Larry Loves His Lips: A Satirical CCMMP Case Consultation

Session notes, revised

The original intake was, by Dr. Archibald's own admission, inconclusive. Larry presented with what the doctor initially coded as a diffuse somatic preoccupation: an expressed fear that his lips might depart of their own volition, relocate to Duluth, and take his tooth with them. The session transcript showed appropriate affect (sadness at the prospect), emotional range (potential anger if the lips said 'adios'), and a functioning support network (he would call his dad). Dr. Archibald had written 'fascinating' three times in the margin and referred the case for a follow-up Rorschach, every card of which Larry identified, correctly, as a lip.

That was before Dr. Archibald discovered the CCMMP.

He has now requested a second consultation. His revised case notes run to eleven pages.

The presenting problem, re-framed

Vitz, Nordling, and Titus open their Catholic Christian Meta-Model of the Person with the claim that a reductive anthropology produces reductive therapy: treat the person as a bundle of cognitions and behaviors and you will miss what is actually at stake. Dr. Archibald, trained in the British empirical tradition, had done exactly this. He had heard Larry say 'I love my lips' and diagnosed attachment anxiety. What he had not asked was: what kind of thing is a lip, and what kind of being is the sort of creature who loves his?

This is not a trivial question. The CCMMP's fourth premise holds that the human person — and, by generous extension, the anthropomorphic cucumber — is a substantial unity of body and soul. The lips are not an accessory. They are the boundary of interiority and exteriority, the organ of speech and of the kiss, the instrument through which Larry produces both language and the extended scat sequence that occupies the middle third of every therapy session. To fear their loss is not neurosis. It is, in a distorted register, an intuition about embodied personhood.

Larry does not fear losing a feature. He fears a kind of disintegration.

Childhood trauma and the cogitative sense

Dr. Archibald's second session, once he had his new framework in hand, went directly to developmental history. The results were disturbing.

At age two, Larry left his lips out in the cold. They turned blue. He did not know what to do. At the age of tooth acquisition, he was required to kiss Great Aunt Ruth, who had a beard, an experience he describes as 'weird' with a flatness of affect suggesting considerable suppression. Then, at age eight, he got his lips stuck in a gate while his friends laughed, and spent six weeks in lip rehabilitation alongside a Polish-speaking child named Oscar, from whom he learned only one word: usta.

Benjamin Suazo's account of the cogitative sense — the faculty by which the person makes concrete experiential judgments about particular objects as helpful or harmful — illuminates this history precisely. The cogitative sense is not abstract reasoning; it is the body's trained perception of threat and safety. Larry's cogitative sense has been shaped by a series of lip-specific traumas: cold exposure, unwanted contact with facial hair, public humiliation, and enforced silence. The wonder is not that he loves his lips obsessively. The wonder is that he can still deploy them in scat.

Suazo's framework suggests that lip rehabilitation with Oscar, while linguistically limited, may have been the most therapeutically significant episode in Larry's formation: a shared suffering, an embodied solidarity, and a single word transferred mouth to mouth across the barrier of swelling. Usta. The word for lip. Larry carries it still.

On pride and the fear of loss

Here Dr. Archibald's new notes take a turn that surprises even him. He had assumed Larry's attachment was a form of vanity — an excessive self-regard for a particular feature, a soft narcissism of the face. The CCMMP would call this philautia in its disordered form: love of self that collapses inward rather than opening outward.

But Jordan Peterson, reviewing similar dynamics in clinical work, observes that the person who is most alert to the possibility of losing something is often the one who has already lost it once and knows, in their bones, what the loss costs. [^1] Larry left his lips in the cold at two. He knows what blue lips feel like. His declaration — 'I love my lips' — is not the boast of the vain man. It is the testimony of someone who has learned, through pain, that embodied goods are real goods, and that their loss is a real loss.

The Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 26 treats love as the first movement of the appetite toward a good. Larry's love of his lips is, on this reading, a love of a genuine creaturely good: the gift of speech, the capacity for connection, the bodily instrument through which he participates in community. That he expresses this through scat and lip-percussion is a stylistic choice the tradition does not directly address, but the underlying movement is sound.

The Rorschach problem

Dr. Archibald's third set of notes addresses the ink blots.

Every card was a lip. This had seemed, on first review, to be evidence of fixation — a projective field collapsed to a single object. Under the CCMMP, it reads differently. The cogitative sense, once sensitized, organizes perception around its trained objects. Larry has not lost the capacity to perceive the world; he has a perceptual hierarchy shaped by a history that made lips matter. This is not pathology. It is formation — albeit formation by accident and pain rather than by deliberate virtue-cultivation.

Kevin Majeres, describing the amygdala's threat-labeling function, notes that the organ which has learned to identify something as a threat will keep identifying it as such until approach behaviors retrain the response. [^2] The corollary holds: the person who has learned to identify something as precious will keep identifying it as such. Larry does not need to stop seeing lips in the ink blots. He needs to understand why he sees them, and to let that understanding expand rather than contract his world.

The goal of therapy, on this view, is not to diversify Larry's Rorschach responses. It is to help him recognize that the love underlying his lip-attention is a capacity that can be ordered toward broader goods — that the person who loves his lips fiercely is practicing, in embryonic form, the kind of embodied attentiveness that mature charity requires.

The scat sequence as prayer?

This is where Dr. Archibald's notes become, in his word, 'speculative.'

Teresa of Avila, in the Interior Castle, describes the earliest mansions of prayer as marked by distraction, noise, and an inability to quiet the interior. The soul wants to move inward but keeps generating surface sound. The scat sequence — 'Be dee bap ba beed bap boo / Ye be dap bap boop ba da boo boh' — is, structurally, this: a mouth in motion without propositional content, a self-expression that exceeds language. Dr. Archibald had tried to interrupt it. This was, the CCMMP would suggest, a clinical error. The scat is not resistance to therapy. It is the sound of an integrated creature doing what it was made to do: make noise with its body in a way that means something even when the meaning cannot be decoded.

Steven Hayes, in the ACT framework, identifies the difference between a person being their content and a person having their content as the hinge of psychological flexibility. [^3] Larry, mid-scat, is not anxious about his lips. He is being a creature with lips. This is defusion before defusion had a name.

Revised diagnosis

Dr. Archibald's eleven pages conclude with a short paragraph that he has underlined twice:

Larry does not suffer from pathological lip attachment. He suffers from an incompletely integrated embodied personhood, shaped by early experiences of vulnerability and loss, which has organized itself around a genuine creaturely good in the absence of a broader framework for understanding why that good is good. The therapeutic task is not to detach him from his lips but to help him understand what his love of his lips is pointing toward: the created goodness of the body, the dignity of speech, the real stakes of physical vulnerability, and the community — however lip-rehabilitational — that holds us when we are stuck in the gate.

He already knows the word. Usta. It means lip. It means: I was there too, and I also couldn't speak, and here is the one thing I can give you from my suffering.

That is not so bad. That is not so bad at all.

References

[^1]: Peterson, Jordan. 'God and the Hierarchy of Authority.' Video lecture. Peterson reflects on the clinical observation that unacknowledged actions have a way of finding their consequences: 'I have never seen anyone ever get away with anything at all even once.'

[^2]: Majeres, Kevin. 'How to Approach Anxiety.' YouTube. Majeres describes the amygdala's feedback loop: approach behaviors decrease threat labels over time, while avoidance increases them — the mechanism underlying Larry's gradual recovery of lip-trust.

[^3]: Hayes, Steven. ACT and RFT video lectures. Hayes describes the capacity to be with one's experience rather than defined by it, locating care and longing inside anxiety rather than as obstacles to it.