Wednesday, February 1, 2017

Phantasy vs. Fantasy and Behavioral Imprinting ...

Realizations of a psychological slave.

By Kay F Gibbs

September 12, 2000
 
Revised January 26, 2005

Instead of killing and dying in order to produce the being that we are not, we have to live and let live in order to create what we are. Albert Camus
 
Please note that this article will be updated periodically.
 
Preface
 
I have embarked on a personal journey to self-understanding, trying to make sense of a tumultuous past that I have now come to view as a tragedy in a country as affluent and educated as America. In 1991 it was determined I was mentally disabled. There were several conflicting psychiatric reports and in the end, I was diagnosed as suffering from schizophrenia, (paranoid type), psychotic, delusional, major depression, and borderline personality disorder. Why? I of course did not believe any of this and now understand that my real problem was a lack of cognition. At no time was I diagnosed with an addictive personality, nor was I ever diagnosed with autism or autistic disorder. I never disclosed the amount of drugs and alcohol I had used prior to any evaluation and that was mainly because I had not associated it as being a bad thing to be using. I had developed a great knack for appearing a normal adult, not understanding, at the time, that I was acting out adult behaviors.
 
I have been on a variety of different medications at different times, but for the most part, I abused alcohol in order to cope with my anxieties. I didn't realize these anxieties were normal and that much of the anxiety I experienced was infantile. I didn't know the alcohol and drugs were suppressing my thought processes, were locking me into my child state (see Eric Berne's, Transactional Analysis), and inducing me to act-out, often called psychosis. I am currently alcohol and drug free. Now the deficits are most apparent. In 1992 I had an MRI done on my brain. It was discovered then that my right brain was larger than my left brain. It is a well-known fact that alcohol damages brain cells.

I sought out several therapists but had a difficult time affording the fee, as Medicare does not pay 100%. So I was left with only one choice, I had to figure myself out on my own, which didn't really bother me, as then my thinking would not be unduly influenced and that was always a concern. I did make an agreement with myself that if I stumbled onto a tough spot and was not satisfied with my own interpretation, I would seek the assistance of a professional. I am also aware that it is possible to deceive oneself in order to protect the ego, particularly when it is in a weak state, but those who have not been breast fed have developed no ego in relation to people.
 
In 1999, actually I began reading up on stuff in 1987. I began reading textbooks on Psychoanalysis, Borderline Personality Disorder, Dissociation, Bulimia and Anorexia (I was diagnosed as anorexic in 1972) and whatever I could find related to my problems. Prior to 1999, I had read books on Post Traumatic Stress disorder, as that was the concluding diagnosis prior to 1991. I haven't read much on Schizophrenia, as I was never really convinced I was schizophrenic, although I may have been well on my way to becoming schizophrenic. In the past Schizophrenia was equated with a split personality, but to my understanding, it is no longer. A split in personality is now described as a Dissociative Disorder and this is not to be equated with the normal primitive splitting that occurs in infancy, called Repression. A dissociative disorder is pathological, while splitting or repression is not.
 
This article is not a professional in-depth explanation of any of the psychiatric terms I have used nor is it an in-depth treatment of my childhood mental history. It is my understanding of the psychology of my experiences. I endured many traumas; molestations (not by my father), an electrical shock, being beaten, a head injury, and being hit in the face that all affected my development from childhood to age 18. I have chosen to share this information in hopes that it will enlighten others like me who have lived in total darkness of the self and prevent such an outcome as mine. Not being a professional, you should not take my conclusions as completely accurate, but I do write from my own personal experiences and what I have read and that speaks for itself.
 
What is phantasy? According to Melanie Klein, phantasy is the state of mind of an infant child during the early stages of development, not to be equated with fantasies, the imagination or daydreaming. According to Weininger*, a duality of sensation is present at birth, good and bad, which the infant forms into phantasy. The infant learns to split-off unwanted, painful sensations. According to Grotstein, "splitting is the primal detour the infant follows in the attempt to cope with the realization of the consequences of birth-separation and the ambivalence toward objects of the newborn world--a detour necessitated by the immaturity of the infants perceptions and defense techniques to cope with sensation and perception"**. These events can also be equated with the experience of agoraphobia in adulthood which I experienced in 1984. After birth, the infant's ego develops further via contact with the mother and mother's breast.

