respectively.

Serotonin is a broadly functioning neuromodulator with regulatory or inhibiting effects on mood, behavior, and cognition [...] its widespread projections act to limit negative affect and aggression while maintaining behavioral and motivational stability [...] a review of research on serotonin and personality found the most consistent association to be between greater serotonin function and greater impulse control.

Dopamine is also a broadly functioning neuromodulator, but with primarily activating effects on behavior and cognition.

[Jacob B. Hirsh, Colin G. DeYoung, and Jordan B. Peterson]
'Metatraits of the Big Five Differentially Predict Engagement and Restraint of Behavior,' p. 1-2

Here's why the sexes differ.

A sexual organism must divide its total reproductive investment into two—competing for mates and caring for offspring. Almost from the dawn of sexual reproduction, one sex specialized slightly more in competing for mates and the other slightly more in caring for offspring. This was because only one sex was able to inherit the mitochondria (the powerhouse of cells); so that sex started out with sex cells larger and more resource-rich than the other sex.

And thus began the great divide into fat, resource-laden eggs, already investing in "caring"—providing for offspring—and slim, streamlined sperm, already competing for that vital investment. Over evolutionary time, this divergence widened, proliferating and amplifying, in every sexually reproducing species that has ever existed.

So the differences go far beyond reproductive plumbing. They are distinctive adaptations for the different life-strategies of competers and carers. Wherever ancestral males and females faced different adaptive problems, we should expect sex differences—encompassing bodies, brains and behaviour. And we should expect that, reflecting those differences, competers and carers will have correspondingly different life-priorities.

And that's why, from that initial asymmetry, the same characteristic differences between males and females have evolved across all sexually-reproducing animals, differences that pervade what constitutes being male or female.

[Helena Cronin]
'2017 : What scientific term or concept ought to be more widely known?'

Cowen: Marriage is good for men, on net - it feminises them, for one thing.

Weinstein: So, greater health, lower depression...

Cowen: ... less drug abuse, suicide rates lower, and so on.

[Eric Weinstein & Tyler Cowen]
'Tyler Cowen on "The Portal", Ep. #016 (w/ Eric Weinstein) - The Revolution Will Not Be Marginalized', The Portal, YouTube

Marriage is the social regulation and placement of sexual energies, which for Spenser otherwise fall back into the anarchy of nature, ruled by the will-to-power and survival of the fittest.

Marriage is the sanctified link between nature and society. Sex in Spenser must always have a social goal.

[Camille Paglia]
Sexual Personae, p.189

Marriage, in other words, is a way of channeling female hypergamy in a socially useful way. (We frequently hear of the need to channel the male sexual instinct into marriage and family, but not the female; this is a mistake.)

Abolishing marriage only strengthens the naturally stronger: it strengthens the female at the expense of the male and the attractive at the expense of the unattractive.

[F. Roger Devlin]
'Sexual Utopia in Power', Sexual Utopia in Power, p. 40

It is impossible to define a feminine practice of writing and this is an impossibility that will remain, for this practice can never be theorized, enclosed, coded - which doesn't mean that it doesn't exist.

But it will always surpass the discourse that regulates the phallocentric system; it does and will take place in areas other than those subordinated to philosophico-theoretical domination. It will be conceived of only by subjects who are breakers of automatisms, by peripheral figures that no authority can ever subjugate.

A feminine text cannot fail to be more than subversive. It is volcanic; as it is written it brings about an upheaval of the old property crust, carrier of masculine investments; there's no other way. There's no room for her if she's not a he. If she's a her-she, it's in order to smash everything, to shatter the framework of institutions, to blow the law, everything, to break up the "truth" with laughter.

[...] you can't talk about a female sexuality, uniform, homogeneous, classifiable into codes - any more than you can talk about one unconscious resembling another. Women's imaginary is inexhaustible, like music, painting, writing: their stream of phantasms is incredible.

The Dark Continent is neither dark nor unexplorable. It is still unexplored only because we've been made to believe that it was too dark to be explorable. And because they want to make us believe that what interests us is the white continent, with its monuments to Lack.

We're stormy, and that which is ours breaks loose from us without our fearing any debilitation. Our glances, our smiles, are spent; laughs exude from all our mouths; our blood flows and we extend ourselves without ever reaching an end; we never hold back our thoughts, our signs, our writing; and we're not afraid of lacking.

At times it is in the fissure caused by an earthquake, through that radical mutation of things brought on by a material upheaval when every structure is for a moment thrown off balance and an ephemeral wildness sweeps order away, that the poet slips something by, for a brief span, of woman.

But only the poets - not the novelists, allies of representationalism. Because poetry involves gaining strength through the unconscious and because the unconscious, that other limitless country, is the place where the repressed manage to survive: women, or as Hoffmann would say, fairies.

