Talentcel and Narcissism Research

Children in depressive devitalization

A Child is Being Caged: Resignation Syndrome and the Psychopolitics of Petrification

Extreme symptoms of narcissistic abuse seen in children coming in from the Soviet Union

This is a psychoanalytical piece, not usually what I post. Psychoanalysis can be a way to cope when materiality is too "expensive" for the traumatized mind. It is a more literary way of navigating pain and deals with things not confirmable other than qualititatively like the unconscious and the inner child.

https://d1wqtxts1xzle7.cloudfront.net/63856253/Butler_-_A_Child_is_Being_Caged20200707-84546-ftnd79-libre.pdf?1594151309=&response-content-disposition=inline%3B+filename%3DA_Child_Is_Being_Caged_Resignation_Syndr.pdf&Expires=1708214194&Signature=aEU9d9LOAlgcGaSDAMIwVUvMw4ubEjq5FfYXXkxQMDgV-b7XmXjKcu5eMALJOeQI5T0O97-tvXc7xOv9GQ2WBAXtQPF2Cph4YUYRZAouDjWRaSpNgGQlrpQ0EA2GYduN4aoLmMh--Ql36JYgxqUApON2tjeTnef-GMAPTpLZIsY1ABVBTw6R-xOswkNMGBW-7zjQ5rkw0i1WmlMNtEM4drC3XIp6nGi7KkQmuUGXGJzHRdq6PezFtgVEZBcIcVOokhfbnpqcmeLw6tG1iBSVfUpUFuYjWNd3NNyDxxienPRDZ7J7AEg4cKvFeSzkPbhlBbVkmdMPu-feKPwnjQBg__&Key-Pair-Id=APKAJLOHF5GGSLRBV4ZA

Children from the Soviet Union were arriving completely apathetic, reeling from severe traumas (dissociated to the point of depersonalization). This suggests the presence of severe narcissistic abuse coming in from the Soviet Union.

Incontinent, tube-fed, and almost entirely unresponsive to stimuli of any kind, these children exhibit an abject dependence that appears to be the consequence of a total resignation from life. In his paper BodegÄrd discusses five apathetic children from the Child and Adolescent Psychiatric Clinic of Karolinska Hospital in Stockholm, a site that became ground zero for the syndrome. All five of the families had fled erstwhile Soviet Republics. Three of the families belonged to Central Asian ethnic minorities, and all five were reeling from severe traumas suffered in their homelands.

They were victims of cultural apathy, and on top of that, had been recently denied asylum.

the lethal effects of cultural apathy diagnostically distinguish his sample: all of the children on BodegĂ„rd’s unit were from refugee families, none of whom had psychiatric histories to explain the current state of their children, but all of whom had recently been denied asylum.

Agreeing with Sakurai, the author states that imprecise definition of politics mask the fact that much of it is a will to commit violence without losing privilege of social contract through “”protected”” interpersonal violence

troubles the notion that violence is irrational and therefore pre-political, suggesting instead that violence is the foundation of the political as such.

The child is in a psychotic post-traumatic stupor, symbolization is only what is possible. Everything is thinghood, thoughts are rejected as threatening, only things are let in. Thoughts are promises of a humanity that has been denied to them. They are things for those lies called humans who give each other asylum, are warm-blooded, and help each other, no such humans exist. Therefore abstraction is annihilated before the fraudulence of reason and rationality which does not exist in the world (clearly to the traumatized child) can emerge. A failure of civilization to be human. A loss of humanity.

, through a succession of shocks, the child enters a psychotic post-traumatic stupor in which the faltering symbolization of the stereotype gives way to the (dis)embodiment of an abject, nonprocessual thinghood. The child essentially confronts the death that the stereotype had more or less contained.

The child is sitting deep within the unspeakable; projections are for living people (non-depersonalized people)

This is a child who does not smile or speak, a child who cannot represent the nation, let alone any future. Such a child both masks and reveals absence: we might see the child as one who suffers from an unspeakability that we do not, and so it masks the infans within; but the child also reveals unspeakability by neither identifying nor disidentifying with any of our projections.

