The Mutant Self

Scott Greenwalt, Shrouded Mutation

Event-traumatised individuals live in a rather suspended state, defined in part by the intrusion of the real into the personal[…] (p.95)

[The word mutant] is an apt description of a self that was changed by a sudden event. (p.97)

These people are often schizoid personalities [and they seem] to recall easily the period of self-mutation. Knowing they have endured a change to their personality, such individuals must call upon a certain kind of personal parenting to hold themselves together, lest their new character break into its own form of madness. Schizoid stiffness […] is an effort on the part of the ego, to hold the mutational self in place.

People who feel they mutationally changed rather that psychodevelopmentally evolved convey this sense of fatedness by creating a curious atmosphere around themselves, achieved through odd gestures, idiosyncratic movements and curious verbalizations of their states of mind, which give off the feel of an impeding climactic change. Something is in the air. Something may be on the verge of happening. The world is not to be taken for granted. (p.97)

[…] The individual who is altered by trauma transforms this deficit into the structure of a wish and henceforth seeks dramatic events as the medium of self transformation. […] The child who has been mutated by the event develops an attachment, therefore, to the nature of mutational eventfulness rather that to the presence of the other. They seek malignant events like some seek relations with people. (p.100)

[…] the individual lives now outside himself, considering himself an outsider. Thrown into the outside by the structure of events, he now is there in the place where it happened, and in that place he observes the self that is mutilated by the course of events. He carries the structure of his phenomenon within himself. Sometimes [the patient might startle another person and bring about a dissociated moment[…] interrupting the other’s harmonic relation to themselves as an object, throwing them outside the internal place into looking at the actual other, looking at themself through the imagined eyes of the other, now quite uneasy about what would happen. (p.102)

Bollas, C (1999) Dead mother, dead child. In G. Kohon (Ed.) The dead mother: the work of Andre Green (pp. 87-108), London: Routledge