Ouroboros or the world inside out - страница 13

It was then that I finally decided to question my mother, despite her active protest. She reluctantly told me that, despite a normal birth, I was brought to her only after 10 hours. I was weaned at 9 months of age and sent to my grandmother's house in another city the same day. For the next few years, I saw my mother only twice a month on weekends. Thus, the meaning of the dream I had 5 years ago became clear to me! It was my mother who helped me understand why my psyche was organized in such a way, why I had been suffering from rejection and loneliness all my life, searching for situations where rejection would be overcome, making unsuccessful attempts to find a mate, and why I suffered from night hunger that I could not recognize and confused with loneliness.

I believe this anguish of mine comes from infancy when these feelings were triggered simultaneously – the baby was hungry if lying alone and feeling rejected. Accordingly, as an adult, at night I dream about hunger as anguish, and during the day I perceive anguish (each one has their own, for their lost “paradise,” for their illusory dream) as hunger. By satisfying hunger, we temporarily alleviate the longing. But since this feeling is immense, we have to eat a lot, and the effect of eating is short-term.

So why does this irrational feeling of anguish arise?

Essentially, loneliness/rejection and the resulting anguish is an infantile fear of starvation. “If I'm not alone, but with someone who loves me and doesn't reject me, that means they'll feed me, and I won't die” – that's what the infant thinks. This is what an infantile person thinks on a subconscious level. An adult can feed themselves; they are oriented to the real feeling of hunger and satisfy it. The infant is oriented to the feeling of loneliness as a fear of death and satisfies this feeling with the help of food, which is widely available and excessive in our time, or by constantly searching for a partner, and when a partner appears, by total fusion with them.

The anguish I experienced in the dream, which turned out to be physiological hunger, was very similar to the sensation that haunted me for many years in waking life and which I identified as pain from loneliness. This anguish stems from the combination in the infant psyche of physiological hunger and the feeling of rejection, frozen forever, like a gnat in amber, in the ouroboric structure. It is the anguish of the infant who has been expelled from the womb and deprived of the breast, that is, rejected. This infantile anguish arises from the impossibility of returning to the womb, where it was warm and nourishing, from the unrealizability of this illusory dream. Essentially, it is the consequence of auto-aggression, by which the person punishes themselves for rejection.

The ouroboric personality is always lonely because it lacks empathy, views others consumeristically, and cannot connect with anyone on a deep level, yet it suffers from loneliness. In short periods of love, anguish disappears, feelings burst into life, and there is a sense of reality, bringing the joy of being. But then inevitably comes alienation and coldness. And again, loneliness, and again, anguish.

This is why I identified my anguish, with which I began the narrative, as loneliness. I constantly need someone whose resources I can access, a partner through whom I will achieve my dreams, defeat loneliness, be loved and protected, and, on a deep unconscious level, return to the “fullness” of the illusory “paradise” of the mother's womb.