This was a personal trip that he laid not only on the Jews and the German nation but directly on his mistresses. It is highly significant that each of them committed suicide or tried to doso, and more than a simple coincidence. It might very possibly be that they could not stand the burden of his perversion; the whole of it was on them, it was theirs to live with—notin itself, as a simple and disgusting physical act, but in its shattering absurdity and massive incongruity with Hitler’s public role. The man who is the object of all social worship, the hope of Germanyand the world, the victor over evil and filth, is the same one who will in an hour plead with you in private to “be nice” to him with the fullness of your excretions. I would say that this discordance between private and public esthetics is possibly too much to bear, unless one can get some kind of commanding height or vantage point from which to mock it or otherwise dismiss it, say,as a prostitute would by considering her client a simple pervert, an inferior form of life.
# I cannot leave this chapter without calling attention to one of the richest little essays on the perversions that I have yet come upon—too late to discuss here unfortunately, but tying into and deepeningthese views in the most suggestive and imaginative ways: Avery D. Weisman’s “Self-Destruction andSexual Perversion,” in Essays in Self-Destruction , edited by E. S. Shneidman, (New York: Science House, 1967). Note especially the case of the patient whose mother had given her the message: “If you have sex you will jeopardize your whole life.” The result was that the patient hit upon thetechnique of half-strangling or half-suffocating herself in order to be able to experience orgasm. In other words, if she paid the price of almost dying , she could have pleasure without crushingguilt; to be a victim in the sexual act became the fetish that permitted it to take place. All of Weisman’s patients had an image of reality and death that was medieval: they saw the world as evil, as overwhelmingly dangerous; they equated disease, defeat, and depravity, just like medieval penitents; and like them, too, they had to become victims in order to deserve to remain alive, to buyoff death. Weisman calls them aptly “virginal romantics,” who cannot stand the blatancy of physicalreality and seek to transform it into something more idealized by means of the perversion.
* As anal play is an essential exercise in human mastery, it is better not interfered with. If the adult anxiously cuts it short, then he charges the animal function with an extra dose of anxiety. It becomes more threatening and has to be extra-denied and extra-avoided as an alien part of oneself. This extra-grim denial is what we mean by the “anal character.” An “anal” upbringing, then, would be anaffirmation, via intense repression, of the horror of the degrading animal body as the human burden sans pareil .
* One exception is Alan Wheelis, who discusses these very things: the need for transference, the problem of historical change and neurosis, the insufficiency of psychoanalytic therapy for finding an identity, and so on. ( The Quest for Identity [N.Y.: Norton, 1958], pp. 159-173). The whole discussion is pure Rank, although Wheelis evidently arrived at his views independently.
† If psychology represents the analytic breakdown and dissipation of the self and usually limits the worldto the scientific ideology of the therapist, we can see some of the reasons Jung developed his own peculiar ideas. His work represents in part a reaction to the very limitations of psychological analysis. For one thing, he revitalized the inner dimensions of the psyche to secure it against the self-defeating analytic breakdown of it. He deepened it beyond the reaches of analysis by seeing it as a source of self-healing archetypes, of natural renewal, if the patient will onlyallow it. For another thing, he broadened the psyche beyond
# I cannot leave this chapter without calling attention to one of the richest little essays on the perversions that I have yet come upon—too late to discuss here unfortunately, but tying into and deepeningthese views in the most suggestive and imaginative ways: Avery D. Weisman’s “Self-Destruction andSexual Perversion,” in Essays in Self-Destruction , edited by E. S. Shneidman, (New York: Science House, 1967). Note especially the case of the patient whose mother had given her the message: “If you have sex you will jeopardize your whole life.” The result was that the patient hit upon thetechnique of half-strangling or half-suffocating herself in order to be able to experience orgasm. In other words, if she paid the price of almost dying , she could have pleasure without crushingguilt; to be a victim in the sexual act became the fetish that permitted it to take place. All of Weisman’s patients had an image of reality and death that was medieval: they saw the world as evil, as overwhelmingly dangerous; they equated disease, defeat, and depravity, just like medieval penitents; and like them, too, they had to become victims in order to deserve to remain alive, to buyoff death. Weisman calls them aptly “virginal romantics,” who cannot stand the blatancy of physicalreality and seek to transform it into something more idealized by means of the perversion.
* As anal play is an essential exercise in human mastery, it is better not interfered with. If the adult anxiously cuts it short, then he charges the animal function with an extra dose of anxiety. It becomes more threatening and has to be extra-denied and extra-avoided as an alien part of oneself. This extra-grim denial is what we mean by the “anal character.” An “anal” upbringing, then, would be anaffirmation, via intense repression, of the horror of the degrading animal body as the human burden sans pareil .
* One exception is Alan Wheelis, who discusses these very things: the need for transference, the problem of historical change and neurosis, the insufficiency of psychoanalytic therapy for finding an identity, and so on. ( The Quest for Identity [N.Y.: Norton, 1958], pp. 159-173). The whole discussion is pure Rank, although Wheelis evidently arrived at his views independently.
† If psychology represents the analytic breakdown and dissipation of the self and usually limits the worldto the scientific ideology of the therapist, we can see some of the reasons Jung developed his own peculiar ideas. His work represents in part a reaction to the very limitations of psychological analysis. For one thing, he revitalized the inner dimensions of the psyche to secure it against the self-defeating analytic breakdown of it. He deepened it beyond the reaches of analysis by seeing it as a source of self-healing archetypes, of natural renewal, if the patient will onlyallow it. For another thing, he broadened the psyche beyond
Similar Books