[Hélène Cixous]

‘The Laugh of the Medusa’, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 1976, vol. 1, no. 4, p. 876, 878, 879-80, 883, 885, 888.

‘A hard heart has Wotan set in my breast', it says in an old Scandinavian saga: a just expression coming from the soul of a proud Viking. A man of this type is actually proud that he is not made for pity: which is why the hero of the saga adds as a warning: 'he whose heart is not hard in youth will never have a hard heart'.

Brave and noble men who think that are at the farthest remove from that morality which sees the mark of the moral precisely in pity or in acting for others or in désintéressement; belief in oneself, pride in oneself, a fundamental hostility and irony for ‘selflessness' belong just as definitely to noble morality as does a mild contempt for and caution against sympathy and the ‘warm heart'.

[Friedrich Nietzsche]

Beyond Good and Evil, 260

To blunder over the fundamental problem of 'man and woman', to deny here the most abysmal antagonism and the necessity of an eternally hostile tension, perhaps to dream here of equal rights, equal education, equal claims and duties: this is a typical sign of shallow-mindedness, and a thinker who has proved himself to be shallow on this dangerous point - shallow of instinct! - may be regarded as suspect in general, more, as betrayed, as found out: he will probably be too 'short' for all the fundamental questions of life, those of life in the future too, incapable of any depth.

[Friedrich Nietzsche]

Beyond Good and Evil, 238

Since the French Revolution the influence of woman in Europe has grown less in the same proportion as her rights and claims have grown greater; and the ‘emancipation of woman', in so far as it has been demanded and advanced by women themselves (and not only by male shallow-pates), is thus revealed as a noteworthy symptom of the growing enfeeblement and blunting of the most feminine instincts.

There is stupidity in this movement, an almost masculine stupidity, of which a real woman - who is always a clever woman - would have to be ashamed from the very heart.

To lose her sense for the ground on which she is most sure of victory; to neglect to practise the use of her own proper weapons; to let herself go before the man, perhaps even ‘to the extent of producing a book', where formerly she kept herself in check and in subtle cunning humility; to seek with virtuous assurance to destroy man's belief that a fundamentally different ideal is wrapped up in woman, that there is something eternally, necessarily feminine; emphatically and loquaciously to talk man out of the idea that woman has to be maintained, cared for, protected, indulged like a delicate, strangely wild and often agreeable domestic animal; the clumsy and indignant parade of all of slavery and bondage that woman's position in the order of society has hitherto entailed and still entails (as if slavery were a counter-argument and not rather a condition of every higher culture, of every enhancement of culture) - what does all this mean if not a crumbling of the feminine instinct, a defeminizing?

There is a desire to make her in general more ‘cultivated’ and, as they say, to make the ‘weak sex' strong through culture: as if history did not teach in the most emphatic manner possible that making human beings ‘cultivated' and making them weaker - that is to say, enfeebling, fragmenting, contaminating, the force of the will, have always gone hand in hand, and that the world's most powerful and influential women (most recently the mother of Napoleon) owed their power and ascendancy over men precisely to the force of their will – and not to schoolmasters!

That in woman which inspires respect and fundamentally fear is her nature, which is more ‘natural' than that of the man, her genuine, cunning, beast-of-prey suppleness, the tiger's claws beneath the glove, the naïvety of her egoism, her ineducability and inner savagery, and how incomprehensible, capacious and prowling her desires and virtues are....

And is woman now being deprived of her enchantment? Is woman slowly being made boring? O Europe! Europe! We know the horned beast which always attracted you most, which again and again threatens you with danger! Your ancient fable could once again become ‘history' - once again a monstrous stupidity could master you and carry you off! And no god concealed within it, no! merely an idea', a 'modern idea’! ...

[Friedrich Nietzsche]

Beyond Good and Evil, 239

Women, too, recognize the social value of male initiation and accede to its necessities. The power and authority of older men in this context are considered necessary to make everyone conform to the cosmic plan.

What men display is the ability to “look after” people. Of course, at the same time, they define what it means to “look after” others: One does so by carrying and passing on the Law.

[Fred R. Myers]

Pintupi Country, Pintupi Self, p. 240

That is why women remain children their whole life long; never seeing anything but what is quite close to them, cleaving to the present moment, taking appearance for reality, and preferring trifles to matters of the first importance.

For it is by virtue of his reasoning faculty that man does not live in the present only, like the brute, but looks about him and considers the past and the future; and this is the origin of prudence, as well as of that care and anxiety which so many people exhibit.

Both the advantages and the disadvantages which this involves, are shared in by the woman to a smaller extent because of her weaker power of reasoning. She may, in fact, be described as intellectually shortsighted, because, while she has an intuitive understanding of what lies quite close to her, her field of vision is narrow and does not reach to what is remote: so that things which are absent or past or to come have much less effect upon women than upon men.

