ENERGY
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GAIN ENERGY
APPRENTICE
LEVEL1
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THE
ENERGY BLOCKAGE REMOVAL
PROCESS
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THE
KARMA CLEARING
PROCESS
APPRENTICE
LEVEL3
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MASTERY
OF RELATIONSHIPS
TANTRA
APPRENTICE
LEVEL4
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2005 AND 2006
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PsychopathTHE MASK OF SANITYSection 3: Cataloging the MaterialPart 2: A comparison with other disorders36. A case showing circumscribed behavior disorder
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36. A case showing circumscribed behavior disorder When behavior disorder is circumscribed, in a child or in an adult, one may sometimes feel that symptomatically the patient resembles a psychopath but that a different sort of personality lies behind the manifestation. Instead of essential indifference to the pathologic situation, we sometimes see genuine zeal to avoid the faulty and self-damaging acts. It is not rare to find relatively normal attitudes to most aspects of life and sometimes healthy and admirable personality features. In such patients, unlike psychopaths, it is more often possible to bring out valid responses and to learn about experiences and relations that have been influential over years and that may have played an important part in causing the poorly adapted behavior. Strong indications can sometimes be found that inner and poorly understood emotional confusions and conflicts are provoking repetitive rebellious and ineffective antisocial conduct. A brief discussion of one such patient may be germane: This young woman in her middle twenties voluntarily sought help front an internist widely known for his interest in personality problems; he referred CATALOGING THE MATERIAL 273 her for psychiatric treatment. Her spontaneous complaint was of sexual promiscuity which she feared would damage her socially. She expressed the opinion that, aside from what these doings might cause others to think of her, she herself deemed them wrong and highly undesirable. A virgin until approximately two years earlier, she had since that time had full sexual relations with over twenty different men. She denied any personal attachment or romantic attitudes toward these partners, to whom she had yielded casually, promptly, and apparently without conflict or indecision. She had obtained pleasant reactions from the physical contact and after the first few ventures began to respond regularly with genital orgasm. She had never entertained illusions to the effect that any of this considerable group of men were enamored of her and said she had no desire to bring out such feelings in them. Her appearance was distinctly attractive and her figure particularly well endowed with anatomic features likely to arouse and enhance erotic interest. An articulate and apparently a candid girl, she showed little reluctance to discuss either her sexual adventures or any other material. In most respects she showed evidence of better than ordinary maturity and a considerable sophistication without affectedness. Her general intelligence was even better than might have been expected from her good record at college and subsequent success in her work. In journalism she had made rapid progress as a writer of advertisements and of feature articles on the daily paper in one of the largest cities in her state. She did not, as many newspaperwomen do, write for the society columns or deal chiefly with material considered of special interest to women. She often discussed politics, scientific developments, and economic problems. Nothing in her appearance or manner, however, suggested masculine characteristics, tastes, or attitudes. She dressed in such a way as to make the most of her looks and had interests and hobbies predominantly feminine. Although the excitement of physical relations seemed to have been genuine and full orgasm occurred and left her without the feeling that anything might be lacking, the experiences reported impressed the examiner, in some important respects, as relatively shallow. She gave as her reason or motive for doing what she regarded as wrong (and as unwise) a mounting sense of tension and a specific desire that she found too strong to resist. It seemed likely that she was really influenced by natural feelings of this sort but not to any unusual degree. In fact, it was chiefly the matter of relieving a trivial or, at most, a rather moderate need than of being driven by intense passions or allured by breath-taking or exquisite possibilities of fulfillment. 274 THE MASK OF SANITY Although she had made her charms fully available to so many men, she usually permitted only a single encounter of this sort. Shortly after the beginning of her promiscuity she had continued with one partner through three dates at intervals of several days, and a few months later she equaled this record with another man. Several other times she had repeated her adventure with the same partner through two sessions. The rule for many months had, however, been one night with almost anybody but two with none. Considering her physical attributes and personal attractiveness, it is not surprising that those who had been so generously treated, often on the first date, wished to continue. She felt not only an aversion for this but also for seeing or having anything further to do with the partner. She realized that after such full and prompt compliance or cooperation at the beginning it would be difficult indeed to keep matters more or less platonic thereafter. She was cognizant of the old analogy