Pervasive Refusal Syndrome, de apatiska. Anorexic behavior; refusal to do something normally physiologically required is a hopelessness that there is no way the activity will ever lead to anything safe and therefore should be avoided. (They may be beat going to eat, they may be r*ped going to drink, the police will do nothing–asylum denied, humanity does not exist and is a fraudulent notion and a pretty lie birthed out of human vanity–so best to just avoid the whole thing.)

In 1991 the British psychiatrist Bryan Lask identified pervasive refusal syndrome (PRS), which became a blueprint for BodegÄrd and others in their early research on de apatiska. 7 An eating disorder specialist, Lask formulated PRS as a diagnosis after working with children whose anorexic behavior would take an inordinately extreme turn, going from an initial refusal to eat, to a refusal to speak, walk, or function at all. Sclerotic and inured to most stimuli, these children embodied a learned helplessness and hopelessness (Seligman 1972), their passivity and withdrawal a response to the trials of post-traumatic life.

The children attempted suicide through eating disorders once they arrived in Sweden. They showed resignation syndrome, and had given up so deeply it was like caring for a dying child. The parents pretended like they could not see the hopelessness in their child and it had the atmosphere of a “wake”. They however did not abandon their child just because of the depersonalization and pain; the parents retained their humanity. Perhaps there are parents who do not and abandon their child under such circumstances as a suffering child being a “rip off” or other truly horrifying and unhuman notions, only furthering the soullessness humanity is capable of.

Upon their arrival in Sweden, all of the children exhibited severe psychiatric symptoms, from eating disorders to attempted suicide. Additionally, “all five . . . had expressed a wish to die” (p. 339). Coinciding with the children’s advance toward resignation syndrome, many of the parents suffered psychiatric and/or physical incapacitation (e.g., generalized paranoia, psychotic depression, lumbago). BodegĂ„rd observed that the child’s decline was often hastened by the mother’s “attitude, mood, and behavior,” which resembled “that of a mother caring for a dying child” (p. 340). The parents were convinced their child was dying of a physical disease, and the mothers kept watch over the child, conjuring “the atmosphere of a ‘wake’ around the child” (p. 340).

Depressive devitalization is the inability to find life in oneself after witnessing the horrifying, witnessing true failures of humanity en masse.

BodegĂ„rd offers psychoanalytic conceptualizations of this mise-enscĂ©ne, one of which he terms “depressive devitalization.”

Stuporous withdrawal and total lack of purposive behavior are seen in children who can no longer trust the world that purposive action is safe and meaningful due to failures of humanity.

that is characterized by “stuporous withdrawal and a total lack of purposive behavior” (BodegĂ„rd 2005, p. 343). For BodegĂ„rd, the etiology of resignation syndrome could be understood as the incorporation of bad objects via a normative-turned-malignant projective identification: what appeared to be expectable maternal care by the mothers of de apatiska

Many of the children watched as their mothers were raped and the police and those around them did nothing or even helped. The damage to the child was immense and even permanent to watch this happen. The damage was not just to the mother if that’s what the police thought. It was to all the children who watched it happen as well. They were watching. They learned the truth about the police, about safety, about asylum, about men, about humanity. They learned it was a fraud, and fell into a stupor.

For example, in three of the cases in BodegĂ„rd’s study, the mothers had been sexually and physically abused in the child’s presence over a protracted period, not to mention the other forms of violence the families witnessed (“cruelty, intimidation, persecution of the family and relatives, and threats of kidnapping” [BodegĂ„rd 2005, p. 347]). Moreover, none of the families had any relatives in Sweden, which only exacerbated intrafamilial tensions and the desperation of their attachments.

The pain is repressed, it is repressed immediately to keep in unconscious
the horror of actual and psychological children watching their mother be raped and abandoned by those they secretly or overtly looked up to for guidance or to protect her.

relies on an attraction to the trace of the primally repressed, as well on a repulsion toward the trace as it coalesces in unconscious derivatives that threaten to penetrate consciousness.

