QUOTES FROM SERIOUS RESEARCH -
Subconscious material that appears one week as a green-eyed dragon with thirteen tails may show up as a lion next week, as father the next week, and eventually prove to be one’s self before ther¬apy is over. In this way the psyche falls back from one protective dis¬guise to another before finally revealing itself. Comfortable abstrac¬tions and allegories slowly assume the shapes of monsters and gods. Monsters and gods are revealed as mother and father. And at the deep psychogenic levels of the mind, even the parents are exposed as pro¬jections of self, agents the psyche used to perform its wishes, upon whom to project its guilts and shames. Finally these last disguises of fusion are sloughed off and the deus ex machina that worked its pur¬poses through a million deceptive images is revealed as the simple sep¬arate self—self-loving, self-hating, self-lying, self-denying—self turned into a thousand postures and relations toward self.
With most patients it does not take long for the grandiose abstractions, complex allegories, gods and monsters to assume the more concrete and familiar forms of father and mother, in the thou¬sand and one guises and attitudes in which they appeared in his child¬hood. These images, however, are not the matter-of-fact figures of the conscious mind, but the legendary figures of the child’s world, dis¬torted with the excessive dimensions, colors, and emotions of primitive imagination. These figures loom in the psyche, vast in size, powerful in significance, intense and pervasive in emotional valence.
The psychic function of guilt is as automatic as, but even less sensible than, the sadistic projection of pain. Why indeed should the psyche throw at itself this burden of pain from its hidden reservoirs of memory? There are several answers, but none of them explain all cases; the problem deserves more investigation. Suffice it to say that in the guilt mechanism the pain which one imagines the other to have is inflicted imaginatively on the self. One never really knows the pain another must bear, he can only deduce this from his own reser¬voir of experienced pain. At times he may outsuffer his victim if he imagines the pain to be more than it is.
This guilt reaction delights the moral sense. There is a certain poetic justice in suffering what one metes out to another. I know of one man who had committed the perfect murder, perfect in the sense that he was never incriminated as the murderer. Through guilt, how¬ever, he developed a compensatory passion for suicide. After a long course of psychedelic therapy had failed to remove his guilt, he resolved it himself—with a gun.
Unfortunately, this is not the end of the problem. If it were, Freud would never have found it necessary to postulate such entities and psychiatrists would not be busy dredging them up. For traumas have a lingering, insidious effect on personality and behavior. Denied the light of consciousness, they torment the psyche with physical symptoms, obsessive emotions, and unrealistic behavior. They reveal the fact that the most arduous efforts of repression are never completely successful. Nothing, once plantedness, all the repressions and projections, are self-deluding failures.
Whether a situation is traumatic depends on the mental set of the person who experiences it. An automobile accident might not be emotionally traumatic for an adult; he has a conceptual preparation, a knowledge of life’s probabilities and consequences, which permits him to face it with a certain equanimity. A child, without the mental framework in which to limit and stabilize this crackup of his immediate surroundings and outidings, might be completely overwhelmed.
For this reason major traumas occur most often in childhood. Growing involves a long process of accommodation to reality. It takes time. Part of this process is physiological: a baby is tiny and helpless; he can neither defend himself from danger nor answer his own needs. To be placed in physical peril or left alone for any time is inevitably traumatic.
Most patients pass from the mature sexual level back into the earlier attachment to mother fairly late in therapy. The connection between the two layers reveals itself in an exotic fantasy progression, and the memories and emotions involved are so primitive, pervasive, and generalized that mother hardly seems to be a person at all but rather a monumental fact of nature. One patient was investigating a particular sexual feeling, a gutty animal urge; not the fire of love, but the sexual release one seeks in orgasm. He was busy tracing that feeling through a series of images to center on the one image with the peak emotional valence, a common investigatory method in therapy. First he lingered on female anatomy, finding excitement in the female vagina. Later the center of attraction shifted to the anus. As he explored these associations it seemed that the attraction to the female body was but a projection of his own sensual excitement; and his attention turned to his own penis. The heightened excitement of the fantasy proved he was getting closer and he hesitated to see where it might lead next. Then he found himself staring head on at a penis in a most unusual fantasy. All he could see of it was the tip, with the small opening in the center where the ureter emerges.
The sexual feeling was approaching a new peak when suddenly his whole psychic field of consciousness erupted. While the very walls of awareness cracked and dissolved about him, he observed the orb of the penis expand and soften, while the aperture in the center closed and protruded into a soft red button: the penis had become his mother’s breast, and a breast alive with an awesome sensuality, before which the former excitement was as nothing.
In this progression he had discovered that orgasm is not limited to the sexual organs, but a pervasive feeling which can find its expression in many organs of the body. Indeed he could trace it through the classic progression that Freud outlined—from the mouth to the anus to the genitals. But above all else, deep in the psyche it is a delicious ache of joy. Man’s first contact with this feeling is at mother’s breast. There it is a madness of identity-dissolving delight. Hence the orgiastic feeling, if felt deeply and strongly enough in sex, always includes an element of self-transcendence, of blinding release into the primitive selfless psyche of the infant.