Narcissism & Schizophrenia

Narcissism and schizophrenia are psychological byproducts of modern western lifestyles.

Being kept in a cocooned environment, where all error in judgment is excused and even promoted, the mind begins feeling invulnerable, and reality irrelevant, because it has very little implication in everyday existence.

The environment is dominated by man made artifices and reality is excluded or selectively allowed entry.

This is when the mind becomes self-absorbed, overconfident, fearless, convinced that its world is the only world or, at least, as probable a world as any other; it begins gaining an untested sense of self-esteem and a false sense of empowerment, eventually resulting in total disconnection from reality.
The mind has now been encased in its own conceptions, placed in a box, and given that it is sheltered against anything that might correct its delusions, it becomes lost in itself: arrogant and demanding...increasingly self-absorbed and self-referential.
The individual begins living in its own world, or one given to him, and since it is a pleasant world, full of of positive to it messages and flattering contexts, it abandons itself to the hedonism.

It will defend the other's right to exist in his/her own little world, if it does not disturb his/her own.
The mind is now conveniently convinced that reality is a matter of personal taste or a human construct that can be altered with mere thoughts or with further detachments.
It is able to do so because there is a system in place, a system that benefits from its complacent detachment, which prot4cts it from its own stupidity and delusion.
A system which is not entirely successful and one which often cannot shelter the individual from reality completely, as it is itself a human construct.

So the individual is often corrected or offered a dose of reality it did not expect.
This correction may have traumatic effects, as the mind is often shocked by a reality that cares not for its self-referencing beliefs or what it thinks it deserves, and the individual is unaccustomed to anything outside its little mental box.
No amount of sheltering can fully protect the individual from a world that is indifferent to its hopes and assessments.
The first response to this sudden contact with a world it had no idea existed, contained as the individual was within institutional walls and social artifices, is that of fear.
Fear that then leads to a desire to destroy - nihilism - the source of its discomfort or to change it - idealism.
The mind dives deeper into itself or into the context it has been given to escape the jolt.

At no point does this mind considered reevaluating its positions, in other words changing itself in relation to the world.
It is the world that must be changed to accommodate its already established hopes and interests and beliefs. This sets up a relationship of animosity between the individual and the world outside its social and cultural paradigm, in other words a world outside its fantasies or what constructs it was given.

Now the mind finds no relation with reality; it feels alienated, disinterested, frightened and confused, when faced with anything outside its own conceptions, or the shared ones.
At this time and if these conceptions are replaced by some foreign influence, some alternative political/philosophical/spiritual scenarios, then it may find identification with an ideal outside its willful control.
It now surrenders to whatever new human artifice is offered as an alternative, promising to change the world, including the social and cultural milieu it has become disenfranchised with because it has failed to protect it from a reality outside its premises.

From the starting point of narcissism the mind may then project itself outward and it may fall in love with a greater Self, breaking the separation of self from other, as it has been established though a continuum of experiences held together in memory.
It seeks escape in communion with otherness, and the unburdening of its fears and risks and costs, by submitting to a shared construct. It sacrifices independence for the sake of comfort and comforting.

It saves itself from the worse consequences of self-realization and rushes to find cover in ideas and ideals and identifications and definitions that offer it a renewed pride, via its association with a new, hypothetically more powerful, entity.

But it is still not content, because it now has alienated itself from its own self.
It is fragmented and confused.

His self-consciousness and the identification which now has been redirected leads him to a sense of detachment form his own actions.
He feels like two people occupying the same form. The mind/body dichotomy might serve to alleviate the distress but if the detachment persists the mind will shatter: being convinced that a voice is speaking to it, whether it be the voice of God, the manifestation of this greater Self, or the Devil or him spirit or ghosts or aliens or whatever.
His internal dialogue become one of otherness towards self, as the undesirable elements are projected as separate from itself and take on a reality of their own.
The greater Self that has seduced him, is now at odds with his subdued self, usually associated with his nature or instincts or essence - essence being the character produced by sum of his past, akin to nature.

He is no longer himself; absolved of all responsibilities, except in service and in loyalty to his new Self - which can take on the form of a nation, an institution, a god or any abstraction - and he is also saved from any accountability in reference to his actions before he "discovered" or was "awakened" or was "reborn" into the new identity.
If he gives in to his smaller self, the parts he sacrificed to be included within the greater self, he must make amends....feel guilty and shamed, offer token of his renewed vows of loyalty to the abstraction that absorbed him and tolerates his momentary lapses.

He is, in fact, free from his past and all that this has determined about him.
Nature, being the sum of all previous nurturing, is now discarded, like unwanted luggage, and the mind soars within the possibilities of its new persona within this new Self.
The sensation is exhilarating, freeing but it sets the mind up for a fall.
It is fragmented.

Having thought it over, I've concluded that narcissism and schizophrenia are replacements for paranoia.

Poison IV wrote:

I would attribute it to a mere ecstatic desperation for identity and to be exalted in some fashion.

Identity is in decline in a world detached form its past.

To Know Thyself is to know every element that contributed in your presence.
Take away family, tradition, heritage, race, sex and what is left?

Poison IV wrote:

It comes from a feeling of eager inadequacy. This can appear as sexual, like among men who feel a constant need to prove that men, in and of themselves, are somehow better than like allllll the womenz in the world because of their bearing a mini little member in their tighty-whities. That they deserve some automatic recognition and acceptance into an elite group of "thinkers" because the doctors slapped a blue cap on their head in the delivery room.

you are more man than most can handle.

It explains why these so called "strong women" have a hard time finding a man to make them feel feminine.

Poison IV wrote:

I believe this has to do with the drop in real masculinity and the fact that their male identity is in jeopardy. They tend to work in the lowest paying fields, have gotten laid maybe once or twice in their lifetimes, and come on the internet to exhibit their manliness by giving us their philosophies on what women really want, why they are all useless materialistic whores, that they are under full control by the patriarchy, and being that they themselves are also male, must rape and abuse a bitch.

Yes...now consider what this means.

To be dependent on another, a female, for your sense of self, your masculinity, is to be enslaved by sex and the female energy which embodies it...first in your own self.
This is where indifference comes into play.
Need is a contradiction of indifference and indifference is a sign of power....and power is attractive, despite itself.

Poison IV wrote:

They have no choice but to fall into the status of an everyday workerbee who has no sexual worth and will probably not reproduce. Compensation comes only in front of a computer screen, with endless declarations of what they are not and will never amount to. (See Joker & Dragon's "Business" thread)

Internet forums are perfect petri dishes for studying this kind of specimen.

Poison IV wrote:

As for schizophrenia, that can come in many forms.

Yes...but schizophrenia denotes a fragmentation within one's self.
It is connected with narcissism.

To be as truly unabashedly arrogant as many of these turds pretend to be, one must separate himself form reality; one must be totally detached from the world while proclaiming himself absolute master of it...otherwise the world will slap you down and humble you.

The only connection I offered between narcissism and schizophrenia was as them both being a byproduct of post-modern living.

The schizophrenia I am proposing is not one induced by some clinical mental dysfunction but one induced by a socio-political cultural which both produced paranoia and a division of thinking or a disconnection between one's nature and one's social character.

We see this in Christianity where one set of logical standards are used for everyday life and then they are all dismissed and ignored so as to apply a different set so as to justify a God and the total submission to Him.

Take, as another example, feminism.
It is based on the social presumptions that all are born equal, though admittedly different, and that appearances are superficial, that love is divine and that all deserve respect.
This goes against the very nature of females who must discriminate so as to pick the most advantageous genes for their offspring.
As a consequence female behavior in western systems is a a bit schizophrenic, fragmented and not cohesive - self-contradicting.

On the one hand they say all that and they actually believe, on some conscious level, that it is true, but then when they act, when they behave unconscionably, they depend on looks and they do consider appearances valuable markers.
This creates an almost craziness, at times females feel disconnected from themselves or they feel guilty for some of their behaviors.

So, they want to be considered outside sexual contexts, as an equal, but then they go out declaring that dressing like sluts or in whatever manner they choose - sexually provocative and inviting - is their right.

Christians have their weekly rituals of absolution where a week's worth of contradictions are dissolved and expunged by evoking the blood of a sacrificial deity....a Jesus Christ, the great redeemer.
Feminists, as liberal progressions of the Judeo-Christian madness - the secular version of it, do not have this safety valve. Instead they must hold onto two or three different attitudes simultaneously in their mind.
Orwell called this "Duoblethink"; I've also referred to it as compartmentalization and I've also related it to the underlying hypocrisy and lie of culture and civility.

Narcissism is a different matter. It is a byproduct of sheltering where the individual retains that child-like delusion of indestructibility and begins buying into its own invincibility and power - it takes for granted its safety and its rights even if they are guaranteed by a system and this has nothing to do with their quality.

Only difference being that modern systems differ from older ones is some fundamental ways:

1) Size
The pressures inflicted upon an individual within a tribe of 100 or 100 or a city-state of 10 000 is not the same as those inflicted upon him in multimillion, or even billion, sized groupings.

2) Homogeneity
Modern systems are characterized by heterogeneity in culture requiring lower common denominators to impose a commonality.

3) Distancing from Nature
In all areas a simulation of reality dominates.

4) Artificiality, in both technological innovations and in mass-population controls
We are supported and defended by methods totally disconnected from our particular qualities.
We become alienated even from ourselves.

5) Ignorance and slandering of the past
The past is rendered useless and even primitive_ overcome.
We see this not only in how we treat older people in our very own families but also in the manner in which we are trained to consider the past passe.

Shall I go on?

Schizophrenia is a word.
It is a word made up of two parts, both of Greek origin:

Σχιζο - to rip to rend...ergo schism.
Φρενα - Faculties, also in reference to the mind.

