When a child is abused by their parent, especially when the abuse involves bodily violations, there are profound effects that include long term impairments of the child's cognitive abilities; in a very real way, the child, and later, the adult victim, is literally unable to think. In milder cases, or where the person has particular resilience, the impairments can be limited to specific, demarcated areas; in more severe abuse, or more vulnerable people, the cognitive impairments can be global.
Consider a woman I treated many years ago, while she was in Graduate School earning her Ph.D. When she began her treatment she had suspicions that she had been sexually abused during her early childhood but had no conscious memories of abuse and no way to corroborate the abuse. She entered Psychoanalysis because of present day difficulties in forming relationships. On the surface there would be no question of her cognitive abilities; she did recall some trouble learning Math and reading in grade school which seemed out of keeping with her overall scholastic abilities, but by High School had become a good student and went to a prestigious University. She found that she had trouble with more conceptually challenging courses and after several years of passable work, graduated college and was accepted into a decent Graduate program in her field. Early in her treatment, one of her complaints was that she was having difficulty understanding basic concepts which she knew she ought to understand without too much trouble.
Her Analysis was characterized by peculiar breaks in her narrative. She would begin to describe a dream, or a memory, or current events, and would suddenly fall silent and begin to squirm on the couch. She had no thoughts at such times and no thoughts about such times. She had quite literally, no thoughts.
Since Psychoanalysis depends on the patient communicating their thoughts (usually, but not always, verbally) this represented a threat to her treatment.
Gradually, we began to find that when these silences occurred, they often followed intrusive thoughts about me. She would have a brief image of me sitting in my chair behind her and then would "hit a wall" and have no further thoughts; in fact, for a long time she was completely unaware that she had even thought of me before "hitting the wall." Following that realization, she noted, with some shame, that not only did she have a fleeting image of me, but had begun to wonder what I was thinking. She could not, no matter what she did, break through the wall of silence that entered her mind at such times. For a very long time, she would completely forget the experience as soon as she left the office.
It took many laborious months for us to begin to piece together what was occurring. She was able to follow a train of thought that was extremely troublesome for her. She would have an image of me, wonder what I was thinking, and then have some tender feelings for me, the Doctor who was trying to help her with her loneliness. Almost immediately, she became aware of an urge to seduce me followed by terror that she would succeed and I would not only respond, but would suddenly turn from the imagined tender and considerate lover into a monstrous, abusive rapist. Her mind would be flooded with images of rape and torture. We could both well understand why she would not have been able to allow herself to think of these things for so long.
One day, after a particularly painful silence in which she haltingly told me that her "scenario" was playing out once again, she gasped. She said that she imagined me brutalizing her and cooing to her that I loved her. She said aloud, "How could I think that?" She then fell silent once more until she uttered, in a strangled tone, "I can't think."
I pointed out, not for the first time, that what was also remarkable was how she seemed completely unable to think that these fantasies might be connected with her childhood experiences with her father, who she knew to be angry and abusive.
Shortly thereafter she tearfully recalled how he used to demand that she tell him that she loved him and that he would tell here that he loved her, often right after a beating. We were able to reconstruct important aspects of her childhood. Her father was an unhappy and angry man; he was frequently violent and abusive. The mood in the house was determined by his mood and his whims. She could be beaten for the slightest infraction or for no identifiable reason at all. Often when he was hitting her, he would tell her it was for her own good and he only did it because he loved her. If she protested, he would hit her harder; if she refused to tell him she loved him, he would hit her harder. She had no choice but to love her abuser; her life and well being depended on it. She needed to believe that she loved him, which also mean that she needed to believe that being abused was an expression of love.
It became clear why she had so much trouble staying involved with a man who was good to her. It took much longer for us to realize that her sexual inhibitions had an even darker and deeper source.
When she entered treatment, she was unable to enjoy sex; most often she felt nothing and, in fact, didn't even feel like she was there during sex. Often she went through the motions without feeling anything at all. On rare occasions she developed a pounding headache during sex but would never tell her boyfriend and would go through with the act nonetheless.
The headaches were pounding, "as if someone was hitting (her) with a hammer from the inside." She began to imagine a little homunculus pounding away at her from the inside. With dawning horror, she realized that the homunculus looked like her father. How had he gotten in there, she wondered? Once again, her thoughts shut down. She began to have dreams of the movie "Alien" where she was the victim. The creature invaded her and took up residence inside her. It did not take any great insight to recognize that she was describing a child's experience of sexual penetration. The monstrous creature forcing its way into her was her father's penis, which to her immature mind detached itself inside her and took up residence within her body.
Much of her analysis involved battles with this creature, attempts to reconcile various aspects of her relationship with her father (and mother, whose contributions I have purposely left out) through her relationship with me. She was able to reject her paternal introject in favor of healthier identifications with me. (With all my flaws as her analyst, I never abused her or took advantage of her.) She not only was able to stop having frequent head aches, but also understood that her rare, though volcanic, temper, which had never really felt like part of her, was a result of her paternal introjects.
