Object relations in this film – warning contains strong language…updated

Alexandra's Project (2003) - IMDb

To an adult, a cucumber might represent the penis, just as the vibrator is designed to look like a penis.  “Stick it up your a**”.  Some farmer may have spoken those words to someone wanting a few cucumbers to take home after a hard day of picking or grating them.   It could also be as in my own molestation in which the upstairs neighbor’s nephew committed the act of sodomy upon my 6 year old person, thinking of his male member as being like a cucumber or banana. 

To an undeveloped child, a cucumber is a cucumber.   A banana is a banana, sausage is sausage and a hotdog is a hotdog, all which are frequently used to symbolize the penis.  I have heard many times “I’ll chop your w**ny(wiener) off and other various euphemisms in response to vulgar commands regarding the same, the derivation of which I cannot determine.   Often times it is the young child who is blamed for committing such acts and labeled over sexed, nymphomaniacs, etc, when in fact, the child has been subjected to the traumatic sexual projections of adults around them.

I gained this knowledge after having read Melanie Klein’s The Psychoanalysis of Children in which I disagreed with some of her findings, wondering if she herself had not created the drama amongst the children she studied and then Fairbairn and Grotstein, in which case most of this kind of happening would be part of the splitting and projective identification talked about by James Grotstein.  An example might be, say a woman and her young male child are standing in front of the boss asking for a few cucumbers.  In his mind he says, “yea and you can stick’em up your a** too”.   The boss goes home to his own young boy, forgetting what he said, transfers those thoughts to his son who in playing one day attempts to put something in his rectum that is or resembles a cucumber and/or the woman’s son attempts to do the same.

This is my understanding of what I have read on object relations in the past ten years.  My parents used no such vulgar language when I was a child or adolescent, in fact they were both likely autistic or in a stage of parataxic thinking, which of course affected my own psychological development, why I had such a strong reaction to The Exorcist.  Changes began when they introduced psychology in my Junior year of high school. 

I consider Melanie Klein my savior, a savior of all children subjected to poor parenting for whatever reasons.  She should be celebrated as much as Martin Luther King, The Pope and any President.