Together they denote a schism of the mind. A duality.
What does modern living do, at least post-modern western living?
It separates man from nature; it slanders nature; it dismisses the past, which is nothing more than the sum of all nurturing and is also called "nature"; it teaches forgetfulness, to live in the moment is to drastically limit your consciousness and, most of all, your self-consciousness...because to know self is to know all of that which participates in its presence...in other words its past. Self-Awareness is not mystical, it is knowing, as much as possible, and understanding, all the elements that participated in your becoming.

A byproduct of increasing specialization.
An individual becomes an "expert" in one field, knowing all there is to know about it (a collector of information he accepts from the "appropriate" sources and regurgitates as a matter of fact); his entire life is taken over, with brief breaks to replenish his energies and to recreate, with keeping up to date with the information he requires to maintain his expert status.

As a consequence his performances in all other areas and his knowledge of any other field of knowledge, suffer.
He may even become socially inept having not cultivated the social aspects of his behavior.
Common terms for such types are: nerd, geek, dweeb etc.

He increasingly becomes dependent upon other experts in other fields, in this way also reinforcing his own status as a specialist they too depend upon.
This increasing interdependence results in the opposite of freedom and uniqueness. His inadequacies in all areas except the area of his expertise makes him more dependent on imitating and simply accepting popular trends or fashions coming from other "specialists" in the fields of behavior or sexualtiy or comedy or charm.
The source leads to a uniformity because it is itself trained by an institution wanting to produce a particular mindset and to reinforce the value of a particular behavior and a particular way of thinking. The institution, after all, wishes to preserve its own relevance and so it both promotes an attitude which does so and it also glorifies those who adhere to its principles.

In the sexual game this type becomes antipathetic to the opposite sex. it lacks the charm and knowhow, the contact with its own essence as male or female to be attractive...yet its social success makes resources accessible to him. What he or she lacks in charm and sexual energy he makes up with social status.
His special skills and techniques make him valuable to the other experts who need him to take care of the aspects of social living they cannot dedicate but little time to, thusly freeing their own time to dedicate to their own specialty.

This codependency is defended vehemently, as the years pass by and more investments in time and resources have been made and more dependencies have been nurtured.
The individual becomes conservative to preserve this inter-relationship making himself viable within it.

As a side-effect these individuals become less and less able to perceive any grand picture or to challenge the status quo. Their entire intellectual capacity is taken over with the finer details of their craft, submerging themselves in the particular, loosing view of the universal.

Quotes from Christopher Lasch's 'The culture of Narcissism':
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Page 191 "The demystification of womanhood goes hand in hand with the desublimation of sexuality."

Page 191-192 "Sex valued purely for its own sake loses all reference to the future and brings no hope of permanent relationships. Sexual liasons, including marriage, can be terminated at pleasure. This means, as Willard Waller demonstrated a long time ago, that lovers forfeit the right to be jealous or to insist on fidelity as a condition of erotic union. ... 'To show jealousy,' under these conditions, became 'nothing short of a crime .. So if one falls in love in Bohemia, he conceals it from his friends as best he can.' In similar studies of the 'rating and dating complex' on college campuses, Waller found that students who fell in love invited the ridicule of their peers."

Page 193 "In high school and college, the peer group attempts through conventional ridicule and vituperation to prevents its members from falling in love with the wrong people, indeed from falling in love at all; for as Hollingshead noted, lovers 'are lost to the adolescent world with its quixotic enthusiasms and varied group activities.'"
Section "Togetherness"

Page 193-194 "The degradation of work and the impoverishment of communal life force people to turn to sexual excitement to satisfy all their emotional needs. Formerly sexual antagonism was tempered not only by chivalric, paternalistic conventions but by a more relaxed acceptance of the limitations of the other sex. Men and women acknowledged each other's shortcomings without making them the basis of a comprehensive indictment. Partly because they found more satisfaction than is currently available in casual relations with their own sex, they did not have to raise friendship itself into a political program, an ideological alternative to love. An easygoing, everyday contempt for the weaknesses of the other sex, institutionalized as folk wisdom concerning the emotional incompetence of men or the brainlessness of women, kept sexual enmity within bounds and prevented it from becoming an obsession."

"Feminism and the ideology of intimacy have discredited the sexual stereotypes which kept women in their place but which also made it possible to acknowledge sexual antagonism without raising to the level of all-out warfare. Today the folklore of sexual differences and the acceptance of sexual friction survive only in the working class. Middle-class feminists envy the ability of working-class women to acknowledge that men get in their way without becoming man-haters. 'These women are less angry at their men because they don't spend that much time with them. ... Middle-class women are the ones who were told men had to be their companions.'"

Page 201 "Today men and women seek escape from emotion not only because they have suffered wounds in the wars of love but because they experience their own inner impulses as intolerably urgent and menacing. The flight from feeling originates not only in the sociology of the sex war but in the psychology that accompanies it."

Page 202 "Instinctual desires always threaten psychic equilibrium and for this reason can never be given direct expression. In our society, however they present themselves as intolerably menacing, in part because the collapse of authority has removed so many of the external prohibitions against expression of dangerous impulses. The superego can no longer ally itself ... with outside authorities. ... Not only have the social agents of repression lost much of their force, but their internal representations in the superego have suffered a similar decline. ... the superego has to rely more and more on harsh, punitive dictation, drawing on the aggressive impulses in the id and directing them against the ego."

"The narcissist feels consumed by his own appetites." [Notice the popularity of consumption, the proliferation of magazines and catalogs, the huge number of obese people.] The intensity of his oral hunger leads him to make inordinate demands on his friends and sexual partners; yet in the same breath he repudiates those demands and asks only a casual connection without promise of permanence on either side. He longs to free himself from his own hunger and rage, to achieve a calm detachment beyond emotion, and to outgrow his dependence on others." [Which, in the economic sphere, involves dodging scams and domination situations e.g. mortgages.]

"He longs for the indifference to human relationships and to life itself that would enable him to acknowledge its passing in Kurt Vonnegut's laconic phrase, "So it goes," which so aptly expresses the ultimate aspiration of the psychiatric seeker."

Page 218 "Most of the evils [!] discussed in this book originate in a new kind of paternalism, which has risen from the ruins of the old paternalism of kings, priests, authoritarian fathers, slavemasters, and landed overlords. Capitalism has severed the ties of personal dependence only to revive dependence under cover of bureaucratic rationality. Having overthrown feudalism and slavery and then outgrown its own personal and familial form, capitalism has evolved a new political ideology, welfare liberalism, which absolves individuals of moral responsibility and treats them as victims of social circumstance. It has evolved new modes of social control, which deal with the deviant as a patient and substitute medical rehabilitation for punishment. It has given rise to a new culture, the narcissistic culture of our time, which has translated the predatory individualism of the American Adam into a terapeutic jargon that celebrates not so much individualism as solipsism, justifying self-absorpotion as 'authenticity' and 'awareness'."

"The proliferation of visual and auditory images in a 'society of the spectacle', as it has been described, encouraged a similar kind of preoccupation with the self. People responded to others as if their actions were being recorded and simultaneously transmitted to an unseen audience or stored up for close scrutiny at some later time. The prevailing social conditions thus brought out narcissistic personality traits that were present, in varying degrees, in everyone -- a certain protective shallowness, a fear of binding committments, a willingness to pull up roots whenever the need arose, a desire to keep one's options open, a dislike of depending on anyone, an incapacity for loyalty or gratitude."

Page 240 "It was his growing preoccupation with narcissism in [the] 'primary' sense, I realized, that pointed Freud toward his controversial hypothesis of a death instinct, better described as a longing for absolute equilibrium -- the Nirvana principle, as he aptly called it. Except that it is not an instinct and that it seeks not deathh but everlasting life, primary narcissism conforms quite closely to Freud's description of the death instinct as a longing for the complete cessation of tension, which seems to operate independenty of the 'pleasure principle' and follows a 'backward path that leads to complete satisfaction."
GOOD: "Narcissism in this sense is the longing to be free from longing. ... Its scorn for the body's demands distinguishes narcissism from ordinary egoism or from the survival instinct. ... Since [primary] narcissism does not acknowledge the separate existence of the self, it has no fear of death. Narcissus drowns in his own reflection, never understanding that it is a reflection."

"The mother in particular, on whom the work of childrearing devolves by default, attempts to become an ideal parent, compensating for her lack of spontaneous feeling for the child by smothering him with solicitude. Abstractly convinced that her child deserves the best of everything, she arranges each detail of his life with a punctilious zeal that undermines his initiative and destroys the capacity for self-help. She leaves the child with the feeling, according to Kohut, that he has 'no mind of his own'. His idealistically inflated impressions of the mother persist unmodifies by later experience, mingling in his unconscious thoughts with fantasies of infantile omnipotence."

"The attempt to redefine the family as a purely voluntary arrangement grows out of the modern delusion that people can keep all their options open all the time."

Mean World Syndrome

A promoter of paranoia.

The method of artificially maintaining anxiety in the population so as to make it more malleable, goes form violence to economic crisis.

The war on Terror has us convinced that a Dirty Bomb will be stolen by the fanatics making us more willing to relinquish our freedoms and now the immanent economic collapse has us shutting our muoths to tax hikes, mass firings and funding cuts.
Once more the world in on the brink of total destruction and all are preparing for the coming Rapture.

Senex/Senility: The Jungian shadow-side to the Puer - the [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]

"Senex consciousness destroys spontaneity, obsessed by its repetitive disciplines into a narrowness of emotions, mental processes, and activities." - the opposite of the puer-type.