[Introjects are primitive, global identifications, which can often be experienced as foreign to the person; "I'm not really like that." Identifications are ways in which we become like an important person and feel like part of ones self.]
The importance of this snippet of a long Psychoanalysis is the illustration of how our rational minds can be short circuited by the combination of dependency and danger. For this young woman, she needed to believe her father loved her. She also experienced his treatment as painful and violating of her person. There was no way for her, or for anyone, to reconcile such disparate facts. She could not question his love and had to believe she loved him. The only way to survive was to stop thinking. After a while, almost any thoughts could lead to contradictions and contradictions were dangerous. She couldn't learn Math because she had to believe that 2+2=5 at the same time as she knew that 2+2=4. Only by not questioning, by not thinking, could she protect herself.
This kind of thought control is the model of totalitarianism; here the personal and the political meet. Recall George Orwell's 1984:
The one thing Winston had held on to was his hatred of Big Brother, which he felt would be his victory over the party's otherwise absolute power. However, by the end of the novel, we see that the torture and 'reprogramming' have been successful, because Winston realizes that "He loved Big Brother.
When you are completely dependent you have no choice but to stop thinking dangerous thoughts. Totalitarian systems, whether Communism, Fascism, Islamic fascism, or Totalitarian-lite Political Correctness (when backed up by legislation) creates dependency and then forces one to believe things that aren't true.
Fjordman has left another indispensable essay at The Gates of Vienna. He has been warning of the dangers of Multiculturalism and Political Correctness in Europe for quite some time. In his current essay, What is the Nature of Multiculturalism? he makes these points explicit:
I agree that Multiculturalism is not exclusively the recourse of the political Left, which may indicate that its roots are complicated and not entirely based on Marxism. However, I disagree with those stating that the closely related form of mind control called Political Correctness has no ties whatsoever to traditional Marxism.
Koenraad Elst describes how Ruby Schembri, a white 35-year old Maltese national who moved to Britain in 2004, earned £750 by taking her employer, HSBC Bank, to court claiming race discrimination because she had overheard a private conversation between colleagues. Watford Employment Tribunal found both Debbie Jones, a local bank manager, and HSBC guilty of racial discrimination after Ms Schembri claimed that she had overheard Ms Jones say “I hate foreigners” and “I am against immigration” in a conversation with a colleague in April 2005.
This was one of the first cases to find that that a comment not made directly to another person, who in this incident was also of the same race as the accused, can be construed as racism. Moreover, the court ruled that using the term “foreigners” is racist. The verdict also indicated that the mere fact of “disliking” foreigners constituted a crime, even if one’s dislike was purely private and not shown directly in one’s behaviour towards a foreigner. Elst points out that thanks to the Multicultural society and its guiding ideology PC, people who in the past would have pursued careers as Inquisition officials or Stasi informers in Communist East Germany can now snitch on colleagues and neighbors.
In another story from the UK, the Labour government is considering denying multimillion-pound contracts to companies that fail to employ enough black and Asian workers. Private firms could be asked to provide figures showing the numbers of black and Asian employees on their payroll. This would then be compared with the proportion of people living in a surrounding area. According to writer Neil Davenport, “the ‘affirmative action’ proposals are less about tackling racial discrimination per se than they are a mechanism to bring the private sector within government control.”
As both these examples from the UK — and many more could be added — demonstrate, there are, in fact, quite a few common features between Multiculturalism/Political Correctness and traditional Marxism. In Marxist societies, the public is continuously bombarded with ideological indoctrination through the media. This constant brainwashing to demonstrate that the ruling ideology is benevolent is a very good indication that exact opposite is true. In case this isn’t be enough, there is also a system for snitching on those who won’t comply with the directives, as well as punishment, public harassment and “re-education” of those individuals who fail to submit to the Official State Ideology.
This Ideology implies that the state has to seize control of, or at least regulate and interfere with, all sectors of society, which leaves little room for individual freedom and thus real democracy. If we notice all the new laws restricting speech and behavior in the Multicultural society, not to mention the massive re-writing of our history and the total change in the very nature of our institutions, we understand that our countries moved rapidly in a totalitarian direction the very second Multiculturalism was adopted as the ethos of the state.
There is little doubt in my mind that this post-democratic ideology was desired and encouraged by certain groups. If we look at the people supporting the most totalitarian and anti-freedom aspects of Political Correctness, it becomes apparent that it is frequently the same organizations and sometimes individuals who a generation earlier supported traditional, economic Marxism. They now hide their goals under slogans of “diversity” and “anti-racism,” but the essence of their ideas is still the same.
The combination of dependency and fear in the modern Multicultural, Politically Correct Society is an analogue of the attack on free thought in an abused child. It took tremendous effort and a powerful constitution for my patient to escape from the box in which her mind was held hostage.
For those who think I might be exaggerating the danger please take a moment to consider the danger for Europe in the al Durah trial in France where free thought is once again on trial: Paris Thoughts: Meditations on the Eve of the Trial.
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