over time. A person might believe in God for the entirety of his life but his image of God might change from an old man on a cloud to an unknowable power.
Every part of our meaning structure is connected to every other part. The part we are conscious of at any one time is really quite small, but the unconscious parts, whether buried in our cellar or just a part we haven’t had any cause to use for a long time, are linked to our conscious part and to one another.
Many people like to delude themselves that they can split their meaning structure into parts which have absolutely no connection with one another.
One extremely popular delusion, especially prevalent in the sciences and the professions, is that you can isolate your personal views and feelings and not allow them to play any part when you make an objective judgement. In psychoanalytic circles this is known as the defence of intellectualization.
Of course, when you are considering a subject which is far removed from your personal life it is possible to take a multitude of factors into consideration and weigh the evidence carefully. However, the more the subject affects you directly the less you can do this. In following the fortunes of the England Football Team I am quite dispassionate about who should be manager, but whenever I was driving from Huddersfield to my home in Sheffield late on a Saturday afternoon and there was an important match being played at Sheffield Wednesday’s ground at Hillsborough my views about football and its fans would become distinctly emotional as I battled through the traffic. Nevertheless, even when a subject doesn’t affect me personally, the only way I can make any sense of it is in terms of my past experience, that is, my meaning structure. I have nothing else on which to draw.
The delusion of objectivity allows many of those who regard themselves as the intelligentsia to believe that they are entitled by their education and intelligence to pontificate on all and sundry. Their education and intelligence have failed to make them aware that they cannot perceive reality directly, that all they have are the interpretations which they have acquired, as we all have, from their personal experience.
If people do not know this they cannot identify just which part of their structure of meaning is influencing their judgement. They then offer spurious reasons for the opinions they hold. They angrily reject any suggestion that there is a connection between their childhood experience and their current opinions or, as a member of that most privileged group, the White, Middle-class Male, they claim that they and they alone have the education and intelligence to know what is best for everyone else.
Such a way of thinking requires little mental effort. In contrast it took me some time and effort to work out that I held approving views about football because my dad approved of football, but, if a particular football match prevented me from doing what I wanted, which was to get home quickly, I wanted to banish football from the face of the earth.
One version of the delusion of objectivity is the belief that politics is totally separate from our personal lives. The feminists who created the slogan ‘The political is the personal’ were derided by their male critics for being weak-minded and emotional. Yet you can’t even draw breath without being affected by politics. Even the quality of the air you breathe has been affected by the decisions made by politicians about pollution.
Psychologists have contributed to our lack of understanding of ourselves by the way they have traditionally separated individual psychology from social psychology, as if you as an individual are separate from the society in which you live. Yet you are a social animal and could not survive without being able to interact with other people.
Intellectualization isn’t the only delusion about the supposed divisions in our meaning structure.
Where the next delusion is concerned we fall into two groups.
We have all been taught one basic delusion, namely that we can separate our experiences from our emotions. Having acquired this delusion, some of us believe that we can dispose of our emotions and just have our experiences. Psychoanalysts call this the defence of isolation and often call such people obsessive-compulsives or introverts. These are the people who can suffer a disaster but still say, ‘I wasn’t upset.’
Others of us believe that we can dispose of our experiences and just have our emotions. Psychoanalysts call this the defence of repression and often call such people hysterics or extroverts. These are the people who will say, ‘Do people really remember their childhood? I don’t,’ and then ‘I don’t know why I get so upset.’
Of course there are often situations where it’s a good idea to keep your emotions in check or to banish certain thoughts from your consciousness, but if you kid yourself that you have disposed of these inconvenient aspects of your structure of meaning once and for all you will soon be in trouble. If, at some later stage, you don’t recognize and deal with these aspects they will come back to haunt you and disrupt your life.
You will have noticed that when a death occurs in a family some family members are very calm and sensible and able to attend the deathbed, agree to an autopsy and arrange the funeral, all without showing many signs of grief. Other family members become distraught with grief, so much so that they cannot contemplate, much less discharge, those difficult tasks which arise from the harsh reality of death.
If you are one of those people who in a crisis become very calm and sensible you need at some later time to allow those unacknowledged feelings of rage and fear to surface and express themselves without any sense of shame or guilt on your part. The people around you need to be able to accept your feelings without criticizing you or rushing to ‘make it better’. If your loved ones lack such wisdom, you need to find a private place where your feelings can come in the full flood which brings its natural conclusion.
If you are one of those people who reacts to a crisis with great emotion and a refusal to acknowledge those aspects of the situation which terrify you most, you need at a later time to confront those aspects of the situation which you so wish to deny. These aspects are not simply part of the harsh reality of life but aspects which carry a personal threat to you: the threat of loss, of being abandoned, of being utterly alone. Such a confrontation is easiest done in the company of people who do not criticize you or rush to ‘make it better’, but developing the skill of quiet and solitary contemplation will stand you in great stead.
Emotions which have not been recognized and dealt with come back in unbidden rage or ‘irrational’ tears or in unpleasant dreams. They will interrupt the efficient functioning of the autoimmune system, thus making the way clear for the development of disease and disability.
A less popular delusion but one which has caught the imagination of the media is that of believing that you can divide your meaning structure into different people. Psychiatrists call this Multiple Personality Disorder. It is an extension of the second delusion where you bury your experiences and invent another role to play.
Women who, as children, have been repeatedly sexually assaulted often report how they tried to split themselves in two, in effect becoming two people, a sexual being and an ordinary girl. While enacting one role they tried to forget that the other role existed. Acquiring the skill necessary to use this desperate defence against annihilation can lead a person to create more and more separate ‘selves’.
If a person does this without reflection upon what she is doing it is not difficult for her to claim that it all ‘just happened’. The professionals and others who become involved with these multiple selves can be so caught up in the drama that they might never try to discover the gross cruelty the person suffered which made such a defence necessary or, equally foolishly, they might decide that sexual abuse is the one and only cause of the person’s behaviour.
Whatever you might like to tell yourself, your meaning structure is all of one piece and each part is connected to every other part. Each part can influence every other part. It is the sum total of all the conclusions you have drawn and are always drawing from your experience, all your ideas, attitudes, expectations, opinions and beliefs. You and your meaning structure are one.