Quote :

"The god Saturn-Kronos is image for both positive and negative senex. His temperament is cold. Coldness can also be expressed as distance; the lonely wanderer set apart, cast out. Coldness is also cold reality, things just as they are; and yet Saturn is at the far-out edge of reality. As lord of the nethermost, he views the world from the outside, from such depths of distance that he sees it, so to speak, all upside down, yet structurally and abstractly. The concern with structure and abstraction makes him the principle of order, whether through time, or hierarchy, or exact science and system, or limits and borders, or power, or inwardness and reflection, or earth and the forms it gives. The cold is also slow, heavy, leaden, and dry or moist, but always the coagulator through denseness, slowness, and weight expressed by the mood of sadness, depression, or melancholia. Psychologically the senex is at the core of any complex or governs any attitude when these psychological processes pass to end-phase. We expect it to correspond to biological senescence, just as many of its images: dryness, night, coldness, winter, harvest, are taken from the processes of time and of nature. But to speak accurately the senex archetype transcends mere biological senescence and is given from the beginning as a potential of order, meaning, and teleological fulfillment –and death- within all the psyche and all its parts. So death which the senex brings is not only bio-physical. It is death that comes through perfection and order. The senex spirit appears most evidently when any function we use, attitude we have, or complex of the psyche begins to coagulate past its prime. It is the Saturn within the complex that makes it hard to shed, dense and slow, and maddeningly depressing –the madness of lead-poison- that feeling of the everlasting indestructibility of the complex. It cuts off the complex from life and the feminine, inhibiting it and introverting it into an isolation. We must further conclude that the negative senex is the senex split from its own puer aspect. He has lost his ‘child’."

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Saturn and the symbolic black bile constitute the Melancholic humour.
Its connection to Patriarchy which Cronos/Saturn represents:

Quote :

"As the list of authors indicates, Ellis’s discussion braids together senescence and dotage (or ‘madness of old age’) with melancholy, and he describes how the consensus of medical opinion held that as human bodies age they grow steadily colder and drier, the characteristic qualities of that humour. As melancholia was considered a female disease ‘in the popular imagination’ this threatened to ‘render men effeminate’, and, moreover, to jeopardize the ‘patriarchal system’. An extended analogy that Ellis draws out from this material is between a failing body politic (and social) and the processes of old age. Thus, visible evidence for degeneration in 1500s England reaches a peak at the turn of the century. These factors include rising inflation, high unemployment, and ‘frightening levels of poverty, vagrancy and crime’ which enable an analogy between the figure of the old man and the larger social unit, ‘suffering its final ailments that presaged death and apocalyptic redemption’. With this extended analogy in mind, Ellis’s later readings of Falstaff in The Merry Wives of Windsor as an economically parasitic outsider and love-melancholic are particularly insightful.  This analogy is returned to again in the sixth chapter’s comparison of Jonson’s The Alchemist and Dekker’s Old Fortunatus, where the private corruption of the elderly male characters Doctor Subtle and Fortunatus (through the promises of alchemical gold) takes place ‘in the context of a depleted, nearly exhausted world’. In the final chapter, Ellis turns to The Tempest and Middleton, Rowley, and Heywood’s The Old Law and describes ‘world-creating projects’ in the light of the tumultuous conditions of Tudor and early Stuart England. In a rather downbeat reading of The Tempest (as comprising a failed utopian model with a sense of loss at its conclusion), Ellis compares how, like an aging body with no answer to ‘debilitating changes’, the utopian vision ‘cannot accommodate change’ (164). "

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Further,

Quote :

"Symbolically speaking, the prima materia corresponds to lead, which relates to Saturn-Chronos, the negative father. One of the prima materia’s many symbols is a weak and infirm old man, the mythic dying king, or “senex,” who has lost touch with feeling, with eros, with relatedness, with creativity, with compassion, and with love. This figure of the rigid-old-man-negative-father is symbolic of a calcification of consciousness which, out of fear of its own weakness, holds onto and becomes addicted to power and control. The dying old man represents a dominant position in consciousness which has outlived its usefulness, and thus becomes an obstacle to the growth and development of consciousness. This archetypal figure is in need of being liquefied and de-solidified, of being given an alchemical bath in the healing waters of the psyche.
Saturn, the corrupted patriarchy, mythologically speaking, is the governor of the prison, the one who binds us and seemingly limits our freedom, while simultaneously being the supreme tester and great purifier. Paradox is the language of alchemy, as it is an expression of the unified point of view in which the seeming opposites are not so opposed to each other after all.

The archetype of the dark father has to do with domination and force over others, as compared to being in relation. The archetypal, negative patriarchy has to do with the suppression of the feminine, of feeling, of spontaneity, of life itself. The negative patriarchy, synchronistically, just so happens to be the deeper archetypal process which is animating events in our world today. Alchemy is a collective dream of our ancestors which also happens to be profoundly relevant for our world today. The archetype of the negative father is initiatory, which is to say it is revealing something to us which is most important for us to know. Seen as a compensatory dreaming process, the figure of the negative father, with its willful lust for, and abuse of power, is challenging us to connect with our intrinsic, God-given power. Our true power is a power infused with the spirit of eros, with relatedness, feeling and relationship, with love and connection, all of which are elements in the magic elixir which transmutes the poisonous aspect of the draconian figure of the negative father.

To be under the spell of Saturn-Chronos, the dark father, “Father Time,” is to be entranced and absorbed in linear time at the expense of the timeless dimension of our being. To recognize that we are playing out on the world stage the mythic process of the negative patriarchy is to have an expansion of consciousness in which we step into a mythical dimension where time is not “chrono-logical.”

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can inform how the negative-Senex type - the 'Senility' of J-Xt. Modernism and the lack of Spontaneity calcifying into a tyrannical homogenous one-world-order, accounts for melancholia, and with melancholia, the saturnine-like devouring of any ground, for the evolution of an autochthonic/organic spontaneous culture;

Quote :

"Consider also the following interpretation of Ernst Bloch’s 1932 essay “Berlin, as Viewed from the Landscape”, by David Durst:
Similar to the uprooted and mobile modern individual, Berlin is a city rising up out of an empty space, without apparent historical origins or firm foundation: sitting “upon ground that is still undeveloped, unstable and perpetually in need of improvement”, it is literally a city built on sand where the dust never settles. Like its restless dwellers, Berlin “always becomes and never is”, it is a city of unrest and perpetual becoming with all its resident themes of instability and unmet potential. (quoted in Durst  xvi)."

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According to James Hillman, the negative-Senex type stimulates the emergence of the positive-Puer type;

James Hillman wrote:

"The archetype of the senex (from which senior, senator, senility arise) rules more and more with each advancing day. Yet, along with servitude to the tyranny of time, the physical bondage, and the medicalization of older individuals and society, something else stirs. The liberation from conformity, as well as a strange idiosyncrasy and spontaneity, attest to the timeless presence of an inner partner—the puer archetype of risk, vision, and joy." [The Force of Character and Senex and Puer]

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The Puella, from 'Perpetual Adolescence: Jungian Analyses':


1.


"Although the puella character can form within the psyche in various ways, it tends to generate from the effects of the absent father, the absorbing mother who is emotionally distant, and the puella who is without sufficient connection to her own ground of being, especially the feminine aspects. The phenomenon described here also occurs in the psyches of men who likewise face the problem of understanding and integrating their own puella characteristics consciously. The puella can be described as a fascinating woman with a free and childlike vitality.
Her presence lights up a room as she performs for the adulation and praise of others. She does not like being restrained, enslaved to rules or conven- tion, or inhibited in any way, particularly by reality. Her freshness, indomitable energy, and zest for the unusual embody perpetual youth and creativity. Naïve fantasies of youth, beauty, and power lift her out of daily life, which she considers dreary and common. In this self-constructed world, she flees from her shadow, which represents the descent to earth necessary for actualizing the creativity and life that can make her whole (von Franz 128). A shadow side of puella manifests in narcissism and difficulty in taking herself seriously because she identifies as a girl, not as a woman. Out of touch with her own femininity, even though she may look the part, she does not find satisfaction in being a woman and does not feel solid within herself.


The puella conforms to outer norms; she is mirrored in the lives of many contemporary women who struggle to feel secure in their bodies and their talents. She is compromised by the cultural value that women are desirable only when young. Unable to be young enough, thin enough, smart enough, she is caught in the personal and cultural pressures of these values that encourage us to worship the unattainable, unrealistic, and inhuman forms of women, a system of values that contributes to the lack of mature female models in our society. The puella nature has a virginal quality, representing a deep interiority and a freedom from external contamination, an intactness of the psyche that protects what is immature and unripe (Hillman 190). On the one hand, this condition supports the kind of aloneness necessary for self-growth and creative reflection; on the other, it can be so enclosed within itself that there is no adequate engagement with the world and no recognition, ability, or seeming need for relationship outside of herself.


Von Franz (38) speaks about the person who is pushed out of childhood too soon and crashes into reality, dropping the painful work of self-making because it seems too difficult at this time of life. This pattern is especially notable in the puella. She observes that analytic work takes much patience and tact because the unmasking of reality can be tricky due to vulnerability and repression. An inauthentic pose and accommodation to outer demands protects the terrified and precarious self that cannot face the world. A false self takes over, resulting in a loss of natural instincts; the real self remains walled off and silent. It becomes necessary to descend into the depths of the shadow and to abandon the false self for the real.


The paradox is that the puella is driven by desires to be seen, to excel, and to be loved but not to be known intimately. Her fantasy is that one day she will become this ideal self that she cannot achieve now because she flees from reality (Hillman 29). There is always a “but” preventing development or commitment because each situation is for the short term, and relationships are with others of similar bent. She becomes bored easily and feels trapped, unaware of her own lack of self-knowledge. Thus, her potential withers before it can ripen, because she has preferred the fantasy of perpetual youth to the reality of painful development.
The sense of fraudulence as an adult creates tension and dissatisfaction. She exudes a brittle, crystalline quality and an aura of aloofness behind which she exists in her own untouchable domain. She is vulnerable, a terrified child for whom physical existence is a trial because bodily sensations are denied or ignored in order to avoid feeling and to protect her from anything that is not part of her carefully constructed world. Because the puella feels undeserving of love, which can be painful, she avoids the possibility of that pain (von Franz 39). This avoidance results in a lack of engagement, a restlessness, depersonaliza- tion, and inability to inhabit the present. It is no surprise that the puella type experiences an inner emptiness that adds to the craving for acceptance and adoration in order to fill that void.

