FREUDIAN EXPLORATIONS
PROJECTION
Projection is a mostly unconscious process by which individuals who are
ashamed of their own disgusting thoughts and impulses, attribute those
thoughts and impulses as belonging to another person..........after which
they like to accuse that other person of having
"disgusting thoughts and impulses". This process often happens between family members, and it's not unusual
for an entire family to unconsciously conspire to make one of its members be
the recipient or container of everyone else's craziness and aggression, by
projecting all of their own "disgusting thoughts and impulses" into that
chosen one. This allows everyone else to actually believe that they
themselves are loving, caring, and eminently sane human beings
who must, sadly, co-exist with that one nasty lunatic among them.
REGRESSION
Regression is a retreat from extreme present-day stress,
by reverting back to childhood behavior patterns
from those times in one's life, that are remembered
as having been more secure and predictable. I once had a friend who would begin to talk like a 3-year-old, every time
her husband became really angry at her. I always thought that it was an
annoyingly cutesy thing for her to do, and that she purposely used baby-talk
to charm him. I didn't understand until many years later, that this was her
habitual response to a terrifying confrontation. Being an adult can be a more strenuous undertaking for some individuals,
than it is for others, and to try to run away from it - to regress - is an attempt
to escape for a while, from its many burdens and responsibilities. A lot of behaviors-patterns may be regressive:
alcoholism.......excessive food consumption........engaging in
physical fights........reckless driving.......being financially
irresponsible.......and having problems with authority figures.
DENIAL
Denial is the unconscious decision to deny that what has happened,
has actually occurred, because to admit that it has, would cause
unbearable fear and anxiety. We can assume that some of the older children of Andrea Yates
(the Texas mother who drowned all 5 of them)
had to practice denial throughout their lives, so that when their
mother's abuse finally became deadly, none of them were able to
understand what was actually happening.
We'll never know, of course, but the way she herself told it,
her oldest son became more and more agitated as each child was drowned
and laid down on a bed next to the previous one........and that when it was
his turn, he finally ran away screaming, and tried to hide in a closet,
from his mother's murderous grasp.
We can assume that just before she ended his life, the boy's denial finally
collapsed, and that he was only then, for just a few moments of
terrifying reality, able to understand that his mother was indeed the
evil, ruthless killer he had always refused to admit she was. Children simply cannot admit to themselves, that their parents might be
monsters. Because if they did, their entire world would be instantly
transformed into a horrific nightmare. Which is why children always protect
their parents' true identity by assuming it FOR them........in what is
probably the most heartbreaking denial of human existence. It might have been really interesting to find out what kind of parents
once raised the Texas Judge and the Texas Jury who declared Andrea Yates
"Innocent by Reason of Insanity".
DISPLACEMENT
Displacement is a process by which people re-direct their rage and their
hatred towards someone who is less threatening and less likely to
retaliate, than the person who originally caused them to
feel that rage and that hatred. When a guy I know got stopped for speeding on a local road, his immediate
impulse seemed to be to throw a punch at the officer who was writing out his ticket.
But knowing that this officer had tremendous power over him, he forced himself to
control this impulse, which left him stuck with an intense feeling of rage, so he
re-directed and thereby displaced this rage, by inexplicably
starting to rant about "...those damn Jews".
INTELLECTUALIZATION
Intellectualization is the process of negating anxiety-causing reality
events, by replacing their emotional impact with reason and logic.
Sort of like trying to stop a flood with the power of thought control. I am reminded of a professor who used to repeatedly tell his students
that certain political forces were secretly planning to destroy the world.
He wasn't demented. He was a highly respected writer and educator,
and the things he said made a strange kind of sense. What no one knew until after he had died, was that when told that he
didn't have long to live, he'd been unable to overcome his fear of dying
and his profound sadness at being forced to leave this earth. So he had
simply decided not to be the only one to have to go, and that the rest of
the world would be destined to vanish at the same time. It's always good to remember that all pessimistic and anti-life predictions
about nuclear war, food shortages, financial-collapse-scenarios, global warming,
and other "disasters"........are based on nothing more trustworthy than
some very personal intellectualizations.
REACTION FORMATION
Reaction Formation is the semi-conscious blocking of unacceptable
and dangerous impulses, by replacing them with their exact opposite. There are many married couples, for instance, who are deeply attached
to each other via each partner's Reaction Formation, an exhausting and
never-ending process that must continuously convert feelings of disgust
and dislike, into the faked emotions of acceptance and love. Sometimes, you can guess that this is what's happening, when a couple's
love for each other is fanatical. They never fight and they never disagree.
They can't permit each other to be free to go wherever they choose to go,
to maintain relationships with others, or to have any interests and hobbies
outside of the marriage. In this mutually-agreed-upon, suffocating prison,
the partners share all their friends, all their email accounts, all their message
boards, and all their clubs & organizations. They do everything together as a pair,
and each one of them will actively sabotage the other's attempts to escape.
RATIONALIZATION
Rationalization is often used to create a
false but seemingly credible justification
for actions taken by oneself or by others,
that in reality are contemptible as all hell. During the past few decades, lots of rationalization has
been used to justify the hiring of illegal aliens at a fraction
of the cost of American workers. Corporate and private profiteers have used such rationalization techniques
to regularly convince us that because they saved a fortune on labor costs
by hiring illegals, we, the American people, are able to purchase our homes,
our chicken legs, our T-shirts, and our vacuum cleaners, at a fraction of the
price we'd have had to pay if American workers had been hired to produce
all of those goodies for us. Rationalization is also utilized by parents and educators who seek to justify the
abuse of children........by gangsta mobs hoping to justify their crimes........by
journalists who submit dishonest reports to promote a personal agenda, and
by media programs that present such reports as truth. Rationalization starts out as a scheme used
to betray others, but inevitably transmutes
into a betrayal of one's own personality.
