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оригинал: https://psuedoanalysis.blogspot.com/p/a-quick-and-dirty-guide-to.html

I am not a Schopenhauerian pessimist, believer in the resentful Freudian death drive, or any of that other high school existentialist-nihilist type nonesense, however, it is a fact that being alive, despite its abundant pleasures and joys, and even with the abandonment of harmful overreaching moralism, is at its core an intolerable frustration that the somatic material – not to mention the mental circuitry being as it is an incorporeal feedback abstraction of this somatic material – struggles gravely to process. In fact, it is, by its overwhelmingly stimulating nature, never fully processed and thus there exists an excess of intensities which are at all times overflowing and collecting into reservoirs of surplus which require, not necessarily discharge (as mechanistic models are outdated), but investment and expenditure.

Take, for simplicities sake, the average human organism. It’s birth into the world constitutes an exit from a state of more or less immediate and unconscious comfort and gratification via the womb. Or, in other words, a state of low frustration. Once outside the womb the infant is required to act, though still minimally, in accordance with an outside. There is a mouth to use, a nipple to latch onto, a body to position in space as to minimize discomfort (all frustrations, what card carrying Nietzschean from Freud’s early inner circle Otto Rank referred to as ‘birth trauma’). Still, however, the infant is, hopefully to an extent, the center of attention. The adults in its world not only organize the object world as to be conducive to the infant’s development – baby proofing the house, appropriate lighting, sound, temperature, etc. – but they also respond to its needs by taking on the bulk of the responsibility, i.e. basic caretaking. As time progresses, this infant is required to take on more actions and responsibilities, and slowly becomes less and less the center of attention. Eventually the child must come to terms, on some register at least, that the parents aren’t his or her sole possession, nor his or her sole provider of attention, and that they may not always give all their attention to the child. As the child becomes even older he or she realizes that not only do the parents pay attention to each other at the expense of the child at times, but that others in the world exist, and that the objects and subjects of the world aren’t determined or controlled by the child’s will, wishes, or center of agency. That is, growing up is a slow process of building frustration whereupon the outside topples residual feelings of omnipotence which originally helped the infant survive. As developmental psychologists rightly show, children do gain mastery and agency, but whether or not this sense of control ever fills the wound torn open by birth is up for debate.

Now, how exactly the individual navigates this wound essentially leads to character, or defensive psychic structure, i.e. mental illness. Too much time has been spent trying to find the ‘origins’ of mental illnesses as if there is some hidden secret to be unlocked. Mental illness is, at its core, a resolution to a conflict that becomes reified, ossified, and inappropriately used as a static tool to approach dynamic situations that do not call for that static tool. In other words, somewhere along our development a challenge presented itself that required some kind of solution to continue living and the solution was clung to as time went on. For example, a child feels – and the feeling may have to do with internal sensations, i.e. drives, or external objects, or both - that his household is dangerous, that if he is seen or noticed he will be the object of ridicule, criticism, attack, or worse, and thus, mostly in an unconscious manner, the child acts in a way that reduces the likelihood of receiving attention. He now flies under the radar, increasing his chances of survival. This child grows up to sit at the edges of the room, shy, introverted. This personality is appropriate, even advantageous, at times, but ultimately, if it is the only way one can approach any situation – say, a situation that calls for a more extroverted approach – then it is a detriment, and to rely on it is neurotic and creates life conflicts.

In this sense, the neurotic goes through life attempting to stick a square peg in a round hole. The obsessional unconsciously believes that if he thinks hard enough about the minute details of the peg, the hole, or both, that somehow the peg will fit – or that the intolerable feelings of the fact that the peg will never fit will somehow be less intolerable. The depressive unconsciously believes that the peg, broken from repeated attempts at fitting it into the wrong hole for so long and thus discarded in the gutter (or simply broken through being as being is imperfect in relation to the idealism capable in the mind), will return, pristine, if only he were good enough. The hysteric and psychotic… we’ll have to cover these at a later time.

In a more general sense, the neurotic, whatever their particular condition and relation to the outside may be, cannot tolerate actual alterity, which by its very nature is outside the residual infantile phantasy of omnipotence, whether that be on the geological scale, i.e. the outside world of objects and the physical play of forces between those objects, and the people that populate that world who have wishes, desires, ideas, and feelings that are not always consistent with the subject’s.

The suicidal at his or her core is not depressed, he or she is angry. Life is not what it is supposed to be, but violence or anger feels intolerable, so the self is chosen as object of attack…but again, we will have to cover this more at length later…