The "Taffy" Personality

It's really amazing how totally flexible our values are.  There's lots of evidence for that statement.  Think of the kidnappings in which the victim becomes attached to the kidnapper and doesn't run away, even when given the opportunity.  Consider the Stockholm Syndrome.  Leon Festinger demonstrated this with Korean War captives.

As we change our behaviors to better conform to the circumstances we are in, so do our values and ultimately the "inner self" that we usually regard as who we are as a person.  "Temporary" changes also in turn change us, and our values and preferences gradually shift to conform to the "temporary" changes we made.  Eventually we are different people.

Even behaviors that we regard as "symptomatic" of a mental disorder represent current values of ourselves and our circumstances.  If you are depressed, begin telling yourself you are worthless and begin acting as if you were worthless, your feelings will match your behaviors, but more importantly, your own values of yourself as a person begin to change to match your symptomatic behaviors.

A way of slowly becoming less anxious and less depressed is to act less anxious and depressed.  It may take months but our feelings and sense of self will shift to match our behaviors and new choices that govern those new behaviors.

All such "temporary" changes become more and more permanent.  When we divorce and marry again, eventually we change to become the person that fits our new relationship.  Our values and preference change and we become a different person than we were.  It certainly would be interesting to investigate how a spy "going undercover" may end up becoming the person he/she pretends to be;  are undercover police and spies changed by their experiences in the direction of their pretended selves?  Theory would suggest they would do so.

I have begun to think of the personality as resembling taffy.  Put a little pressure on for a long enough time, and .. squoosh!

The Disappearance of the Unconscious (Sorry, Siggie)


The original concept of the unconscious involved a part of the mind hidden from conscious or verbal awareness but which contained all the primitive, childish drives and wishes.  It was able to influence our behavior without our verbal awareness.  Our irrational and animalistic impulses remained comfortably apart from our image of our own character.  Over time the concept took on even more potency to run our lives.

Nowadays, as we watch television, read the papers and books, and watch movies, we see behavior that seems quite primitive even to us.  To the people of Freud's day, in the first half of the 20th century, it would seem animalistic, shocking and outrageous.  We watch it with some amusement and interest. They would have left the room and had bad dreams.

If we had an 'unconscious', what would we bother to bury in it?  We don't bury those impulses anymore.  We are not shamed by them. Actually, we seem to enjoy them at least vicariously. So what has happened?  The unconscious seems to have largely disappeared.
Yet it still appears in peculiar and unique circumstances.  People with rigid and limited self-images or self-concepts find themselves behaving in ways that surprise them (though not those who know them well).  People who are very naive, uneducated or "innocent" seem also to fall prey to "unconscious" impulses.  People from cultures who have a very narrow and limited range of acceptable behaviors or strong religious prohibitions also seem to have problems with their unconscious.

It seems that the "unconscious" is not so much universal as it is a function of denial and repression in certain personality types.   Those behaviors and impulses that are "forbidden" or have been shamed strongly are relegated to the non-verbal sections of the brain.  I imagine this process as being like that of a child shamed by a parent for displaying aggressive or sexual impulses, whose shame strikes at his very self-concept and sense of self-worth.  The child does not want to verbally acknowledge those impulses or admit to them in any way.  However, this does not mean that the impulses will not be acted upon.  It means that the child can express the primitive and instinctual behavior without having to acknowledge that they are a part of his actual self.

So we develop an "unconscious" in situations or circumstances in which an important and emotionally strong impulse is shamed and denied.  Since less and less seems to fall in this category, the unconscious seems to be relegated to those limited circumstance described previously.  No shame or denial equals no unconscious.  We may choose, however, to limit our awareness in order to preserve our "proper" sense of self.

Addiction as privilege

Technically, addiction is the result of your body becoming dependent on pleasure-producing substances to the degree that discontinuing the substance causes profound physiological disturbance.  We could stretch the definition beyond usability by attempting to shoe-horn substances like water or food.  What is meant is quite clear, however.

People attempt to widen the definition of addiction to include behaviors, such as gambling or sexual activity.  As a psychotherapist it is useful to ask the purpose of such a re-definition.  The answers seem clear. There is an implication of reduced power to control one's behavior due to some sort of physical dependency.  "Sex addicts", for example, don't simply enjoy sex, they "must" have it or some sort of withdrawal and physiological disturbance must result. Consequently they are not somehow as responsible for controlling their behavior as the rest of us non-addicts.  The same reasoning applies to "gambling addiction" or "food addiction".
Thus defining oneself as an addict of some kind implies a lesser responsibility and blame for the behaviors involved.  If one simply "can't" (not "won't) control their behavior, they can't be blamed.  They want to consider themselves "ill", not morally culpable.  They should get a free pass  for their behavior, no matter how damaging it may be to themselves or others.

Our innate responses to stimuli fall along a normal curve, with the majority in the mid-range, and with extremes at the tail end of the curve.  We respond to sudden noises with a wide range of reaction, from nearly placid disinterest to sudden leaps and shouts.  One has only to watch the reaction of new-born infants behind the viewing glass to flash photographs to observe this range, and it is clearly innate.  But just because our response lies toward one of the extremes does not imply an "illness" or disorder of some kind.  People who have relatively extreme reactions learn to moderate them.  We do not allow people to have a free pass to hurt someone just because they are more easily angry or frightened than others.  The law makes no exceptions, nor should it.