What if you were not breast-fed? Your first contact would be with a non-human, inanimate object, the bottle, and the only connection to the nurturing mother would be her hand holding the bottle. So the object relation for a bottle-fed infant would be the hand and you would develop phantasies about hands, not breasts. Klein theorized that many children in this stage formed phantasies about the breast. My own personal experience can affirm this. I have had an attachment to and preoccupation with hands since birth. My first awareness of this was at about age 3. At about age five it was more pronounced and had erotic elements, which leads me to believe children do indeed have sexual feelings toward their parents. How do I know I was not breast fed? My mother finally told me, when I was about 24, but I was not able to associate it with my cigerette smoking or other behaviors at the time and I was most likely subjected to other transferences as well. I continued to smoke until I was 32. I started again for about 9 months, then stopped again and have remained free of cigerettes since 1990.

Klein and all other Kleinian psychoanalysts theorize, which is no longer a theory, that the infant splits at a point in the process. Good breast, bad breast, which then becomes projected onto the mother as good mother, bad mother and all serves the purpose of further developing defenses to protect the weak ego. I suppose a bottle-fed baby then splits the bottle into good bottle, bad bottle. But the bottle-fed infant is developing defenses against an inanimate object, the bottle, and does not develop the necessary ego defenses via the mother. But, the bottle-fed baby soon learns she does not need mother around to hold the bottle, she can do it herself and she can control when and how often she wants to be fed and with what she wants to be fed. The bottle-fed infant must go through the process of connecting the bottle with the hand and then connecting the hand with the mother, before splitting can be associated to the mother. What experiences, physical sensations would serve to create this good bottle bad bottle, in an infant? Milk that was too warm soured milk...who knows.
 
I did not make this association (good bottle, bad bottle) in infancy. At some point I suffered from a problem that required the administration of an anti-diarrhetic. At that time (1954-1961), the most popular drug available was paregoric. Paregoric is a tincture of opium; tincture meaning it also contains alcohol. So, here comes the hand again, only this time it is giving me something that tastes very, very bad. But baby soon learns that the hand is giving her something that makes her feel very, very good, even though it tastes very, very bad and baby learns to tolerate things that taste bad so that she can feel good. This became the key to my drinking problems that started my junior year in high school when I shared my first half can of beer with a friend at a sleep over, 13 years after the use of the paregoric, which I would not connect with until 29 years later. Weininger writes. "...It is like the autistic child who, while he is able to manipulate a wheel very well, places his hand on the adult's hand, leads him to the door, and insists on using the adult's hand to turn the knob. Perhaps the knob stands for the feared, envied, and yet loved breast, and the child is not able to cope with these intense feelings and so splits them off, fragments the emotions, and uses another as a tool to intervene between his phantasy and the reality of walking through the door...". This is where Weininger and I part ways. My experience leads me to concur that the child chooses to open the door with the adult's hand, because that is how the child has bonded with the parent, via the hand as opposed to the breast.
 
So, what really tripped me up? Was it a genetic predisposition to alcoholism, was it a learned behavior, or was it the script? I theorize that an infant who is not breast fed remains in a perpetual state of unconscious phantasy and splitting, and does not attain adequate ego defenses, in relation to the mother. My personal experiences also confirm this. I further believe that this is the basis for the development of specific, non-oral communication skills by bottle-fed infants; methods that employ the hand as opposed to oral, verbal communication. My own personal experience bears this out as well. "Games appear to be segments of larger, more complex sets of transactions called scripts. Scripts belong in the realm of transference phenomena, that is, they are derivatives, or more precisely, adaptations, of infantile reactions and experiences. But a script does not deal with a mere transference reaction or transference situation; it is an attempt to repeat in derivative form a whole transference drama, often split up into acts, exactly like the theatrical scripts which are intuitive artistic derivatives of these primal dramas of childhood. Operationally, a script is a complex set of transactions, by nature recurrent, but not necessarily recurring, since a complete performance may require a whole lifetime."...Eric Berne, Transactional Analysis, chp. 11, Analysis of Scripts, pg. 117.