A passage from the Journal of Sylvia Plath expresses this:
You have had chances; you have not taken them, you are wallowing in original sin; your limitations. You have lost all delight in life. You are becoming a neuter machine, You cannot love, even if you knew how to begin to love . . . You want to go home, back to the womb. . . . You have forgotten the secret you knew, of being joyous, of laughing, of opening doors. (Journals 62)


The wounds the puella feels, such as Plath’s, arise from early losses, rejections, and lack of nurturing, all of which result in a sense of inadequacy. This keeps her moving and doing but not being or evolving. She enters analysis because “there is something [she] cannot forget, something [she] cannot stop telling [herself], often by [her] actions, about [her] life. And these dismaying repeti- tions . . . create the illusion of time having stopped” (Phillips 15).


This emotional arrest keeps her behind glass, removed from her existence and the world. She sidesteps the dark aspects of the self, which are threatening to her fragile sense of identity (Schwartz-Salant 22). But the shadow exerts itself in the puella woman; she looks a part and functions well according to others, but she feels nothing is meaningful, and without meaning the experiences are nothing (von Franz 148). To make sure neither she nor anyone else discovers this, she feigns confidence and composure that might come across as exhibitionistic and grandiose, self-centered, even mean-spirited, narrowly ambitious, and envious. This façade can seem harsh, for it conceals the lack of capacity for intimacy and reciprocity in relationships. Without a favorable image of herself, she has little basis for understanding others. She has trouble giving because she feels she has nothing worthwhile to give, and she is unable to take a step back and respond with flexibility to other people’s behavior.


...The puella needs love and attention, yet she engages in deception of herself and others by putting on a performance and acting “as if ” (Solomon 639). She feels unlovable and experiences shame, vulnerability, and fear—all based on a conviction of not being good enough. The lack of basic trust and security leaves her chasing an ideal, through cosmetics, body reshaping, and other compulsive and negative thoughts and behaviors. This self-absorption, however, is actu- ally a defense against self-intimacy and self-reflection. Preserved in a state of suspended animation, the puella is not present for the moments or the hours of her life. Rather, she is absorbed in watching the weight-scales, her hair, the wrinkles, and the imperfection of her work. How can she find her ground of being when this is the very thing she avoids? The self-denial renounces identity, eating her up from within and cutting off her feminine spirit from its innermost recesses. She endures an unending war between parts of the self, a victim of sadistic and unrelenting internal voices.


...The puella character is not easy to pin down because elusiveness becomes reinforced as part of her charm. For years she hardly notices who or what she is, floating through life with her head in the clouds. Daily she dresses a mannequin, but she selects only a part, or the effect, or the image, set for the occasion. Because she lacks a capacity or desire for realistic self-reflection, her image is distorted by the inability to connect with her core. A dark shadow envelopes her creativity and expressiveness so that they can go nowhere; thus, while the shadow is seen as frightening and not herself, it also contains the parts she needs to gain self-fruition. The problem is that when the potentiality of the psyche is not used it becomes perverted (Leonard 89). Wrapped in self-denial, she cannot access her own natural gifts. Needing approval from others drives her competitive nature, but she must not threaten or surpass them as she fears being hated or excluded. Therefore, she diminishes herself by holding back in one way or another that perversely supports the cultural bias against women who are healthily competitive and strong.


The hallmark of the puella is that she lives provisionally by hiding in the shadows of disconnection, self-loathing, and disavowal of self-expression. Although she is self-absorbed, she needs others to reflect back to her and to witness her life. She wastes time thinking about the pounds she wants to lose and never does the thing that is always in the future, when the time is ripe.


...Typically, the puella is described as a daddy’s girl who is special in his eyes as the one who understands and gives to him. Father and daughter are emotion- ally attached in her serving his needs so that she can obtain love. This father loves her when she is a child, but as she grows older he detaches, and she feels his absence, neglect, or abuse. The father who denies his daughter’s essence restricts her to a half-dead life, while she remains bound to him. His unavailability entangles a daughter in overvaluing him and other males and denigrating femininity. His fathering and the nature of their bond, whether in overt or covert forms, affects her ability to love or express herself and brings about reactions ranging from melancholy to self-destruction. She may inter- nalize a persecutory father figure and develop a hostile inner world; she may feel rage or numbness while she obstructs her own inspiration and arrests her own self-integration. Acquiring such patterns and behaviors, she grows more and more lost.
The puella learns to remain helpless to the father and other masculine aspects personally, culturally, and relationally. The daughter/father problem reaches to the intrapsychic depths and archetypal roots—to issues of self and culture wherein lie the complex aspects and the patriarchal biases that many daughters are raised on. For many generations of Western culture, a daughter was regarded as the least important member in the family. The daughter/father issue remained a dark terrain, and their relationship was relegated to the shadows. Cultural biases kept daughters docile and fathers unapproachable, as if they were not present in their children’s lives. In fact, a father wielded so much influence that a daughter did not question her role with him and instead projected her disappointments and difficulties onto her mother, in yet another diminishment of the feminine.


A daughter naturally goes through a stage of idealizing her father. But, if he stays ideal, for whatever reasons, a daughter cannot gain a realistic sense of either of them. By default, she falls into the male-defined ideal, the woman who buys the myth of being an object of perpetual youth, docility, and sexual allure—all experienced as if at a distance. As such, she is a personification or reflection of the passive servant, an object helplessly absorbed into the other:
The daughters of such fathers often arrive in analysis with a façade of self- sufficiency. They despair of earning their father’s attention except temporarily and unconsciously, often as a sexual object, and they are caught in having to defend themselves while trying to prove themselves equal and worthy of their father’s praise. They split off their sensuousness, capture men and/or accom- plishments, but feel no tenderness and little self-regard. They are focused forever on seeking the father’s blessing and personal attention. (Perera 66)
Father-dominated, the puella woman cannot access the feminine and therefore cannot find who she is."

2.


"However, a puella woman often feels the wounds from her mother’s ignored and betrayed creativity and the insufficient use of female potency. This pits her against her mother, and she ends up not accepting or not knowing how to access her own feminine qualities. The emotional distance, disapproval, or blame of mother forms a vacuum of intimacy between them that is compounded by the cultural lack of favorable feminine images.
Unable to appreciate the maternal, a daughter feels unlovable about herself, and this attitude alienates her from her body and the earth; it can escalate into a hatred of life: “She started out in the world with averted face . . . and all the while the world and life pass by her like a dream—an annoying source of illusions, disappointments, and irritations” (Jung, Archetypes para. 185). When the instincts are injured, she may experience problems with her female organs, remain unconscious of her ability to conceive or be creative, and repudiate or rebel against her feminine nature. A rage toward her mother can also result in self-inertia and low self-worth. The mother complex in this type of woman is manifested in depressive moods, constant dissatisfaction with herself and with the whole of reality (von Franz 126).


Sylvia Plath describes a feeling of crushing maternal self-annihilation and a mother’s guilt-inducing refusal of her daughter’s autonomy through the medusa image in her poetry. In her Journal, Plath wonders what the gods ask and wonders about herself, as well: “Am I living half alive? . . . I feel in a dream, a fog” (Journals 324). Her poetry reveals a disturbing netherworld of psychological oppression and need for release from the mutilations acquired from marriage and mothering. She mentions Jung in her Journals—his refer- ences to parents who do their best and who live for their children. Pressure to achieve, especially for her mother, is manifested as a distorted mirroring she turned onto herself.
In her Journal, Plath attributes her suicidal tendencies to “a transferred murderous impulse from my mother onto myself ” and blames her rage on fear of her mother’s appropriation of her writing (Journals 280). Feeling doomed to be enveloped in her mother’s dark shadow, Plath writes about this conundrum: “How can I get rid of this depression: by refusing to believe she has any power over me, the old witches for whom one sets out plates of milk and honey?” (Journals 280).


Operating in the tradition of feminine passivity, many puella women stay dependent, immature, and unaware—not knowing what they want or do not want and wondering if they will be loved or hated. The puella lives as if life goes on forever, while she remains stuck on a treadmill of predicable responses, repetitive and self-deprecating behaviors and thoughts that include a disturbed relationship to her body.
About this, Plath opines that the exploitation of women is partly due to their compliance with demeaning roles. Her words put a visage on inner chaos, whereas if she remains mute, she will be mutilated by avoiding self-knowledge (Van Dyne 54). Her heroines endure physical dismemberment through mutila- tion, torture, and victimization. They act ineffectual and suppressed, cornered into immobility, the feminine ego wrenched from the true self. Like a puppet, deprived of independent action, the woman is vulnerable and then erased, unable to forge her own image. Self-hatred is at work in the desire to be rid of her body—because it is female.

In the poem “Lady Lazarus,” the woman is reduced, her body an object, doll-like and man’s prey:
I am your opus . . .
You poke and stir.
Flesh, bone, there is nothing there. (Collected Poems 244)


The puella is the woman unable to use her talents as she holds some internally imposed ideal, a feeling that frustrates yet has been with her for as long as she can remember. For the puella the pressure to be perfect means that unacceptable feelings must be hidden at all cost. She outwardly takes on the role of seeking to please others while inside are fears about showing her real self. A punishing core of “I don’t deserve” creates an ever-present tension that cuts off pleasure in both mental and physical activities. This derives from the narcissistic wounds that create inertia and repress the aggression needed for entry into life. A sense of not being present promotes the continual search for the ideal rather than the real. This is a narcissism that has to do not with self-love but with self-hatred (Schwartz-Salant 24). Various modes of emotional protection and avenues of psychological escape are sought out as methods of defense that lead to an inauthentic existence. And, at the same time, she does not notice that the idea of an ideal life gets in the way of living it.


