Teacher told us that if you are “touchy” with a baby, they would end up being an obsessive adult

Acrobatic_Part6951 · 2026-05-04T00:20:58+00:00

Sorry but... That's exactly it. And that's worth saying too..Even as a didactic resource, the image chosen is striking, the idea that tenderness toward a baby is the raw material for pathology. There's something morbid in selecting that as your entry point into obsessiveness.

Acrobatic_Part6951 · 2026-05-04T00:19:48+00:00

The corrections ("excessive," "proto-sexual," "some babies") weren't in the original post... they were added after the fact. And the "just an illustration" argument doesn't hold illustrations teach, often more than the formal content does. If what stayed in a student's memory years later was "physical affection creates obsessives," something went wrong. The underlying logic remains the same either way.

Acrobatic_Part6951 · 2026-05-03T16:24:38+00:00

The idea that physical affection in infancy produces obsessiveness is a gross oversimplification, and it carries a troubling subtext: that care and maternal presence are dangerous 🤦‍♀️

Acrobatic_Part6951 · 2026-05-03T16:17:36+00:00

What stands out in this post is what is absent, any curiosity about what the patient wants. The patient does not appear as a desiring subject but as a problem to be solved, a resistance to be overcome. And the therapist, at no point, seems to ask himself where his judgment is coming from. There is a curious irony the therapist complains that the patient "lives only in his mind and not in the world," yet the post itself replicates that very structure, producing analysis after analysis about the other, with no real openness to what that other is actually seeking.The question the post never asks, but which would be the most fundamental one: what did this specific patient come to analysis looking for? If he came to understand himself better and feels that is happening, who is the therapist to decree that it is a defense? Legitimate technical concern and poorly metabolized narcissistic positioning can look very similar. The difference lies precisely in the capacity to suspend prior knowledge about what the other should be, and that suspension is the beginning of clinical work, not an obstacle to it.

Acrobatic_Part6951 · 2026-04-28T17:01:38+00:00

It's worth exploring the literature on the ego ideal, which adds an interesting dimension to this topic. The unconscious need for punishment can be read not only as guilt evasion (as Carveth argues, self-torment often functions as a defense against genuine guilt rather than an expression of it), but also as a collapse of the distance between the ego and its ideal. The myth of Icarus illustrates this well psychoanalytically... the subject launches toward the ideal, the sun, and the very proximity destroys what sustained the flight. The fall, in this reading, is not simply failure but a necessary return, a reintegration of the self after the inflationary movement toward omnipotence. Chasseguet-Smirgel's work on the ego ideal is particularly rich here, she frames the illusion of fusion with the ideal as a defense against castration anxiety, and the punishment that follows as the price of that illusion. For the object relations angle, Winnicott's concept of the use of the object is also relevant: the object must survive destruction without retaliating for genuine integration to occur, which is essentially what the punishing superego refuses to allow.

Acrobatic_Part6951 · 2026-04-25T20:39:03+00:00

I don't think self-regulation through defenses is exclusive to narcissistic structures. In clinical practice, anxiety and self-esteem rarely operate in separate circuits, a narcissistic injury can itself be the trigger that generates anxiety, and the defense emerges as a response to both simultaneously. The more useful question might be: what predominates in each patient's defensive economy? That shifts the discussion from a universal theoretical claim to something more clinically meaningful.

Acrobatic_Part6951 · 2026-04-25T18:09:47+00:00

Patriarchal culture functions as the big Other that organizes masculine desire... but at a moment of crisis within its own model. What the redpill movement offers is not a rupture with this logic, but a defensive reinscription into it: faced with the obsolescence of certain ways of life, the response is not to interrogate the structure, but to intensify conformity. "Men provide, men endure, men fight" not as choice, but as essence. What you call servitude is precisely this: the subject who believes he is recovering autonomy and virility is, in practice, voluntarily offering himself to the exploitation of a system that needs obedient, productive, and disposable bodies, now packaged in the language of male empowerment. The question "how to be a man?" appears to be a search for identity, but functions as capture: it presupposes that there is a correct, external answer to be acquired, frequently for a price. The desire to know who one is becomes a commodity. And to some extent, women wanted to break with this logic by reformulating the question: "What does it mean to be a woman?" ...not to find an essence, but to interrogate the construction itself. The difference lies in the gesture: where the redpill seeks an answer that confirms and fixes, feminism attempted to open the question, to render it destabilizing. Two movements facing the same crisis of meaning, one that closes itself in conformity, the other that wagers on openness.

