How psychology has damaged if not ruined me

This toothpaste can’t go back in the tube. I don’t see human drama – in the real world, movies and tv, in books nonfiction or fiction, even great novels – as legitimate. I can only see by x-ray: lost children flailing in their unaware, or only partially aware, adult persona. This goes for adolescents, too. If I didn’t see the person as the neurotically seeking child, countless actions, facial expressions, expressed feelings, all the unique personalities and their stories would be fascinating to me. Fundamental to that – they’d seem like the flower of glorious human nature. But they’re just weak and sorry covers. Adult romantic attractions in movies are just symbiotically needy children. Their confusions and angst, noble pain and great insights are not deep and poetic, just ignorant: They haven’t figured themselves out. They assume the surface is the essence. They know not why they believe what they believe. Sophisticated or cool male heroes – James Bond, Dirty Harry – are just delinquents with a derivative front they may have grown in high school. Adam Sandler isn’t a young-at-heart adult. He’s a frozen adolescent, or infant, acting from the assumption that childish adults are adults.

The profession of psychology doesn’t by necessity do this to its people. Most therapists aren’t trapped under the surface like me. They are living the panoramic jazz. It’s going to be the feeling-centered depth therapists who are there, who can’t accept the adult or adolescent as the substrate. Some writers will also be in our bunker, but not philosophers and intellectuals: They must live the assumption that complex ideation is valid, rather than what it is: the effluent of the child’s feeling, “shaped and channeled by the mental mechanisms of defence into all the shades and textures of adult behaviour.” Vereshack’s next sentence is: “We are the living disguise of a primitive and powerful childhood self.”*

Since I’d have preferred to be a normal person, I slide up to the here-and-now whenever possible. I don’t talk like the self-editing and -polishing pseudo-intellectual I was in high school and college. I’m slightly raucous, spontaneous, part-childish (oppositional-defiant) and profane, stammering and gibbering like a Tarantino lowlife. I don’t dissect Jennifer Aniston’s bitch personality on The Morning Show. I live my marriage in the moment – have already seen my wife’s embedded child, which shines through frequently. Moving on . . . .

While I’m glad that most people don’t live underground like me, they do look silly, dangerous, destructive, blind and dumb to me when they don’t. But there is a reprieve: therapy clients. Most of mine want to understand whence they came. They learn the ungainly, slapping webbed feet beneath their – and their family’s – presentable duck. And I believe they leave therapy to live for at least a while in the nether zone between normal human drama and self-awareness of their childhood webbed feet. I’ll admit I’m comfier with people who can see.

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* Vereshack’s on-line book – http://www.paulvereshack.com/paulcvr.html. Be careful – some of this is x-rated.