what appeared to be rageful biting and then immobilized resignation in behaviorally depressed rats.
Freud’s last paper, Analysis, Terminable and Interminable (1939), featured examples of what he perceived to be the unsolvable mystery of helpless psychological entrapment in repetitious patterns of self-destructive behavior. He blamed the lliad’s and Odyssey’s villainous immortal, Thanatos, the ever- threatening spirit of death and destruction to contrast with the good, life giving Eros. The Yiddish word for a personified Thanatos is Moloch ha-Moves. A range of fixations in self-excitatory, repetitious, self-mutilating behaviors is documented in domesticated animals. Dogs, particularly German Shepherds and Labrador Retrievers, can lock up in compulsive grooming cycles of what is called acral lick in which endless licking of paws or flanks lead to the break down of skin into seeping- sore dermatitis, which, in turn, stimulates more licking.
Mark Twain wrote a story about his getting stuck in ceaseless mental repetitions of a catchy, clangy poem. He could not stop reciting it to himself even after days of sleep loss and anorexia. He was finally cured by relating his problem and the poem to his pastor who he then unwittingly heard creating a community epidemic by including the rhyme in his following Sunday’s sermon. Psychologists, who study this form of human mental limit cycle attacks, call this state of internal, repetitiously recited, poetic stuckness, earworms.
There are additional invariants of sudden transformations into spiritual-mind- brain bifurcations into a limit cycle lockups and, as discussed, one of them is psychological splitting. |n psychoanalytic theory, as first suggested by Freud in his 1937 written and posthumously published paper, Splitting of the Ego in the Process of Defense (1940), splitting implies two simultaneous and contrary psychological reactions, one can be conscious and the other unconscious. They can both emerge in conflictual situations involving adaptive efforts of the personality to deal with the opposition between some form of powerful instinctual pressure and attendant perceived or imagined danger. Otto Fenichel’s Psychoanalytic Theory of Neurosis (1950) elucidates multiple manifestations of splitting of the | (more technically, the
ego) into a conscious part that knows reality versus an unconscious part that denies
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