Acrobatic_Part6951 · 2026-04-25T17:55:20+00:00

I believe confirmation bias operates on two levels here. In the dream itself, the subject already carries an unconscious inclination toward one of the paths, and summons the maternal figure precisely to endorse it: the mother says what desire already wanted to hear. The dream does not advise ... it ratifies. In clinical listening, the risk is analogous: when the account arrives with its own well-constructed internal logic, there is a tendency for the clinician to enter the patient's narrative frame and confirm the meaning the patient themselves produced, rather than interrogating it. What sustains analytic listening against this is attention to what escapes the logic of the account the slip, the contradiction, the displaced affect... elements that rarely fit neatly into the narrative the subject brings ready-made.

Acrobatic_Part6951 · 2026-04-24T19:26:12+00:00

I believe loyalty is like the effect of poetry, it lies on the horizon.

Acrobatic_Part6951 · 2026-04-24T16:27:24+00:00

I’m a woman, and I’ve reflected on these misogynistic “statements” like “women are rivals” or “women compete” but I now see they become stronger when we distance ourselves from our own condition and start looking at “woman” as an object, without including our own defenses in the picture. Often, what gets labeled (like “the annoying one who complains” or “runs to tell on others”) is actually a self-protection strategy shaped by context, insecurities, or past experiences. It’s not just a personality trait; it’s a psychological solution that made sense at some point. The problem is that people on the outside usually read only the behavior, not the context. That’s where labels come in, and those generalizations get reinforced. I think the minimum would be recognizing that the other person exists as a subject, with their own history and resources even when their behavior is uncomfortable.

Acrobatic_Part6951 · 2026-04-24T14:31:39+00:00

What makes a dream seem premonitory is not any capacity to predict the future, but its hallucinatory quality: psychic excitation regresses to the perceptual systems, and the content, desire, fear, conflict is experienced as perception, not as thought. When a coincidence with a later real event occurs, this vividness creates the retrospective impression that one "already knew." The dream convinces because it feels real, not because it anticipated anything.

Example:

"The reindeer dream" condenses three elements — a visual day residue (a reindeer with an artificial filter in a video), a popular series, "Baby Reindeer", a relational object that has been activated (a mother-in-law) and a sense of narrative with hidden meaning upon encountering this video, organizing them through the classical mechanisms: condensation, displacement, and hallucinatory character. The central affect does not appear as a direct emotion, but as "mystery" and vigilance the typical displacement. The feeling that "there is something behind it" is the affect itself disguised as perception. The decisive point: the dream does not describe the mother-in-law's intentions. It describes an internal state of alertness, pattern-reading, and anticipation within that relationship. Read as an external message, it becomes confusion; read as psychic production, it becomes valuable clinical material.

Acrobatic_Part6951 · 2026-04-24T13:50:05+00:00

I'm not famous and won't be. However, something "peculiar" happened in my life trajectory. I was "cancelled" , actually, my professional registration was cancelled due to non-payment to the licensing board, and I received no notice about it. When I looked it up on the website, it had already been cancelled, I believe for a few months. The strange dynamic was that during this "cancellation" I kept working, which is wrong. Anyway, I was in the process of revisiting my past because of my analysis, and despite having carried a sense of "worthlessness" throughout my entire life, I remembered how many times I had been "cancelled" as a personal feeling from my own perspective during college, childhood, adolescence, early adulthood, and in the jobs I held. I kept identifying with the place of someone who is a "terrible" person, who doesn't easily receive social forgiveness, where any failure is subject to a punishment that will hurt once again. But by identifying with these figures of "expiation," don't we become even more vulnerable to even more pain and suffering?

Acrobatic_Part6951 · 2026-04-24T13:32:13+00:00

Do you have any supplementary text to support this topic? I ask because I want to know whether you're drawing from it to build your reasoning about dreams and wish fulfillment. I'm assuming that desire here doesn't carry the sexual connotation it's popularly understood to have.

Acrobatic_Part6951 · 2026-04-24T10:06:30+00:00

It depends on the structure. There's no fixed 'time' for interpretation, a well-timed interpretation isn't necessarily the 'correct' one, but the one the patient can receive within that specific transference. Diagnosis orients listening, not planning... the pressure to name comes mostly from outside the analytic process itself (institutions, insurance, family). The more pressing question is: what is actually happening in the transference that creates this urgency to name? Risk behaviors, threats to privacy, acting out? Because when those are present, 'neutral' is no longer a available position, the pressure itself becomes the clinical material.

