Id has become super-ego

  

The id

“The id is the instinctual component of personality that is present at birth, and is the source of bodily needs and wants, emotional impulses and desires, especially aggression and the libido (sex drive). The id acts according to the pleasure principle – the psychic force oriented to immediate gratification of impulse and desire – defined by the avoidance of pain.” (Wikipedia)

Freud: “It is filled with energy reaching it from the instincts, but it has no organization, produces no collective will, but only a striving to bring about the satisfaction of the instinctual needs subject to the observance of the pleasure principle.”

“. . . contrary impulses exist side by side, without cancelling each other. . . . There is nothing in the id that could be compared with negation . . . nothing in the id which corresponds to the idea of time.”

The id “knows no judgments of value: no good and evil, no morality. . . . Instinctual cathexes seeking discharge – that, in our view, is all there is in the id.”

The super-ego

“The super-ego . . . reflects the internalization of cultural rules, mainly taught by parents applying their guidance and influence.” . . . For Freud, ‘the installation of the super-ego can be described as a successful instance of identification with the parental agency,’ while as development proceeds ‘the super-ego also takes on the influence of those who have stepped into the place of parents – educators, teachers, people chosen as ideal models.’

“The super-ego works in contradiction to the id. The super-ego strives to act in a socially appropriate manner, whereas the id just wants instant self-gratification. The super-ego controls our sense of right and wrong and guilt. It helps us fit into society by getting us to act in socially acceptable ways.” (Wikipedia)

Here is a way to describe the psycho-evolution that has taken place in our country suddenly and has overcome much of it since Trump was elected president: Id has become superego. The primitive, guttural, aggressive, amoral and immoral spasms and cries of the Right have been so diligently, so pandemically reframed as the good by a massive concatenation of individuals and institutions that they can no longer be stared down by the actual good, by time-proven conscience. Intentions of care and decency seem to have withered, have weak knees, have been derided, defeated, rendered impotent. I am sure many of us can feel this defeat, this impotence. Trump, a true sociopath, warms millions of people’s hearts with love and with fire. Women’s rights to their bodies – their lives – are torn from them. Simple and practical social aims are hated with the intensity of insanity and insane pain.

The moral magnetic poles of our world have nearly reversed.

One doesn’t reason with the id. In its non-instinctual conceptualization, it is based in the deepest childhood loss traumas and later solidifying losses. To unmask the id would be to return the person to his infant on fire in the crib, to the lost, unparented child. But then – to assign this poisoned force the imprimatur of morality: This is to give it ultimate power. The corrupt person now sees himself as right as God, not a pariah or aberration. Clasping hands with his fellow millions, he feels good, like a Narcissist. “As he basks in the comfortable habitat that he has constructed, an air-tight cocoon of narcissistic enjoyment, life can seem pretty good. In fact, he does feel good; he feels secure, and as long as nothing punctures the closed circle, he will not be aware of any serious personality problems. He thinks he has it all, and those who know him would agree, since he has carefully selected and enlisted them to be part of his world and therefore buttresses his view of himself.” (James F. Masterson, M.D., The Search for the Real Self, “Portrait of the Narcissist,” page 93.)

None of us knows what to do to reverse this regression. Critical thinking among the Right has become impossible. Challenge Marjorie Taylor Greene or Josh Hawley or Donald Trump on their puerility and sociopathic craziness and they will smile and pontificate more righteously than the Pope, who has some humility. The fascinating irony, of course, is that these people are children frozen in their development, in their psyche. So we ask: How can children win? How can the weakest, the inchoate, prevail? This may seem impossible, yet it makes ultimate sense: It is only children who deserve revenge.

Ceasing to believe what you feel

Thirty years ago, I would not have believed – had I thought about it – that children had any right to have their way, to get what they wanted. I would have felt that their opinions were silly and ignorant. I would have felt that a young child's anger about her circumstances was meaningless, to be responded to with greater anger. I would have felt that her simply expressing herself was a nearly insane affront to the hierarchies of the world – the wrongest of wrongs.

Those would have been unarticulated feelings that would have been the deeper substance of what shallow therapists and their clients like to call "core beliefs." An impasse would have arisen, though, had I been asked to exhume the feeling, convert it to thought, and verbalize the thought. That's because I was far gone, but not that far gone that I would have consciously endorsed the belief, even while the feeling existed. That's to say, I would have surprised myself by my own inner contradiction.

