Dr. Dolores Rusk:  On the level of objects and a projective infantile omnipotence where you experience magical thinking about your thoughts and the behavior of objects' relation to your narcissistic wishes, the counterphobia presents as the delusion of some special agency or control to compensate for some repressed wounded inner trauma having to do with the absence of control.

Ortho Stice:  Over linoleum?

Rusk:  My suggestion might be to forget linoleum and objects in general. In for instance an analytic model, the types of traumas counterphobic reactions cover are almost always pre-Oedipal, at which stage objects' cathexis is Oedipal and symbolic. For example small children's dolls and Action-Figurines.

Stice:  I don't play with no goddamn Action-Figurings.

Rusk:  GI Joe typically being cathected as an image of the potent but antagonistic father, the "military" man, with "GI" representing at once the "General Issue" of a "weapon" the Oedipal child both covets and fears and a well-known medical acronym for the gastro-intestinal tract, with all the attendant anal anxieties that require repression in the Oedipal phase's desire to control the bowels in order to impress or quote "win" the mother, of whom the Barbie might be seen as the most obviously reductive and phallocentric reduction of the mother to an archetype of sexual function and availability, the Barbie as image of the Oedipal mother as image.

Stice:  So you're saying I'm overestimating objects?

Rusk:  I'm saying there's a very young Ortho in there with some very real abandonment-issues who needs some nurturing and championing from the older Ortho instead of indulging in fantasies of omnipotence.

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