Flexibility of the self is REAL power

Philosophy Forums Philosophy
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Flexibility of the self is REAL power

Those people are STRONG who can withdraw a pseudopod at will from trifles as well as from important matters. The individuals who are strong enough to control the ego rather than the ego being in control is indeed “master of their domain”.

One of life’s more urgent and difficult problems is learning to set the boundaries of the ego. Such control represents true maturity of character and personality.

The “self” is in the body but is not part of the body; it is symbolic and is not physical. The human can be symbolically located wherever s/he thinks part of her really exists or belongs. The more insecure we are the more important these symbolic extensions of the self become. In conceiving our self as a container that overflows with various and important extensions that our technology provides us we might appear like a giant amoeba spread out over the land with a center in the self.

Because the child has no such control and is almost always identified through the parent, the child reflects the parent’s point of view. The child is the parent before s/he is his or her self; psychoanalysis’ call this “repression”. “This simplified discussion of the ego and its boundaries take us right into the heart of psychoanalytic theory, and to one of its true and lasting discoveries: the famous “mechanisms of defense”.

These mechanisms describe how the child stakes out the extensions of the self. “Introjection” is the taking the parts of one person into the image of the self. “Projection” is the placing of the child’s desires and thoughts into others. “Each of us is in some ways a grotesque collage, a composite of injected and ejected parts over which we have no honest control…Little wonder that we spend our lives searching in mirrors to find out who we “really” are.”

Ideas and quotes from “The Birth and Death of Meaning”—Ernest Becker

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Why does psychoanalysis call it “repression” ? That means that if the child didn’t have parents transmiting a point of view, she would be “released”?

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Things like fear, which control the body, also, when felt, show signs of things such as immune-system functionality also being reduced/suppressed.

Control is ultimately, and very often, a form of suppression, in that one thing, running its first corse, is taken away from that course, and set into a new course, by means of applied force.

The human ego is so toxic to the body, because the self has been toxic to everything else, also. It is an incomplete, temporary, virul being, constantly replecating, only in so far as it can consume others, but soon dies, and was not actually, really “alive” in the first place. It could not save itself individually, so it turned others into itself, and made two or more of itself, before it died, so that these two or three could make more, and dodge their incompleteness by means of prolonging the time it would take before factor a thing claimed their existence and took their existence away.

Obviously, Terrans are externalized, imperialistic survivalists, whom are not individually self-sufficient when alone. It is of little surprise, either. But, they have “progressed” in so far as the degree in which they are, has expanded.

Creation via Reorganization.
It was how stars and planets were born.

This reply was for coberst and acquaviva.
Woof.

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It appears to me that psychoanalysis has chosen the word “repression” because the child represses the self and accepts the parents point of view.