ABSTRACT
There we are: "glue" (see Intensifiers—frontispiece). We are all quite used to talking about separation and the effect of separation and the effect of loss. However, in this constellation one of the elements that is always, always present is what I call a "glue-like attachment". It is the only way I can describe it. I think it is similar to what Mrs Bick used to call "adhesive identification". Now, I want to explain something. I put paranoia at the opposite end of it. You see, when there is that glue-like attachment—and I'll try to describe a bit more what I mean by the glue-like attachment in a moment—I think it is very important to go back to this central point that what human beings seek is freedom. If I am attached in a glue-like way to somebody, to my mother or father or whatever, I'm entrapped, and there is a hatred of being in that entrapped state, but it is not the way I experience it. The way I experience it is that I hate the figure. So let's say I am attached to my mother in a glue-like way, I hate her, you see, and someone might say "Well, why do you hate her?"—"Oh, well, she is so possessive and she is so arrogant and she's exploitative and she doesn't take any interest in me" or whatever, and all those things may be true—probably 104are. I haven't yet come across a mother without deficits. However, what is actually hated is the glue-like attachment to either an individual or an individual merged in the group. So that is how you get the paranoia, and the paranoia is always associated with that glue-like attachment. I defy you to produce an example of someone who is paranoid who doesn't have a glue-like attachment to an institution, a school of thinking, a group, or something. It is part and parcel of the same type of system. This is the thing that is difficult to grasp, but it is also part of the system of "God and the Worm" as well. I am just, as it were, bringing the lens round to look at this side of it.
