By Stan
A primary overview of Milk-chan’s psyche, in addition to psychotics generally.
Introduction
Disclaimer:
I’m not a educated psychoanalyst, psychiatrist or a contributing member of society in any means, form or kind. All the pieces you see right here, I merely learn from books.
By means of this “information”, I hope you’ll uncover new particulars, make new connections, maybe acquire a brand new perspective.
Delusions, Hallucinations (Half 1: Freud)
Milk-chan hallucinates and have delusions all through the story. However the place are they from?
We start to reply this query by first analyzing the place psychosis comes from.
From Sigmund Freud’s perspective, all of it begins when the Id, the impulse inside the psyche, encounters a battle with actuality. In neurosis (regular individuals), that is resolved by means of repression. In psychosis, the conflictual impulse can’t be repressed, and it’s “resolved” by means of disavowal— actuality is rejected. The topic excludes each the conflictual concept and its corresponding have an effect on, alongside any facet within the topic’s actuality to which they’re associated.
Then the topic makes an attempt to create “a brand new exterior and inner world … in accordance with the id’s wishful impulses.”
This new actuality is constructed by means of psychotic delusions, the place concepts, judgments, representations, and so forth. are altered to adjust to the the conflictual drive impulses.
To take care of their “new actuality”, the psychotic topic hallucinates, in order that the perceived world adjust to the alterations.
Discover how delusion and hallucination work collectively. Milk-chan believes within the therapeutic results of her newly invented drugs, after which she hallucinates that her issues are cured one after the other.
Reference:
Freud, The Lack of Actuality in Neurosis and Psychosis, 1924
Delusions, Hallucinations (Half 2: Lacan)
But when one hallucinates to maintain their delusions, their imaginary, excellent world alive, why wouldn’t it be as horrible as… Mum?
French psychoanalyst Lacan supplied the reply.
Since his principle is radically completely different from Freud and far much less intuitive, we’ll take our time to briefly look at his principle on the origin of psychosis.
Lacan theorizes that the mechanism which results in psychosis is “foreclosures.”
However what’s it that will get foreclosed?
Initially, as a new child, the infant is in an unitary state with its mom. The kid is one with their mom so far as they know. Then, at one level, the mom establishes a distance from her little one by means of what Lacan calls the “nom-du-père,” the “name-of-the-father.”
The name-of-the-father is the explanation the mom provides for prohibiting the kid’s want to be one with the mom. It topics the Mom’s Need to the prohibition of incest. It additionally acts as a “elementary signifier,” which means it ties the topic (the kid) to the world of language.
Think about your self on a ship in the midst of an enormous ocean. The ocean is language, which precedes your arrival, and the anchor is the “name-of-the-father,” which stabilizes the chain that permit your ship to situate itself on the identical level. What occurs if the anchor breaks off? You will be misplaced within the horrifying ocean of language, a “sentimental mass of the present of discourse.” The signifier (phrases) and the signified (the referent) current themselves in a totally divided kind. The which means of phrases grow to be extraordinarily unstable.
In psychotic topics, the name-of-the-father is foreclosed. To not be misplaced within the ocean, Milk-chan ties the chain to another heavy object she discovered on the ship, and use it as a makeshift anchor. However the weight of such object isn’t fairly sufficient…
The “symbolic order”, the foundations of language, stay fragile regardless of her greatest efforts.
(Bear in mind the terrifying “O” within the sky, the way it distresses Milk-chan?)
Whereas neurotics assume language for themselves and make it their very own, psychotics expertise it as an exterior drive or entity that’s persecutory in some circumstances.
Lacan says, “If the neurotic inhabits language, the psychotic is inhabited, possessed, by language.”
Inside the symbolic order, the ocean of language, lurks the Different. The Different is the purpose of origin of speech and language. That’s to say, language is past aware management, and are available from the Different. The unconscious is the discourse of the Different.
Each phrase we use, each sentence we utter, is already weighted by the historical past of the language, socially and culturally charged with contextual meanings, entangled with quite a few connotations. This inescapable internet tying up language is the manifestation of the Different. As we be taught our mom tongue, the Different’s language, it shapes our ideas and wishes. A primordial spider manipulating our each thought…
We will conceptualize the Different as a spot. The primary occupant of the Different is the mOther, who receives the kid’s primitive cries and retroactively sanctions them as a selected message.
For neurotics, their want is the will of the Different. The topic wishes from the viewpoint of the Different. What makes one thing fascinating is just not associated to the item itself, however merely the truth that it’s desired by the Different.
For psychotics, the internalization of the Different’s want was hindered. The Different’s want is rendered alien, as separate from the topic and having a lifetime of its personal. This alien want is obscure and incomprehensible to the topic. This want typically takes on a persecutory position, embodied by a menacing Different who doesn’t allow or mediate the topic’s jouissance (a type of satisfaction), however goals to satisfy its personal, even on the expense of the topic themselves.
