A female teacher’s story of eyebrow tattooing Speaker: Professor Xi Wei Ling, School of Psychoanalysis, Paris 7, France
A female teacher, very beautiful, her husband is a high school classmate, in the government department, very handsome. Liu Huaqing, Department of Child Psychology, Beijing Huilongguan Hospital
Once she wanted to have her eyebrows tattooed in a beauty salon, she suddenly thought that some unclean women would also have their eyebrows tattooed, and that they would not pass dirty diseases to her. She stopped at once, but felt that she had already passed it on. She often felt cold and refused to have sex for fear of passing it on to her husband. She often had nightmares at night and woke up crying in the middle of the night.
She went to the hospital to ask if she was infected with this condition. The doctor denied it, but she didn’t believe it yet. Her husband told her that even if he did have the disease, he didn’t care if it was transmitted to him through sex. But she was just afraid. Her body kept shaking when she came for consultation.
What is this problem? How can I solve it?
I would like to use this problem to do two things with you. The first thing that is important is not “how to solve”, but how to work on it.
Focus, as we always do, on the two determinants of impulse: the goal and the object, or thing, or object.
The first one we want to throw out is the question: which one, or which ones, of the impulse targets can be identified in this case? The second one: in the case. Which are some of the impulse objects that we can mention?
This is the daily work of the psychiatrist or psychologist.
When you say it, people think it’s easy, I know the cause, I’ll go and operate. But when you are directly dealing with the patient, it is not simple at all, or even the exact opposite.
Once in an actual clinical situation, you are immediately consumed by your own imagination and assumptions.
The target of the impulse is very easy to locate: it is the verb used by the patient, the verb that he himself uses and repeats over and over again. This verb implies that the imagery of the word is what she over betrays. Betting is a sexual impulse.
In this case, it is immediately possible to locate two verbs.
Some would say that this is a case supervision and to beware of this type of self-deception. I’m not doing case supervision, I’m just taking some of the elements you’ve handed me and playing a purely pedagogical game of unscrambling with you.
There is a “contagion” and a “lengthening”. The eyebrow tattoo is elongation, to understand that the woman wants to strengthen her femininity. “Contagion” is passive, being contagious.
Even if we take only the verb “contagious”, it has a long list of objects. The first one is “dirty”, contagious is contagious with dirty.
Then there is the “eyebrow”; third, the needle, the needle triggers the compulsive thoughts. In fact, there is another object, “other women”, and some “unclean women”.
If we use a very simple solution, we can say that it is in a very small and thin circulation. Why?
Because there is only one goal here, and that is “contagion”. She may do a lot of things during the day, but all of them cannot drain her of this goal. In other words, this target has completely wrapped around her.
The objects listed just now all seem to be related to the target, but the most crucial object is also the only one, the “unclean woman”. She was afraid and convinced to pass on this disease. What does that mean? It is the fear of being an unclean woman, an unclean prostitute. We pause here.
But if someone asks, is this proactive or reactive? That would be a good question.
Because there is a detail that, in fact, in the end, the “contagion” has another object, which is her husband. This is a reversible position that she thinks she will pass on to her husband.
How to work with her? As a psychoanalyst, I will answer you in a very condensed way: it is very important to invite her to speak.
To invite a person to speak means to invite her to speak about her associations. You have to ask yourself: do I work on the target of the impulse or do I work in front of the object of the impulse? We often prefer verbs and invite visitors to speak around “contagion”: What does contagion make you think of? What does being infected make you think of?
Why invite verbs? Because verbs are more dynamic around the target, around the target.
The goal of the impulse, in this case, is currently stuck on the word “contagious”, and when she is invited to do her work on contagion, she will find new objects and goals. For example, to be infected by a disease is to have something dirty enter one’s body.
What entered my body was also my husband’s sperm. Is the husband’s sperm a “dirty” thing? The woman was afraid to have sex with her husband anymore, and she had doubts in this position.
Why don’t we do work on the object she mentioned directly, but on the object of impulse?
Because the object of impulse is always the one that triggers the disease, as is clearly stated in this case. The objects of impulses are actually objects of fear: the unclean women are frightening, the needle is frightening, the husband is frightening to her, although it is not directly stated. The word “sex” is so fearful that it does not appear at all.