However many disadvantages all this may involve, there is at least this to be said in its favour: that the woman lives more in the present than the man, and that, if the present is at all tolerable, she enjoys it more eagerly.

[Arthur Schopenhauer]
‘On Women’, Parerga and Paralipomena

Projection is a male curse: forever to need something or someone to make oneself complete. This is one of the sources of art and the secret of its historical domination by males.

The artist is the closest man has come to imitating woman’s superb self-containment. But the artist needs his art, his projection. The blocked artist, like Leonardo, suffers tortures of the damned. The most famous painting in the world, the Mona Lisa, records woman’s selfsatisfied apartness, her ambiguous mocking smile at the vanity and despair of her many sons.

[Camille Paglia]
Sexual Personae, p.28

Male homosexuality may be the most valorous of attempts to evade the femme fatale and to defeat nature. By turning away from the Medusan mother, whether in honor or detestation of her, the male homosexual is one of the great forgers of absolutist western identity.

Male concentration and projection are visible everywhere in the aggressive energy of the streets. Fortunately, male homosexuals of every social class have preserved the cult of the masculine, which will therefore never lose its aesthetic legitimacy.

Major peaks of western culture have been accompanied by a high incidence of male homosexuality—in classical Athens and Renaissance Florence and London. Male concentration and projection are self-enhancing, leading to supreme achievements of Apollonian conceptualization.

[Camille Paglia]
Sexual Personae, p.14-15, 22

The fire-pit ... signifies the woman and the poles represent the man. Men are the shield; they protect. The woman is the center, being protected …

Everything revolves around the tipi … it's a people. The cover is men. The fire is woman, warmth, love, and perpetual labor for a family to live. If there's no woman in here, there's no rhyme or reason to it … Everything is male in that lodge except the women and the fire.

The four Grandfathers are the home: in the center is the hearth, the woman: this is completion. Neither is anything without the other. That is what our life is about.

Creation is recapitulated in the holy lodge as the Singers sing the first night to the first Grandfather and what he represents, the second night to the second Grandfather; and so on.

The singing is structured to bring together male principles (the structure itself, the dancing hides, the Singers) with female principles (the fire-pit, Godmothers, those impersonating White Painted Woman) - balance again.

[Bernard Second]
‘Singing for Life: The Mescalero Apache Girls’ Puberty Ceremony’, Betwixt and Between, p.244, 255, 257

Primitive life, far from peaceable, was submerged in the turbulence of nature. Man’s superior strength provided protection to women, particularly in the incapacitating final stages of pregnancy.

The polarization of sex roles probably occurred rather early. Men roamed and hunted, while women in their gathering forays ventured no farther from the campsite than they could carry their nursing infants. There was simple logic in this, not injustice.

The link between father and child was a late development. Margaret Mead remarks, “Human fatherhood is a social invention.” James Joyce says, “Paternity may be a legal fiction.” Society had advanced when the male contribution to conception was acknowledged. Both sexes have profited from the consolidation and stability of the family.

[Camille Paglia]
Sexual Personae, p.42

“Women want men to read their minds—or, more accurately, their emotions—because it’s what they do, easily…. Females want males to anticipate their needs and desires.”

Women do in fact have a greater ability to perceive the needs and feelings of others without verbal communication, an evolved adaptation to the requirements of successfully nurturing infants. When they expect their husbands to have this same ability, they are in effect upset that their husbands are not women.

[F. Roger Devlin]
'Rotating Polyandry - & it's Enforcers', Sexual Utopia in Power, p. 40

Aging Idealism

Linklater: You asked earlier what the Slacker crowd were doing. I think unlike other generations before, no-one feels like they’ve given up their youthful idealism. I think that’s the best thing, this generation isn’t going to be sitting around, wallowing…

Idler: …thinking, “I’ve been through that phase, that was a brief interlude away from normality” …

Linklater: … yeah, that was youthful idealism and it’s been crushed now. It’s more of an ongoing process for everyone now. I don’t think there’ll be any Big Chills coming out of this generation. No-one had any illusions to begin with, so no-one can sit around feeling disillusioned. That’s an accomplishment, because it leads to realistic productive activity.

Idler: I think that’s what I was trying to get at when I was talking about Dazed and Confused. It’s not just a simple process of nostalgia - the attitudes that are voiced are actually sensible ways to think. Why suddenly relinquish them when you turn 21?

Linklater: For me one of the big things in Dazed is when on the football field at the end, one of the characters, Don says: “I want to look back and say that it was the best I could do when I was stuck in this place.” That could be your metaphor for life. That’s probably a more positive attitude than, “we, as a generation, are going to change the world”. And you do change the world, in your own way.

[Richard Linklater]
Interview with The Idler, full text here.

Standing the Strain

A Safe Space

Masculine / Feminine

Aging Idealism

Search Forever Becoming

Archives