When and how do you become you?
The newborn, the infant, it is such a delicate origami.
And there is a tenuous process of unfurling which, if mismanaged by a mother who is not good enough, becomes unraveling and leads to an empty schizoid core and to pathological narcissism.
It is an act of fine-tuning, a high-wire act.
Many parents get it wrong. Others succeed.
And the child inexorably becomes, in contradistinction to his parents, especially the mother.
It is an interplay, an interaction in the fullest sense of the word.
And today, I'm going to explore some hidden corners of this process, hitherto neglected in the literature.
When the child is born, it has a template. And this template is empty. There is a structure there, there are implements and instruments, they are all available and ready to absorb content from the environment, to assimilate it and to produce you, the adult, the child, the newborn, the infant is the subject, it has a city.
However, this subjectivity is potential. It's not actuated or effectuated. There is no content yet.
So it is what Immanuel Kant called the ding an sich, the noumenal, preverbal and in principle unknowable.
This elemental core, this nucleus, this quiddity and essence distilled into a field of potentials.
This is the primordial atavistic form of subjectivity.
And it is immersed in what Freud used to call oceanic feeling.
But the oceanic feeling is not the outcome of a schizoid empty core, nor is it one and the same.
Oceanic feeling is not about absence. Oceanic feeling is not about not being.
Oceanic feeling is the equivalent of Kenosis in Christianity. A kind of empty nothingness that is eager and about to become.
A kind of potential that knows its worth and its capacities and is able to hungrily devour the environment, to absorb internal and external objects, information and processes, and integrate them, and constellate them, and suddenly emerge, like some kind of epiphenomenon.
So this is what the Buddha is called Anatman.
Anatman is comprised of three elements.
A lack of an essence.
The child has no introspection, just proper reception.
The child perceives its own body, but doesn't have a mind yet to perceive, doesn't have a subject.
So the child is all body and no mind.
There's a lack of essence.
Element number two in the Buddhist Anatman.
Impermanence.
Indeed, the child is growing. The child is developing. The child is changing.
And in this sense, the child is never the same from one minute to another, which might explain the problem of emerging subjectivity, because how can you be a subject if you are constantly evolving, impermanent, inconstant, transformative, transforming and changing like Kafka's metamorphosis?
The child's rate of development and growth in the first two, three years is astounding.
And it is so fast, it's so furious that there's no time for a stable, permanent, all-encompassing, integrative subjectivity to emerge.
The third element in the Anatman is interdependence on individuals and things.
And this is the famous symbiotic phase with mother, who also represents the world.
The child is one with her.
We don't use the phrase symbiotic phase or symbiosis anymore, but I rather like it, actually, because I think it does capture exactly what's happening.
There's a single organism. It has two heads, multiple legs, multiple arms, but it's one. It's one in every meaningful way. It's the child mother dyad. But a dyad that is unitary, a single logos, if you wish.
And so the three elements of the Anatman, coupled with the Kenosis, coupled with Kenosis, described perfectly or capture perfectly, the state of the newborn and the infant, at least until age 18 months, and some say until age 36 months. But definitely in the first six months.
It is an emptiness, a nothingness, but that is aware of itself as an emptiness and a nothingness. A self-referential, recursive emptiness and nothingness that has the potential to become.
In other words, it has the potential to negate itself and to destroy itself, eradicate itself, and obliterate itself in the process of becoming.
There is therefore an inbuilt tension, and inbuilt dissonance in this primitive initial phase of life.
Because to become, one must disappear first.
The phase of kenosis, the phase of empty nothingness must vanish.
It's a precondition for life.
There's a choice the child has to make between kenosis and life.
The child is in a state of Buddhist Anatman, a lack of essence, no introspection, impermanence, interdependence on individuals and things, symbiosis, and so on so forth.
And life is a rebellion. It's a thrust forward. It's the discarding of the previous state.
It's exactly like a larval transformation of the larva and the emergence of a butterfly.
And throughout this period, immersed in the oceanic feeling and in the ocean that is mother. Mother is the world, of course.
