The psychological symbol

Hiding, and invisible, in the bowels of our psyche are pools of gaso­line* waiting to be ignited. They are invisible because they existed, and remain, in the past.

We like to believe that we live in the present, the “here-and-now.” But this isn’t really true. Like a flower whose face follows the sun yet is transfixed by its roots, each of us moves through the world on a foundation that does not move. Our history – our roots – limits growth, tinctures the air and confounds our present feelings, grows the emotionalized attitudes that guide or warp our endeavors.

One phenomenon that proves the past is immanent in the pres­ent is the psychological symbol. Unlike a literary symbol which we grasp consciously by intellectual or emotional association, a psy­cho-symbol strikes the unconscious directly and we may never know we’ve been “symbolated” – altered or acti­vated by a repre­sentation, a defini­tion, a meaning, a conclusion from our past.

The ability to be moved by symbols must be a neurological-chem­i­cal function, probably involving Candace Pert’s “molecules of emo­tion,” and it is fascinating how an emo­tional meaning from our childhood can forever escape awareness then be embodied and explo­sively mag­ni­fied in a present word, tone of voice, or act. Follow­ing are some psycho-symbols I have seen:

 

*   “My dog pulled me her way”

*   One’s child or someone else’s child

*   “I want to take your laptop in”

*   Lump in the throat

 

“My dog pulled me her way”

 

Client reported that his puppy made a peremptory yank on the leash to venture off the path. He exploded in a torrent of rage and injustice, cumulative injustice never to be tolerated again. “How dare” – his uncon­scious screamed at his pet, and at the world – “anyone treat me like a trifle, having their goddamned way with me!” As a young boy, he had been balanced precariously and help­lessly between his di­vorced parents’ new fam­ilies, “disap­point­ing” one if he pleased the other. His ground was never his own, his feet on two warring islands drifting apart. Later, having grown only enough ego strength to exper­ience impotent rage, he would be dev­as­tated once again to be pulled away from himself by any self-centered will, even a pet’s.

 

One’s child or someone else’s child

 

I believe that many teenagers and adults feel the loss of their own child­hood, or maybe the death of their child-self, in any child they see. This symbol is some­times masked in the pseudo-sophis­ticated, acrid humor of those comedians who say they can barely tolerate and have no use for children. If we laugh at, find ourselves empathizing with these jokes even for a moment, we are revealing some tragic loss of our own child-self.

 

“I want to take your laptop in”

 

One afternoon several years ago, my wife informed me that she intended to take my laptop computer to a repair shop. She believed she saw a virus warning and was probably run­ning on the indus­trious momentum of a similar recent repair of her own computer. I heard her innocent and helpful remark and something turned in me. The world froze. I felt my­self melting, butter in lava. With great difficulty, I replied in a deliberately sinister voice – which might have shaken her had she not been in her momentum – that my computer was in fine shape, had no viruses, and needed no repair. Unheeding, she repeated her statement in more persuasive terms. Now at the point of disinte­gration, I found myself standing yet disembodied, raising the laptop like Moses with the tablets over my head then smashing it into shards and bent metal against my desk. Later, I took great pains to under­stand, for myself and for her, the nature of the sym­bolism that trig­gered my disintegration. It was rooted in a childhood of total pas­siv­ity that threatened to ruin everything as it spread into my teen years. That cancer was stopped only by a flimsy barricade of narcis­sism in high school. When my wife voiced her unappealable state­ment, it returned me to the passive egolessness of my childhood that in some sense I had never surpassed. The shell of narcissism, lately reduced to a thin­ner cognitive film (I had whittled away much of the pathology over the past two decades), cracked. Only destroy­ing the predator's tool – the computer – could prevent the void from overtaking me.

 

Lump in the throat

 

My client knows that the extreme somatic and catastrophizing anxiety he constantly suffers started with his mother’s personality disordered mental abuse – consigning him to hell for innocent play with a friend – and continues to be fed by introjected terror. He has now grasped that the lump in his throat in his mother’s presence, obstruct­ing his breathing, is the exact meaning of this truth: “I never had a voice.”

There is a difference between a symbol and a simple resonance or emotional association. Vereshack gives the example of an echo sent from the past and received in the present:

 

“A woman leaves a party early. Her conscious sense of why she is going home is that she has become tired of the superficial conversation all around her. Actu­ally, a man sitting near her, who has been speak­ing in an authoritarian way, has triggered a feeling of neg­ativity which more properly belongs to her father. She does not know this. The uncon­scious con­nec­tion and the force with which it drives her out of the room are absolutely invisible. Without knowing that she is flee­ing, or what she is fleeing from, she nonetheless flees.”**

 

And there is a difference between a symbol and what I conceive as the entirely sym­bolic life of a past-dwelling person: someone such as a psychopath, deep psychotic or cyclical batterer whose emo­tional growth was aborted, undeveloped in babyhood or childhood. Thrust by the passage of time into a present to which they do not belong, these individuals are always and only living on the endless fuel of their original pain. They cannot, as Janov would say, see beyond their unmet needs, and the present is only a symbol of unmet needs and un-had revenge. For them, everything – from their body to someone’s smile, from his wife’s suspiciously attractive hairstyle to a good night’s sleep, from an undercooked or perfectly cooked ham­burger to a sunrise or sunset, to the placement of a dish towel, to the simplest quiet moment, to the contemplated universe – is a potential trigger.

I believe the difference between these three states is one of degree, the diffusion of pain in differently intact psyches. At the cleanest end of the continuum, the minimally-"symbolated" individ­ual might have, in her youth, swal­lowed too large a trauma – loss of a beloved pet when the family moved from house to apartment – and later cannot live with a dog. The past remains a fissure in her soul.

Like me and the young man walking his dog, you may only come to see a symbol through regret and painstaking introspec­tion. But it is waiting for you like a compro­mised heart: an electrical charge in the atria of the past, stimulating the ventricles of the present.

 

 

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* Metaphor inspired by a case history in The Illusion of Love, David Celani, Columbia University Press, 1994.

 

** Paul Vereshack, M.D., online psychotherapy book: Help Me – I’m Tired of Feeling Bad. Chapter 20, “The Devices of Invisi­bility and Not Knowing."