I was slow to develop verbal communications as a child. My parents informed me that I had highly developed reading skills at age 2, but latent verbal skills. My physical development was also latent, as I remained only 3 ½ feet tall until my 8th year in high school. My physical development was not only influenced by the lack of breast feeding, but other factors as well. I remember being weighed and measured and everyone making a joke about it. I also recall watching the Benny Goodman story for the first time at about age 11 on TV. I have vivid memories of Benny Goodman sitting in a window playing this mournful tune on his clarinet and identifying with his depression. As I entered the 6th grade I had an opportunity to take music lessons, which I did. I was adamant about playing the clarinet; my father wanted me to play the flute. I won the conflict, well this is not altogether true, I did not win the conflict, because there wasn't really a conflict. My father gave in to my wishes and I got to play clarinet. I was not aware that I was really trying to communicate my depression to my parents, which I had associated with the scene from the Benny Goodman Story and which I was subsequently acting-out. My depression was rooted in the denial of the breast, so I had not experienced a loss of ego or self, but never developed an ego. And, according to Weininger and other Kleinian psychoanalysts, this could be considered the acting-out of the repressed, love hate relationship with my father, (I hate you so I will not play the flute I will play the clarinet. I love Benny Goodman because I identify with his depression, he is like me, you are happy, and you are not like me). I guess it would suffice to say, I split off the good son at that point, projecting the good, happy self onto my father and brother and associating the bad depressed feelings with myself and being a bad person. It should be noted here that I had split off from my feminine side long before this and had projected that onto my sister who was only 2 ½ years younger than me. I developed the habit of projecting the feminine side until I sought treatment in 1972 and prior to that time I know my sister and I were used for the purposes of making movies. I can clearly identify at least 20 movies about myself and my family and one about Mrs. Becker and myself, obviously engineered by Staff of John Umstead Hospital. This was long before I ever became disabled and put on disability. This abuse of my personal life has been going on since my childhood and I am now aware, is part of the cause of many of my difficulties in lack of awareness of the pitfalls in my childhood so I could better cope, and robbing me of income I could have been making and putting aside part time, instead of having to depend on the government, had it been acknowledged, had I been informed and had I been appropriately trained to use my deficit as an asset. Dr. David Bohm and David Peat clarify my contentions in their book, Science, Order, and Creativity, "Whenever this creativity is impeded, the ultimate result is not simply the absence of creativity, but an actual positive presence of destructiveness, as was suggested in Chapter 5."

Overall the lack of breast-feeding affected my achievement abilities. A pattern was established whereby I was denied the fulfillment of instinctual needs. This pattern has repeated itself throughout my adult life in whatever I have pursued, but it is particularly evident in my failure to meet the social and academic challenges of my freshman year in college. Whatever I had achieved in high school was all based on a deception, and what others had allowed me to achieve because they felt sorry for me, not because I was that talented, creative or intelligent. Let me correct that, autistics can be highly creative. It is because we are stuck in this perpetual state of phantasy that we are so creative and why many of us are eidetic, many of us never have access to our creative side, because it becomes dissociated. Our creative potential does not evolve to become useful or structured to fit into a potential outlet for a healthy means of expression. We do develop specific skills such as Temple Grandin's.

Here I'd like to interject a brief clarification of the term repression and dissociation, as described by Marlene Steinberg: "Repression is used more to refer to pain whereas dissociation refers more frequently to the avoidance of pain from an external source. Dissociation is a passive process and repression an active one. Repression is the removal of unwanted material by the ego, whereas dissociation is the ego's allowing itself to fall apart (fragmentation)"***. It seems to me that many analysts draw little difference between primal splitting and repression. It is my personal opinion, that in order for splitting to occur, repression must have already happened. This is not true with autistics. A short analogy will help. I have a plug in my bathtub that cannot be removed. It operates by applying a little pressure with the foot or hand to close it to hold in water. I liken what occurs with autistics to the water coming down from the shower and flowing off the body and then the closing of the plug to prevent the water (unwanted feelings) from flowing down the drain or splitting off. What happens if you continue to run the water? The tub begins to fill with dirty water, and starts to over flow. I think this is what happens to autistics. This damming up of internalized projections and traumata that is unable to be split off, creates the emotional energy that causes me to act out. I have also drawn the conclusion that some autistic acting out is more primitive than others, which gives the appearance of what many psychologists and theorists call, high functioning autistics, as opposed to the more disturbed autistics.