The child is, again, what Emmanuel Kant called, Kant is a really, really bad name. Okay, what Immanuel Kant called, ding an sich, the nomenon.
The nomenon is contrasted with the phenomenon.
The phenomenon is the way things appear to an uninterested or disinterested observer, an objective observer, a neutral observer, let us say a scientist.
These are the phenomena.
And they're contrasted with the nomena, theding an sich.
The nomenal holds the contents of the intelligible world.
Kant said that reason, speculative reason, definitely, but reason can only know the phenomena.
We have no access, we cannot penetrate, we cannot comprehend, and we cannot interact with or communicate with the noumenal.
And yet, we know it is there.
We know it is there because it manifests through various potentials and capacities.
For example, the capacity to act as a moral agent. The noumenal or world is postulated because it gives rise to freedom, god, morality, immorality, etc. This phenomena cannot be attributed to speculative reason or to the world of phenomena. They come from somewhere else, there's another fountain head, and that is the noomenon or the ding.
And this is exactly the state of the newborn and the infant, a series of potentials to become.
And so one of the potentials is what Chomsky calls the innate universal grammar, the ability to acquire a language, the pre-wired, the hard-baked ability to acquire a language, the pre pre wired, the hard-baked ability to acquire language, their templates and instruments and tools and rules, especially rules, as to how to acquire language, says Chomsky, and today this is the common perception in generative grammar studies and so and so forth.
So the child is born with the ability to acquire language and communicate. It's a crucial facet.
Because language is the bridge to and the engine of object relations.
Why is that?
Because all language is relational and all language is object oriented.
Don't trust me on this. Take a list of 10 random words and you will see that all 10 of them have to do with some kind of relationship to another person, to the world, to the universe, to yourself, some kind of relationship.
And all words are somehow connected to objects. Objects could be other people, could be ideas, could be concepts, could be social groups, objects.
Language is never solipsistic. That is Wittgenstein's observation. Language is never truly private. Only public language is language.
So language is relational and object oriented. I have my own beef with Wittgenstein on this, but at this stage, let's stick to the orthodoxy.
So the infant's innate capacity to acquire language and make use of it is the precondition and the foundation of object relations.
There are no relations with objects without language.
It is through language that the subject emerges as an object unto itself and unto others. This emergence is mediated via language.
Take the word I. I am making this video. That makes me the object of my own observation. And who is doing the observation? The subject.
So by using the word I, I objectify myself. I become an object to my own subject.
But how is this done by using the word I? Which is of course a language element.
Language allows me to observe myself as an object, to become the object of my subject.
And of course, only language allows me to regard other people, external objects, as objects to my subjectivity.
I am able to interact with them because I perceive them as separate from me, as external to me.
And then I use language to bridge the gap between us and to allow me to form with them an interactive dyad or interactive group.
So it is language that allows us to objectify ourselves and others in the good sense.
Not to objectify, to treat as objects, but to objectify in the sense that we can perceive them as external to ourselves and separate, and therefore worthy of exploration and interaction.
And so this is the sequence.
The child is born with potentialities. They are unrealized, unactualized.
And so the child is a ding an sich. It's a nomenal.
Then one of the potentials is a potential to acquire language.
The child acquires language. The child acquires language.
The minute the child acquires language, the child becomes its own object.
There's a split, subject and object.
This is at the core of any known language, including, by the way, artificial languages, such as computer programming.
So subject object and then the child is able to perceive the first object itself we come in a minute we come to the question how it's done and what's the mother's role in this.
But the child perceives itself as an object.
Suddenly there's me and the rest of the world.
And this is the first time that the child comes across the world of phenomena, not noumena.
First time the child comes across the world, reality, period, via the mediation of language.
There were philosophers like Foucault and Adam Ben, who insisted, who took this argument much further and insisted that actually there are only objects. There's no such thing as subject. There's only subjectification, a process of transforming oneself.
When you relate to yourself, you are subjectifying yourself, but you don't really exist as a subject. You exist only as a relation in relationship to other people.
