Disclosure and ideas
There's this schizophrenia thing. Marcuse, Deleuze. Anyone. They are opposed, but they both understand the pleasure principle in ways that are much more refined than Freud. The point is that you could say my psyche is a "troubled" one. I suspect that I am only able to hold everything together because the patriarchal-capitalist reality principle is so strongly ingrained in me that I can't simply give myself over to the "pleasure of schizos," as Deleuze might style it. Important is the patriarchal element, not, in this sense, in the exploitation of women, but in the dominance the parent(s) hold in the psyche. I've said many times to myself throughout my life, in moments of extreme lucidity, that I keep going "because of my parents." I don't give up, I don't disassemble, I don't hurt myself in the way I might want to, I don't let my outstanding severity come through completely, for the reason that "I have parents," which is more accurately assessed as, "my parents have me." All of this drive to succeed according to the performance principle of patriarchal capitalism, to become a self-sufficient and productive adult - decidedly, to succeed in a spectacular way that conforms as much to the performance principle as it does to my needs; therefore, professional academic work - is only because of the psychical domination of the parents. Most of all, patriarchal unicity and the performance principle keep me from letting my schizophrenia run its course. Thus I hold it together. Dominated and yet able to do some remarkable things because of this essentially volatile and indeed dangerous to myself relationship. I’ve always wondered, “What defines the threshold whereby one gives in and declares oneself insane? Why don’t I declare myself insane and leave anxiety behind? What kind of ‘decision’ must occur before one allows the rules of the patriarchal reality principle to slip away, as one’s ontology goes from reality-based to immanent and schizophrenic?” Perhaps this threshold, this “decision,” is either granted or not granted depending on how strongly present the Name of the Father is in the psyche, in this way making a number of fruitful, if controversial, correlations between absent parents - and the corresponding mitigated influence of the patriarchal reality principle in the psyche - and psychosis, poverty, diminished self-control and self-awareness, and reduced threshold for “declaring” oneself invalid. It is both the trump card of the high-functional bourgeois who is "born of woman," and the bourgeois's unique form of bourgeois suffering.