The object is just an “image”, and it is her fearful emotions that cling to these “images”. If she touches the object directly, she is directly creating tension.
But working with the verb contagion, with the impulse target, helps the patient to open the field of objects, to make the field of objects more open, so that she can come up with more objects.
This is not the right answer, this is a work, a psychological journey.
What I want to suggest now is to do something very brief, that is, to take only one of the myriad hypotheses as clinical teaching. I know nothing about the case and only teach our course in a very superficial way like this.
What is the most central thought in all the fears? It is to become a prostitute. To be infected as one of a certain group of people, a group of women, unclean women.
The fear came at a very specific time. It was when she was going to get her eyebrows tattooed and wanted to become a little more feminine. To be more precise, theoretically to please her husband, at such a time when she wanted to become more womanly for a man. At this point, we again encounter that important concept called “irreversibility”.
As far as I know, eyebrow tattoos can’t be erased.
The signal behind this is to become a woman “irreversibly” from now on, and to become a woman for him alone. This is actually a very complex spiritual activity. The symptoms reflect a deep inner sway.
A very strong fantasy should have a homosexual core. This core comes in the form of fear, which complicates things even more. We all reassured the woman that her husband was so absolute that “I am not afraid to catch that disease”, but why did she still want to confirm it as a fact?
There is a desire for a thought to linger. A strong fantasy is fixed behind this “imagination”: I will be infected, I am already infected. If something dirty has gotten into me, it means that I have already been done something, by a group of women. It’s not my fault that such passivity, with its pain and pleasure, is not my choice. In the process, I have become one of this group.
Even this one assumption, you can have countless versions: I am one of the prostitutes, I want to be a prostitute, are possible. Even if this thought is something she is afraid of, it is her, who is constantly imagining it.
The lingering of this imagination, which could not be stopped, caused the symptoms to appear.
What happened in the truth?
The first thing she did immediately was to turn from the track of making love with a man. No more of this action. Whether it’s passive or active. We go from childhood, into adolescence, into adulthood, and have to make a decision, and that decision is often a denial, a denial that I have another sex, a denial that I belong to another category.
We see in these kinds of cases that physical adulthood is not determinative. You can express how male or how female you are on the level of consciousness, on the level of social life, but hide an unconscious fantasy of wanting to switch to another sex.
The prick of the needle to her face is the moment that triggers the understood onset of this fantasy. Even if it is only a subjective imaginary prick to. What it really means to be a man or a woman is this. It is that at some point we really have to accept that it is not possible to have everything.
It sounds like a very obvious, simple fact, but it’s really hard to give up. Man or woman is a deep-rooted and severe test.
Freud said, in fact, a person never refuses to deny and give up: I always have a lack in two. So in the spiritual world, there is a place where such an illusion is silently cultivated, as if these two can be born together. For psychoanalysis, everyone is deeply rooted in hermaphroditism, and hermaphrodite is still a more elegant term.
There are countless examples to tell, but there may not be so much time. We don’t talk about it because we leave the rest of the time for the issue of homosexuality, which was mentioned by some students.
The purpose of talking about homosexuality is to better refine the “Oedipus complex”.
Homosexuality
What is it that makes us homosexual, heterosexual, or bisexual? Freud had a scary phrase: “All men are homosexual.”
Freud actually went further and more radically, he didn’t think there was something wrong with “homosexuality”. Everyone thinks there’s something wrong with homosexuality and tries to explain it away, but in fact, it’s a mystery that people are “heterosexual”.
The whole spiritual world itself is gradually constructed, not born. Why is heterosexuality the only choice?
Now we have to talk about the basic elements. The formation of homosexuality and heterosexuality is in a way the same, both through the mechanism of “identification”.
In the case of a young boy, he identifies with his mother and with his father, and begins to develop his own identity. A young boy’s sexual identity begins with an identity that sounds simple, but in fact he identifies with his mother’s female and his father’s female, and his mother’s male and his father’s male. Speaking in this way has been simplified countless times.
All people are deeply rooted in the coexistence of duality, unconsciously. All identities are dual, not “1”. I would be happy if this sounded complicated to anyone here.
The core of homosexuality is identification with the same sex. So the strongest relationship here, the circulation of sexual impulses, is the circulation of the “same”. And there is an important concept in the identity of sameness, called “narcissistic” identity.
