The Finns or
Danes or Swedes, or some or all of them, or thereabouts, have such lovely
social welfare systems. (Yes, I care so little that my conscience militates
against specificity.) Are their velvet-gloved nations better than the U.S.?
Here’s how you answer that question: by the answer to this question: Is there a
lot of domestic violence and child abuse in those countries? Yes, there is. Their
people are not better than ours.
Human beings,
psychologically, are the same everywhere. Roll the political dice at different
times, in different moods, and our country will be run by an actual sociopath
with the cognitive bent of an Oppositional-Defiant fifth-grader. Roll them
again and you get Joe Biden, with decency on its way!
Many people around
the world don’t like strangers, are racist or xenophobes. That’s not our
distinction. Americans are supposedly felled by the disease of rabid
individualism. Is it individualism that led millions to walk lockstep behind
the most childish and botched president in our history?
A society’s
overall coloration, reducing to the political social clubs of its people, reducing
to liberal and conservative and socialist and QAnon and NRA ideologies, reducing
to its visceral definitions of good and bad, reduces to the neuroses of each
individual. Many clients’ presenting problem, or later discovered problem, is a
sense of emptiness and vacuum of identity. “I don’t know who I am. I don’t know
what I like.” Under the emptiness are the gates of repression, and beneath
them, the pain of childhood. Janov speaks of “leaky gates,” defective
repression. Our pain and emptiness are given false identities by our leaders
(whom we could define as: “they who got to the podium first”). Pain, uncertainty,
impressionability, morality, politics and society leak from the deeper brain.
And create the world.
There's not much in this life that can't be linked back to childhood feelings, is there? Somehow, when those feelings are layered into a grown (not grown-up!) body, we take the person seriously, we engage with the manifestations of that childhood drama (Thanks, Alice!) there's so much resistance to entering into the child in the man (or woman, but men have to deny their need of the mother, then somehow re-engage shortly after he - escapes!! ;) A male's emotional journey is, shall we say, "trickier"? after the force of attachment to the mother, the prototypes for future interpersonal relationships (especially without guidance from a well-rounded father). The 'good' narcissism provides the sugar coating to what may be a treacherous journey; of course, most have that sugar coating of healthy narcissism blasted away before things even get started. Often people talk of "A" narcissist , or, "THE" narcissist, like it's a disease they have caught in adulthood, rather than a process absorbed throughout childhood. Mirroring. But what if that mirror is itself an empty shell, insecure, full of dread, fearful and full of nerves, the good and bad get absorbed, there is no discrimination at this age. The mis-attunement can be stored in the body for a lifetime, distorted patterned responses, for which the person will be labelled this or that personality, the world waits to induct the child into its particular hall of fame. Universities, Medical faculties, learned treatises, Abstracts, tomes. The sand on the beach is hot, burns the feet. A small rock pool, beware the crabs!, ah that cold cold water!! (Sorry it's a bit rambling, its hard to compose in a small window. I should really compose in Word then cut and paste!)
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