REPRESSION
Repression is the "forgetting" or pushing out of consciousness, of painful
memories and terrifying events that one simply cannot afford to remember. Such memories and events do remain quite alive in the recesses of the
unconscious, however, and may re-enter a person's awareness at a later
time, when intense anxiety attacks are experienced by those who had
hoped to have forgotten all about them. When the violence against white farmers in Zimbabwe became intolerable, the
parents of one little six-year-old sent their daughter to live with relatives in
England, where she was finally able to go to school like a normal child, and to
forget the indescribable terror of Zimbabwe's gun-toting murderers and rapists. As time passed, this little girl also forgot about the parents she had left
behind, and even though she often cried secret tears of a sorrow so profound
that it shook her entire being, she had no idea why those attacks of sadness
kept haunting her. Several years later, when the little girl's mother, who had
somehow managed to escape to England after her husband had been killed,
just walked into the little girl's bedroom and smiled at her........the little girl
started to scream with instant recognition. She kept on screaming for several
hours, after which the long-repressed emotion of loss became too much for
her, and she simply died.
SUBLIMATION
Sublimation is the process that converts free-floating human energy
into labor-intensive acts of production, invention, and creation. Sublimation can transform even our most primitive and aggressive
impulses into truly valuable assets. Sublimation has the power to replace individual feelings of rage
and frustration, with those of joy and satisfaction experienced
as a result of achievement. Every nation, every culture, and every family unit, has a choice:
It can prevent and sabotage sublimation, or it can support
and encourage it. Except for Dubai and Abu Dhabi, Arab nations seem stuck in the Middle Ages.
All "modernity" is actively prevented by the antiquated laws of religious
zealots who want nothing to be changed, nothing to be invented, and
nothing to ever be improved upon. Their societies provide no form of
sublimation, which is why, at a moment's notice, they can get thousands
of maniacal individuals to partake in violent public ragings against the
rest of the world's deeply despised Buddhists, Christians, inventors,
writers, artists, women, and other assorted "infidels". Africa is so profoundly at the mercy of its own tyrants, that all innovation
and all attempts at sublimation are repeatedly being sabotaged, while individual
ragers continue to murder women, children, and each other, with complete
impunity. And whenever someone does have the courage to try to create
something new and life-affirming, they're almost always being made to
watch helplessly, while the rest of their community destroys it. Russia and China are still too overwhelmed with needing to overcome
the poverty resulting from decades of communist violence,
to be able to afford the luxury of sublimation. At this moment in history, the most sublimated populations thrive in the EU,
in Japan, and in the USA, where evolutionary, world-changing inventions
in engineering, science, agriculture, and technology, are a daily occurrence.
NARCISSISM
Narcissism is the never-ending pursuit of one's own gratification and dominance.
It is the choice of self-love combined with a rejection of other-love. Malignant narcissists confirm the accuracy of their own sense of entitlement,
by ruthlessly exploiting and destroying the emotional, intellectual, and physical
freedom of others, thereby dehumanizing and manipulating them as objects
that exist for no reason other than to serve
the narcissist's false sense of grandiosity. To really understand how narcissists relate, one
must remain aware of their unspoken message:
"I REJECT YOUR REALITY
AND SUBSTITUTE MY OWN."
__________
__________
__________ Narcissists often display
the following personality traits:
1. Extreme sensitivity to all forms of rejection and criticism. 2. Sadistic and destructive tendencies. 3. The satisfaction of one's own needs and wants, without regard for those of others. 4. Complete ignorance of the emotional and/or financial havoc caused to others. 5. Uninterrupted self-absorption and self-centeredness. 6. A malignant lack of empathy. 7. Using others to act out one's own aggressive impulses. 8. A personality that's void of identity or true core of self. 9. A brilliant verbal talent used exclusively to distract and deceive. 10. A strange unwillingness to ever provide anything from which others might benefit.
 
TRANSFERENCE
The Transference phenomenon was Freud's second most powerful discovery. It's a
way of interacting with others, that most people engage in without knowing that
they're doing it. It's not very complicated: it simply means that they experience others as
symbolic stand-ins for someone from their childhood with whom they established some
painful or unfinished business that they keep trying to resolve. A man might, for instance, believe that if only he'd been more athletic and courageous,
when he was a kid, his father would have been able to love him, and would therefore
never have disappeared and left him alone with his mother. That same man might also think that if only he had taken better care of his mother
and been able to give her what she needed, she wouldn't have been
crying and screaming at him, all the time. So what does this man do? He'll find a friend, an employer, a co-worker, or a marital partner, who is exactly like
his "vanishing" father or his "crying and screaming" mother.....after which he'll
then try to correct what he had always assumed to have been his own childhood
"failure".....in the hope that this time around, he'll be able to create a success. But this story never has a happy ending. Because he has now transferred or embedded all of his hopes and dreams into
one or several individuals who are destined to re-enact both the rejecting father and
the angry, screaming mother, such stand-in actors will simply repeat the exact same
painful experiences that once turned his childhood into a living hell.
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