between getting the first olive out of a bottle and getting the first kiss and of its even greater applicability to what she had offered without even initial delay or any impediment whatsoever. This did not, however, appear to be the chief factor in her breaking off relations. There was a primary loss of interest in the partner. No evidence emerged of an appreciable sense of shame on her part or of uneasiness about meeting unflattering attitudes and appraisals that might develop toward a girl who lets herself be taken so readily. Nor did she worry about perhaps drawing out strong feelings in the partner, about his developing a binding attachment that might cause him distress. She was not, so far as she was aware, designing her conduct so as to enjoy the frustration or disappointment of all these men by cutting them off so abruptly from a quite lively pleasure they had reason to hope would remain available. Completion of the sexual act was not followed by remorse or self-recrimination. Relieved and pleased, she had no wish for any sort of personal closeness or intimacy with her companion but, on the other hand, she did not feel strong revulsion. She had not sought personal intimacy in the beginning, and nothing happened, despite rather delightful somatic sensations, that gave incentives in this direction. After satisfaction occurred, she did not react with negative feelings toward sexuality or promiscuity as she might had there been strong conscious conflict between an intensely passionate yearning and the ordinary resistances to such conduct under such conditions. She evaluated her behavior as wrong, dangerous, and puzzling, but this evaluation was steady. Her attitude did not lead to a fierce struggle CATALOGING THE MATERIAL 275 against the impulses toward such behavior, succumb temporarily to overpowering passions, and then arise to invoke shame and bitter regret. She did not feel impelled by any special need for variety in changing her partners so promptly and in embracing so many, nor did she have the mistaken idea, so commonly encountered in problems of female promiscuity, that she was proving her charms and sex appeal by the fact that so many men had relations with her. She had been popular with men for a long time before her present habits began, and she realized better than most women that almost any female, even one of distinctly mediocre attractions, would not have trouble in getting seduced by practically any number of males alert for opportunities of free entertainment of this sort. Though sometimes succumbing with almost unparalleled rapidity as soon as her date began his advances, she often pretended to be reluctant and made him go through a good many overtures, both verbally and with caresses, before cooperating. She could not, however, recall having even once, since over a year previously, failed in full cooperation on the man's initial attempt. Although not unresponsive sensually to kisses and caresses, it was not the heightening or prolongation of ecstatic pleasure that prompted her to hold out for a while and allow these preliminaries to run their course. She expressed, in fact, a preference for "going on, getting to it, and getting it over with." She distinctly enjoyed observing with skepticism a man's efforts to pretend he might be taking her seriously, his tactics in going through rituals of deception so common and sometimes rather elaborate, which the predatory male uses to get his way with the ladies. She was not conscious, during early discussion of these matters, of any real hate or contempt but admitted it made her feel that by seeing through these hypocritical ruses and pseudoemotional maneuvers she was getting the better of the man in their encounter. It had not occurred to her that this would be regarded by most as an almost fantastically inaccurate way of scoring in such a contest, since the adversary never failed to gain all his ends. She admitted awareness that men would be inclined to take her lightly, to say the least, on finding that she could be so casually induced to have intercourse, and by so many. She seemed to regret this and to show some concern about it, but hardly to do so in ordinary or adequate degree. She admitted that the feeling of satisfaction and superiority she attained through her prompt recognition of the date's concealed intentions and through inwardly mocking him in the steps he took to work the situation 276 THE MASK OF SANITY toward seduction while pretending other attitudes was distinctly pleasant to her and that she valued it highly. The more this was discussed, the larger part she estimated it to have played in her motivations. She did not recognize any deeply derogatory attitude in this but found in it something more like the thrill of a game in which one enjoys outwitting and defeating, according to fair rule s of the contest, an opponent who is not disliked or despised because of this. She did not feel tempted to show that she saw through the date's pretenses by her manner and attitude, by so telling him, or by making him fail to achieve his obvious aims with her. As about other matters, she entered frankly into the discussion of relations she had previously maintained with an older woman. The patient voluntarily brought up this subject and did not seem to have had any intention to evade it. Shortly after moving to the city where she now worked, she had met this woman, who immediately showed warm cordiality and treated her with attention that suggested both affection and admiration. This new friend, although almost fifteen years older than the patient, was youthful in appearance and in spirit, attractive to men, and extremely intelligent. She and her husband also were on the faculty