I am certain this is the mental subterrane of many parents. The problem is that until they go to therapy, they may never be asked to materialize their hidden, hurt-formed, deep-rooted feeling as conscious conviction. And so they continue to be emotional history-based, treating their children as less-than, as owned, as deserving of punishment, as "misbehaving"* rather than simply behaving in a way that doesn't harmonize with their parent's equilibrium or unconscious unmet needs.

There are doubtless countless internal delusions adults harbor that might be disabused in a shock of disorientation. A man may find that he actually has never respected his hard-working father. A woman may come to see that her lifelong goal of becoming a nurse or a writer or a chef was a fantasy not a fact. You may discover, one day, you are more child than adult. These dormant epiphanies stay buried for a good reason: They speak to childhood failure that we can't base our life on. To be faced with our fundamental escapes is to dissolve our sense of who we are. Take note: Your child is as good as you, is your equal, but since you never got to be equal as you grew up, your child will seem superior to you.

That is undermining. And humanizing.

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* https://www.gordontraining.com/free-parenting-articles/children-dont-misbehave/

The Cosmic Bullseye

 

I am blushing. My New York Times comment to a Charles Blow article* got a pretty fair number of appreciations:

In a way, I think that the biggest problem of our time is that we have become aware, thanks to the news and the Internet, how emotionally disturbed so many of our fellow citizens are. https://nyti.ms/3Eef4D5#permid=117833903.

Plain and simple, grammatically rough, and hitting the cosmic bullseye. Because while awful circum­stances come and go all the time – “Pandemic PTSD,” the “Great Resig­nation,” “Great Grief,” more road rage and gun violence than usual, Blow cites – real­izing that so many people are so corruptly messed up is to dye our psyche, turn our soul to dark­ness, change who we are. It’s the Psychological Messiah, or Antichrist. Realizing this, we will not go back. We have instantly devolved into stunned, huddled watchers.

It started when we realized, two elections ago, that millions of people loved or were deluded by a narcis­sist and socio­path, Donald Trump. And it continues today, tomorrow and into the future, where these people hate a basic­ally innoc­uous president, hate Demo­crats because they are Demo­crats, and love sopho­moric haters who have not an ounce of class. There is mental illness – never to be stigmatized – and there are those person­ality disorders who throw their full colostomy bags at social workers.

This is "disappointment" writ across time and space.

Counselors: If you believe you are helping these afflicted clients, you are professionally mistaken. To remain congenitally angry as a trait is to cover core hurt – yes, from child­hood. And to be barri­caded, defended at one’s depth is to be impervious to help. You are letting them blow off steam and cry tears that come from their twisted umbilical cord. But that steam is infinite, as are the tears.

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* https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/13/opinion/covid-pandemic-ptsd.html.

Self-explanation

I will occasionally read one of my old blog articles, to link a Nostalgia post, or from curiosity, or for "mental masturbation." Sometimes I'll land on one whose purple prose is too false-sounding and perfumey to tolerate; or one which has such a bitter and self-nursing attitude that it mortifies me. Or one that is much too self-disclosing. The thing is -- I know these flaws are destined to happen, because I'm not trying to write objectively. My intent is to present my inner terrain's take on subjects. To write objectively, "scientifically" – as if psychology were about extrinsic facts not feelings and subjectivity – would to me be the hideous height of incompetence. (There's more of that purple, or mauve, prose.)

It stupefies me that all the other psychotherapy blogs I've read do treat the client as a possessor of objective categories and disease entities. Depression is a "disorder," not the result of injury and repression in an individual person's life. Anxiety is a "disorder," not what happens to your child when his fears are poorly answered. Clients are reduced to their thoughts as their primary nature, as if thinking were not what our mind does to justify or run away from our feeling.

This is the reason for my difference: The lens through which a therapist sees the client is his own psychology, and his own psychology, which determines his understanding, is unique, history- and feeling-based, mostly pain-based. I am aware of this, and I use the material deliberately, observing my clients, observing myself, applying myself to others, applying others to myself. I believe other writers either don't know or believe this self-generativity, or do know but think they can and must escape from it for the sake of their professional standing and writing.