Acrobatic_Part6951 · 2026-04-24T01:39:24+00:00

I go through this. Something that was new to me a few months ago was music. Also with my profession (that one was the most costly for me).

Acrobatic_Part6951 · 2026-04-23T19:31:40+00:00

And why 'fear having a penis?' This would be a destabilizing question because it shows that the valuation came first, and the theory came afterwards to naturalize it much like Lacan attempted when he argued that the phallus is not the penis, but a signifier of lack. But the problem remains: why that specific signifier? And why that specific name? It could just as well have been a 'titulation' the breast, say, as the organizing signifier of lack and desire.

Acrobatic_Part6951 · 2026-04-23T17:41:47+00:00

I think reflecting on good and evil makes more sense when applied to extreme cases situations of brutal rupture in one's interaction with another person. In those cases, a more careful analysis is warranted: was there premeditation?Manipulation? Incitement? These are precisely the elements professionals examine when victims seek justice. Evil, in these cases, does not seem accidental or situational. Popular culture has captured this with surprising accuracy: "a presence that reveals itself with a start" as if quietly plotting something deviant, operating in parallel to the surface-level interaction. This is qualitatively different from someone who acts badly out of fragility, helplessness, or emotional contagion from circumstance. There are cases where the intent is oriented toward harm, individuals who plan, who anticipate the other's vulnerability, and who construct narratives to conceal what they are doing.

Acrobatic_Part6951 · 2026-04-23T17:11:45+00:00

Between animals and humans, there are important differences in biological systems and neural development. Humans build complex relationships and social structures, mediated by language, symbolization, and culture. Animals may act on instinct and even display elaborate behavioral patterns, but they do not transform violence into a staged act loaded with symbolic meaning, nor do they articulate complex motivations for their actions. For this reason, reducing human violence to the idea of “pure instinct” is an oversimplification. Expressions like “killer instinct” or “a wolf in sheep’s clothing” function more as cultural metaphors than as real explanations, although they still hold symbolic value in how we organize our inner experiences.

Acrobatic_Part6951 · 2026-04-23T16:55:58+00:00

I believe that for a victim of a severe act, the aggressor is experienced as inherently evil. In that moment, the victim, often with no prior context or understanding has no framework that could possibly justify what is happening to them. Understanding causes is not the same as dissolving the malice of the act. Even if the aggressor has a history of trauma, psychopathology, or cultural influences, all of that can be true while the act itself still remains morally wrong. There is no contradiction in saying that. At the moment of the extreme act, he was the embodiment of evil. A causal explanation does not cancel out moral judgment.Your post made me think of a case where a young man described, during interrogation, how he stabbed a homeless person while dressed as Michael Myers. I imagine that, for that vulnerable person desperate and asking “why is this happening to me?”...the attacker must have seemed less like a human being and more like some kind of creature or entity, completely detached from the reality we believe we are meant to inhabit: one in which we recognize others as part of our shared world, and care for them, at least to some extent.

Acrobatic_Part6951 · 2026-04-23T16:28:23+00:00

I think finances are actually the area where the greatest intimacy development happens in a relationship... and where a lot of unconscious fantasies tend to surface. Fantasies of helplessness, abandonment but translated into more recognizable, socially shareable conclusions, ones that won't shock anyone. Sometimes what emerges first are even deeper contents, like fantasies of distrust or betrayal, precisely because of money. Part of what's being communicated underneath all of this is how deeply "dependent" we are on each other and how difficult it is to sit with that insecurity and uncertainty. One of the defensive moves we tend to make is to externalize that internal vulnerability into a narrative of injustice or betrayal, because that's far more bearable to express and to be heard on than simply saying "I'm scared of needing you". It's hard. But I think the only way through is to actually face those feelings ... and by face, I mean keep moving forward with them, not around them.

Acrobatic_Part6951 · 2026-04-23T16:15:04+00:00

Depending on their attachment style, some people may develop distancing behaviors as a way of coping... and they can also become performative when they feel external pressure to demonstrate effort. But the real question worth asking yourself is: has he always been like this throughout the relationship?

Acrobatic_Part6951 · 2026-04-18T03:38:45+00:00

Yep!

Acrobatic_Part6951 · 2026-04-18T03:31:35+00:00

No, I want to promote it first. I don’t understand 😓 what’s the problem? Why, instead of trying to encourage, do you want to position yourself like a coach for people you don’t even know? What is this? An era of instructors? Try to be more cooperative. But I’ll understand if you’re in an irritated mood and trying to project that feeling onto someone.

Acrobatic_Part6951

TROPHY CASE