Comments on: You sowed a baby and you reaped a bomb.

By: Rock The Boat

Rock The Boat — Sat, 27 Feb 2010 09:53:04 +0000

It’s so true. I mean, I probably shouldn’t be commenting here as I lack in sophistication and academia. But certainly, I become more frustrated with my modd when I do not know what is instigating (or driving) it and occassionally I feel like I’m about to explode. Lash out. Oh, the moods. Moods do what moods does.

By: A Teaching (IV) « . . . . . . . Supervalent Thought

A Teaching (IV) « . . . . . . . Supervalent Thought — Sun, 27 Dec 2009 23:26:56 +0000

[...] minor and ephemeral variations that, for people not in dementia, add up to nothing, or sometimes, a mood. If I’m going to work at home there is no place to turn that is free from the noise of her [...]

By: e

Sat, 08 Aug 2009 19:04:49 +0000

though not exactly about moods but rather about spirits and melancholia, Agamben’s Stanzas may be useful to glance at.

By: Joan

Joan — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 11:56:36 +0000

I learn from Heidegger on moods. Just a snippet, from B&T: “A mood assails us. It comes from neither ‘outside’ or ‘inside’, but arises out of being-in-the world, as a way of such Being….Having a mood is not related to the psychical in the first instance, and is not in itself an inner condition which then reaches forth in an enigmatical way and puts its mark on Things and persons.”

By: patsy yaeger

patsy yaeger — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 14:34:07 +0000

wow Lauren–a v. interesting set of ideas. max. freedom and max destructivess is exactly right– the other thing that interests me about moods is how demanding other people’s are–and how difficult to tug away from. A mood can completely fill a room, and filter everyone’s behavior. someone else’s mood can be like an octopus or a sea anemone with very long tentacles.

Hmm–I’m also thinking that my main sense of my mother when I was a child was of her shifting moods, and trying hard to jump ahead of them, or behind them.

So how do moods relate to your research on impasse? Moods are often places to be stuck–things that can be hard to roll around in bed with. What does it mean to be in the mood for sex or not in the mood? Odd, that locution–I’m “in” the mood. patsy

By: ashtor

ashtor — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 16:29:20 +0000

Michael Eigen’s “Abstinence and the Schizoid Ego” (1973) (“The Electrified Tightrope,” ed. Adam Phillips, 1993) organizes a discussion of ego withdrawal around a question of what it means, structurally and conceptually, for a part of one’s ego to be detached and expressing “life-rejecting tendencies.” Eigen relates 3 clinical cases of patients who preserved destructive attachments to their lives (one sabotaged his career by failing to complete a dissertation, another vegetated in front of the television for months and a third was trapped in an endless cycle of failed attempts at rehabilitating from alcoholism). After delineating what these cases have in common, Eigen uses a contrast between Winnicott and Guntrip’s description of the withdrawn ego structure to suggest a version of the “schizoid ego” that is detached *without* necessarily representing selfhood’s core (Winnicott) or libidinal regression (Guntrip).
Eigen writes: “Winnicott speaks of a true, silent, inviolable self, beyond all usual communication with the outside world. This silent self appears safe in a hidden enclosure, out of reach of all impingement” (7). In contrast to Winnicott’s “unbroken – unbreakable? – kernel of the true self,” Eigen cites Guntrip’s model of “such phenomena…as expressions of the regressed aspect of the libidinal ego, the most hidden and withdrawn part of the personality, driven out of contact by fear…the regressed ego, as described by Guntrip, is wholly passive. It seeks the womb” (7).
As a corrective to these two schemes, Eigen offers a third reading of the detached ego. He writes:
“The ego structure described here, on the other hand, is intensely alive and active in its compressed density. It is experienced in an aura of power – it exudes a sense of power. The respite here is not passivity in the womb, not a sleep, but an active seeing stillness, compact and electrifying.” A little later, Eigen continues, “The ego structure appears to be what Elkin has called the “schizoid ego,” an aspect of the self which “retreats to a hidden, detached existence” to preserve a sense of psychic freedom or safety” (8).
Although I am not sure whether the difference between Eigen’s conceptualization of the “active seeing stillness” of the “schizoid ego” is altogether different from Bollas’ idea of the mood as “occasions for the expression of a conservative object” (211), I do wonder whether Eigen makes space for what you refer in your post to as, “many styles of enacting a structure as one gets older.” While Eigen is, like Bollas, focused on the ego’s present relation to a past experience, nevertheless, I am curious about what it means for the question of “the past’s efficient causality” (Berlant) that Bollas’ model necessitates reparative working-through (integrating the arrested emotional moment into the pantheon of transformational objects) versus Eigen’s idea that “actual isolation and abstinence tended to bring the schizoid ego out into the open as a preliminary step toward its integration with the central or communal ego.” While both Bollas and Eigen imagine the eventual integration of exiled affects, I wonder about the possible value of framing detachment as “active” and “electrifying,” rather than strictly the doomed reemergence of the repressed and correlatively, the idea of “abstinence” rather than other more conventional approaches to working-through?

Also I thought the image at the end of the post of hiccuping with laughter at Winnocott’s phrase was especially compelling in the context of the post, in so far as the mood *is* itself a kind of affective “hiccup.”