Scald

Mostly about pain, or a deep hurt, possibly caused by emotions, or a hurtful display of emotions. It can also indicate telling off, or be told off, so criticism.

 The agony of birth begins a bank account of pain which grows until death. This account is limited to no one kind of currency but includes a wide range of all denominations extending from the aches, burns, and stings of the body to the humiliations, guilts, shames, terrors, and doubts of the psyche. The knowledge—indeed the scalding memory and horror of those pains—remains in the psyche demanding relief. It is hard for consciousness to recall them; ordinarily it absolutely refuses. But in sessions they can come back unbidden in full and excruciating intensity.

Deep within the subconscious, at the boundaries of identity, lies an ambiguous hinterland where the polarity of subject and object becomes flexible and miscible. There the rudimentary identity, in an effort to rid itself of pain, seeks to reverse the polarity of damage and project it out onto “other.” By a trick of symbolic manipulation, it strives to become the hurter instead of the hurt, the destroyer instead of the destroyed.  The primitive identity assumes that in giving pain to another, it has given its pain away. In reality it has only shifted the destructive consciousness from the self and projected it into the mental limbo of psychic not-self within the brain. Actually, the consciousness of pain has been temporarily repressed, nothing more.