So these philosophers claimed that only relationships exist, only objects exist, only interactions with objects exist, and that the perception, self-perception, other perception, the perception of the subject is wrong, it's misleading, the process of subjectification, which is a precondition for establishing a relationship with an object, leads to self-deception, to the mistaken belief that you exist apart from the relationships, that you could exist, even if there were no objects in the world.
And so again, Foucault claims this is completely untrue. If there were no objects in the world, there would not be a subject.
Okay, back to language.
Language allows the infant to conceptualize the world.
But the first piece of information about the world is mother's gaze, mothers smell, mother's touch, but especially mother's gaze.
Mother's skin, mother's smell, the child can't really regard them as external. The child perceives them as emanating from the inside.
But mother's gaze is definitely external.
And it is language that allows the infant to conceptualize the mother's gaze and to begin to regard her as separate from itself.
The infant says, Mother is looking at me. She is looking at me. So she cannot be me. She must be external. She must be the other.
Language allows the infant to conceptualize the mother's gaze by othering her irrevocably, regarding her as the other.
One could ask of course why is language needed here the gaze, the gaze is a gaze, the child is a child. The child could of course perceive the gaze as emanating from an external object, even without language. Why does the child need language?
Well, pay attention to what I said. I said that the language allows the child to conceptualize the other in process.
The other in process is automatic. The other in process is inexorable. The other in process happens naturally and without any intervention by the mother or by the child.
It's an insight that the child gains that is spontaneous and emergent.
However, the child doesn't have a handle on this.
As Winnicott said, as long as a child doesn't exist, he doesn't have any experience.
So the child doesn't have a handle of this new discovery, that mother is not me. Mother is not me. Mother is external.
Therefore, if mother is external, I must be internal somehow, or at least I must have some internal dimension. Internal, external, inside, outside, out there, in here, boundaries. A whole new revolution in the perception of the world.
And yet the child is unable to experience this because the child is unable to conceptualize it. The child is unable to create, if you wish, a theory about it, a working model. The child is unable to mentalize, for example.
So to do this, the child acquires language. Language is a prerequisite for this, it is true. Language is the tool that the child imposes a new order and structure on the universe.
By using the word I, the child reifies this chasm, this break in the world, between internal and external, me and mommy.
The word I sets the child apart, permanently, irrevocably, irreversibly. It becomes a feature of the world, not a bug, but a feature of the world.
And that's a single word, I.
Language allows the child to make sense of its new discoveries, to organize them.
So language is both an organizing principle and hermeneutic. It allows a child to interpret what's happening and to interpret it in a way that is self-consistent and other consistent. In other ways, it has internal consistency and external consistency, which is the hallmark of a good theory.
Language allows the child to create predictions by asking questions, to interrogate the world by interrogating mummy.
This stage, mommy is the world. The child knows that the world is no longer internal, it's external, but it's still only mommy.
And interrogating mommy, verbally, behaviorally, interrogating mommy yields answers.
This process of interrogation, driven by survival instinct and a bit later by curiosity, this process of interrogation gradually allows the child to create three very critical theories.
A theory about himself, that's introspection.
A theory about the mother, that is the first theory of mind, the first act of mentalization.
And a theory about relationships, a working model.
It's a very critical period because if the mother is not good enough, these theories are wrong.
The child constructs theories that are wrong and they lead to dysfunction and pathology if the input from the mother is misleading, absent, cold, detaching, instrumentalizing, parentifying, abusive, traumatizing, you name it, selfish, depressive, schizoid. If the input is pathologized, the output is pathologized, garbage in, garbage out.
And the result is a set of theories that don't serve the adult will later on in life.
The first act of othering is with mother. The first other is mother.
And it's a major, terrifying trauma.
Imagine. You're in a symbiotic bond with another person, not realizing that it is another person, essentially in a symbiotic bond with yourself, with a part of yourself that looks like mother. It is mother, but you don't know yet that she's separate, that she's external to you. You think the whole world is you. Mother, the furniture, the occasional father, I mean, it's all you.
And then suddenly you discover that you are not as all encompassing, all pervasive and omnipotent as you thought you were. And even worse, even more terrifying. There are objects out there that used to be part of you. You thought they were part of you, but actually they're not.