Much as she strives to ignore it, the shadow draws her to pay attention: “Closer examination of the dark characteristics—that is, the inferiorities constituting the shadow—reveals that they have an emotional nature, a kind of autonomy, and accordingly an obsessive, or better possessive quality” (Campbell 145). Raised to be aware of her background, looks, and the externals in life, yet equally trying to refuse any shadowy parts puts the puella in conflict.
The repressed natural body urges, instincts, and feelings fall into the uncon- scious. The writer Adrienne Rich, living in the era of Sylvia Plath, commented on this: “But the fear and hatred of our bodies has often crippled our brains. We have tended either to become our bodies—blindly, slavishly, in obedience to male theories about us—or to try to exist in spite of them” (Rich 284–85). Left with a split-off and unrealistic self-reflection, the puella woman needs a perfect body, but not one to enjoy. Denying the body leaves a woman without desire, and the dispossession of her body means a bulk of her libido is devitalized and scattered.


Likewise, Plath’s poetic imagery of dismemberment suggests physical alienation and fragmentation as well as thwarted longings for emotional relatedness and the struggle to reconnect the personality. Jung says that the body depends on the psyche just as the psyche depends on the body. Bodily experiences bring one into the here and now, and, “The hole which one falls into is through the body and the body says ‘but this is you’” (Jung, Symbolic Life 209).
...The puella represents one of the dis-eases of our era—she does not breathe deeply; she fears being emotionally touched and does not know how to be present to the basics of life. This is a collective discomfort, and Jung says, “The fear of life is a real panic . . . It is the deadly fear of the instinctive, the uncon- scious, the inner [woman] who is cut off from life by [her] continual shrinking back from reality” (Symbols 298).


For the puella, the shadowy recesses reveal the parts calling for re-cogni- tion—accessing her feminine core, resolving the yearning and melancholy, creating support and feeling from within—so that she can be present to her individuality and creativity. The girl becomes a woman through accepting the shadow, acquiring patience and healthy regard for herself and for others.
In the process, she discovers the meaning in her personal drama, and this is a step toward healing the collective attitudes that limit the feminine. As Jung said, “Woman today . . . gives expression to . . . the urge to live a complete life, a longing for meaning and fulfillment, a growing disgust with senseless one-sidedness, with unconscious instinctuality and blind contingency” (Civilization 130)."

Lyssa wrote:

With regard to Peter Pan Syndrome , I was wondering if you have considered the Jungian shadow-side to the Puer - the [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]  ('senility')?

"Senex consciousness destroys spontaneity, obsessed by its repetitive disciplines into a narrowness of emotions, mental processes, and activities." - the opposite of the puer-type.

"Puer Aeternus embodies, according to Marie-Louise von Franz, “all those characteristics that are normal in a youth of seventeen or eighteen continued into later life”. She continues:
The one thing dreaded throughout by such a type of man is to be bound to anything whatever. There is a terrific fear of being pinned down, of entering space and time completely, and of being the singular human being that one is. There is always the fear of being caught in a situation from which it may be impossible to slip out again. Every just-so situation is hell. At the same time, there is a highly symbolic fascination for dangerous sports—particularly flying and mountaineering—so as to get as high as possible, the symbolism being to get away from reality, from earth, from ordinary life. If this type of complex is very pronounced, many such men die young in airplane crashes and mountaineering accidents.  

Senex is a figure of time, history, order, tradition, the abstract, and the regulated. As a heavy and depressive personality, senex is easily seen in opposition to puer in its immature lightness of being. Puer summons to psychic life imme- diacy, experiment, the overthrow of traditions and laws. It is characterized by idealism, charm, and in a deeper sense it invokes the spirit (Hillman, Blue Fire 227).
So puer and senex belong together, are essentially two parts of a psychic whole. The narrative of a human life could be understood as a dialogue between them (which is not to exclude other archetypal divinities):
History is the senex shadow of the puer, giving him substance. Through our individual histories, puer merges with senex, the eternal comes back into time, the falcon returns to the falconer’s arm. (Hillman, Blue Fire 223)

... Hillman reminds us that “Saturn . . . attends to childbirth so as to be able to eat the newborn, as everything new coming to life can become food to the senex. Old attitudes and habits assimilate each new content” (“Senex and Puer” 18). Like the Old Testament deity—the senex writ large in antique form—who hid from sight and issued inflexible commands and unbreakable edicts for the “good” of his people, the senex-system of education deploys “old attitudes” to “assimilate new content.”

Consequently, an imbalance of senex-puer on a collective level leads either to a darkly paranoid oppressive state or to an irresponsible carelessness uprooting the national psyche. Arguably, it is the dissociation of senex and puer that troubles American self-identity, American myth today. For while terrorist outrages prove dangerously potent in darkening the mechanisms of state in the (understandable) desire for order and security, TV also is liable to split off senex and puer.

Keith Polette has pointed out how far TV fulfills senex obsessions:
TV fulfills the fantasy of omnipresence, an all-pervasive position that was once reserved for the “senex god of our culture.” (Polette 95)
Slotting into monotheism’s senex structure, TV is the father god’s material incarnation. The creature of money and power, TV permits no real dissent to the status quo and demands a monolithic version of truth, as Polette shows. TV thereby ignores the essential polysemy of the psyche (Polette 97). Moreover, its images embody truly demonic power in their ability to possess, rather than engage with, the viewer’s psyche. TV reduces culture from archetype to stereo- type: it drives viewers into the most childish, undifferentiated, base version of puer without its spiritual energies (Polette 107–12)."[Perpetual Adolescence]

Quote :

"In general, the man who is identified with the archetype of the puer aeternus remains too long in adolescent psychology; that is, all those characteristics that are normal in a youth of seventeen or eighteen are continued into later life, coupled in most cases with too great a dependence on the mother. The two typical disturbances of a man who has an outstanding mother complex are, as Jung points out, homosexuality and Don Juanism. In the case of the former, the heterosexual libido is still tied up with the mother, who is really the only beloved object, with the result that sex cannot be experienced with another woman. That would make her a rival of the mother, and therefore sexual needs are satisfied only with a member of the same sex. Generally such men lack masculinity and seek that in the partner.

In Don Juanism there is another typical form of this same disturbance. In this case, the image of the mother—the image of the perfect woman who will give everything to a man and who is without any shortcomings—is sought in every woman. He is looking for a mother goddess, so that each time he is fascinated by a woman he has later to discover that she is an ordinary human being. Once he has been intimate with her the whole fascination vanishes and he turns away disappointed, only to project the image anew onto one woman after another. He eternally longs for the maternal woman who will enfold him in her arms and satisfy his every need. This is often accompanied by the romantic attitude of the adolescent. Generally great difficulty is experienced in adaptation to the social situation and, in some cases, there is a kind of false individualism, namely that, being something special, one has no need to adapt, for that would be impossible for such a hidden genius, and so on. In addition there is an arrogant attitude toward other people due to both an inferiority complex and false feelings of superiority. Such
people also usually have great difficulty in finding the right kind of job, for whatever they find is never quite right or quite what they wanted. There is always "a hair in the soup." The woman also is never quite the right woman: she is nice as a girlfriend, but—. There is always a "but" which prevents marriage or any kind of definite commitment.

This all leads to a form of neurosis which H.G. Baynes has described as the "provisional life," that is, the strange attitude and feeling that one is not yet in real life. For the time being one is doing this or that, but whether it is a woman or a job, it is not yet what is really wanted, and there is always the fantasy that sometime in the future the real thing will come about. If this attitude is prolonged, it means a constant inner refusal to commit oneself to the moment. With this there is often, to a smaller or greater extent, a savior complex, or a Messiah complex, with the secret thought that one day one will be able to save the world; the last word in philosophy, or religion, or politics, or art, or something else, will be found.

This can go so far as to be a typical pathological megalomania, or there may be minor traces of it in the idea that one's time "has not yet come." The one thing dreaded throughout by such a type of man is to be bound to anything whatever. There is a terrific fear of being pinned down, of entering space and time completely, and of being the singular human being that one is. There is always the fear of being caught in a situation from which it may be impossible to slip out again. Every just-so situation is hell. At the same time, there is a highly symbolic fascination for dangerous sports—particularly flying and mountaineering—so as to get as high as possible, the symbolism being to get away from reality, from the earth, from ordinary life. If this type of complex is very pronounced, many such men die young in airplane crashes and mountaineering accidents. They generally do not like sports which require patience and long training, for the puer aeternus, in the negative sense of the word, is usually very impatient by disposition, so that such sports do not appeal to them." [Marie-Louise von Franz, The problem of the Puer Aeteurnus]

Quote :

"The process of individuation is a process of inner growth to which one is attached; one cannot get away from it. If one says no to it and does not accept it, then, since you are not in it, it grows against you. Then it is your own inner growth which kills you. If you refuse the growth, then it kills you, which means that if a person is completely infantile and has no other possibility, then not much will happen. But if the person has a greater personality within—that is, a possibility of growth—then a psychological disturbance will occur.

That is why we always say that a neurosis is in a way a positive symptom. It shows that something wants to grow; it shows that that person is not right in his or her present state and if the growth is not accepted then it grows against you, at your expense, and produces what might be called a negative individuation. The process of individuation, of inner maturing and growth, goes on unconsciously and ruins the personality instead of healing it. That is how the
death-tree, the death-mother tree and the life-tree are essentially connected. The inner possibility of growth in a person is a dangerous thing because either you say yes to it and go ahead, or you are killed by it. There is no other choice. It is a destiny which has to be accepted.

If you look at the puer aeternus in the negative sense, you can say that he does not want to outgrow the mother problem; he does not want to outgrow his youth, but the growth goes on all the same and it destroys him. He is killed by the very factor in his soul by which he could have outgrown his problem. If in actual life you have to contend with such a problem, then you see how people refuse to grow and become mature and tackle the problem, and more and more a
destructive unconscious piles up. Then you have to say, ''For God's sake, do something, for the thing is growing against you and you will be hit over the head by it." But the moment may come, as the star prince says in the book, when it is too late, for the destructive growth has sucked up all the energy. The luxuriant growth is also an image of a rich fantasy life, of an inner creative richness. Very often you find in the puer such a rich fantasy life, but that wealth
of fantasy is dammed back and cannot flow into life because the puer refuses to accept reality as it is. He dams up his inner life.