of a local college. This woman, whose knowledge of literature, music, and of many other matters was considerable, seemed to the patient distinctly the most delightful and understanding person encountered in all her life. A tremendous new interest was aroused in my patient, who found in fiction, poetry, psychological books, and in almost all the activities of life, meaning and delight she had never before discovered or deemed possible. She felt uniquely understood and really cared for in a way that made everything she had regarded in the past as understanding and love seem perfunctory and trivial. For the first time she felt very close to someone and was thus able, for the first time, to realize that this had heretofore been missing. The patient had been popular with both girls and boys and had never considered herself as lonely or isolated. Her friendship with other girls had, she now discovered, been relatively superficial. She realized more clearly also how little her popularity with boys had led to any personal intimacy or valuable shared understanding. She learned far more in a short time from this new friend than she had during all the years at college, and what she learned filled life with interest, humor, and all sorts of marvelous pleasures and goals. She found confirmation of attitudes she had developed toward many of the conventional and uninspiring ideas, demands, limitations, and expectations CATALOGING THE MATERIAL 277 she had encountered in her family. Achieving what she felt was new and real understanding which she could apply to conflicts and uncertainties that had troubled her as long as she could remember, she now felt secure, independent, and almost triumphantly eager for the future and its opportunities. Soon her friend's husband had to go elsewhere for several months of work on a research project. She welcomed the opportunity to give up her own quarters and stay in the house of this wonderful and inspiring guide and benefactress. Despite the complications and interruptions of her hostess's two small children (whom the patient seemed to enjoy playing with and to love), there were greater opportunities for listening together to symphonies, for reading aloud Shakespearean plays, and for discussion over a few highballs until long past midnight. She shared her friend's room and soon was sleeping in the same twin bed with her, both finding the nearness and the contact delightful. Lying together in the dark, thrilled with evidences of being understood and loved, she liked to talk and to listen and to have close physical contact with her idol. Both women made lively and articulate by highballs and by delight, found it easy to murmur to each other all sorts of things concerning admiration and love and what each meant to the other. From close embraces, to kisses, to mutual masturbation, things proceeded without our patient's giving very distinct thought to whether or not there was anything homosexual, anything perverse or queer about such practices. The older and more sophisticated of the two was the other's symbol of the ideal. What she approved and considered natural and delightful was almost automatically accepted by the other. Furthermore, she got the strangest new delights from what happened while they were in bed together. She had, as a matter of fact, not only erotically exciting sensations but distinct orgasms from the digital caresses and stimulations of the other. She did not think of herself and the other woman as something equivalent to husband and wife or as one pretending to be a man and the other acting the part of a woman under such circumstances. Both were women, in the patient's feelings, but there were wonderful and unforeseen revelations, sensual as well as intellectual and otherwise, in all this prized experience. She was not preoccupied with resentment toward the absent husband. Without quite knowing why, she would not have wanted him to know every detail about what she and his wife did. But he did not loom in her concepts as a distinct rival, nor did their mutual masturbation seem to intrude distinctly into the areas supposedly reserved for husbands and wives. She was more concerned about the fact that her main source of happiness 278 THE MASK OF SANITY would be curtailed, that she could not be so often with this wonderful person after the husband returned and she went back to her regular quarters. The sensuous feelings and the startlingly delightful and new experience of orgasm were all tied in with her affection and love and unstinted admiration for the wonderful person who had brought so much to her. She had learned something about homosexuality not only from books but from her efforts several years earlier as president of a students' honorary society at college to help a freshman who had shown what seemed to her serious and regrettable tendencies of this sort. It sometimes occurred to her that what she and the totally wise friend did might be regarded as perverse or like the misdeeds of that girl at college, but such thoughts had little more force in her evaluation of the acts than some farfetched philosophic abstraction which might be literally true in syllogisms but without relation to actualities of experience. These sexual activities were a private and secret delight, one part of the many things they shared and into which no one else entered. As she discussed this matter, freely and without hedging or apparent shame, she seemed to have little or no fear that she might be homosexual also felt that she was probably not what this term indicates in its reference to full and fixed lesbian women. Her physically erotic relations with the other woman had been in some respects a substitutive practice, though