And because they're not part of you, actually they're not, and because they are not part of you they cannot be controlled, you cannot minimize your frustration, you cannot cater to your needs, including your survival, because you're not in control of these objects. And that is absolutely terrifying, the birth of these objects. And that is absolutely terrifying.
The birth of the external and its schism from the internal, the rupture between external and internal, inside and outside, the world and me, this is possibly the greatest trauma imaginable, the equivalent of a second birth, the birth of the object and the birth of the subject.
The birth of this duality, the dual nature of the world, object subject, is therefore grounded in frustration and trauma, in perceived rejection, in aggressive counter rejection, because the baby becomes very aggressive, very angry, and rejects mommy initially.
Allow me to explain it a bit.
When the child is born, there is no subjectivity and no objectivity. There's no subject and no object. There's just this undifferentiated mass of potentials, of templates, of innate possibilities, of scenarios.
And the translation into actuality and into reality of some of these potentials, those which are selected in accordance with environmental pressures, this selection process is mediated via the mother's gaze.
When the child realizes that mother is separate from it, because mother is gazing at it, the object is born. The first object is mother. The gazing mother.
And the minute the object is born, the subject is born, of course.
Because when there are objects out there, who is doing the observation? Who is observing them? Who is becoming aware of the existence of these objects?
The subject.
So the birth of objects and subjects is simultaneous.
And it is grounded in the frustrating experience of not being able to control mother as an internal object. Not being able to instantaneously gratify needs by resorting to an internal space.
This terror of having lost control over your source of sustenance and life itself, your very survival depends on mother. This terror is traumatic.
And the break between the child and the mother is perceived by the child as some kind of rejection. The mother has rejected and frustrated the child by becoming an object.
And becoming a subject is equally traumatizing and frustrating.
Because in order to become a subject the child needs to deny the nothingness, the empty nothingness that it had been until that moment. The child needs to deny its previous nature and become something completely different, from lava to caterpillar to butterfly.
And so there's perceived rejection, not only a rejection of the child by the mother, but a rejection of the child by the child.
And of course when you feel rejected, even now as adults, but a rejection of the child by the child.
And of course, when you feel rejected, even now as adults, sometimes you become counterdependent. You become defiant and you counter-reject. You reject me, I reject you.
So it's a way to resolve cognitive dissonance.
And this applies to the process of becoming as well.
When the child is rejected by the mother, since she has become an external object, she has abandoned the internal space. She has deserted the child. She left the child to its own devices, emptied the place. There's a hole in the shape of mother where mother used to be. Now she's an external object. Separate from the child.
This is perceived as rejection. And the child reacts with counter-rejection, and externalized aggression.
Gradually, because the child is dependent on mother, the child goes through a process of splitting, mother is all good, I'm all bad, this is called the moral defense in the work of Fairbairn.
And the child learns to reconcile with this critical first object with mother by recognizing the externality and separateness and developing realistic expectations as to her availability and to the child's ability to manipulate her.
But mother, throughout all this, mother is still perceived as perfect. The child needs to perceive mother as perfect, because what's the alternative? If mother is not perfect, let alone if mother is evil or bad or absent, the child is at life risk. This is life-threatening.
So rather than confront the possibility that, you know, you could die because mommy is not good enough, the child idealizes mother and regards her as perfection embodied and she perceives the child as perfect she idealizes the child to a large degree not as much as the child does because she's an adult and you know she has developed cognitions and observational powers and so on, but she still idealizes the child.
It allows her to provide nurturing even through difficult periods, even if the child is honorary and demanding and so.
So there's co-idealization, there's mutual idealization. The child idealizes mother now as an external object and mother idealizes the child.
But this raises a serious conundrum, serious problem.
You see, it is easy to love a perfect object. If you're perfect, it's easy to love you. It doesn't take much effort. It doesn't take much investment. It doesn't take much commitment. It doesn't mean anything, actually.
If you're a perfect object, someone loves you, doesn't mean much. Because automatically, by virtue of your perfection, you engender and foster love in others. It's like automatic, it's reflexive, it's not mediated via the prefrontal cortex, it's reptilian. You're perfect, you're loved. It's like being very very beautiful. When you're very very beautiful, you know everyone is attracted to you.