The origin of my depression was in infancy, but was in no way confined to events from infancy. At about age 4-5, I overheard a conversation between my parents. I thought my mother had abandoned me, as in left me on someone's doorstep. For years I had felt my parents, (mother), did not want me. I discovered several years ago that I had not been left on anyone's doorstep at all, the conversation was about someone else, but I was experiencing these feelings of abandonment, which I had associated with this notion that my parents did not want me. Therefore, the only explanation I have for my feelings of abandonment, is the lack of breast-feeding. Prior to age 11, I had been severely beaten by my father for reasons I am still unclear about and my father had lost his eyesight prior to that. I am not sure I was not possessed of a degree of his depression as well. I believe I was also internalizing transferences from my father after the loss of his sight, which I projected onto Benny Goodman (because I was angry with my father for beating me), rather than transferring them back to my father. Or splitting them off. In essence I was identifying with my father's depression and had associated this with feelings of love. This brings me to the term autistic detachment and autistic disorder.

Autistic persons are unable to project or split off unwanted sensations and feelings. They internalize thoughts and feelings. I believe when others project unwanted thoughts or feelings onto an autistic person or if they are subjected to transferences from an external source, they internalize them as well, particularly if they are verbalized.

So I was trapped in my child state by an infantile desire to fulfill my instinctual needs which were not appropriately met by my mother. This is not to be construed with oral fixation, unless, you can prove to me that an autistic child can develop thought processes so advanced that he or she can distinguish satisfactory breast feeding from unsatisfactory breast feeding and fixates on this need until it is appropriately met. The man or woman in this stage of development can have gratification of his or her oral needs met with the bottle or if they were unfortunate enough to have been molested, by engaging in oral sex and by other means such as smoking, etc. During my childhood this normal natural instinct was averted to an inappropriate means of gratification when I was sexually molested, at age 6, by a next door neighbor while living in Portsmouth, Virginia. See the movie, The Cell (my sister is Dental Assistant and I had a bad experience with a Dentist as a child). He led me from my backyard into his house and then into a closet where he made me perform oral sex on him. The drive was then forced into suppression again until I was given my first cigarette at age 16. It is easy to see how some can become sex slaves. My experience proves that we often become paired with people who, for reasons of their own, are unable to engage in a more normal means of sexual gratification and thus become the victims of someone else's unhealthy sexual desires (remember Norma Jean Baker alias Marilyn Monroe). To me there is a sadistic element in many of these relationships, which is most likely rage at a parent, some other lover, etc., averted upon the sexual slave. Physical harm is often inflicted upon the masochistic partner, who may have been subjected to some form of physical abuse by one or both parents in childhood. This was the case in my own experience, and in many instances this fact was known and I was put in circumstances where I could and would be harmed. See Dark Eros by Thomas Moore and Autonomy and Rigid Character by David Shapiro. People like me, who are not cognitive of these deficiencies in themselves, often become guinea pigs for the medical, psychiatric and military professions and the drug industry.

