And... It All Clicks Together!

You ever have one of those moments where the theory that you have read about for years and years suddenly clicks in a way that it never has before? I had that today.

And it of course has to do with psychoanalysis. (My thesis during my M.A. contained psychoanalytic theory applied to television).

I am hoping not to botch this as I write it.

Language, in and of itself, is limiting, and as we enter into it as children, it reduces our whole experience into identifiable parts. The law, potentially, can be seen as language and as limiting, since it, too, reduces our whole experience into parts that are allowed and parts that are not. In other words, “No, you can’t smoke on these premises. The whole you is not allowed to be here. Only the non-smoking you is allowed to be here.” When the whole self is not allowed, when only a piece of one is allowed to be present, in any moment, that is castration. In other words, “You don’t get to enjoy this here. Only the piece of you who does not enjoy this gets to be here.” The term “castration” actually makes sense because not all of you is allowed, and the part of you that is capable of enjoying is not allowed.

The fear of law should definitely result from this. If the “law” (whether in the form of a parent, a teacher, etc.) says only a piece of you is allowed at any one time and place, then it should be feared. In the presence of this individual, you are not whole.

Enter the mirror stage. This stage of a child’s development is when she realizes that the image of herself as seen by others, and as by herself, is far more whole than she ever truly gets to experience (because her experience has been divided up by both language and law). She wants to reach this wholeness, and she chases after it, identifies with it. But this is only to cover up the fact that language and law have divided her and do divide her at any one time.

When a child focuses on presenting herself as the whole version she wants to be (whole before the law came along), she is no longer keeping track of where the divided self actually is or what is dividing her. She is too focused on being/seeming the perfected version of herself to others and herself. Thus, when something goes wrong, she can’t figure out why. In reality, something came up to her and said, “This emotion, this piece of you is not allowed here.” To feel whole, to feel as though that didn’t completely hurt her, she gets used to and keeps on pretending as though it’s perfectly fine that a piece of her isn’t allowed, and she loses sight of what just happened. In other words, she is pretending castration doesn’t exist so she can feel whole again.

So, something hurts, but she doesn’t know why. She can’t locate it. Her thoughts are, “How can I hurt, if I am whole?” “If I am whole, why won’t it stop hurting/what is wrong?” The reality is, something has just divided her up in a way that said, “This piece of you isn’t allowed,” and which ended her enjoyment, and she is too focused on what she is supposed to be feeling to understand that a castration has occurred. She is too busy pretending that she is not castrated to note that someone has just come in and picked a piece of her out and flicked it away.

And that is why we have therapists.

It is to bring her attention back to the fact that she is not whole and locating just what law came along and divided her up, what she ignored, or tried to ignore. It is to remind her that the perfected version of herself she tries to be is an attempt to ignore the thing that has kept her from experiencing herself as whole. It is to bring her attention back to the fragile, divided self she actually is and to determine what particular “law” came along, what it did, and why it ended enjoyment.

And it only took, like, five years for that to click.