So what's a meaning of this attraction? This is the child's dilemma.
The child is perceived by the mother as perfect and perceives mother as perfect.
And this all round bubble or globe of perfection, sorry, makes the mother's love suspect. It's as if the child says to itself, I'm perfect, of course she loves me, but would she have loved me had I been not perfect? Had I been imperfect? Would I still be the recipient of her love? I need to test her. I need to become imperfect.
The child develops a theory, albeit not verbal, but not pre-verbal. This is already the verbal state. And children verbalize what I'm telling you right now.
So the child develops a theory that the mother's love should be unconditional. The mother should accept the child, no matter what. No matter which misbehavior and misconduct the child engages in, no matter how ugly the child is, no matter how deficient, no matter in other words, what kind of bad object the child is, the mother should love this bad object. Because that's mother's role, to love unconditionally.
Later on, initially, the child regards the mother as perfect, renders itself imperfect in order to test the perfect mother's unconditional love.
Much later in life, after age three and between the ages of three and six, the child begins to regard mother as imperfect.
Why is that?
Because a perfect mother is not capable of anything but loving. A perfect mother is not capable of anything but loving. A perfect mother is not capable of hating. A perfect mother is not capable of rejecting. A perfect perfection is identified with love, even in religionand in philosophy, love and perfection go hand in hand. God is perfect and he loves us all, doesn't he? Well, last time I spoke to him.
So the child says, mother loved me because she regarded me as perfect. And then I became imperfect and she still loves me. Checkbooks.
Next.
Mother loves me because she is perfect. I am imperfect now and she still loves me, but she loves me because she is perfect and perfect beings love. Mother is godlike. God loves, mother loves.
So I need to change mother. I need to render mother imperfect in order to test her unconditional love. Both of us were imperfect, I as the child would have imperfect and mother is imperfect, would we still love each other unconditionally?
So what the child does he splits mother into a bad mother and a good mother, what Melanie Klein called the good breasts and the bad breast, pornographic psychoanalysis. So, object relation, sorry.
So, the child splits them up.
Initially, the child splits itself. That's the moral defense.
And then much later, the child splits mother.
Initially, the child splits itself. That's the moral defense.
And then much later, the child splits mother.
All these splitting procedures, they have one goal in mind to test the mother's unconditional love.
Initially, mother regards child as perfect, child regards mother is perfect.
That's not good enough because perfect beings automatically love each other. There's no investment here, no commitment. It's automatic. It's a discharge.
So the child renders itself imperfect. And lo and behold, mother still loves him.
So now the child is convinced that mother's love is unconditional.
Then the child grows a bit, grows up a bit and says, wait a minute, mother is perfect. That's why she loves me unconditionally, even though I am imperfect. Because perfect beings love unconditionally, period.
So I'm going to render mother imperfect by splitting her. And then let's see if she still loves me.
And then, having tested the mother's love by self-splitting and other splitting, the child becomes sure and certain of the constancy of the mother, the permanence of the mother, as an object, and embarks on the generation of an introject of the mother that is permanent.
He once, having ascertained that the mother's love is unconditional and fully accepting, indeed, the child feels comfortable and safe. The mother becomes a secure base and he can internalize her, internalize the mother, he can identify with the mother and he can interject and incorporate the mother without being afraid that he is interjecting or incorporating or identifying with a bad mother, a bad object, a mother who is incapable of unconditional love and acceptance.
Now, if the mother is not good enough, this process fails, of course. It fails and the interjection of the maternal figure is disrupted.
Consequently, the constellation and integration of a self is disrupted.
The self is the subject and it is defined in contradistinction to the object.
And if the object is threatening, unpredictable, ominous, unloving, absent, uncaring, instrumentalizing, parentifying, traumatizing, abusive, if the object is bad, if the external object is bad, objectively bad, the child is unable to create a subject.
The mother is the trigger to the creation of the self and the foil against which the child creates the subject, the self, the ego.
A mothering that is not good enough disrupts the formation of the ego or the self. Call it whatever you wish, the core identity, the who you are, the essence, the quiddity.