what it might stand for was not well formulated among her goals. Her reaction, in certain aspects, seemed akin to what a normal, adolescent boy might experience in masturbating while immersed in vivid fantasies of intercourse with the image of the girl he has chosen as a sweetheart and wants someday to marry. There was, however, an important difference. She had no definite referential imagery in which a male figure could be located as the personally and fully embraced partner in the world of delightful feelings that were evoked. There was no channellized structure, as in the example of the romantically masturbating boy, to conduct her aspirations toward a real and well-defined goal. Although there were resemblances, her experience apparently lacked features essential to the persistent pattern of true homosexuality. In the first rewarding intimacy she had experienced with another human being, this delightful and exciting physical contact seemed wonderful, and she found it in no way disturbing or objectionable. Such a situation could scarcely have arisen for a man under similar circumstances without vastly more pathologic actualities and consequences, for in the virgin male genital aims are nearly always clearer and less ambiguously merged in general and nonsexual personal relations. After some months of what had been the most delightful time in this patient's life, her beloved friend and idol announced that their relations must CATALOGING THE MATERIAL 279 be terminated. The young girl could not conceive of any valid reason for such a decision. The articulateness of her preceptor failed at the task of making clear or acceptable what was, nevertheless, made final. Soon afterward this indescribably wise and wonderful being moved away, her husband having been given a position much to his advantage at a university in another section of the country. The young lady we are concerned with was puzzled, sad, and hurt beyond anything that she could express or explain. After having for the first time in her life exposed and offered her intimacy, love, adoration, longings, and everything else that she had heretofore automatically and fearfully guarded, she found herself rejected. Her emotional commitment had led to loneliness and frustration and to the shame and hurt of being discarded. It was not difficult for this intelligent girl to begin discovering that without knowing it she had for some time been deliberately and actively engaged in the process of throwing herself away. She had been thrown away by the only person to whom she had offered and fully given herself. Unable to make verbal comment on her hurt and betrayal, she formulated and, in another way, expressed comment in behavior that spoke with more authority than any language. She began to understand that by so damaging herself she was, not in the mere light symbols of language but in terms more concrete, trying to explain to the one who had rejected her how much this rejection hurt. This could not be adequately conveyed without pain also to the one her desperate message must reach. The banishment inflicted by this other, she had already found, constituted a wall that could be penetrated, if at all, only by an emotional projectile of great traumatic force. Going back a little farther, let us consider the situation of this girl prior to her meeting with the older woman. Since she could first remember, it had seemed obvious to her that civilization was devised in such a way as to give the human male many undeserved advantages over the human female. Little boys could wander off on treeclimbing, hiking, or other adventures, but little girls were more restricted. Boys became airplane pilots, surgeons, generals, whereas nearly all women, as she saw it, became wives who day after day performed routine household tasks, washed dishes, nursed babies, and seldom got out to have any fun, even at night. Furthermore, husbands did not seem to find them attractive. Even the funny papers joked about how dull a wife was as compared to the stenographer and showed husbands on every possible occasion gleefully slipping away from prosaic and dowdy figures at home to get "a night out with the boys." As her life progressed, she had steadily encountered facts to corroborate the implications of an old saying fairly common in her childhood, 280 THE MASK OF SANITY "Why you can't get any more lift out of that than out of kissing your own wife." When she had wanted to be a general or a cowboy leader in those early games in the park, the others laughed at her and said she was only a girl. Facts such as her being able to run faster and climb better than some of the boys did not matter. No, the decisions were all determined by the irrelevant point about her being a girl. She had to stay at home sometimes and help her mother with the dishes or other tasks. Daddy, after reading the morning paper, went off and stayed the whole day among all the excitements of town. There is no need to give much from the thousands of incidents, real and familiar to anyone, which she encountered and from which she logically derived her distorted convictions that active and exciting lives are open to men whereas wives are expected to live in the circumscribed orbit of a house, carrying out repetitious tasks and dull, petty, routines and often becoming creatures of convention, careless of their looks, shapeless, and uninspiring. In her reactions to these formulations she did not derive envy and admiration for man as compared with woman. It was not through any real virtue or superiority that these males had all the interesting work and freedom and fun. It was because of conventions and rules, based not on facts but on tradition, that men had this