In actuality, for instance, he gets up at 10:30 a.m., hangs around till lunch time with a cigarette in his mouth, giving way to his emotions and fantasies. In the afternoon he means to do some work but first goes out with friends and then with a girl, and the evening is spent in long discussion about the meaning of life. He then goes to bed at one, and the next day is a repetition of the one before, and in that way the capacity for life and the inner riches are wasted.

They cannot get into something meaningful but slowly overgrow the real personality so that the individual walks about in a cloud of fantasies, fantasies which in themselves are interesting and full of rich possibilities, full of unlived life. You feel that such a person has a tremendous wealth and capacity but there is no possibility of finding a means of realization, and then the tree—the inner wealth— becomes negative, and in the end kills the personality. That is why the tree is frequently linked up with the negative mother symbol, for the mother complex has that danger. Because of it the process of individuation can become negative.

There is a parallel in the Finnish epic Kalevala, which describes the fight of the divine child and the tree:
A man rose out of the sea, a hero from the waves. He was not the hugest of the huge nor yet the smallest of the small: he was as big as a man's thumb, the span of a woman. His helmet was of copper, copper the boots on his feet, copper the gauntlets on his hands.
Väinamöinen asked the hero from the sea what he intended to do, and he replied,

"I am a man as you see—small, but a mighty water-hero. I have come to fell the oak-tree and splinter it to fragments!" Väinamöinen, old and wily, scoffed: "Why, you haven't the strength, you'll never be able to fell the magic oak-tree and splinter it to fragments."
But the little man took his axe.
He struck the tree with his axe and smote it with the polished blade, once, twice, and a third time. Sparks flew from the axe and flame from the oak as he tried to bend the magic tree to his will. At the third stroke the oak-true was shattered; the hundred boughs had fallen. The trunk stretched to the east, the top to the west, the leaves were scattered to the south and the branches to the north. . .

Now that the oak-tree was felled and the proud trunk leveled [now comes the important part] the sun shone again and the dear moon glimmered pleasantly, the clouds sailed far and wide and a rainbow spanned the heavens.

There you see that when the wrong inner overgrowth of fantasy is pulled down and recognized as being simply the mother complex, then another dimension of consciousness appears—the sky is seen again, the clouds can sail far, and the sun and the moon can shine. It is not a
narrowing of the horizon, for pulling down that wrong growth of fantasy means a widening of the human horizon. I think that it is an infinitely important text because one of the objections which the puer aeternus always brings up when you want to encourage him to fell the tree is that he does not want such a narrowing of the horizon.

What would be left if he had to give up his wishful fantasies, his masturbating, and such stuff? He would be just a petty little bourgeois who goes to his office, and so on. He could not stand such narrowing! But it is not true! If one has the courage to cut down this wrong kind of inner greatness, it comes again, but in a better form—the horizon and life are widened and not narrowed. I think this myth should always be told when the hero has to cut the tree, because that is always what he does not want to realize, or believe. If he only knew how much wider life would be if he could give up that wrong kind of inner life, then he might perhaps do it." [Marie-Louise von Franz, The problem of the Puer Aeternus]

That's the product of schizophrenia where the ideal can never match-up with the real, creating self-doubt, insecurity, self-hatred, shame, when accountability turns inward ...and when it turns outward it becomes the cult of victim-hood, escapism, nature hating, a desire to disappear in multiplicity, blaming the other and accusing the world etc.

I do believe in psychology, and in evolutionary psychology, but I dont regard it as real science, which can be scientifically verified. I do still believe that there is some truth to psychology and especially evolutionary psychology, and your videos Satyr have cleared many of my thoughts.

The psychological terms regarding authoritarian personality(alpha male psyche) are usually distorted and revisioned by marxist theorist as hateful, illogical, privileged or ignorent. Most of the american jewish psychologist went on their way to make authoritarian personality a mental disorder, as they saw strong idependent and active males to be harmful for the society and the established system. The jews wanted to be sure, that white people would never be masculine and active as they were in Germany. This is why they try to force the image of psychopathy, narcism, and sociopathy as a real mental illness, and not normal male identity.

I really like your YT channel, and regard it as one of the valueable tresures in YT. I would like to hear your thoughts on the matter of authoriterian personality Mr. Satyr. Thou you have much material on that subject indirectly.

Vrilseeker wrote:

I really like your YT channel, and regard it as one of the valueable tresures in YT.

Better start saving those videos. im surprised its lasted this long.

We must first define what we mean by "authoritarian".

To posses authority means to either have authority over others or to be your own authority, master of yourself.
The first imposes his authority over the alien, whereas the second imposes authority over his own becoming.
An "alpha-male" may be advised, may respect, and acknowledge others, but his standard for evaluating what is more true than not, is a standard which lies outside an other.
Nature is his standard, and not the opinion of another.
By nature I mean - and I repeat - the sum of all nurturing, but also the past, and it can also be another way of saying world, or reality as it is perceived using the senses (empiricism).  

How does one evaluate the quality of an opinion?
By how many reference points the opinion has to that which lies outside human ideals, and shared delusions.

An ideal is what man wishes the real was.
The real, whether we like it or not, is what lies outside human emotional desires and hopes and dreams.
The most successful ideals are those which begin with a more precise understanding of the real.
The most healthy ideals are the ones which are most in harmony with the real, with nature.
Once you divert from the real, from nature then you should expect collateral effects, which you, then, must deal with.

An alpha-male is a male who holds himself as the final arbitrator, the final authority, after he has consulted others, and the world through his own senses, unemotionally, without any motive other than seeing what is.

It is not "authoritarian" if you refuse to accept an imbecile's propositions as 'good enough' to question your own, particularly when they have no connection to anything perceived and they actually declare nature as something to be overcome, ...not to be understood and used, and exploited, and harmonized with, but overcome.  

Whomever proposes an "overcoming" of nature, the world, reality, must justify this by offering a reason how the outcome will be preferable.
The ideal always diverts from the real, but not not all ideals do so equally, this is why we have so many ideals.
Some ideals intervene slightly, simply to gain an advantage, whereas others, the nihilistic ones, try to overturn all of nature, forget all the past, reject all sensual perceptions of reality, so as to construct chimeras.

An authority is one who demands respect, not just because, but because he is in-tune, brave, in possession of his own faculties, has the ability to defend his own positions without deferring to other authorities, and is willing to accept the consequences of his own positions.

-----

Is it not interesting that the ones using "authoritarianism" as an insult use authority figures to stand between themselves and a world which is present before them and requires no more than an senses and an honest, brave, and analytical mind, free of emotion (particularly fear) to see it?
How fantastically predictable that it is these minds that use emotion as an insult against those they cannot reason against without evoking some grand humanistic ascension to some coming futuristic utopia, they describe using all sorts of flattering and hopeful epithets.

Those professing to be against authorities present themselves as humble followers of authorities, as the ideal.
They need an "expert" to tell them what they are seeing, in the most flattering light, and to give them the okay to accept what they are seeing.

I ask all to not take my perspective as gospel, nor use my name as an argument, but open your damn eyes and see, with no fear and no motive other than clarity and a desire to understand before you die.

Also interesting that the very consequences of human meddling are then used as evidence as an argument against the world the meddling intervened upon.
If I, for example, close a cat in a box, and restrict its activities, the subsequent cat neurosis is not evidence that neurotic cats are natural and healthy, nor that neurotic cats are a "higher" form of feline.

Only nature, as that which no man has created nor defined for me, is my standard, not ideals and what some call "higher" or "lower" or what they claim as an enlightened advancement in human cognition.
I evaluate fellow thinkers using that standard. Not that he is famous, has written a book, or is accepted by a majority of imbeciles as an indisputable authority, but by how well he can explain what I see for myself, by referring back, not to human conceptions and ideals (solipsism), but to reality itself.
If a paraplegic can only survive if human meddling intervenes to help him survive, when he would perish otherwise, then this is not an ascent, not fit, nor an indication of a higher state of being.
If man intervenes and helps replicate mutations that would normally face the natural consequences of what they are, then propagating them within the gene-pool will have consequences.

We can say that retardation is also a way nature is self-correcting, a species that has gone too far, but this still does not mean that it is healthy or a higher state of being.  
You cannot justify an action by using human constructs as a justification, because then all mutations become natural.
Sociopaths included.

If something is not able to replicate itself, but relies on parasitical replication or on some external willful intervention imposing a rule that helps it do so, then using it as a method of correcting what man has produced with his sheltering, is an example of human insanity.
It's part of narcissism and schizophrenia, as a product of modernity and current social methods and standards.

--The one who places no one and no thing, above him and his own.

--The one who does not use another consciousness of the world as a standard but goes directly to the world itself.

--The one who accepts the benefits and the costs of his own authority over his own opinions and actions.

--The one who shows appreciation for one who has contributed to his own understanding of what he sees, without placing him on a pedestal, above himself.

--The one who tests an other's opinions and advice not against those of still another, but against the world around him.

--The one who shows reverence, and defers, not to another living being, like himself, but to the world, nature, reality, which is independent of all consciousness and interpretations and perspectives.

--The one who does not wish to correct, or escape nature, nor change it, but only tries to adapt and correct himself in relation to it.

--The one who only resists the imposition of another's corrections and ideals and interventions upon nature when they contradict it, and only promise pipe-dreams and fantasies as hopeful futures.

The schizophrenia I've described is a byproduct of man-made ideals contradicting naturally evolved behaviors.
As of yet, we only know of one species - at least on this fine Earth - that can intervene upon natural processes to such a degree that the products of these interventions begin to affect man more than the environmental which was intervened upon.
As such, we also know of one species that can create its own reality, enclosed within its own premises - we call this institutionalization.
Man is also the only species that can contradict nature with his own fantasies, his own mental abstractions.