The “O” that distresses Milk-chan symbolizes the “O” of the “Different”. The rogue Different, who doesn’t allow Milk-chan to want, however takes by itself want, even its personal ego.
In line with Lacan, the kid perceives the mOther’s want as threatening, as mirrored in some mOthers’ want for the kid to her end-all and be-all, and different circumstances the place the mOther genuinely needs to acquire jouissance, a type of satisfaction, from her little one. In each circumstances, the mOther would finally engulf the kid, cease them from changing into a being separate from the mOther.
The name-of-the-father stops the mOther from devouring her little one.
With out the safety of the name-of-the-father, the mOther (is perceived to) devours Milk-chan. This appears to be the explanation why Mother is represented in such a horrifying means in Milk-chan’s thoughts, although the video games don’t present us with almost sufficient particulars about her childhood.
References:
Brenner, L.S., The Autistic Topic: On the Threshold of Language, 2020
Fink, B., A Medical Introduction to Lacanian Psychoanalysis, 1999
Lacan, J., Seminar III : The Psychoses, 1993
Vanhuele, S., A Lacanian perspective on psychotic hallucinations, 2011
Delusions, Hallucinations (Half 3: First Demise / Strangulation)
The scene is triggered as such:
Participant: What have been you pondering whereas mendacity on the ground?
Milk-chan: What do you imply? You need to realize it higher than anybody else.
Participant: That’s the factor. I don’t know… that is bizarre. (triggers strangulation scene)
or
Participant: (…) (no strangulation scene)
Milk-chan perceives somebody choking her with each arms, because the participant says they don’t know what she’s fascinated by.
To Lacan, hallucination will be outlined extra precisely as a perceptum that has a paradoxical impact on the percipiens. Let’s unpack this definition step-by-step.
Firstly, A perceptum is psychological picture we have now of the world, and a percipien is the one that perceives. Secondly, Lacan noticed that hallucinating sufferers don’t expertise their hallucinations as being according to different points of their psychological life. Typically, the hallucination is a perceptum {that a} affected person can not convey into coherence with their different experiences.
So what sort of paradox did Milk-chan face right here?
Take into account these:
(a) The participant is a hallucination
(b) The player-hallucination doesn’t perceive what Milk-chan was fascinated by
(c) The player-hallucination verbally identified that they “don’t know.”
We will see an inconsistency inside Milk-chan’s imaginary from (a) and (b), and (c), the direct articulation of the paradox, triggers the “first loss of life”.
Whereas not precisely the case right here, it is price mentioning that Lacan describes that, central to the primary moments of psychosis, is a radical disappearance of order and an expertise of disintegration or vacancy. We see within the recreation that, following the strangulation, the world disintegrates.
Apparently, Lacan additionally means that the topic is “loss of life” at these moments.
Did Nikita know all this?
References:
Lacan, J., On a query previous to any attainable therapy of psychosis, in Écrits, 2006
Vanhuele, S., A Lacanian perspective on psychotic hallucinations, 2011
Desires
We’ll start with Freud’s simplistic principle on goals:
1. Desires categorical an unhappy want, unhappy because of both aware objection or repression. Within the case of repression, the want is unrecognized. The dream on this sense is a return of the repressed.
2. Two issues favor this return of the repressed:
(a) Notion and motricity are inhibited throughout sleep, which protects the dreamer from precise satisfaction. This leads to “topographical regression,” the place the excitation flows again unto the psyche and reinforces the dream-work.
(b) The repressed is censored in our waking state, and this censorship is weakened in our sleep.
3. Although weakened, some remnants of censorship stays, and so usually solely a filtered type of satisfaction will be obtained. The “dream-work” capabilities on this means:
(a) Major processes of condensation and displacement are employed.
(b) Photos are generated.
(c) Secondary revision, the method the place the “dream façade” is revised to offer a believable which means. The thus manifested content material is completely different from the dream’s underlying which means, the “latent dream-thoughts.” Certainly, a dream is sort of oblique in its workings. The dream-work is itself a type of pondering, however with very completely different guidelines from logical ideas, which will be noticed from the contradictions usually seen in goals.
4. The dream supplies an outlet for libidinal strain. It’s the “guardian of sleep” within the sense that its intention, as a channel for catharsis, for reduction, stops the strain from retaining the dreamer awake.
5. The dream’s uncooked supplies are the “day’s residues,” the occasions, ideas, impacts from the latest previous, in addition to bodily sensations that happen throughout sleep. However the dream’s “actual” content material are the reactivated childish reminiscences. The dream is thus a regression to an childish state.
(paraphrased from: https://nosubject.com/Dream)
Insomnia