advantage. They were often smug enough and biased enough to think they deserved such a break. Women, not taking the trouble to think things through, placidly accepted such an arrangement. She did not want to be a man or more like a man, but she was determined to evade as much as possible these artificial impediments. Instead of throwing her life away in a meek gesture to empty conventions, she would go after the interesting things. The success and independence she might achieve, the fun she might have, would, aside from their intrinsic value, be a comment on the fallacies she had detected and would oppose. Under hypnosis and narcosis as well as in unaltered awareness, she gave much detail that filled in a convincing picture of her childhood environment. Hundreds of memory items emerged to disclose her father not as cruel but as an arbitrary and moody disciplinarian in small matters. Her parents did not (to her) seem to find intimacy, fulfillment, or very much real fun together in their marriage. The mother (in her eyes) lived in trivial activities and was bored, boring, and fretful but unaware of the reasons. The patient's outlook and aims had slowly taken form in reaction to the model of marriage she found, or thought she found, in her home. As she grew, she discovered in her general CATALOGING THE MATERIAL 281 surroundings thousands of items which seemed to support and which further shaped opinion and inclination. It should not be assumed that the marriage of these parents was all that it appeared to the little girl. Details of it which she encountered at susceptible moments might be accurate without being representative of the whole. So, too, as she grew and observed the world about her, she found facts which continued to confirm her early evaluations. Anyone can find dull housewives and distant, bored husbands. Everyone knows that the immature male may take advantage of the "double-standard" and see how far he can get with girls under the pretense of love, only to react with the precise and unflattering opposite of love in degree proportionate to their acquiescence. During an early discussion of the disadvantages of marriage for girls, the patient cited as evidence two young couples who often went together on automobile trips, the two husbands sitting together in front, the wives ignored on the rear seat. All the observations given as evidence by the patient seemed to be true and accurate. Her interpretations also seemed, for the specific instances she cited, correct. If a man and a woman value so much the opportunity to be together on dates, why should they almost immediately after marriage so change as to choose even a person of the same sex to sit by in preference to the mate? Custom or courtesy might suggest that, as in seating arrangements at dinner parties, husbands and wives, in this limited sense, be swapped about. But can anything except the absence of basic sexual and personal interest make men turn regularly to men and women to women on occasions when married couples gather? The patient found in scores of incidents she had observed indications that these couples were not particularly close to each other or having much fun together. Among other examples she pointed out how often at parties the husbands drifted or sometimes almost raced for the kitchen, where, in purely male company, they spent much of the evening, frankly oblivious of the wives stranded together in the living room. I could not but agree with her that such behavior was consistent with and might indicate serious attrition, if not indeed the unhappy and untimely death, of what it is natural to seek in heterosexual love relations. Her basic concept can, perhaps, be conveyed by a joke she told. It is an old joke, but expressive: A husband who habitually paid little attention to his wife did not even look up from his paper when she came down one day in a new and breathtaking dress. She tried in vain to make him notice and admire it. She was a goodlooking and voluptuous woman and resented being ignored. Not succeeding 282 THE MASK OF SANITY in getting the husband to raise his eyes even momentarily to regard her, she ran back upstairs. Resolved to shake him from his lethargy, she stripped and came down again, completely naked. Announcing she was on her way downtown to shop, she paused for his appraisal. Finally she succeeded in getting him to glance up from the paper. Before returning to peruse it, he indifferently remarked, "Umph! Need a shave, don't you." Among her married friends she had observed many wives who received strict allowances dealt out to them as if they were children or servants by husbands who would not even divulge to their mates and reputed equals any fundamental information about the family's finances. Everything concerning their business affairs, to which these husbands seemed to devote most of their lives and interest, was withheld from wives who were, the patient felt, appraised as too inconsequential or undeserving to share in these matters sacred to the male world. Many of her conclusions might apply correctly to the specific cases from which she drew them. She had, apparently, with precocious accuracy, sensed and ferreted out negative points in specific husbands and specific wives that others, accepting more optimistic generalizations, would have overlooked. Her ideologies and the general shaping of her aims and actions had been strongly conditioned by the implicit assumption that all marriage was necessarily what she had seen it to be in many instances. Argument with her about this overgeneralization would scarcely have altered her fundamental outlook. In the course of time, however, as she brought up the concrete details of experience with increasing