Perhaps the brusque collapse of a traditional hierarchical order is one of the causal factors leading to moral masochism. The individual, without the traditional order, is left without guidance on which model to take for himself. He then takes whatever model appears to him to be the most worthy of his admiration. He will overvalue this model and feel completely unable to rival it. Which contains the nucleus of masochism: the constant assurance of submission to the rival, the constant reassurance that one has renounced the objects which 'belong' to the rival.

i speak of the brusque collapse of a traditional order, and that is something sociohistorical, but perhaps something similar happens at a microlevel: consider the neurotic individual to be someone who suffers from a 'collapse' of a clear order, a clear model to adhere to.

Kubrick has something anally-retentive about him. Everything is orderly, shiny, clean, sterile,... very appolinian. Into which he then introduces traumatic intrusive elements.

Mike Leigh is expulsive, dostojevkian, chaotic, the dialogues are not 'clean', they are open, animalistic, rough and undefined like the sound of waves, ... Here there is no sudden traumatic representant of the continuous in the midst of a harmonic, appolinian, anal order, everything is continuous already.

As a child i "felt" the presence of gods in open fields, in nature. The whole pagan thing . It is probably a projection of one's own will to expand, to fly, to symbiote with the animal, etc.

Many women are indifferent to the ideological system they live under. The ideological is for them but one of the modi of appearance, in this way they are relativist. Islam can become acceptable for them, because it is to them no more than but yet another modus of appearance of which they can with great dedication learn all the intricacies and all the details. The vanity of women will then be the trojan horse that reintroduces their subordination to patriarchy.

When I think of my early childhood, i feel as if all those memories are covered in a blissful feeling. The 'Stimmung' of those memories is pure bliss. The only moment when I feel this kind of Stimmung in my adult life is in dreams or on mind altering drugs.

Also, in phantasy, when i hope something, when i am in love with someone. Or when i think back of childhood, or listen to music associated with those times.

I think it is not an illusion to think that once upon a time i really was completely plunged in that blissfull Stimmung.

I do not regret that today things are different, it is necessary that things are different. It is toxic and immature to demand from the world that it poses no more exigencies than what caretakers would demand of a young infant.

Besides, as we have seen, it is still possible to return to bliss: in sleep the cathexes and inhibitions which have been necessarily and which are the reason for the ceasing of the bliss, are withdrawn, to some degree, and we can once more enjoy narcissistic fullness.

We can only feel the grave terror that the infant feels, in nightmares, panic attacks, objectless anxiety, 'bad trips', and the likes.

Bliss and anxiety are the two modi that come with being an infant yet unhindered by necessary inhibitions, adherence to the 'symbolic order', and need to live up to ideals (instead of the illusory selfsufficiency of infancy) that reality demands of us.

For Georges Bataille 'continuity' means that which is not limited:

- the individual may be discontinuous, but life itself, including death, is continuous

- the individual may not be omniscient, but God is

- the symbolic universe (language, conventions, ...) consists of the introduction of discontinuity in the continuity which is reality...

I think 'cursing', like 'goddammit', 'shit', 'fuck' always refers to the continuous. One curses to relief oneself of the constant pressure to adhere to the conventions of discontinuity (which is synonymous to the adherence to certain culturally exacted inhibitions), and for that one uses terms that one associates with the continuous: these terms refer to excrement (all adherence to convention in some way has its prototype in the mastery of the sphincster), God, the souvereign pure expenditure of energy that is coitus,...

Often we do not choose to find some object ridiculous. I think this is because we know that any possible object (=person) can become an example for us. With this example, an ideal (inner object) is correlated, an ideal which can be used by the inner daemon. To neutralize this power others have over us, we look immediately for what can discredit them as 'examples', as models: and this is the background of the impulse to ridiculization.

It is considerend impudent, when one speaks of humour, not to exhibit at the same time a humorous attitude. It is like humour is some kind of god to which one has to pay tribute, to which one has to sacrifice.

One has to pay tribute to this god also, when one speaks of those phenomena that are repressed in everyday conversation: sex, excretion, actual inequality (class, physical ability, ...), perhaps religion, vestigial remainders of etiquette that could be interpreted as undemocratic servility or sexism etc...