In 1974 I was enlisted in the US Army. During my basic training I was assaulted by an enlisted woman in the latrine. After basic I was transferred to my AIT training station and there I encountered the same woman. One evening while at the EMEW club while I was highly intoxicated, the same enlisted woman along with another woman, took me from the club to a mobile home off the base (behavioral imprinting). I must have experienced a blackout as I have no recollection of getting into a car, arriving at the mobile home, or what occurred after they took me from the club that evening. The next morning I found myself stripped of my clothing. I demanded that they return me to the base, but I still have little recollection of the vehicle in which I was transported. I was also raped by an MP Officer and also by a car salesman, while on leave from Fort Gordon, GA. After reading Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, A Clinical Review, I was convinced that the kidnapping and assault by the car salesman was in part a re-enactment of the events that occurred in the Army and events in my childhood. The assailant forced me to perform oral sex on him while threatening me with a weapon, which proves I was still in that stage of development. And still being stuck in this stage of development (no ego) explains why I was unable to follow through with prosecution of this perpetrator, and is why I was unable to follow through on reporting the enlisted women who assaulted me, the MP Officer who raped me or disclose to my parents what was happening to me as a child. It was like a merry-go-round and I kept repeating the same events over and over until I felt so badly about myself that I wanted to take my own life, despite the fact that the events were no longer occurring, because I did not understand what was happening to me. I had been made to feel like I was just a bad seed and no one had intervened during all of my psychiatric treatments to tell me the truth about what was being done to me. This was the case with my father as well. Why? And the strange thing is neither of my parents had experienced any of this, so my parents did not script the events. I believe it became someone else's script after my first molestation (not the one mentioned here), a transference perhaps, and I suffered the humiliation (humiliation and shame because I was not able to gain any control over my life) and abuse because of it. The term transfer is part of the nomenclature used by students of telepathy...Mental transfer plays an important part in the psychodynamics of unsophisticated people, (ie., "No free lunches", and don't expect me to suddenly become sweet and sophisticated). Surprising though it maybe, it is quite obvious that many psychic phenomena are totally unintelligible if we ignore this fact." Wilhelm Stekel, Patterns of PsychoSexual Infantilism, chp. 3, The Mechanism of Transfer, pg. 135. In direct opposition to Stekel's denouncement of the phenomenon of transference, it was confirmed to me by my therapist and from my own experience that thought transferences do occur and that transferences can and do occur many times outside the therapeutic process. How can it not.

This experience created yet another pattern of behavior, behavioral imprinting, I had to overcome. I found myself getting involved repeatedly with women and my alcohol use escalating, until I joined Alcoholics Anonymous in 1979. I worked diligently to maintain sobriety to no avail and had even sought the assistance of a trained psychologist on two occasions, one of them a PHD. What brought me to the Doctor's office? I had been acquainted with a man for sometime who suddenly disclosed to me that he was a pedophile, an employee of the State where I reside and an artist like me only much better and much older than myself. He was not actively seeking treatment. His disclosure started a chain of reactions in me, that sent me to the hospital for fear of relapse in 1983, in addition to work related stressors. I was becoming cognitive of what had happened to me in my childhood, what was happening to me at the time, and developed symptoms of agoraphobia and had suffered several panic attacks. Unfortunately, my insurance company, Blue Cross and Blue Shield, denied my insurance claims, as pre-existing, and refused payment to the Doctor so I had to terminate my treatment. Why? Was I becoming too aware? Had I molested a child, they'd have forced me into treatment at all costs! I continued to abuse alcohol until recently (the past 18 months) when I was able to separate myself from these relationships and confront the truth about my childhood. Now I have an even more difficult task of maintaining emotional stability and sanity because of the baggage that has been unloaded on me, by the women in these relationships (behavioral imprinting) and others. Melanie Klein spells out what was happening to me quite clearly. I became the container for parts of these women's personalities, of unwanted traumata, thoughts, emotions, scripts and experiences, often times acting out their behaviors that landed me in prison or jail and subjected me to even further harm and abuse. I rarely disclosed anything about myself. Did they know what they were doing to me? Yes some of them did as I look back on the events. They acted out their shame, at what they were doing to me, in the form of violence toward me, slamming me against walls, etc. I also realize some of the rage came from the nature of the enmeshment itself as in they were often put into the position of either my adult state or theirs or the parent and I was the child, of which I had no cognition, at the time. This was the case with Susan when I took the overdose of Glutamic Acid in 1990. She had taken an overdose of something and had been given a spoonful of charcoal to absorb the drug she had taken. This event was transferred from her adult state to her child state and I acted it out only I didn't take charcoal, I took the glutamic acid, which set my brain on fire and I subsequently took an overdose of xanax to quiet my head. I had no conscious awareness of the fact that I was acting out a script from her child state, at the time it was happening as I had no clear undrstanding of the workings of the brain, that my mother became caught up in also. See quote above from Eric Berne, Transactional Analysis, chp. 11, Analysis of Scripts, pg. 117 and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, a Clinical Review, Sidran Press, re-enactment syndrome. Most of these women had problems with their mothers, some both parents, as I did. I am now able to recognize these transferences for what they are, but am still unable at times to split them off. I make it sound like a multitude of relationships but it was not. I was only engaged in three homosexual relationships (acting out in my child state) and I did on occasion have normal relations with men (when I was in my adult state that is, but it was still acting out and is not unlike psychosis). And during all of this I still had an attachment to my mother. I went home nearly every weekend, until I was about 25. And for what it's worth I believe what I have just described is the real issue behind the disease called AIDS. It became more apparent to me after seeing Tom Hanks in the movie Philadelphia Story, with Denzel Washington.

