ShrinkWrapped

Defensive Denial: The Focus on the Minor Error

Experienced Psychoanalysts know that the best interpretations are the simplest ones.  There is a good reason for this.  A short interpretation offers the patient less of an opportunity to deny its validity by focusing on a possibly inaccurate subordinate piece of the comment. 

A good interpretation (ie, one that is accurate) exposes to the patient's conscious mind a piece of previously unconscious mental activity.  Thoughts, fantasies, impulses, wishes, are maintained in the unconscious mind because they are felt to be unacceptable to the Executive apparatus of the mind (the Ego). 

One particular, and very clever, defensive maneuver is the veiled negation of the minor error.  Often enough, a correct interpretation is undone by a minor factual error, which the patient then can us to negate the entire interpretation, even while appearing to give it careful consideration.

After a session in which a patient had become overtly angry at me for what he felt was my lack of support, the following day he called to cancel 5 minutes after the session was scheduled to start.  The following day, when we talked about the missed session, he reported that he had been out the night before, had a couple of drinks (unusual for him during the week) and had subsequently overslept.  Further exploration revealed he had gone out with co-workers, despite his policy of never going out during the week for drinks after work.  Conspicuously absent, even in response to my prompting, was any connection to our session of the day before, where he had been so angry at me.

I finally suggested to him that he might have decided to change his policy because he was angry at me and that his "forgetting" to set the alarm was an expression of his unconscious anger at me.  He appeared to give this some thought and replied that he had been annoyed at me, had thought about canceling his session anyway because he wanted to get drunk, BUT in reality it wasn't that he had forgotten to set his alarm.  His clock was broken and he hadn't had time to replace it.  He added that if I had paid attention, I would have remembered that his clock was broken because he had mentioned it just last week.

By underlining my minor factual error, the patient was able to dismiss the entire incident as a meaningless event.  In this way, he was able, at least for a time, to avoid acknowledging his responsibility for the use of an action to convey his feelings and avoid understanding why he was so angry with me.  Furthermore, if I had fallen into his trap and argued the point, we would have been effectively derailed from understanding what was going on in his mind.

Since this was a rather typical type of enactment by this patient, there would be and were many more occasions in which to address his tendency to deny by way of the minor error.  Since one of the things that brought him into treatment was his tendentiousness, especially with his bosses, which stemmed from his troubled relationship with his obsessional and angry father, his well being ultimately depended on understanding these issues rather than enacting them.

We see this tendency to change the subject to avoid unacceptable thoughts and feelings in much of our public discourse.

The Danger of Fantasy in International Affairs: The UN

In my original post on The Danger of Fantasy in International Affairs I offered a definition of "fantasy" and described how it interferes with our ability to accurately perceive and respond to reality:

All people understand the world through various templates or paradigms.  Most of the time, we fit new data into our existing templates until the model breaks down in the face of reality.  In Psychoanalysis, much of the work involves exposing and delineating the unconscious paradigms and templates through which our patients view the world.  Psychoanalysts refer to such templates as "fantasies" and transference, and by exposing such fantasies, we help our patients make a closer approximation to reality and change their dysfunctional behavior, if they so desire.

Unfortunately our reliance on such fantasies has a major impact on our understanding of the world.  Since our perceptions of the world are filtered by the Media, the problem is compounded when inappropriate and dangerous fantasies affect how news from the outside world is filtered by our Media.  While the MSM has been accused of conscious bias, and often gives evidence to support such conclusions, their unconscious bias, based on their fantasies, is more often the problem.

One of the great fantasy enabling structures in the International arena is in the news this week.  The gap between the fantasy of the UN and the dysfunctional actuality of the UN is so great that it can no longer be bridged by the usual psychological defenses.

Cinnamon Stillwell, a columnist for SFGate.com, the online arm of the San Francisco Chronicle, recently attended a conference, The UN and Beyond: United Democratic Nations, sponsored by the Hudson Institute, and filed her report yesterday, Getting Beyond the UN:

Saying Whatever Comes to Mind VII

The Sanity Squad addresses the Pope's remarks about Islam and the not-unexpected response from the usual aggrieved parties, in this week's Podcast, A Religion of the Perpetually Paranoid.  Join Neo-neocon, Dr. Sanity, Siggy, and myself for our discussion and learn why a commenter says, "I feel that I can not hear such a depth of discussion as yours on NPR or any other media."

All of our past Podcasts can be found at Politics Central.

Liberalism and Aggression: Gun Control

My post on Liberalism and Aggression from last week led to an interesting discussion of gun control, pros and cons.  A Canadian commenter, Charles Stewart, offered a variation of a common point made by gun control proponents:

I have no problem at all with controlled gun ownership for recreational or sporting purposes, which is one end of the "gun culture" spectrum, however I do have a serious problem with incidents like the one in Montreal a couple of days ago, which represents the other end. Somewhere in between, there is a level of control that I think everyone in the US could live with if the issue were not so polarized.
In Canada we already have stringent controls, which obviously failed us in Montreal .. most of the guns used in criminal activity here are smuggled from the US .. a side effect of your lack of the same.

It is worth re-visiting some of the points since the UN is in session in New York, and the UN is the ultimate expression of the liberal impulse on an international scale.  In fact, one significant line of demarcation between Liberals and Conservatives (and Neocons) is over the utility of the UN. 

The Liberal position is that the UN serves a number of important purposes and, as a corollary, it is always better to talk than to fight.

The Conservative/Neocon position is that the UN has outlived it usefulness and now serves primarily to protect thugs and thieves and prevent action to protect the innocent.