amounts of affect, she became aware of distortions and evasions formerly screened by her dogmatic ideologies. Eventually she could see (and feel) that it was her mother (or the image she had made of her mother as a child) which she had rejected and that this did not demand rejection of the feminine role itself. She could see also that while she had determined not to accept all the limitations she believed inherent in woman's status sociologically, this distortion had not extended into deeper biologic levels. She had not, in turning from the mother, identified herself with her father and determined to be a man. Had this occurred, far more serious problems might have arisen for this girl. Marriage was very strongly rejected as an ambition. Reactions to her mother and to her father apparently combined in this negative force and contributed to a distorted response to this major feminine role. She examined again and felt again the effects upon her of her older brother. It was he for whom money had to be saved so that he could go to medical school. She recalled that at first she had been very fond of him and proud of him. As she continued to reorient herself to what had appeared to CATALOGING THE MATERIAL 283 be preference on the parents' part for his ambitions, while deprivations were demanded of her so that he could attain the independence of being a physician, she became better able to see these things in the general context of her life. Incidents scorned at the time and since then neglected, when now recalled and reappraised, indicated parental pride in her also. It became possible for her to see that this had not been sufficiently valued by her because it was pride in her as a girl and for qualities unlike those she specifically needed for competition with her brother. It is impossible to set down here all the myriad events that came up for this girl's reappraisal or the affective reactions and shaping of attitudes that, seen as a whole, seemed to account for her rejection of marriage and fear to give herself in any deep, personal intimacy with men. Nothing that is said as a generalization about her life pattern can convey what emerged as she reproduced it in the concrete form of innumerable incidents. Nor would any explanation in general terms have been useful in her efforts to reorient herself as were the explanations she herself gradually arrived at. The sexual relations with men, begun several months after the break with her lesbian partner, soon convinced her of something she had not wanted to admit at the time-that the sexual organs of man and woman are appropriately designed for contact and work together in such a way as to get better sensual results than anything possible with two female bodies, which are not anatomically equipped for such a feat. She was forced to admit this although she continued to deny all possibility of other genuine and happy relations between man and woman. This at first was a blow to her, for she sought to preserve in idealized perfection her concept of the relation with the other woman as being in every respect superior to anything possible between woman and man. She had jealously guarded those feelings and impulses which, in being bestowed, constitute falling in love. In her sexual activities with the series of men she went to unusual lengths in trying to keep all relations and contacts of any importance to herself and to let her sensations remain confined, localized, and impersonal. Capacities to love another, to give genuine intimacy (herself) to another, drawn out initially by the homosexual partner, were less deeply buried than heretofore and hence demanded more vigilant protection from arousal by man. In having intercourse with men she continued also her old competition with the other sex, rejecting them as lovers or needed complements to herself in personal matters, but seeking to outwit them or to find some basis, however farfetched and flimsy, on which she could mock them in their sexual tactics. 284 THE MASK OF SANITY Her promiscuous relations appeared eventually to the patient as having been used to carry out several purposes simultaneously: 1. They satisfied a need for sensual pleasure and orgasm that had, since her experiences with the woman, become clearer and more urgent. 2. By cheapening herself as a sexual object, she expressed reproach and criticism of one who had discarded her and made a protest against being so treated. 3. She reaffirmed her rejection of woman's role in marriage by caricaturing in her own attitude the personal relations of the heterosexual act. 4. She found an aspect of the situation, however farcical and insubstantial, by which she could think of herself as mocking the man (his not realizing she knew what he was after). 5. She tried to ensure her freedom from any need of marrying by getting localized genital pleasures and relief while keeping distinctly withdrawn from truly personal relations. 