And then you have the difficulties in becoming you are half potential, you know, one leg in reality, one leg internally, half potential, half actuality, half fantasy, half reality.
You're stuck in the twilight zone, forever, for the rest of your life. You have become schizoid or a narcissist.
Separation, individuation at age three, between 18 months and 36 months, and later in adolescence, separation and individuation, these are reenactments of this rupture, reenactments of the schism between subject and object.
When the child separates from mommy and becomes an individual, the individual is an ideal abstract. It doesn't really exist, but never mind.
When the child becomes an individual, separates from mummy, this is reenacting the subject-object initial split.
It is as if the child gained a concept of object and subject by using language.
And then the child goes out to test the hypothesis, to test the theory.
The theory says, there is you, the subject, and there is mummy, the object.
Okay, but maybe the theory is wrong. Let's give it a run. Let's give it a test run.
So the child goes out and separates from mummy and becomes an individual and then object subjects are clearly delineated and demarcated there's no debate anymore the theory is right separation individuation is a transformation from object to subject and at the same time the transformation from subject to object.
Separation individuation gives this process, gives the individual, gives the emerging individual, the child, gives a child the tools to begin to split the world more and more, to multiply objects, kind of non-parsimonious against Occam's razor, I think.
But the child multiplies entities, multiplies objects, and all the time enhances his sense of self, his subjectivity or his subjectification.
Because the greater the number of objects, the more pressure is exerted on the subject to become cohesive and coherent.
It's exactly like physical pressure. When you put physical pressure on something, you compress it. You render it more homogeneous, you know, stronger.
So separation and individuation is another test, critical test for the mother.
A mother who is not good enough does not allow the child to separate from her in a variety of ways and techniques.
The child cannot separate and cannot in a variety of ways and techniques the child cannot separate and cannot become an individual and cannot therefore perceive external objects as external.
That's at the core of pathological narcissism, psychosis, and schizoid phenomena. There is a severe difficulty to perceive external object as separate, it's external with a life of their own, personal autonomy, independence, etc.
It's huge difficulty because there's no experience in separating from the object.
And when there's no experience in separating from the first object, from mother, there's no experience of the subject. There's no experience of the self.
And so there's a mother who doesn't allow the child to separate. She's overprotective or she's traumatizing or she breaches the child's boundaries whenever the child tries to become, she disrupts the process, interferes, intervenes.
This kind of mother not only damages the child's ability to perceive external objects as external and separate, but she also damages the child's ability to form a core, a nucleus, an ego, a self, an identity.
The damage is immense.
But even healthy children, children who are fortunate enough to have a good enough mother, even such children who go through the phases of splitting and then separation and then individuation and everything is okay, even this kind of chipping there's always residual self-objectification. Always there's always a sense that yeah I'm a subject, there is me, there is I, but there is also an object. I'm also an object.
It's like I in me there's a me that is observing the I or vice versa, depending on which school in psychology you adhere to.
So there's this concatenation or this regression of egos or selves, one observing the other.
And this internal observation, constant internal monitoring and supervision, observations, surveillance, this is a form of self-objectification.
So we are all both subjectsand the objects of our subjectification and subjectivity.
This is what gives us the possibility, the technical possibility, the clinical, the clinical, psychological possibility to relate to others.
We have the experience of being an object.
Because we introspect, because we observe ourselves, because we study ourselves, because we are the objects of our own subjectivity.
We know how it feels to be an object. We know how to interact with an object.
In other words, we develop object relations.
The first object, therefore, is you. The first object is the subject.
In this sense, Freud was right when he talked about narcissism, self-directed libido, self-directed cathexis and emotional energy.
Fairbairn was much more elaborate and meticulous in dealing with these issues, but Freud did a good job of placing this question on the map.
So the experience of treating yourself as an object, of relating to yourself as an object, of investing your sexual energy in yourself, auto-erotism, of investing your emotional energy in yourself, cathexis, this first experience is a training ground.
It's a training ground, it's a boot camp for object relations.