Nihilism is nothing complex, but it is ambiguous: it simply takes the perceived, the empirical, and sensual, and imagines its opposite.
It is the extreme of self-hated, nature-hatred, flipping reality on its heads, with human artifices - which are then symbolized with words. The word becomes the representation of this "better" reality.
Then they baptize these words, this abstraction, the more authentic reality, or they claim that these are a human ascent, an overcoming of nature - which means an overcoming of the past.

The obsession with futurism, utopia, paradises, the future, progress, is rooted in this faith that what will come, no matter what it is, will be preferable to what is, as this was determined by what was.
Here is where the mind begins to come into conflict with itself, creating this psychological schism, compensated by this hyperbole of pretended self-love, which depends on self-denial or a partial acceptance of self, and the past that made it possible.

Narcissism is this love detached form all past. A love founds on the immediate, where the mind loses itself in its own reflection, its own image, but has no concept of self as a product of the past.
When this image can be intervened upon, picking from a variety of social types, the mind begins to believe that it is free to be whatever it wishes, if only it forgets the past, denounces it, and samples form the modern, the current, the immediate, symbols provided for it - a shallow kind of love, compensating for self-hatred.

This schizophrenic existence forces the mind to use double-standards to accept the parts of existence it likes and reject the parts it does not like.

So, sometimes appearances matter, whereas other times they are nothing but superficial.
Sometimes nature is good, and sometimes it is something to be overcome.
Sometimes a being lives forever, and sometimes it does not.
Sometimes they are empiricists and rational, whereas other times they are not.
Sometimes life is fair, sometimes it is not.
Some organisms are comprehensible, whereas others are totally not.
Sometimes sex is for reproduction, wheres other times it is a mystical force surpassing procreation into some divine realm.

The standard deciding what this "sometimes" means is emotion, self-interest, comfort, ease, fear.
The mind is compartmentalized, Orwell called this newspeak, where is can hold two contradictory views in its mind simultaneously.
When the ideal the mind needs to cope with the world is nihilistic to such a degree where it often contradicts the sensually perceived, or even common sense, then the conflict between it - the ideal - and the real, creates a psychological phenomenon observed in minds that have experienced traumatic events: forgetfulness, or, as the Hellenes called it Lethe (ληθη), as the opposite of the negating a-lethea (αληθεια) ...truth (veritas).

Veritas, for the Greeks was what is revealed, what is remembered, recalled, uncovered, for it is there right in front of us, constantly.
The mind incapable of seeing what is in front of it, must turn away, reject, blind itself, at least partially. If we use the parable of the cave, it must return to the semi-darkness of the cave when the sunlight hurts its eyes and threatens it with insanity.

The mind fearing its own destruction, by being exposed to a reality ti may find too disturbing, too unflattering, too much to bear, will find comfort in an idea(l) which partially or totally contradicts it, and denies it relevance.
The degree of weakness and insecurity determines the level of nihilism the mind requires to cope with the world that cares not for its ideas of justice, fairness, equality, uniformity, oneness, godliness, immortality or whatever words it uses to hide behind.
This is where the schism begins, because the real being that it is independent of all human interpretation of it, will contradict the mind's ideal, all the more forcefully if it is totally detached and fantastic and delusional.
In natural environments the mind will face the obvious consequences of being so unable to deal with reality, but in man-made environments where the goal is to maintain a stable, loyal, malleable working slave-class, sheltering protects the mentally deficient organisms from facing the natural consequences of their weakness.
Not only are they protected from nature, but they are permitted and helped to reintegrate the failed genes back into the gene-pool.

At first this creates a system of co-dependencies (sheltered organism totally dependent and committed to the inquisitions it depends upon, and remaining a loyal and dependable servant ...and the institution that enabled this organism to survive and to propagate, totally dependent on it to be serviced), but, in time, as the genetic effects begin to surpass the system's ability to compensate for, a slow decline begins.

Vrilseeker wrote:

The psychological terms regarding authoritarian personality(alpha male psyche) are usually distorted and revisioned by marxist theorist as hateful, illogical, privileged or ignorent. Most of the american jewish psychologist went on their way to make authoritarian personality a mental disorder, as they saw strong idependent and active males to be harmful for the society and the established system.  

We are so distanced from nature that now our conceptions must go other minds rather than go directly to nature.
Anyone who has lived in the country, around domesticated animals, like I have, has experienced, first hand, how social structures amongst animals (who are independent of human hopes and social constructs) works: how simple creatures like chickens can display personality which determines their social status; how there is a pecking order (not a figurative one but a literal one); how roosters differ in behavior from hens, with no human gender issues coming into play.

But most people have no direct access to such observations, living in urban settings where human constructs dominate the environment.
They depend on intervening minds to do this for them, receiving insight as a second-hand insight.
We know that art is now, in modern items, imitating art, because the artifices of man have pushed back nature to a point where man can only experience it partially, in controlled, settings, or through television and computer screens.  
Therefore man's thinking does not comment on nature directly, but now samples and comments on other thoughts: opinions referencing and showing deference to other opinions.
The real recedes and all becomes a judgment on the ideal.

Art imitates art, and thoughts refer to thoughts, in a self-referential process we may call solipsistic and reminds us of Baudrillard's ideas on simulacrum and simulations.  

Since this is the only form of thinking which is respected by the common mind here is an example of deference of my own:    

Schopenhauer, Arthur wrote:

Thus a man who thinks for himself only subsequently becomes acquainted with the authorities for his opinions when they serve merely to confirm him therein and to encourage him.
The book-philosopher, on the other hand, starts from those authorities in that he constructs for himself an entire system from the opinions of others which he has collected in the course of his reading.

Schopenhauer commenting on authorities, and the authoritative mind.

Then he goes on to comment on the comparison between the noble mind and the slavish one:

Schopenhauer, Arthur wrote:

The works of really capable minds differ from the rest in their character of decisiveness and definiteness, together with the distinctness and clearness springing there from, since they at all times clearly and definitely knew what they wanted to express; it may have been in prose, verse, or tones. The rest lack this decisiveness and clearness; and in this respect they can be at once recognized.
The characteristic sign of all first-rate minds is the directness of all their judgments and opinions. All that they express and assert is the result of their own original thinking and everywhere proclaims itself as such even by the style of delivery....Therefore every genuine and original thinker is to this extent like a monarch; he is immediate and perceives no one who is his superior. Like the decrees of a monarch, his judgments spring from his own supreme power and come directly from himself.

The inferior mind must refer and defer to another human position, because it is either incapable of analyzing the world directly or is cocooned in a world of man-made artifices and has no access to anything independent of human creativity.
It's "pride" is in its ability to humble itself before another man; not nature, not reality, but another man commenting on reality.
Humility is its karmic ace in the hole.

When human thought is institutionalized the official narrative must be the only reliable narrative. The naive notion that institutions have no underlying motive, is part of the psychology of the follower, following authorities, experts, divine creatures, genius etc.
This may be unavoidable when the subject matter requires special equipment, but when the subject is as familiar as human nature, and/or life, the deference to "specialists" is a sign of surrender to otherness.

I revisit...
I offer links to other threads because I think I've covered most of the ground relating to the subject.
I've been accused of repeating myself, so I will no longer repeat.

[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]

On-Line Dictionary wrote:

narcissism
  Use Narcissism in a sentence
nar·cis·sism
[nahr-suh-siz-em] Show IPA
noun
1.
inordinate fascination with oneself; excessive self-love; vanity. Synonyms: self-centeredness, smugness, egocentrism.
2.
Psychoanalysis . erotic gratification derived from admiration of one's own physical or mental attributes, being a normal condition at the infantile level of personality development.

My thesis, so far, is a bold assertion. A controversial one.
I stand by it.

My basis for affirming my opinion in relation to what I call [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.], defining the term as not always what is always most current, in fashion, placing it within all ages, but also defining it within the contexts of its most current manifestation, in the west, associated with Americanism, or Globalization.
I've connected this most current form of Modernity, in the west, with a ongoing western tradition, going back to the Jewish faith, and perhaps further back to Zoroastrianism.
Christianity/Islam being religious offshoots of this cult of victimhood, and anti-nature, anti-self, anti-reality, psychology, which then morphed into Marxism and what is called Humanism, with many other peripheral ideologies springing from this common root.

I call it a nihilistic memetic strain, with particularities due to its adaptation within European Aryan/Pagan cultural influences.
I've also explored a symptom of this memetic virus, in my [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] ....see also [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] essay.  

I revisit my post, here, because of a recent accusation, which is not the first  time I've experienced it, that I am a narcissist.

I assume that I am accused of this for these reasons:

1- I have something to say, and I think it is worth hearing.
If this makes me a narcissist then every writer, poet, creator that has ever lived is one as well.

2- That I ridicule positions I consider inferior.
This assumes that I have not considered them and it also assumes that all positions are worth listening to.
The former is not true, and the latter is based on the Nihilistic ideology currently infecting western man. The idea that all positions, no matter what they are, deserve consideration, respect, or preservation, under the heading "Let's agree to disagree"  is part of the cult of victimhood, and par of the infection.

I will contest this with some comments.

--- The current psychology of the Modern mind is characterized by a compartmentalization.
Selective reasoning....or a form of specialization, socially produced and reinforced autism, which i connect to schizophrenia.
The connection is obvious, at least for me.

It is the byproduct of trying to harmonize an ideal with the real, when the ideal is annulling the real.
It's a [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] conflict.

Modernity is this disconnect form self, where self is a reference to identity as a sum of all that nurtured the organism determining its appearance....its presence.
The connective ideas concerning [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] and/or the [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]  sexual dynamic, which is no more than a human or species internal dynamic, is also a part of it.
[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] is another part of it.
And if we add homosexuality into the mix we close-off the most popular issues inciting controversy, where the majority are convinced that the subject is closed and that uniformity is a done deal....man being born as a Tabula Rasa, a Blank Slate...[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] responds to this popularized "self-evident" fact.

