Repost: Critiquing Donald Meltzer

He ties in sexual energy with the direct access to (what I would call) the lizard brain's various modalities of consciousness -- power awareness, knowledge awareness and so on. (I am due to once again review his book, The Claustrum.)

I believe the point at issue here is that one stumbles across some explosive internal psychical energy that enables one to shift between the various levels of consciousness from high to low. Meltzer, who writes in the  tradition of Melanie Klein and object relations, has alighted up sexual energy then, as the energetic means by which consciousness shifts. Of course he also doesn't speak of shamanising, but rather of modes of pathology.

Taking from him, indirectely, I can understand, in theory, the psychical melting power of sexual desire -- however I'm  also  inclined to think that rage, even more than sexual energy, is able to open doors of awareness if one's mind has been blocked for too long.  But that is shamanism, not psychoanalysis, since the latter pathologises anything that deviates from established notions of convention.  Meltzer, by the way, is hostile to the use of sexual energy in ways that don't create adherence to already existing forms of reality.  It is possible that his conceptualisation of reality is not deeply philosophical.

Talking shamanically once again, once one has entered R-complex consciousness, one has access to a whole modality of thinking whereby identity and power become pliable to other parts of human consciousness.

Rage gave me the energy to move in ways defensive and offensive -- as if I had suddenly advance to a totally different level of understanding, that was separate from normal, everyday consciousness, and yet not apart from it.  It is likely that, because negative emotions were entirely denied to me as a person being brought up in the Rhodesian feminine modality, to acknowledge and express them gave me insights into an entirely new channel of communication that others had been using on a different frequency all the time.  I tapped into their frequency and thus I understood a great deal more than I had previously done.

And speaking shamanically, again, I did not,  at any stage, lose my 'reason'. Indeed by accessing an awareness of the power complex, all my actions could become multiple times more accurate and instrumental.  My awareness of this level was also at the same time a movement that transcended it, but in knowledge not in blind oblivion of it.