In the era of irony one has to assure the others that one doesn't take things seriously. That one pays tribute to the god of humour. Like a muslim who feels obliged to say 'peace be with him' when he speaks of his prophet, so that no doubt may exist to his inner commitment to his belief system, so the ironic westener feels obliged to joke when he speaks of certain things. Or one can also imagine the need to say "bless you" when someone sneezes, which is perhaps a 'proof' that one is committed to wishing no harm to the other.

Corpsing on stage implies that the magical defense against the inner daemon  (acting in this case) is thought to have stopped working. The subject had used the audience as 'accomplices' to his transgressions, as 'witnesses' who could testify to the oral self sufficience of the comedian. The comedian had reversed the relation of passive child and oral mother.

But now the witnesses are felt to be absent and unwilling and the daemon cannot be convinced.

The subject panics and wishes he would 'dissappear'. In biological terms, the subject feels threatened by a predator (the inner daemon) and wants to play dead .

The comedians I like most are those that can play with the precarious equilibrium between oral 'omnipotence' and vulnerability, who can toe that line and keep their balance. This for me, is the 'art' in comedy: revealing vulnerability and revealing the supple mastery of that vulnerability at the same time. Without the revelation of vulnerability that is being mastered, comedy would be boring and too safe. There would be no art to it.

A stoic wouldn't be a very good comedian. he has found a different way to harness himself against his fellow men, those 'witnesses' of his incompetence.

I would just like to say, it is possible to get ‘cured’ from perverse object choice (paraphilia, homosexuality, etc).

What this perverse subject suffers from is an attachment to a ‘bad object’ (he has in Klein’s sense not worked through the depressive position, and has regressed to a ‘schizoid’ approach to objects). Because he fears the unpredictable, painful rejection by the good object he chooses the reliable pain of the ‘bad object’.

This could be linked to the Oedipus complex. The perverse subject does not believe he can compete with his oedipal rival, and instead ‘holds fast’ to the reliable negative Oedipus. Heterosexual masochism is always the libidinal investment into a phantasmatic object which combines the bad mother and the castrating father. This is why the protagonist of Tanizaki’s “Diary of an Old Man” feels attracted to transvestites.

Populist media in Flanders, assume a need for authority and for an image of the world filtered through clearly defined, standardized, simplistic sentiments, in their readership. The Unmündigkeit of these citizens is fed by providing for them a pseudo-discourse covering up the possibility of a more mature, more challenging information provision. The pseudo-discourse, the simplistic image, closes off the possibility to further reflection.
Humour can be a revolutionary tool, but usually it is used to close off the possibility of further reflection, which would be accompanied by an initial anxiety. Humor removes the 'ground' but immediately offers something to hang on to, and the ground returns immediately. Real reflection removes the ground with no assurance that one will find one's feet on the ground once again. In this way humour also 'closes off' the possibility to further reflection. Everything has to stay cosy, or comfortably cynical, detached, non-consequential, manageable, sentimental, crude.

"We perceive that the self reproaches [that appear so often as a symptom of melancholia] are reproaches against a loved object which has been shifted away from the patients own ego" writes Freud in 'Mourning and Melancholia'.

I believe that Jekels and Bergler in their 1933 article 'Transference and Love' offer an interesting perspective on what it could possible mean that reproaches against a loved object are transformed into self reproaches.

In this article these authors conceptualise the 'super ego' as consisting of the 'ego ideal' on one hand, and what they call the 'daemonion' on the other.

The daemonion is to be understood as an intrapsychical construct of thanatic energy directed against the ego, of which the purpose consists of the coercion of the ego into adherence to the ego ideal. It differs from the other, older constituent of the super ego, the 'ego ideal', in that is purely 'malicious' and aggressive. The daemonion employs the other super ego constituent, namely the 'ego ideal', to confront the ego with its own inadequacy.

A love object is used, according to Jekels and Bergler, to neutralize the daemonion. The love object furnishes proof that the subject is worthy. In other words, the love object takes the place of the ego ideal. The authors write that the ego ideal is projected onto the love object and then reintrojected: 'In love, the ego ideal is then, projected on the object, and thus "strengthened", is reintrojected - the daimon is thereby disarmed'.

And I believe this can offer an interesting perspective on how reproaches against a loved objectseemingly are transformed into reproaches against the self.

