As a Psychoanalyst, I have spend a great deal of time trying to understand how people change (more accurately, how people's minds change). In a psychoanalytic therapy, the changes we are striving for involve fundamental shifts in the way a person sees himself and others, which then affects how he or she interacts with the world. The goal is to help them minimize the distortions in their perception of reality. We recognize that there can be no such thing as a completely objective sense of reality, but there is, within certain parameters, a consensus reality.
My interest extends from how people change in their most personal psychology to how the conventional wisdom, a part of our consensus reality, can change. For example, for most of his term in office, Ronald Reagan was considered by many (readers of the New York Times, for example) as a doddering fool, who nearly caused catastrophe by his lack of diplomacy (calling the USSR an "evil empire" was just as bad as George Bush and his "Axis of evil"), a reckless cowboy who threatened the world. Amazingly, by the time of his death, he was seen as a giant of the 20th century who was instrumental in freeing millions from the clutches of totalitarian communism. How did the meme change?
Reality is complex and we have learned to use basic templates (symbolic representations) for categorizing and interacting with the world. Our templates exist for everything from the most basic objects to more complex ideas. (Helen Keller's great breakthrough was realizing that she already knew the symbolic representation of a real object, water=wah wah; all else followed that step.) All of us have a mental image of a "chair". When we see a new chair we have never seen before, as long as it falls within certain limits, different for each of us, we have no trouble recognizing its "chair-ness". Moving up the ladder, we have templates for "dog" and "cat" and "friend" and "enemy". We need these templates because otherwise we would spend so much time decoding our environment, we wouldn't be able to function. One of the reasons computers are so much dumber than even the dimmest human is that a computer requires specific rules in order to form templates and there are too many exceptions for an inflexible mind to comprehend. To most of us, a Great Dane and a Chihuahua are obviously dogs, but a computer would have a great deal of trouble trying to group them under the same model.
Biology is conservative; living organisms tend to use as little energy as possible to accomplish its goals; this explains why so many of our genes exist in fruit flies and yeast cells. Why do all the hard work of inventing a new enzyme to split a sugar molecule when we already have the code for one that works just fine, sitting in the DNA of a yeast cell?
Our minds work in the same way, tending toward the lowest energy level necessary. When we have a template, we will tend to conserve that template even if it requires distorting our perception of reality. Our templates form early in our lives. When we put together all our disparate images of our mother (the loving mother, the nurturing mother, the angry mother, the withholding mother, etc) into one complex image, this becomes our template for all the women who follow. If we experienced our mother as more withholding than most, we will tend to see all women as aloof creatures who are cold and unloving. We will also, in a marvelous display of the power of our unconscious, tend to find women to be involved with who, in fact, are aloof and unloving. Our templates often produce this kind of "self fulfilling prophecy." This is an important part of what we mean by "Transference." It is part of how we explain the frequency with which abused children tend to find abusive mates, why children of alcoholics are so likely to find a partner who has an alcohol problem, and why children from loving parents are more likely to find loving mates.
In Psychoanalysis, we set up conditions that allow the reactivation of the underlying, earliest versions of the templates our patients use for their "short cuts" in their interactions with the people in their world. Transference is a part of every relationship because we rely on these templates to help us function and make sense of the world. In a therapeutic transference relationship, the patient sees the analyst as being just like an earlier, primitive template (based on some combination of images or representations of an early important relationship.) Once this is active, we can show the patient how they distort their perception of us. This is not an easy chore, patients resist change, and the moment of clarity occurs at the end of a long pathway.
I will present some ideas on what processes occur in the changing mind in the next few days.
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