I had a terrible, evil thought this morning over my coffee.
At that point in the early morning light I was listening to a famous Eastern Guru espousing the kinds of philosophical notions famous Eastern Gurus typically espouse and I thought :
“This has a flavour, a style, it is distinct. This means it could be copied easily. This also means it can be satirised easily because people need the specific and replicable flavour to know who the target of the satire is. That step is necessary for satire to be funny. If you don’t know who is being satirised its not funny, its bewildering.”
Then I had another thought:
“I wonder if you could easily copy the flavour of Western schools of philosophical thought and satirise them too.”
Then I took to trying an Eastern flavour copy approach to narcissism and the grand old subject of “Narcissistic Abuse”.
Cue a bunch of word salad about karma, attachment, ego, desire and suffering.
Then I tried a Western one.
Cue a bunch of jargon about the collapse of boundaries between subject and object and
how it is we know that which we think we know and
is the truth of our perceptions not always contingent on certain factors?
Does the notion of abuse only mean “abuse”
if exploiting the other is seen within a specific culturally defined moral framework?
What if you believed the person to be royalty or a demi God? … and so on.
And then I thought: “Ha! Yeah thats pretty stupid and boring. I wonder if you could do it with that other ideology: psychoanalysis.”
You can, please try it!
Freud: You are attached to your abuser because your mother was abusive and it humiliated and aroused you.
Now you want to punish the mother figure and assert your phallic dominance over her
because everything you do is about sex. And trauma. You sexy thing.
Klein?: You love the narcissist because they occasionally feed you the milk of human kindness before savagely pulling the breast away causing you depression, frustration and aggression which you feel guilt for etc
When you miss them, you miss the “codependent supply” they intermittently feed you, that you greedily suckle upon.
Jung: you are the fool archetype of the tarot of the unconscious Jabberwocky archetype of the apotheosis of all apocalyptic leviathans that has eaten the shadow heart of Seth meaning (of course)
its time to rescue your fathers penis from his vengeful brother the Cat god (naturally! why wouldnt it?) and
individuate from the self that you can neither see or know. Or even know that you don’t know.
And THAT my friend is, obviously, why you cant leave “ your narcissus”
(because they are you, or at least the shadow of your reflection in the Goddess Athena’s bidet).
And so on.
Pointless but vaguely amusing first thing in the morning.
Then I thought of Adler.
Well with Adler whatever you’re doing is exactly what you want to be doing
to protect from doing something else, something better
that probably requires some Herculean degree of courage and the capacity to grow the hell up.
So from that perspective, what would Alder say about “narcissistically abusive relationships”?
This one was harder and took longer. So I drank more coffee.
Then…
Ah ha!
I had my Eureka moment:
We stick with the narcissistically abusive person because
we want a strict abusive parent to keep us home/imprisoned
which is synonymous with protection (a prison is also often a fortress - think of the Bastille or the Tower of London) from the FAR GREATER dangers of growing up.
And therefore:
The only escape from the narcissist
(even if they are dead or the relationship is over
we do not escape, we call this post traumatic embitterment or stress)
in this Adlerian flavoured simulation is
to learn to deal with the thing we were using the narcissistically abusive relationship to avoid:
being a fully fledged adult human being in our own right.
I nearly spat my coffee out.
As I said, I think this thought was pure Evil.
What kind of sick, corrupt, morally degenerate “victim blaming” is this?
The idea!
That we use our conceptualisations of “narcissistic abuse” and
cling on to them like a child clinging/attached to a nasty but protective teddy bear to avoid growing up!
All this malingering in forums and banging on for years about narcissistic abuse
would go through the Adlerian star trek translator and come out
as "I dont want to grow up. Im frightened. Ive not been given guidance.
My parents didnt show me how to be an adult
nor did they themselves know how.
Im scared. I dont wanna."
As I said, I cannot countenance this kind of patriarchal, phallocentric, misogynistic
(when its applied to biological men its still an affront to their most feminine part, the anima,
so men too can be the victims of misogyny from long dead Psychoanalysts)
victim blaming that my simulation of Adler just engaged in.
Yes I know, he was a product of his times.
No I dont expect him to have the sensibilities of the morally pure orthodoxy we (the righteous) enjoy in modern times, but goodness me simulated-Adler : DO BETTER!
Its disgusting and once I find the manager I tell you, a most sternly worded email will be written.
Anyway, just to be clear. I am not saying these things.
I am as much a victim of this horror as anyone
as it was my simulated Adler that cruelly and with scant regard for my sensibilities
spoke through me as a vessel after I had accidentally made some thoughts occur inside my brain.
Obviously I would never suggest any of us have any agency, responsibility or power WHATSOEVER in any given situation as that would be “lidderurly” a hate crime.
I really must change my brand of coffee.