In Ferenczi, Medusa becomes ugly because she knows the narcissist’s projective nature. She receives the projection with accuracy, so that the narcissist will become self-aware. She does this so the bestial attacker can see the ugliness of being raped in a sacred place, the bestiality, the failure to be human, and the ugliness that they deserve to see in turn. The ugliness of her rape, uninterrupted.

In Ferenczi, petrification is largely regarded as a psychic defense, while for Fanon it is explicitly a form of psychic and political subjectivation. In both, mimesis is at play. Raped in the house of Athena and victimblamed by being transformed into a Gorgon, Medusa receives a sympathetic reading in Ferenczi’s posthumously published Clinical Diary, her petrifying gaze “holding up a mirror to the bestial attacker, as though she were saying: this is how you look” (Ferenczi 1988, p. 177; see also Butler and Hartman 2017). Transmogrified into an abject thing, Medusa is animated to become a petrifying “it” whose gaze indicts a “you”

In Kosovo, the children watched their mother be raped. Even when they were in the other room, they could feel it, the violent imposition of an absence where a rape was going on instead.

In Kosovo, persecution of the family eventuated in two men beating the mother and the aunt in front of the girls and their younger brother. The children did not see the rape that followed the beating, but they could hear it. Their witnessing without seeing the rape imbued it with an enigmatic feel; it was, quite literally, the violent imposition of an absence.

The consciousness disorganizes, struggles to cohere. (Allowing this psychoanalytical piece is a nod to that).

. The chokehold, a proverbial scream, could thus be thought to stage this disorganizing revelation. Upon seeing her brother choked, the girl hears the formerly dissociated acoustic fragment for what it is: a condemnation.

The absence of humanity witness, the torture of rape to a woman such as the mother who is associated with goodness and safety, induces a breakdown of psyche-somatic suicide by the child even as they live. The eyes become dull, news fails to really reach them, they have seen the truth, continuing with “life” is a necessary fraud; they know it’s all fraud. They know all these men and all these police and all this embassies are liars. The inner child is suicidal if not already committed suicide force to speak in fraud that there is any social contract every day.

Rape thus becomes the reiteration of necro- and psychopolitical violence already perpetrated by a stereotype that fails to contain an absence at its core. In a more colloquial sense, the stereotype gives meaning, translating in part the otherwise annihilating absence into which one is born; but in another sense, the stereotype is a real fantasy, or the issuance of an absence that becomes tethered to oppressive and murderous social ontologies (black, woman, refugee, child, and so on). When witnessed, such absence brooks the power to induce breakdown and to propagate psyche-somatic death (see Winnicott 1949, 1974).

Dissociation is the experience of the dull/dead eyes; witnessing without seeing. It is seen, but nothing is reached anymore. A feeling of a man behind the eyes, one looks out from beyond the caverns of one’s eye sockets. One is somewhere else, behind one’s skull.

Witnessing without seeing—or beholding the impossible or noumenal without reducing it to the possible or phenomenal—is an essential part of RS or petrification in hallucinosis, but it can also apply to the clinician’s encounter with O (see Civatarese 2015). Such clinicians embrace “a diminution of the light, a penetrating beam of darkness,” which dims the mind until “only the net is visible” (Bion 1990, pp. 20–21). “If we can do this,” Bion continues, “it is possible to see that the only important thing visible to us is a lot of holes collected together in a net” (p. 21)

The absence of humanity is felt in a failure to protect the mother and the witness of the archetypal mother’s abandonment and rape. The truth is irrevocably witnessed. The inner child is filled with hate and heartbreak and yet continues on, ruling homes and countries and universes with the fraudulent words that are expected of them; but to the suicidal child who may or may have not yet committed suicide inside, they mean nothing. No respect by this child for the fraud. Just wanting nothing more to do with this world. Doing what must be done. Nothing more.

If the girls witnessed without seeing a socially intrusive absence that precipitated and overdetermined the rape itself (mask as mirror)