morethanenoughtruth

One reason why Alzheimer’s is so ugly is that it mimics Narcissism in its deconstruction of the self.  Narcissism might well be defined as the inchoate fear of disintegration.  What can be more frightening?  This wonky insight is something that accrued to my fascination with the important psychoanalyst Heinz Kohut who is agreed to have broken the code of Narcissistic Personality Disorder.  I learned that narcissism is far more complex and ubiquitous than the classic myth of Narcissus, gazing into his pool , provides to the general run of popular psychological understanding.

I believe there is a connection between Alzheimer’s and the mechanisms of human thought.  Why is there now an epidemic of dementia?  I suspect it is because we just plain folks know way too much about it, and we are terrified.  If we indeed create each other’s minds through our interactive gaze, (See previous posts entitled “Gaze” and “Catching Corelle”.) We may be initiating the shutdown of the mental processes through our cooperative hypochondriacal interactions and paranoiac expectations.  We used to say, “He’s just getting old and forgetful.”  Now we say, “He has been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s Dementia”.

Who in 2011 cannot describe in grisly detail how people of advanced age are expected to cognitively decline?  There is the science, the graphs, all slip-sliding down, all predicting what will, must, should occur.  Why “should”?  Because it is expected.  What is expected must occur; if it does not, we will make it occur.

My mother, deserted by my genius father when I was nine, fell into a distraught paranoia.  I too began to anguish, not about all the missed meals, but that I might come to be like her.  She made this wish to detach from her a natural, holding and stroking my hands, telling me that I was just like “Him”, exactly like “Him”, totally like “Him”, that I would surely do great things, like “Him”.  I saw the lunatic gleam in her eyes, and knew she was not there, but was somewhere else less frightening than being left to care for her child all alone with no-one to share the silent scream that chased its tail in her head

I submitted to her gentle stroking of my bi-lateral upper appendages, feeling wrong, feeling violated in some down and dirty way, soiled because at some dark and hidden level I believed I was like “Him”, wanted to be like “Him”, prayed to be like “Him”.  This was a Faustian transaction: I could let my Mother disintegrate, dragged away by the raging tide of her obsession and I could become “Him”, or conversely, I could mount a quiet rebellion.  It was my choice.  In my prior little twerp healthy narcissism, I had thought I created my own world, was thus all-powerful and omnipotent.  When my parents fought, it was always about me.  Mother shrieked at Daddy for his ever longer absences, leaving us bereft of money for basic earthly requirements such as food and shoes with room for growing feet. He loved me conceptually, even poetically, but failed to translate me into a meaty, bony, messy, inconvenient incarnation of all those lovely thoughts and words.

I affected a compromise: I chose to try but never succeed to become “Him”, never to be the son he wanted.  The wisest part of me knew that I must fail.  There was always a way to deny myself the hoped for success that would secure my fathers devotion, and in so doing, validate my mother’s incestuous desire to make me into a “Him”, a creature she could create and adore.

There is no doubt I did inherit an aptitude for understanding and manipulating the physicality of my realities, offering themselves to the joy of creative play.  However, I am not my Father.  I will never be fine enough, smart enough, dear enough, amazing enough.  It is better that I should just be me and let that be good enough.