What actually happens intrapsychically is:

1) The ego is under attack from daemonion, which uses the ego ideal, to accuse the ego of inadequacy

2) In order to defend itself, the ego seeks an external witness, a love object, which solves the problem of the ego ideal

3) When the love object dissappears or becomes threatened, this proof becomes threatened as well.

4) The daemonion (which is a function in the ego) reprises its relentless accusation of the ego ("the self accusations").

Analysis shows, according to Freud, that these 'self accusations' do in fact have their origins in an accusation 'against a loved object'.

Would it not be possible, however, that two different phenomena are confounded here (and indeed appear to the observer/interlocutor/analyst of the melancholic as a confused mixture)?

On one hand, there is a 'self accusation', which is in fact an accusation of a function of the ego ('daemonion') against another function of the ego (the subject of experience).

On the other hand, we can imagine that the 'subject of experience' in its desperate situation starts accusing the loved object in order to discredit it in the figurative 'eyes' of the daemonion, in order to neutralize the reality of having failed to live up to the ego ideal which was invested with the content of the loved object?

And this 'accusation against the loved object' can be associated with my own concept of "envious hatred": "the object reminds the subject of its inferiority to the object. The subject wishes to cancel this feeling of inferiority by destroying or humiliating (reversing roles) the irritating object."

1) "The thought of suicide is a powerful comfort: it helps one through many a dreadful night.", writes Nietzsche.

2) In his text on "Mourning and Melancholia" (1916) Freud typifies sleep as a state wherein the object cathexes of the waking state are withdrawn.:"The sleeplessness in melancholia testifies to the rigidity of the condition, the impossibility of effecting the general drawing-in of cathexes necessary for sleep"

3) The concept of the "ego ideal" is introduced in Freud's text "An Introduction To Narcissism" (1914). In this article, he writes:

The advent of the "ego ideal" is thus dependent on the experience by the ego of the demands made by other people. Its contents are interpretations of the demands that parents and other significant persons (parents, peers,...) from the environment of the subject make on the subject.

To connect the apparently comforting 'thought of suicide' which Nietzsche talks about with the 'drawing in of cathexes' which Freud talks about is the object of this entry.

People need to be loved. This is a fact. But why is this so?

When the love they crave is felt to be absent, or under threat, people become anxious.

Jekels and Bergler (1933) write:

"Freud, in 'The Problem of Anxiety', describes anxiety as the reaction to a loss, to a separation. According to Freud, the anxiety of infants, and young children no less, has as its sole condition the missing or loss of the object."

The infant abandons the exclusive investment of libido onto the self, because it is forced to recognize that the self is, unlike previously thought, dependent on other people. Consequently, the infant is unable to experience the self as 'whole' anymore, a part of the egohas split off to form the 'ego ideal'. Jekels and Bergler:

"The child's feeling of omnipotence is undermined by the demands of external reality, such as hunger, weaning, toilet training. After a series of unsuccessful attempts to restore its feeling of omnipotence, the child is faced with the alternative of relinquishing it or of maintaining it at the price of a compromise. Such a compromise is described by Freud : "We may say that the one . . . has set up an ideal in himself ... To this ideal ego is now directed the self-love which the real ego enjoyed in childhood. The narcissism seems to be now displaced on to this new ideal ego, which, like the infantile ego, deems itself the possessor of all perfections."

The self love that once was an automatic evidence, now can only be achieved through the condition that one is trying to live up to the ideal. The psyche of the child has established an "inner critic", who demands proof that one lives up to the ideal. One of the ways to "prove" this is the validation of others, of witnesses, i.e. the aforementioned significant objects (parents, peers, ...). The withholding of approval and validation from these important others, is painful and will make self love impossible.

The conformity to the ideal is therefore essentially related to object cathexes.

What happens during phantasies about suicide? In this phantasy the object cathexes which provide the painful reminder of inadequacy are annulled, since the ego to which the judgements of these objects pertain is itself annulled. Consequently, the subject can find rest and become ready for sleep.

Other methods for bringing about the cessation of self criticism so that one can get to sleep: reading novels (taking one's mind off oneself, onto others), erotic gratification (temporary annulment of existential incompleteness, validation, or a phantasy of these things), alcohol (which numbs everything including the self critical faculty), certain alimentary rituals (unconsciously associated with reunification with mother/nurturer) ...