It still takes time to understand that human beings are human beings. Once the idea of psychology appeared, it was quickly connected with sickness or a need for healing. It led to the idea that humans would be best off without all these psychological “inconveniences”. The unconscious was seen as a source of risk or strange behaviors, transferences and countertransferences became fantasies, representations, or even manipulations. Not to mention the ego that led to associations with narcissism, borderline, or sociopaths. Things have changed, however, the old fears continue to be present in our culture and the language used.
The confusion lies in evaluation instead of awareness.
The problem is the fear of losing control. Sadly that is unconscious.
Humans are great at keeping it there as they’ve settled into perceiving emotions as obstacles.
There are emotions that are seen as ok and then all the other ones that are kept away through denial. What is lost in this, is that denial pushes all the available information into the unconscious, leaving it to the control of the unconscious. The unconscious fear of losing control becomes the way we lose control.
Sigmund Freud named this in his description of transference: “The patient, in general, doesn’t remember anything that is forgotten and repressed, but he does act on it. He doesn’t reproduce it as a memory, but as an action. He repeats it, without knowing, of course, that he does it “.
All these phenomena simply occur. They are there.
It’s only through our willingness to make oneself aware, that they start to talk a different language. They provide information and allow us to make choices.
Take for example the impact of transference on leadership. It often is, what contributes to leaders being followed. It can be an emotional glue that creates tolerance and eases people to trust one another. When the sense of relationship has fewer roots in reality things may shift easily in periods of crisis where the relationship comes under stress. It may even go as fat as doubts transforming themselves into conspiracy theories. Without realization of the impact of transference and countertransference on the relationship, there is little that can be done to come out of crisis.
Or take the illusion of contact we experience through screens and the social media app behind them. They are used despite the absence of real contact. It is the better than nothing mindset, one that persists until the information that the contact isn’t real is lost. Constantly going back to it, then happens to fill in an experiential gap. Missing out on the information that the contact experience is not complete, people forget to complement with real contacts.
Not knowing doesn’t mean not experiencing.
Absence of communication is what contributes most to the absence of awareness.
Making experience available to one another makes the invisible visible.
Vulnerability is hard, useful, and generous.