Narcissistic identification means that I want to identify myself with someone who is the same as me, who is like me, who is me. When we say a homosexual relationship, we mean that the person is of the same texture as me.
Narcissistic identification usually arises in early childhood and is the more primitive state.
My mother herself told me that I was all she loved, that I was all she had. When Mom said this, she erased herself, erased me. There is no more me here, and no more her.
To simplify things, it means that Mom loves me, I love Mom, Mom is me, and I am Mom. If I’m a boy and I love a man, it’s like mommy loves me.
Mom loves me and I am a boy, and I love boys like my mom does, because I am my mom. Mom loves me, I’m a boy, and when I love a boy, I’m loving me for my mom.
Girls are the same, and this is a very important result.
Mom loves me, I am a girl, and mom loves girls, so I love me by loving girls. In a word, such an identification is very easy. We stay stuck in narcissistic identification through such a cycle.
The model of narcissistic identification is: “This is my sex, sex is mine.” All of it, no lack of it at all.
One has to come out of it. This is why we talk about homosexuality, to refine the Oedipus complex.
Yesterday we talked about counting from “two” to “three”, the structured statement.
To be able to turn to dad and be interested in him when mom has the ability to do so means that I am no longer able to satisfy her completely. I am not enough for Mom, I am not all she has. With me, she was still missing a little something. From here, I had to change my narcissistic identity and move to another model. It was a lot of work. It meant identifying with something that I didn’t have from then on.
In order to transform the self into something I don’t have, the first thing is to distinguish between “I am a boy and my mother is a girl” and “I am a girl and my mother is a girl”, the question of sexuality.
The second level is this “mom likes other things, I am not all she is”. In other words, Mom herself is also lacking and looking for something.
Only when my mother turned away from me was I interested in the source of my frustration. What was making me so miserable? That person or that thing, what is it? Gradually, interest in the other sex will help us come out of our narcissistic identity.
It is classically said that the young boy owes it to the intervention of his father. This intervention can symbolically be expressed as, “No, your mother doesn’t belong to you alone!”
The boy whose private relationship with mother and son is truncated by the father’s intervention will begin to abandon his identification with his mother and gradually pass to identify with his father’s masculinity. Because dad is interested in mom, and mom is a girl, I will be interested in girls.
It is from this time that homosexuality starts to go wrong. The child’s narcissistic identification carries over, and the strong narcissistic identification carries over to the father.
Usually the boy enters into the identification with the father, which is very smooth. In this case the father is very gentle and caring to the child. So, instead of going to the father to find a girl, the boy very simply falls in love with the father. The father is so caring that the boy’s love is easily transferred to the father. This is a partner father.
After becoming a partner father, the boy actually looks for the female component in the father. So it sounds beautiful to say that the boy is in love with his father, but in fact a problem has been born.
There is an overly important identification here, with the maternal nature of the father. Originally, the shift away from the mother to the father was the introduction of another sexuality, but now the problem reverts to exclusivity, back to the narcissistic process.
“Daddy loves me, I am a boy, so Daddy loves boys; I love Daddy, I am Daddy, Daddy loves boys, so I love boys.”
One important difference between male homosexuality and female homosexuality is that female homosexuality is not always recognizable, so it is often misidentified by society and is often widely accepted. What matters is why we are talking about the Oedipus complex.
Because it is completely engraved on the diversity of objects of impulse. Whether you choose a father or a mother, if the object is single and fixed, you fall in the position of “two” and the Oedipus complex does not really enter.
Only when the diversity of the object of impulse can be generated, if I am a man, meaning that I am taking the initiative, I am not an object, I am a subject.
If I am masculine, I will start my journey of seeking different objects.
Back to the “ambivalent mood” already mentioned.
A father who is tender to his child, who seems to love him to the end, has his own ambivalence at the core. In order not to confront his hatred for his son, subconsciously he has to preempt the release of more tenderness.
The father and the son are supposed to have a competitive relationship. The father can’t say “get out” or “get out” because he doesn’t have the guts to face his own ambivalence and can’t get out of his own narcissistic complex. Subconsciously, he was still protecting the illusion that “you are me, and I love you just as much as you love me.
Therefore, the father could not recognize his son as another person. The problem of homosexuality in the spiritual world actually lies in the central position of the “father”.