Pope Benedict, Islam, and Reason

The current emphasis on rationality in our public life and the denigration of religious belief of our elites rests on a misunderstanding of rationality and its role in our civilization.  That is a rather bold statement which flies in the face of current liberal orthodoxy and might also be considered unusual form someone who works at the interface of reason (rationality) and irrationality. 

It is a safe bet that most members of the intellectual elites in Academia, the MSM, and Politics, among others, would argue that our civilization is based on the ascendancy of reason.  We have used our rational faculties to tame the irrationality that resides at the core of our minds.  There may be lip service offered to the idea that at one time religion was useful in taming man's irrational inner beast, but most "sophisticates" would argue that religion has out lived its usefulness.  This argument can be seen frequently expressed as there being no difference between Christina fundamentalists and Islamic fundamentalists (with occasional references to Jewish fundamentals for trifold symmetry.)   This misunderstands Pope Benedict's message.

Daniel Johnson in the Sun writes, in Understanding Benedict:

But the message was, at heart, a straightforward one. The Jewish or Christian God acts in accordance with reason: In the beginning was the Word, the Logos. Benedict emphasizes that this new, logocentric understanding of God is already present in the Hebrew Bible, long before the fusion of Jerusalem and Athens in the New Testament. Our knowledge of God — the God of Israel or the God of Christianity — emerges in the unfolding of the encounter between faith and reason.

As I have written before, civilization depends on binding and controlling the instinctual energies (both aggressive and libidinal) which arise from our irrational, animal, minds.  Without such binding, we are left with the brutal Hobbesian world of pre-history.   What should have been learned from the 20th Century's blood spattered pages, is that reason alone is insufficient to bind our passions.

The Council Has Spoken:

This week, most of the nominated posts, not surprisingly, were related to the 5th Anniversary of 9/11.  The winning Council post was by Matt Barr, at Socratic Rhythm Method.  In Your chance of dying in a terrorist attack, he pointed out, for the slow learners, that you can feel passionately about the current travails without necessarily feeling personally threatened by terrorism.  There was a second place tie between Soccer Dad, who highlighted the Three strands not easily broken that led to 9/11, and my post on 9/11 Ambiguities.

Among non-Council Posts, Cassandra's And At Night, I Dream Of You... won with her moving tribute to a wonderful person lost on 9/11.  There was a four way tie for second place:

Ten Reasons Why the West Will Lose the War on Terror (the pessimist’s view)

Countdown To 9/11: My Days With The Dead

The Shadow of Our Hand

A General Theory of Just About Everything

As always, all the nominees can be found at the Watcher of Weasels and all will reward your time and effort.

Liberalism and Aggression

In today's New York Sun,  R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr., with tongue lightly implanted in cheek, wonders about the source of liberals' discontent with the world in Alone At the Heart Of Liberalism.  He points out that liberal principles are exactly what are most at risk in the current war against Islamic fascism, which would suggest that they would be very supportive of the efforts to defeat such an illiberal movement, yet the liberals have moved far to the left and are effectively trying to hamstring our military and the administration in their prosecution of the war.   Tyrrell quotes Brett Stephens' piece in the WSJ last week:

In a thoughtful and timely Wall Street Journal column Bret Stephens offers this, "Here's a puzzle: Why is it so frequently the case that the people who have the most at stake in the battle against Islamic extremism and the most to lose when Islamism gains — namely liberals — are typically the most reluctant to fight?" They have also been the first to bug out of Iraq, which one would think does not put liberals in a good light.

Mr. Stephens advances several reasons, none of which diminishes the irony of his point. He offers the liberals' "instinct for pacifism," their moral relativism, their weakness for appeasement and their confusion of Islamism with opposition to materialism and to the corporate world.

Tyrrell then offers his assessment:

A Woman Who Couldn't Think

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.

The Moral Bankruptcy of Europe

Old Europe has spent quite a bit of time lecturing Americans on our responsibilities to the International Community and the need for multilateralism in managing world affairs.  It has been easy to dismiss much of their concern as motivated by self-interest of the most venal kind (see Claudia Rosett's articles on the Oil for Food scandal) but it is worth wondering if there is not something more insidious at the core in Europe which presages horrors to come.

Richard Landes at the Augean Stables is covering The Al Durah Trials: Portrait of French Culture at the Beginning of the 21st Century.  If you are unfamiliar with Pallywood and the al Durah affair, please spend some time at his site to get up to speed.  The current trials in France involve a legal attack on the journalists who were involved in exposing the al Durah scandal.  Ace of Spades (courtesy of the indefatigable Larwyn) describes what is involved, in Pallywood on Trial? [Sobek]:

In 2000, a Palestinian cameraman got footage of what appeared to be a Palestinian boy being deliberately targeted by Israeli soldiers, and shot dead. The 55-second video was broadcast around the world, did irreparable damage to Israel's reputation, and sparked a retaliatory Intifada which resulted in the deaths of 500 Israelis.

Problem is, the video was a fake.

Oh well, no harm done, right? I mean, other than all those dead Jews.

But France-2 television (which is owned by the government) has now filed a lawsuit against critics of the film who have shown it to be fake. Anyone with any integrity would admit the mistake and apologize for being an instrument in the deaths of so many innocent civilians, but we're talking about the French, here. So a lawsuit it is.

What France-2, and by extension the French establishment, is doing here is bad enough, but there is worse.

Saying Whatever Comes to Mind VI

Listen in, as once again our intrepid explorers of inner space delve into the issues of the day.  This week's podcast by Neo-neocon, Dr. Sanity, Siggy, and myself looks back at 9/11 and our evolving response to that terrible national trauma, including the continuing difficulty too many have in making moral judgments.

Download or play Grieving and Taking Sides in the Wake of 9/11 and you will not be disappointed.

All of our past podcasts can be found at Pajamas Media.