This [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] of reality, I consider nihilistic, I've also traced back to Modern man's [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.].

All this I consider a psychological schism.
A detachment of man from his [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.].  

Narcissism is not speaking your mind.
Narcissism is the belief that your mind is the center of the universe, that you deserve respect, eternal life, love, survival....just for being born.
Narcissism is considering yourself at part with everything and everyone else.

Narcissism is being convinced that [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] is your choice, created by your tastes, just because, and for its own sake.
That you decide, for no reason at all, what is beautiful....that you are not limited nor answerable to anything....determining by nothing....free of all determining factors.
Narcissism is considering your pleasure a fact of reality...that the universe is interested in your happiness, your hedonistic experiences.

Narcissism is thinking that the quality of art is whatever you want it to be...that you are the standard.
Narcissism is living in the delusion that  [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] is art, comparable to any other.
Narcissism is thinking the world is created by you....not that you are forced to live within your subjective interpretations of an objective reality, but that you simply decide what is true and what is superior and what is beautiful.

Narcissism is hiding your selfishness behind fake selflessness, turning your love into a universal so as to ensure it for yourself.
Narcissism is declaring "all is equal" while inside you feel superior, more enlightened, more meek than the meek, more humble than the humble, more deserving of being called "good".
Narcissism is considering your preferences, your moral positions, as universal truths, all must abide by.
Narcissism is hiding your ego in feigned humility...turning your weakens into a omnipotent power, your ignorance into omniscient absolutes.

---I do not think I am the center of the universe.
I do not deserve eternal life.
I do not create reality, I discover it, uncover it, represent it, as best I can.
Beauty is not my creation.

---I am not a blank slate...free to become anything I like.
Only a narcissistic dolt would think this.
I am not the governor of my own destiny, no matter how much I would like to be so.
In fact, I don't even want to be so....because that would be narcissistic and a dead end...literally a dead....END.

---If my child, or having one, is an indication of narcissism then all life is just as narcissistic as I am.

--Not once have I ever posted a picture of myself...unlike many of these characters I've come across on these forums.

---I do not think my opinions are absolute.
This does not mean I will waste my time on stupidities, to appear humble, or to pretend I respect the other.
Do I have something to say...YES!!!
Because I think, i explore, I want to know.
Not just because I say so.
Do all opinions deserve my attention simply because they come from a human mouth?
No!!!
I do not go out looking for simple minds just minding their own business...but if you come here under the pretext that you are seeking clarity, or are interested in philosophy, then it is you that comes here with expectations.
If you stayed at home, drinking, eating, shitting, preying to invisible gods, fucking your mother, believing in whatever absurdities you found pleasing, then I would not bother you.
I would not care.

---I do think I have something important to say, and its because I am surrounded by lies, and people nodding their heads like robots, in agreement, wither having nothing to say contrary to the lie, or faking it.
I will not fake agreement just to protect someone's feelings.
Enough with the bullshit!!!
Too much has been lost in the name of some fake civility, which is nothing more than an expectation for reciprocity.
[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.].
If things were otherwise I would remain silent. I am not controversial simply for the sake of being controversial.
Am I flattered by attention?
Yes.
Do I need it desperately...no.
I receive more than enough, and not intentionality.
Sometimes I receive unwanted attention, and too much of it.

---Have I ever said that my opinions are absolutely right, just because I said so?
No.
Does this mean I will change my opinions simply because some idiot says so?
No.
Only a narcissist, and an infantile mind, expects something just because.
If you are a simpleton, why would you expect to be taken seriously, if you were not a bit narcissistic?
Offer me a reason to change my mind...or fuck off!

An example of modern [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.].

An extreme case, of course.

Being, is a term describing solipsism.
What is God, the idea(l) of it, other than a self-referential, Being, that needs nothing, but to create....contradicting His perfection?

The monotheistic Deity is a solipsist, dreaming the world into existence.
The concept of independence is the projection of the desirable end in self-referential Order.
The idea(l) of freedom, independence, is this desire, needs, to become self-referential.

But the world cares not.
A true solipsist, or any degree of it, would have to be protected from his own stupidity, or he would die, ignoring the world as it is and not as he wished it were.  

The boundaries of a institutionalized existence is the outer boundary of this protective shell allowing solipsism to persist within its premises.
Words are conceptual walls, if they do not symbolize the phenomenon, but loop back unto human abstractions.
In the latter case, the word symbolizing the abstraction, the noumenon, refers back to the noumenon....and has no reference other than here.
The phenomenon become the complex, the evil, that which must be "corrected".

Consider some of the Modern words, defining the current Nihilism:
Equality
Freedom
Love
Humanity

Consider them not as they apply in reality, but within manmade constructs.

Take equality.
It has no reference outside the human brain.
In fact it is a contradiction of reality and of evolution Theory, and of the idea of natural selection.
It's reference point is another human abstraction: justice, Democracy....and so on.

Social Schizophrenia: the compartmentalization of ideals, where the gene and meme ideals can coexist even if they contradict each other.
Social Autism makes this feasible, as specialization focuses brain-power, focus, towards a singular object/objective, creating a knowledge-based, brilliance - as the kind found on-line, but accompanied by an ineptness in all other areas of human existence.

Social Narcissism: the "me" generation of capitalism, translated into hedonism and materialism, and expressed through the modern pop-industry.
Self becomes enlarged, and the individual finds self in the greater Self....Humanity.
Humanity expunged from its primal, "dirty", shameful, definition...a humanity purified into an abstractions all can be included within equally.
It begins with the Monotheistic autocratic God, who only demands complete surrender from the minions (humility) to then offer them an absolute self-love (narcissism via a proxy).
By, hypothetically, and hypocritically, sacrificing the self, the imperfect, one attains eternity, salvation, the perfect.
One is worthy of it, one deserves it, simply by being born.

A insidious arrogance, which has been called the "Jewish Paradox"....resulting in the three types of Zionism: Religious (Orthodoxy - true to the cult of victim-hood), Cultural (An attempt to become like other memes through the acquisition of a homeland - meme to gene), and Cultural (Modern Nihilism - secular humanism, which levels all mankind down to where all past becomes indistinguishable enabling an escape from the past of shame and guilt).

Satyr wrote:

1- I have something to say, and I think it is worth hearing.
If this makes me a narcissist then every writer, poet, creator that has ever lived is one as well.

2- That I ridicule positions I consider inferior.

This is a perfect example of what actually led to my use of the term. Instead of actually dealing with the reasons I gave for using the term, others are suggested instead. One of the reasons given was that instead of integrating the opposing arguments in a response, an essay triggered - in some way - by the post is written without clear reference to the post triggering it. This is what is happening here. It is solipsistic because it is not what the posts contain, it is what they remind the solipsist of. This is more important the way not integrating the post one is arguing against can be lazy or avoidant. Something happens 'out there' and the solipsist uses this as an opportunity to regurgitate something from inside himself. In this meta-example, here in the narcissism thread the accusation of narcissism is used to regurgitate opinions about modernism, jews, etc. and then a habitual model of why the solipsist is rejected. No new information got in. No need to address the actual reasons the accusation came up. What is important is the reiteration of one's values, opinions and the implicit model of other people's psychology. Just as when the word romantic was used in a post, this led to an anti-romantic short essay that was not a valid response to the post it was intended to respond to. The arguments did not fit the post, but did fit some other post where someone said that the feeling of falling in love is the best way to choose a partner or something of that order.

The solipsist sees a word with the root romance, and gets triggered to regurgitate his position on romance/romantics. Or from the outside, the word, not the post, is taken as an opportunity to pontificate primarily irrelevantly.

This is solipsism functionally.

In defense the solipsist lists beliefs and certain specific lacks of beliefs. 'I do not believe I am the center of the universe.' and so on. And sure, these are likely the answers the solipsist would give if given a survey.

People often confuse the language based ideas that they are conscious of having and believing with who they are and how they function in the world.

What happens when input from outside is only vaguely looked at - some vague outline on the radar screen - and used as a jumping off point for lectures/essays easily linked to here, for example, and not directly related to what is actually on the radar - or if one looked up from the radar screen and returned to experiencing less mediated, what one might experience there - you have functional solipsism.

A different kind of example: There are people who say they are interested in X - a group, profession, set of texts, person, a philosopher, a thinker, whatever. And they will pass a lie detector test on that. But once you track how they function, you can see what they really feel and think about X via their actions. People confuse their ego-beliefs with their actual beliefs all the time. The ideas they think they should believe and what they actually believe. (or what they primarily believe since we can believe even contradictory ideas. Modern humans are like this in many ways. Just listen to how they define the self over a longer conversation and you will find dualisms and monisms and physicalism and idealism and a whole host of more specific contradictory psychological theories.

Here it is specific function over a long period of time, and thankfully even in the refutation of the accusation, the solipsist repeats the precise process that was already described in the original accusation.

And to some extent this is OK. At least the essays/lectures are more interesting than those most people could produce. At least they can be stimulating, challenging and not common. Great.

But it would take a moron to confuse this with a discussion.

And so the only mature response it to throw essays back.

Your post reminded me of a story.

That word reminded me of an idea.

The irony that this will be taken as disrespect is that anyone who does not respond this way, if they respond at all, does not respect themselves.

Number 2 above is also self-serving. In the accusation is was not the ridiculing of positions that was mentioned.

So amazingly two not relevent interpretations were made despite being presented with direct and clear information about what the actual accusation was based on.

And while pleased that in the dismissal you confirmed the accusation, I have serious doubts this will help you in any way.

Which is why, again, the intelligent response to the solipsist is to respond in parallel, barely registering him. This gives the solipsist the real choice - to go on immersed only in himself or not.

Those who post as if a discussion is taking place - here, generally by aggreeing and trying to be interesting to the solipsist - are simply parts of his dream. Not just subjectively for him, but even objectively, poor things.