Vlog CCXVII

I had two or three layers of my father's psyche to deal with.  In one part he saw me as his omnipotent mother who was being mean and casting him out into danger without any support.  On the other side he saw me as a representative of himself and his own personal failures, being kicked and booted around in life.  He desperately needed me to express the emotions of his alienation for him.  I had to express his response to all the negativity he had encountered in life  -- the psychological torment and anguish of it.  On another level he saw me as "emotion" as such, which is to say the feminine part of the stiff, masculine or soldiery ideal he had been brought up to embrace.  
Well, after his stroke I did help him to express himself in a much healthier fashion by narrating to me his memoirs.  Strangely, the manipulative and projective part of his brain was destroyed by the stroke and he became more linear, realistic in thought, as well as more gentle and uninhibited.  So I have all these disjointed vignettes, narrating his pain.