I recently read on an internet site, that we have many misconceptions of reality, and after over 60 years of life, I am convinced this is true. We misconceive so many things that we have to ask, what it is that we actually get right! Of course, we seldom admit it. Our facade is holy to us and we’d rather hold on to misconceptions, which fit into our facade, than face the truth and insecurity.
I had a misconception about my own country of origin, Britain, having an ideal in my mind, which I reserved in my forty years as an ex-pat in Germany, where I had originally served in the army. My ideas of moral decency have long not been the ideals of my country – if social media is anything to go by – even though it is often professed to be the case. I was even told by a member of my family that I was like someone who came out of a time machine forty years later.
I have had misconceptions about religion and numerous other things which we all think we know something about, I have had misconceptions about human behaviour – even about my own behaviour. I have thought I understood so many things only to find that, when we actually come face to face with a situation we haven’t previously experienced, we get a new perspective and learn from this experiences. This has had me yearning to learn over the last twenty years, and seen my stumble from one point of view to another, over and over again.
This has led me to believe that misconceptions are a part of life, just as the denial of the same is a part of life. It is only when we have genuine experience of life, when we get out and meet people, talk to them and “get into their moccasins” that we start to understand why human beings have continually attempted to create stories in which these failings are described, and tried to make them universal and general, by using myth and analogy, metaphor and parable. Because by avoiding the mistakes we know we make doesn’t mean we don’t make mistakes, but it can mean than we can grow out of them and perhaps become “wise”.
Our present problem, at the start of the 21st century, is that we think we are above the mistakes people have made in the past – although more and more people have no real understanding of what history has to tell us. This is revealed by the repetition of mistakes already made in the past.
I have come to think of psychologists as a new kind of priest, helping people to overcome their misconceptions using a different language than in the past, but giving absolution all the same.
How would you see the role of psychologists and psychoanalysts in our modern world?