I concluded, after reflecting on my experiences, that a bottle-fed infant grows up with grave deficits in psychological development and should fit the criteria for those of the developmentally disabled. I know I have incurred a significant amount of damage to my brain and that my mental and emotional age will never equal that of my chronological age and is also why I found myself often being taken advantage of sexually. The original parental attachment is handicapped by the infant's attachment to the bottle and can only develop via the bottle versus the breast. What happens if you introduce the breast at a later date by someone who isn't the birth mother? I theorize you create a whole new set of personality traits and problems...which I believe is the basis for many cases of multiple personality and autistic acting-out. It is my belief that many artists, writers, musicians and actors suffer from this form of autism. Those who are prevented from expressing themselves in these professions, are frequently exploited and profited from by these professions, without permission and is an example of corporate greed at it's worst. This has been the case in my experience. Is it any wonder the California Psychiatric Association denounced and denied Melanie Klein's findings? However I do believe there are selfless and caring individuals in these professions and others who are not driven by greed or prestige.

In 1992 after having been hospitalized at the VA hospital, I was informed I could file for service connected disability because of the assaults. I had no idea that they actually had nothing in place to follow through on such an action. Instead they were using me to build a plan to address this issue; myself and probably lots of other women who were brave enough to talk about it and bring it to the military's attention.

I has been 12 years since I filed for service connected benefits. There was an interruption of my claim for some strange reason and a new claim had to be filed but it has still not been decided. The Government expected me to collect letters from all involved (me and the perps) to corroborate my case. Typical Military defenses. They knew this kind of thing was going on, they just wanted to keep it behind closed doors. Is it any wonder I got a diagnosis of Schizophrenia? They still want more information and all I can give them are my recollections of what happened. Is any sexual assault performed in front of an audience? Rarely. Do you think anyone would go to such lengths to pursue a lie? I don't have that kind of discipline for deceit, but I will go to the ends of the earth to support and defend the truth. I guess they think they will just wear me down and I will give up this "ludicrous notion" that some black man jumped me outside the NCO club and dragged me down the side of an embankment and took sexual liberties with my body while suppressing my screams for help or that some lesbian had the guts to take me form a military base and have her way with me while I was so intoxicated that I couldn't remember what happened. It's all in your head, little girl. Sure I'm going to spend 12 years of my life pursuing some drummed up falsehood and I'm going to waste my time writing about it over and over. Right. I'm not that greedy nor am I that lazy that I wouldn't get a job if I could or that I'm going to go commit some crime just so I can get locked up in prison or thrown into a mental institution to prove the point. They expect me to keep quiet to preserve the careers of all involved at my personal expense. When hell freezes over.

Now that I fully understand what has been done to me and how the best years of my life have been wrecked because of someone else's sick #%& behavior, I will never abandon myself, like Women's Health and the Psychiatrist at the VA Hospital abandoned me after they got what they wanted from me.

Kay F Gibbs

*Melanie Klein From Theory to Reality, by Otto Weininger, 1992, chp. 1, The Paranoid-Schizoid Position: the birth trauma and the earliest mother-child interactions.

**Splitting and Projective Identification, by James Grotstein, 1981, prt.1 Splitting, Splitting as a Basic Ego Defense.

***Handbook for the Assessment of Dissociation A Clinical Guide, by Marlene Steinberg, MD, 1995,chp.2 Dissociation and Trauma.

The Psychoanalysis of Children, Melanie Klein.

Kay F Gibbs©All Rights Reserved. No portion of this document can be copied or reproduced in any form without written permission of the author.