If you pass this stage with flying colors, if your mother is good enough, you separate and individuate, you have all the skills that you need to interact with external objects because you've been interacting with yourself as an object, either two.
The relationship between the true self and reality is like the relationship between symbolic objects and real ones in Lacan's work.
So Winnicott's work about the true self can be mapped out one to one to Lacan's work.
Winnicot's true self is a symbolic territory. This is the subject. It's the land of language, the land of law, the land of culture, the land of society.
So the true self is what Lacan calls the symbolic order.
And then there's reality.
And the true self has a relationship with reality. The subject has a relationship with objects. The true self has a relationship with reality in the world. Symbolic order has a relationship with real life objects.
The self, therefore, is a part of Lacan's symbolic order. It contains a conscious linguistic element plus the unconscious.
Lacan called it alterity. Lacan said that the unconscious is the discourse of other people, of the other, and so belongs wholly to the symbolic order.
The self therefore is symbolic, but what does the self symbolize?
It is a receptacle and a reification of the realization of one's own boundaries and limitations, of one's own individuality, of where one ends and the world begins, of the self.
The self is the subject.
Self is when we come to terms and accept and make our peace with the inevitable breakdown in the world.
Mommy used to be one with us. You and mommy used to be a single unit, a symbiosis, and then all hell broke loose and things fell apart and mommy became external.
It's difficult. It's difficult to accept this.
The child employs all kinds of defense mechanisms, trying to kind of restore the previous order, maybe even go back to the womb, maybe be unborn, become unborn.
Reality is intolerable, unbearable, terrifying, frightening. Who wants to live in reality?
So when the child realizes that mother is external and cannot be controlled, the child is so terrified, so traumatized, it wants to unbecome, to unbe, to become unbe, to become unborn, go back to the womb, to the matrix.
And so after a while, through the process of separation, individuation from a secure base and a good enough mother, the child learns that it can survive the externality and separateness of objects in the world. It doesn't need to control them. It can negotiate with them, can interact with them, can communicate with them. It can reach a modus vivendi with them.
And it is at this stage that the child reconciles itself to the broken universe, to the universe of I or me versus others.
There is an essential loneliness in this solipsism, newfound solipsism.
You want to be part of something. You want to be part of a fabric and many Eastern mystical traditions and so on tell you that you are. That you are the universe. You're part of the fabric. You're Indra's Net, you're one node, node one bead in Indrasnet one node in a network and all this.
But the reality is we live alone and we die alone, especially we die alone. The reality is we can never access someone else's mind. We are utterly, totally, irreversibly, irrevocably isolated. Solipsism is the only true philosophy. Solipsism is the only reflection of internal reality.
All the other philosophies are make-belief. They're deceptions.
Because we have no access to someone else's mind, soul, psyche, call it as you will. We have to rely on self-reporting. Others self-reporting.
What if they're lying? It's a very unsafe proposition.
And so when we reconcile ourselves to this state of affairs, the self is formed.
It's symbolic. There's a linguistic element which is conscious, which is a desperate attempt to bridge the unbridgeable gap between us and others.
And this is coupled with the unconscious. Where we internalize others, interject them into our unconscious, thereby creating an anxiolytic environment, an anxiety-reducing environment, because now they are with us. Now the other has become you.
And when you create an internal object that represents someone out there, the external object may abandon you and separate from you, but the internal object will always be with you. It's a form of feigned mastery or control.
And so this is the end of the line.
Adults have a self or an assemblage of self-states, depending on which school you adhere to.
They are symbolic. They represent others and relationships with others.
And they are mediated or communicated via language. Language creates the illusion of intersubjectivity, of a space that is common to multiple subjects and can be shared somehow.
It's an illusion, it's nonsense. No communication, not meaningful communication is possible between subjects.
That's where I differ from we can see.
But still this delusion is critical for our daily life and daily function.
And so we maintain it somehow.
And the self becomes more and more symbolic as it absorbs more and more of the other. As it becomes more and more the other and not us.
Our subject gradually becomes a mere hive mind, a mere representation of all the others we have ever met and all the others we've ever interacted with.
Ultimately we boil down to the sum total of our relationships.