Maggie's Farm

It is a cliche that the definition of neurotic person is someone who keeps doing the same thing, while expecting a different result. There is surely a good lesson in that expression. However, I often find it useful to think about things from the outside, in ... instead of inside, out. Especially with stubborn minds.

What do I mean? Erik Erikson famously said that "Psychotherapy begins where common sense ends." I like that. Despite being a psychoanalyst and thus by definition a happy diver into the human depths, I rarely take anyone deeper than is necessary. You don't want people to run out of air on the way down, or to get the bends on their way back.

This is why I like the idea of Reality Therapy. You may call it God, or Life, or Reality, or Chance, or whatever you chose, but It has a funny of way of teaching, and re-teaching us whatever we need to learn until we finally learn it, or die first. For me, this is analogous to the image of Christ at the door of our heart, knocking and knocking until we open the door.

Life is always trying to teach us something, and we all have problems and weaknesses and blind spots and areas of stupidity and of emotional immaturity where we can improve our mastery of life and of ourselves.

Sometimes, all we need to do is to stop, look, and listen to find what it is that life is trying to teach our stubborn minds. While I would rather piously - but truthfully - say that the red buds now emerging on my antique French Roses are teaching me that God is in his heaven, instead I will offer a timely but trivial example from my own life. I will quote myself:

An area of life in which I do not function well is with paperwork and book-keeping.  I could find plenty of excuses for this, and plenty of fancy psychological explanations, but I was raised to never make excuses. The truth is that it is a character flaw, a flaw which is thrown in my face every tax season. I procrastinate - which is precisely what I am doing right now by writing this piece. I love Quicken, but I don't enter my checks. I save business receipts, but they collect dust in piles and drawers and and pocketbooks. I have delivered three Suburban loads of good outgrown kids clothing to Goodwill this year, but God knows where those lists are. In the glove compartment, maybe? And what about cost basis for stocks bought in 1987? The computer those numbers were on died years ago. No clue. And since then, I have changed brokerages and the old guy retired.

I try to pretend that April 15 is an absolute deadline, or I would never get this chore done. And I cannot rely on the hubbie, because he will have nothing to do with my mess, so we file separately.

The lesson is just not the annual miserable last-minute hassle to get everything together. Last year, I had a fine of over $3000 for errors and lateness. Ouch. There is just nothing like reality to hit you over the head and force you to learn.

Life is the real final exam, but you get to take it over every day. I will never forget my favorite Neurology professor in medical school who overheard me and a friend bitching about an exam in the hallway. "This is nothing," he said. "Every patient you will ever have is the real exam. These exams are just for you to find out what you don't know, before it's too late."

Keep knocking, Reality. Eventually, we will get it. Thanks to God that every day is a new chance to learn and change.

Marriage is for White People. WaPo, H/T, Instapundit

At the same time, Morse posted a piece at Town Hall titled Marriage: A Social Justice Issue. She points out, as has been done before by others, that most of black poverty is due to the absence of marriage. Marriage creates wealth and social stability, among other things. One quote:

Marriage is a protective factor against social pathologies. Marriage generates and preserves wealth, unlike other family forms which dissipate wealth. A recent publication by the Boston-based Seymour Institute, "God’s Gift: A Christian Vision of Marriage and the Black Family", spells out the case for marriage as the most important next step for the future of black America. The report cites the fact that married families in the black community have twice as much income as unmarried black families.

The founder of the Seymour Institute for Advanced Christian Studies is the Rev. Eugene F. Rivers, III, the black Pentecostal minister whose work with poor urban youth has been widely celebrated. In the introduction to God’s Gift, Rev. Rivers states his case. "The impact of the decay of marriage among black people has been enormous, resulting in higher poverty rates among black families, school failure among children, and the intergenerational transmission of high teen pregnancy rates and female-headed households. Sociological research has implicated fatherlessness in violence, drug use and criminal behavior, especially among young black males."

To those who might argue that marriage is somehow alien to the black experience, linguist John McWhorter has an answer in the most recent issue of The American Enterprise. McWhorter observes that the high proportion of single parent families among blacks is a relatively new development, and not something that can be attributed to some amorphous "legacy of slavery."

And a comment from one of our readers, re the News Junkie post:

What a depressing article. Marriage was ordained by God for the procreation and rearing of children in the service of God. Spouses are supposed to be helpmates to each other not playmates. Marriage is for grownups, not hedonistic children.

Psychoanalytic theory isn't really very complicated. We only have three or four basic concepts, from which a myriad of fascinating ideas derive.

One of the key basic concepts is Transference. At the risk of annoying readers who hate fashionable words like "template," I have to use "template". To keep it simple, a transference is a relationship template, usually molded during youth, and mostly unconscious - by which we mean that we aren't aware that it is acting on us.

Transferences distort our relationships as our brains attempt to apply the template of prior relationships, or, more often, our distorted versions of prior relationships, onto current ones.

Most common are paternal and maternal transferences, but sibling transferences, grandparent, friend and avuncular transferences are common too. (What's the female version of avuncular? Avauntuler?)

Because our transferences tend to be beneath our awareness, they are usually only evident to analysts when observing behaviors or feelings which do not seem to fit the real current-life situation. Thus the less transference-driven our relationships are, the more mature and in reality they tend to be.

As psychoanalytic concepts have been integrated into everyday thinking over the past 100 years, there has been a degradation of the technical terms. Thus we can talk about a "maternal transference" towards government, for example, when someone experiences their government as "need-fulfulling", or a "paternal transference" towards government when it is experienced as "opportunity-providing, demanding, and challenging."

Even if such uses of the concept may not fit the technical usage, they are sometimes useful ways of thinking. For example, it is commonly stated that people tend to view the Democrats as the Mommy Party, and Republicans as the Daddy Party. It sounds like a ridiculous simplification when you hear it, but there is something to it: politics is not rational.

I was moved to write this post because of a couple of items on the blog this week. Pieces about Europe: the passivity of Britain and Norway in the face of their enemies within; the economic irrationality of French socialism, etc.

Such things represent what we would term "regressions" to "transferences."  In other words, backwards developmental steps to more immature and less realistic ways of experiencing the world. When a kid privileged and smart enough to attend the Sorbonne feels he needs to rebel for job security, you know you are dealing with people who have reverted to a child-like, maternal experience of their government. It does not bode well for a nation whose youth seeks security over challenge, and comfort over life adventure.

Similarly, in Britain, with their willful denial of the social cancer they have welcomed, we see a "regression" to a "nicey-nice" childish view of the world in which evil and unpleasantness do not exist - a Mommy World. They tried that before, didn't they?

Despite all of the push in the direction of the Mommy World since Franklin Roosevelt, the US has never fully succumbed to the fantasy that government can make everything "nice." Thank goodness for that. In the US, many people tend to more annoyed when the government does something than when it doesn't.

Thus the US does, indeed, tend to have less transference towards government - eg a less emotionally distorted relationship with government. Most of us want it to just drive away our enemies and to leave us alone, but we do have our share of those who wish the government could make all of our dreams come true.

Lots more to say but this is getting too long. If you like my ideas, click our Psychoanalyst category and read more and get smart.