Consequently, their articles are light, generic, soothing, dully clinical. Take a read. You will see that you might be touched, but not stirred or shaken.

https://privatepracticeblogs.blogspot.com

Solidly Pessimistic Therapy Laws

Teenagers cannot do therapy. They can only do counseling. Their problems are factors of birth and family life, primarily the way they are raised. The pain their family causes them cannot essentially be faced and expressed, as that would be to question their parents' validity or humanity, an impossibility for a dependent teen. So their dysfunctions will remain. Counseling – friend and sharer of the here-and-now – is the path to travel, as long as the intrapsychic roots of issues are not touched. Depression, anxiety, anger, depersonalization, identity, eating disorders, friendships, college, intimate relationships, jobs, parents' negative personalities and tactics – all these issues can be worked superficially. It's only when the teen leaves adolescence and is away from the childhood home – both are necessary – that the parents can be faced in truth.

I don't believe young children should do therapy outside of extreme circumstances such as the parents' long-term absence. I have never had a client who said that the therapy she was taken to from age five to twelve did her any good. The parent should be the client – for individual therapy and psychoeducation.

Problems of meaning in life cannot be healed. The many adult clients who say they can't tell what is the right direction, or work, or life purpose will not find it because this was prevented by "the loss of the real self in childhood." Depression is the burial of feeling, which over time is the loss of meaning. The person is lucky if some early childhood interest survived repression. But that interest is likely to be submerged beneath the more pervasive depression. People have a desire or goal, or desire for a goal, and then it evaporates.

Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder is simply the result of a more shocking, perceptible loss than other losses. A child whose parent is loveless is traumatized. As Fairbairn said: "Frustration of his desire to be loved and to have his love accepted is the greatest trauma that a child can experience; and indeed this is the only trauma that really matters from a developmental standpoint." All standard trauma techniques are repressive: Like EMDR, they desensitize negative images or feelings or "install" positive cognitions. Some people prefer numbness, so they would say they are helped. Genuine trauma therapy must expel the pain of loss; the more pain, the more expulsive.

Trump culture shows us that adulthood is too often the de-evolution of the injured child through time. Children are not likely to be delusional, swallowing fact-less conspiracy theories with relish; hating anonymous masses of people they have never met; contriving ideologies that are simply their emotional pain and rage rationalized and intellectualized. But the majority of Republican adults are prone to all these errors. We should never assume that children naturally mature. If their injuries are not helped, they will founder more and more as the years go by.

I suspect people will never accept a predominately childhood-determined psychology that states unhealed injury aborts evolutionary growth and makes the defenses that form character. The reasons people will never accept these facts are that they want a stable identity and to be happy. Happiness does not countenance the perpetual saboteur beneath it. Stability requires that we accept our character. So we ignore the darkness. The human race is destined to be delusional.

Here I slap the universe then shake its hand (aka: If anybody can do psychology, then anybody can do physics [skipping the math])

 

👽   If there were planet- or galaxy-sized aliens, would their scientists determine that the smallest detectable particle was fifty thousand miles across?

👽   If there were quark-sized aliens, would their scientists discover particles infinites­imally smaller than the naked eye can see?

👽   Today’s theory is that the universe doesn’t exist, is impossible. There is no compre­hend­ing “smallest” or “largest.” There is no compre­hending “beginning” or “end.” These concepts make no sense in the mind and in reality. There is no compre­hending fundamental particles whose energy derives from themselves and is essentially timeless. Now, it may seem that Des­cartes’ logic ruins this theory: Denying that anything exists presupposes something existing which is doing the denying. But there’s no reason to accept that circular reason­ing. Some­thing came from nothing, as Lawrence Krauss said? Something is nothing. (I realize this theory is a contemptuous affront, a dare: “Show me I’m wrong, universe!”)

👽   The only solid alternative to this theory is that the quantum population, so Uncertain, so baffling, decided to let us live in our ignorance and our translucent science – a kind of détente. They are the quiddity, we are the illusion. We don’t bother their random (-seeming) move­ments and their inscrutable identities, and they don’t disrupt our gross world. I believe they could if they wanted to. Their particles might all march in lockstep. They could forsake camarad­erie and cohesion. They could get tired, peter out, go on vacation, retire.

👽   It may be my self-limiting dysthymia that makes me see the cosmos this way, where God is stumped (“Where did I come from?”) and bored (“I’m . . . everything!”), and where the most highly advanced aliens and we would, after First Contact and a thousand conver­sations, end up staring at each other across a café table, tapping our fingers, wondering at the unknowable.

👽   It would be interesting if nothing existed. Or if Mystery were the ingredient of nature. That’s my second and favorite theory: It changes dysthymia, creates curiosity and awe.