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Tag: psychology

  • Theme:

    Mastery: ideal ego vs ego ideal

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    1–2 minutes

    Jaques Lacan, via Freud, discusses identity formation: you begin with the imaginary, the ideal ego, in which one fantasizes about interacting with people and things. This fantasy is the perfect goal, such as being like Michael Jordan or Jesus.

    However, as you work towards your ideal ego (fantasy), it needs real-world affirmation and support. The gaze of others affirms (or denies) your efforts and actions align with your symbolic goal. This is the ego ideal.

    Now, what is interesting is that to achieve your impossible ideal ego goal as the ego ideal (which is to become precisely a copy of Michael Jordan or Jesus) would only pinpoint a “lack” within you: Jordan and Jesus were both highly unique, generating an inimitable quality, revealing your lack of originality or self.

  • Theme:

    Reiterating your power, publicly

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    1–2 minutes

    You must reiterate who you are to self-narrate what you will and will not tolerate.

    These behavioral mantras, pronounced in public, exhibit:
    1) our malleability to talk ourselves into being what we are naturally not
    2) a fear of losing our “place” (which we have confused with ourselves).

    Consider this: By intermittently (occasionally, randomly) repeating your frailty or anger, you manipulate others into not only paying attention but obsequiously submitting to your voice. This is attentional power. You are using their kindness/compassion/empathy to shore up your faltering sense of self.

    You may consider your pronouncements as “standing your ground,” as a moment of strength when it is truthfully the opposite: a social ploy of “acting out.”

  • Theme:

    Enjoy your “symptom”

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    1–2 minutes

    Lacan’s jouissance is paradoxical enjoyment that reaches a painful, disruptive state: not necessarily ecstatic, but destructive pleasure.

    Such a state can be neurotic: compulsively scratching your "itch" both soothes and traps the individual in a repetitive cycle (hoarding, grooming, sex, counting, organizing, procrastination, work-a-holic).

    This "symptom" (Freud’s term) is an early compromise of conflicting desires manifesting in a distorted manner, a sign of unresolved unconscious issues. Yet, Lacan says we can recognize—and accept—our unconscious satisfaction gleaned from our symptoms: it is not merely a problem but a meaningful expression of the self.

    Žižek

    takes it further, saying ideologies are a collective "symptom" offering what feels like pleasure/enjoyment while masking deeper issues and contradictions. (For example, consumerism provides satisfaction and alienation; politics is often about tribal affiliation and winning over moral motivation.) Like Lacan, Žižek is not interested in eliminating the "symptom," which only moves the symptom elsewhere, but in learning from it.

    To accept that our pathology is linked to—integral to—our identity reveals our uniqueness as "symptomatic" of our inability to handle conflicting desires: jouissance reveals our sickness, which is our identity.

  • Theme:

    Loyalty as payment

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    1–2 minutes

    Loyalty pays, but you pay for it.

    Becoming loyal guarantees special treatment, but it often requires a long process of paying in and self-abnegation/abasement in return.

    The fealty of the knight (structured with obligations) or the love of a parent (unearned, irrational gift) is different: loyalty can be gained or lost, becoming fickle and transactional, but it is based on a subjective interpretation of the value you have put in versus the return you are given.

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  • Theme:

    Cognitive dissonance

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    1–2 minutes

    Cognitive dissonance is not only having two non-complementary beliefs that clash, the contradiction producing anxiety about who you are and what you value, but the antagonistic beliefs are handled by doubling down: over investment rather than correction.

    While doubling down may protect the self image (ego) it is merely a temporary soothing of the psychological disjunction, more of a means to displace and distract by acting out and blaming others.

    The longer cognitive dissonance is held, the more pathological the response: to remain traumatically blind we become defensively aggressive; protecting the internal battle through external histrionics.

  • Theme:

    Your Animal Operating System

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    1–2 minutes

    Your unconscious is an operating system for an animal: it speaks in images and metaphors, impulsive drives.

    It directs you before language can get in the way. It works before we can "make sense" of the world’s workings.

  • Theme:

    The art of caring less

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    1–2 minutes

    Therapy is primarily learning to care less. Over-caring leads to anxious rumination, where we spiral into desperation.

    One approach is to shift the direction of care: from inward to outward—caring for others instead of fixating on ourselves.

    Another is to reframe our perspective, diminishing the importance of the issue until we care less. For example, remind yourself that “it’s just a job” or question why we need a relationship with harmful people.

    Ryder Richards
    ryderrichards.com
    letusthinkaboutit.com
    (c) 806.790.5508

  • Theme:

    blunting old survival strategies

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    1–2 minutes

    The tools we use to get us through periods in our lives can lose their purpose. Once we have moved on, there is a tendency to maintain these practices because if they provided safety and security once, they might do it forever.
    Sometimes, the challenge is not maintaining your edge but letting go of your knives.

  • Theme:

    perfect = invisible

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    1–2 minutes

    The perfect child is invisible, a non-entity until trotted out to perform childhood cuteness, which is more often than not a parody of adulthood.

    Many children are taught to hide from confrontation and never stand out, a “good boy/girl” coping tactic to avoid the ire of a tantrum-throwing, belittling bully (parent, sibling, teacher, classmate). The best strategy to avoid causing ripples is avoidance and disappearance: to be perfect is to be perfectly invisible, a polite genie that appears when the lamp is rubbed.

    Yet, this conflict avoidance increases relationship conflict: there is no intimacy with an apparition.

  • Theme:

    Hoarding Protective Strategies

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    1–2 minutes

    The tools we use to get us through period in our life can lose their purpose once we have moved on or overcome.
    Yet we tend to hang on to our protective practices, to reenact them in more and more inappropriate ways. If they provided safety and security once they might do it forever. In such ways our baggage swells, as we hoard our coping mechanisms.