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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Ron who wrote (317506)	11/10/2016 10:27:19 AM
From: Cautious_Optimist	Respond to of 543196

Thanks for posting. Garrison Keillor's written voice is amazing. A bit like James Aura.

To: Ron who wrote (317506)	11/10/2016 5:11:06 PM
From: freelyhovering	Respond to of 543196

Here is a very good commentary by an American psychoanalyst. "I did not vote for Mr. Trump. I signed the online petition against "Trumpism." Nevertheless, I see two very hopeful signs in the news discussions today: First, there seems to be move away from splitting. There is a recognition that "they is us," referring to the people who voted for Trump. Similarly, there is less facile demonization of Trump, and more curiosity, albeit anxious curiosity, about how he will actually function as President. Second, there is a recognition that the superficial social scientific methodology of gathering polling data is inadequate. Pundits on television are actually talking about the need to actually meet with people and talk to them in depth, not just give them questionnaires. They mention the need for a more sophisticated kind of empathy, as opposed to short, binary answers that can easily be subjected to statistical analyses. Garbage in, garbage out, as they say. I think both of these changes are consistent with psychoanalytic values. They make me less depressed. Leo" Definition of Splitting: Splitting as a mental process thus enables us to makes distinctions. Throughout life, splitting serves this exact function: it allows us to take an undifferentiated, confusing mass of experience or information and divide it into categories that have meaning. Without splitting, nothing would make sense to us. We wouldn’t be able to understand because we couldn’t divide the mass of sensory input into meaningful categories. Projection likewise has valuable and normal functions, as do other so-called defense mechanisms. Splitting can also serve the exact opposite function: that is, it can remove meaning by separating parts of a whole that actually belong together. This is where it becomes a defense mechanism and is used to ward off unbearable feelings and emotions. Although they’re not actually separate experiences, as I’ll discuss below, it’s useful to think about splitting either (1) the self or (2) the other person. So far, this has been fairly abstract and I think it’s time for an example. Let’s say that I have a hard time bearing my anger and aggressive feelings; maybe they were unacceptable in my family of origin and I was expected to be “nice”. In truth, I’m a nice and also a not-so-nice person, with a mixture of loving and hating impulses; when the anger and hatred can’t be tolerated, however, I will split them off: The loving and socially acceptable feelings — those are ME — and the hostile aggressive ones are NOT ME. Thus I have split myself (more accurately, my awareness of myself) into parts and disowned one of them, which almost always goes hand-in-hand with projecting it outside. (For a more in-depth discussion of the disowned “shadow” self, see Marla Estes’ post on the film ‘ Wolf’ starring Jack Nicholson, or mine on ‘Black Swan‘, both available on ‘Movies and Mental Health’.)