Relationships: How to Turn a Nerd into an Ogre | Clarissa's Blog

Relationships: How to Turn a Nerd into an Ogre | Clarissa's Blog

I’m speculating lately (more than usual on this topic) that perhaps why psychoanalysis does not make any sense to me, most of the time, is because it assumes an ego orientation to life as inevitable and and natural. The ego is inclined to be self-deceived, as traditional Eastern philosophy points out. It thinks it wants something but it doesn’t. It made a mistake. It didn’t aim for what was good for it but ony for what was familiar. Nietzsche said beneath the ego is the “self”, which actually draws correct evaluations about what is going on with oneself. It commands one to pursue life or to die. If the ego is making a lot of wrong decisions, the self has the executive power to pull the plug and command the individual to die.

This is interesting enough and probably true. In any case, it still assumes that the ego is very important, although now it is not at the forefront of the identity.

Actually, what was always at the front of my identity was superego, which means I did everything not out of desire but duty for a large part of my early adult life. This meant a very harsh and driven life, but I don’t believe I was ever self-deceived about anything. In fact there was little room for “self” in this equation.

I’ve overcome that limitation significantly now, through lots of self-training and actually what Georges Bataille calls “transgression”, which is the way to expand and develop a self beyond the original narrow limitations. But I still retain a different weight to my being compared to the average Westerner, which makes me invisible to them or opaque (depending on how you’re looking at it). One can make judgements about me based on an assumption of the normativity of ego-orientation and I will sit back and simply note they are untrue.

I’ve always tracked all my actions like a good computer programmer recording updates to software and fixing bugs, so I know exactly why I had to choose the mode of transgression to make myself free. If people suggest that I really do not know myself after all, I can can point to my own mental recordings of how much I have changed, thus acknowledging to myself that transgression is efficacious.