ellauri083.html on line 332: Although they have flirted with the cathectic (affective) and conative (motivational) modes of consciousness, in the context of identity salience or prominence (Stryker 1968, 1980; McCall and Simmons 1978), identity theorists have generally viewed identities in cognitive terms (see MacKinnon 1994).
ellauri083.html on line 334: When, in turn, this anger proves incapable of restoring the subject to the earlier, wished-for state of things, the characteristic symptoms of clinical depression set in: feelings of helplessness, a tendency to reproach the self for its inadequacy, and, not least of all, the drawing away of cathectic energies from the ego, "emptying [it] until it is totally impoverished." This impoverishment is also referred to by Freud and others as inhibition: "inhibition of all activity," "general inhibition," "complete motor inhibition," or "an inhibition of functions including the interest in the external world." And Bibring has instructively spoken of it as the "exhaustion of ego libido due to an unsolvable conflict" (p. The rhetoric of exhaustion and the exhaustion of rhetoric: Erskine Caldwell in the thirties)
ellauri083.html on line 336: For all their profusion, these paled in comparison with Sachs's newest display pieces: The Cabinet, 2014, and The Rockeths, 2017. The former was a folding case fashioned from orange-and-white striped barricades and festooned with hundreds of tools, hung in groups and inscribed with the names of individuals who have "inspired, influenced, or frightened" the artist--from Le Corbusier and Louis Kahn to the members of the Wu-Tang Clan--while the latter was less a cabinet than a kind of portable workbench and shelving unit, similarly jam-packed with the tools of the artist's trade, as well as a collection of model rockets, all again labeled to namecheck various figures of personal importance--scientists, musicians, artists; Apollo, Dionysus, Stringer Bell. The fetishistic frisson the assembled materials (pens, pliers, drill bits, tape measures) clearly provoke in Sachs was made even more explicit in McMasterbation, 2016, one of a trio of scale-model space modules arrayed on plinths. Featuring a copy of the legendarily comprehensive McMaster-Carr hardware catalogue spread open like a porn mag centerfold designed for lonely gearheads--alongside a ready supply of Vaseline and a handy tissue dispenser--it was part cathectic confession of objectophilia and part self-derogating indictment of his own work's tendencies toward sometimes masturbatory excess. Smart and stupid, funny and somehow a bit sad, it was classic Sachs: too much information, in every sense of the phrase.
ellauri083.html on line 338: Hendershot recalls that, in the Schreber case, God was believed to manifest his creative and destructive power as celestial rays (Freud 22). As with spider-webs and hedgehogs quills, this radial pattern describing dilation and contraction, movement back and forth from center to circumference and from circumference to center, is the essential figure for the paranoid narcissism of a subject who feels threatened by the world and guilty for having taken "his own body [...] as his love-object" (Freud 60). Signaling Fistule's repressed homosexuality, the rays of his intelligence had first been focused on the masochistic annihilation of his genitals, which he denies were the original object of his love ("organes hideux," "vomitoires de dejections"), and then had been used in reconstructing a sexless new reality. Insisting on his exemption from the Naturalist law of biological determinism, Fistule denies his human parentage and maintains that he was born of a star, which, shining like the rays of his genius, had inseminated him and allowed him to be the father of himself, causa sui. Homosexual guilt initially projected as the corruptibility of matter is overcome by Fistule's principle of Stellogenesis, which turns flesh into radiance and bodies into starlight. As Hendershot concludes: "In Freud's theory, the paranoiac withdraws from the world (decathexis), directs his or her cathectic energy to the ego resulting in self-aggrandizement, and then attempts to reestablish a cathectic relationship with the world in the form of a delusional system"
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