6. By changing partners on each occasion, she expressed her freedom from attachment, her disdain for any important relationship in connection with the act. This practice also made it impossible for an attachment to develop and threaten the sort of lonely security she had built up over so many years. It took her much less time and effort to reach the foregoing conclusions than to realize emotionally that she had, without suspecting it, been very much influenced by a need (not admitted) to find something she had never realized was desirable and necessary until she had sensed a misleading clue to it in her close personal relations with the older woman. It was more difficult still for her to accept the possibility that anything of this nature might be worth seeking in a man. This possibility did not become acceptable to her so much through its direct examination or continuing reappraisal of what she had experienced with the woman, but chiefly, it seemed, through the relation of present and recent matters, to aims, attitudes, and reactions recognizable in her childhood and, under varying aspects, in the year-by-year pattern of her life. She at first brought out material with little affective reaction to it. Later her feelings about incidents already mentioned were allowed expression. It was less difficult for her to give up her sexual promiscuity than to alter her attitude toward marriage. Even the possibility that male and female have personality features and resources for erotic relations with each other comparable to the situation anatomically (which she had found so superior to the deviated homosexual experience) was a possibility it took her much time to accept. The fear, born in her childhood, of losing that freedom which would CATALOGING THE MATERIAL 285 enable her to escape the fate she saw as inevitable for every housewife, strove long and stubbornly against the recognition of anything that might modify her concepts and her affective reactions to them. These concepts, warning her perpetually from within, had, it seems, blocked many nascent impulses that might have led her years ago into experiences which could not but modify her basic fear. Not by reasoning alone but only by experiencing something directly, something directly between herself and man, was it likely that sufficient modification could occur for her to continue improvement. From a small and very reluctant beginning, such experiences developed, and with them came changes of attitude extending much deeper than the presence or absence of the symptoms she had once expressed in her behavior. No attempt has been made to bring out anything very deep or remarkable about this patient. She illustrates, however, several points useful for our purpose. The outlandishly promiscuous and poorly motivated sexual activity that constituted the objective clinical manifestation of her trouble was entirely typical of what we find in the real psychopath. Her conduct in this respect would seem to argue well for that diagnosis. The lack of adequate conscious purpose, of anything resembling irresistible passion or even strong ordinary temptation, to account for such inappropriate and unrewarding behavior seems even more characteristic than the bare deeds. Important distinctions can be made, however, between this localized expression and the similar but generalized malfunctioning that distorts the psychopath in all his serious performances. Not only was this young lady consistently successful and purposive in her work and in all other social relations, but her emotional attitudes and responses in almost every situation except those centering about sexual aims were normal and adequate. In the erotic situation she not only behaved unwisely and unsuccessfully but also showed evidence of distorted evaluations, of affective confusion, and of serious deficit. In a crude analogy it might be said that her pathology compared with the widespread pathology of the psychopath somewhat as a carbuncle caused by a staphylococcic infection compares to staphylococcic septicemia. Despite many superficial resemblances to serious and predominant homosexual reactivity and life patterning, she had retained, beneath the surface, biologic and fundamental heterosexual potentiality. Her experiences with the seriously deviated woman awakened or liberated needs and capacities for close, devoted, and understanding human relations. In the framework of this broad awakening, genital impulses were also stimulated, though misdirected. For the patient, it appears that she found in the experience 286 THE MASK OF SANITY perience with the older woman expression for much that she had missed long ago in parental relations as well as in friendships and the usual heterosexual gropings of adolescence. The somewhat clarified and freed genital impulses did not seem to be integrated into the broader pattern of personal arousal in such as way as to constitute real and firmly fixed homosexuality, but rather, they appeared to accompany, in a confusing but additive sense, the other and surrounding affective capacities and urges as all emerged. In a confusion which she could not evaluate, reacting to several important needs or urges, she hit upon the maladapted behavior pattern in which she presented herself. Her personality as a whole remained sufficiently intact or normally functional for her to give to the physician and to herself an account of earlier experiences and her reactions to them sufficiently valid for plausible explanation of the disordered behavior to emerge. The awareness of important influences shaping the pattern of behavior made available to the patient (as well as to the observer) some understanding of this pattern. On the basis of this, slowly but progressively, helpful modifications were made by the patient in her evaluations and in her adaptation. It is quite possible that in the fully disordered psychopath similar but far more complicated causative influences exist behind the clinical manifestations. In the real psychopath a gross lack of sincerity and insight seriously impedes all efforts to obtain information essential to interpretation. We must also consider the possibility that the psychopath may be born with a biologic defect that leaves him without the capacity to feel and appreciate the major issues of life or to react to them in a normal and adequate manner. |
Energy Enhancement Enlightened Texts Psychopath The Mask Of Sanity
Section 3, Part 2
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