Why do we choose to avoid strong emotions rather than live them to the fullest? What avoidance mechanisms do we often use and what consequences can this lead to? How have religious practices over the centuries helped a person not pay attention to their feelings and why is it so difficult to give up such practices? Psychotherapist Svetlana Belukhina has prepared a translation of a short excerpt from the book Avoiding Emotions, Living Emotions, Taylor & Francis, 2011 by the Italian psychoanalyst Antonino Ferro, where he offers his (not always indisputable) answers to these questions.
I would like to reflect on how avoiding emotions becomes one of the main tasks of our mind. If this modality clearly prevails over others, it then becomes a symptom.
We have many different mechanisms for avoiding or evacuating unwanted emotions from the psyche. These mechanisms range from, say, an almost harmless projection of our own negative mental aspects onto external objects and events, and then we tend to condemn something, to such unsafe variations as paranoia, schizophrenia, hallucinations, delusions.
Emotions can be evacuated even into one's own body in the form of psychosomatic diseases, or into a social body in the form of such manifestations as mass aggression, deviation, crime, etc.
It should be repeated that avoidance is a psychic mechanism, inherent, of course, in the thinking of any person. But, if this mechanism prevails and unbearable emotional experiences cannot be “digested” properly, they remain in such a “half-baked” form and inevitably settle in the human mind, forming a kind of deposits there.
These raw proto-emotional clots then form all the variety of mental symptoms: various phobias (if there is a task to avoid meeting with unpleasant knowledge about oneself); obsession (if the main goal is to establish control); hypochondria (if the strategy is to move emotion to a particular organ or the whole body), and so on.
Different forms of autistic manifestations also serve this purpose - to know nothing about their own sensory experience. Examining José Bleger's concepts of the "agglutinated core" of autism and the provisions of Thomas Ogden's autistic-sensory theory about the core of autism help to understand this phenomenon more clearly.
But now let's take a look at some of the strategies humans use to avoid encountering emotions, or rather their never-metabolized raw precursors.
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One of the most "successful" strategies is narcissism.
Take, for example, my patient with a narcissistic personality structure.
He is a middle manager of a large financial group.
During the session, he recounted two dreams.
In the first dream, he overcomes the distance from his home to my office (about a couple of kilometers). He tries to walk strictly in a straight line, while looking down at passers-by. Perhaps he considers himself more educated than them. But then it turns out that the real reason he strictly follows the chosen course is not to cross the road once again - he is afraid of cars flying towards him, which could run over him.
And if we look at this dream as a message about his emotional state, we can assume that his emotions are endowed with such kinetic force, such power, that they can simply "crush" him. Thus, as long as he remains at a distant distance from each dangerous accelerating proto-emotion, he feels safe and sound, retaining the ability to hold the "straight" thread of reasoning.
The second dream is even more interesting. The patient dreams that he is the captain of a galleon, where everything should work perfectly. The crew of the crew constantly checks: whether the sails are perfectly tensioned, whether there are any leaks, etc. Thus, everything is arranged perfectly, and nothing threatens the ship. But the patient's anxiety grows, he believes that if the slightest thing is out of place, a disaster will occur. The sails will inevitably break, and even a small leak will lead to the sinking of the ship. To prevent this, he tightens discipline, then comes up with a shameful dismissal, but this is not enough, followed by a military tribunal and even a death sentence.
We can assume that everything in this person's life should be perfect: grades at school, success at work, perfect dinners with friends. And if something is out of place, it will lead to disaster. But why?
Because - and this is the answer we come to with him - any imperfection activates emotions that are difficult to deal with; in other words, it is as if he did not have a command on board (namely in his psychic space) to manage and deal with emergencies - emotional winds or strong waves.
The effort that my patient makes in order to achieve perfection and keep his ship afloat is enormous. But they are simply nothing compared to what he may face if new, strong and unknown emotions are activated, the appearance of which he cannot predict.
I think autistic behavior has the same roots. With autism ⓘ
Apparently, we are talking about social autism, and not about autism spectrum disorders, the causes of which may be biological. - Ed.
the constancy of every detail, the repetition of every gesture, as well as the miniaturization of emotions ("emotions are bonsai" ⓘ
Bonsai is the Japanese art of growing bonsai for decorative purposes, as well as the tree itself.
as one of my patients stated) serve to prevent the same emotional storms that cannot be dealt with.
And in everyday life, let's see, we usually extinguish all our hot passions in routine, repetition, boredom or intellectualization of that emotional lava that is about to erupt. Why is this happening? Yes, just so as not to pull the pin in our emotional grenade.
So, for example, my patient, Carmelo, prefers a routine life with his unloved wife instead of taking the risk and still reaching the Pillars of Hercules, which every time he dreams of at the moment when he meets an interesting female colleague at work. And now, instead of deciding on a new relationship, he prefers to deal with the already known and safe. He lovingly cares for the domesticated aspects of his own personality and is not ready to go in search of new emotional dimensions.
The strategies that people devise to keep their emotions on a leash are extremely varied. Think about anorexia, for example. We remember that anorexic people think of themselves as fat by being thin. In this case, the unbearable split-off parts of the personality (or proto-emotions) are projected in reverse perspective and remain, as it were, invisible. But they can also be discerned if we use a kind of "binoculars" in which we connect the split psyche and see how weighty and meaningful for the anorexic is this huge gap between real weight and imaginary. So, not awareness of reality, but precisely this splitting allows him to paradoxically feel himself whole and intact, but has a destructive effect on his body.
I have always adhered to the belief that this kind of psychoanalytic conclusions can only be drawn in the context of the psychoanalytic situation in the office. However, let me contradict myself based on the opinion of Alessandro Manzoni, who speaks about the incomprehensible nature of that complex fabric that is called the human heart. So, I believe that various macro-social phenomena also serve the purpose of blocking unwanted emotional states, but at the level of society.
Take fanaticism or a religion that guarantees the attainment of truth and the attainment of unbreakable faith and reassurance, for example. Let's think, because it is really quite safe to think of yourself as a divine whim without purpose and reason, without all these “before” and “after”, without wandering in the dark where it is too scary, where there is physicality, where there are many emotions. Well, religion really is the opium of the people. But remember that in medicine, opium is used to relieve unbearable pain. And the thought that the meaning of life can only be contained in life itself and that there is absolutely nothing in it that would exceed it can cause intolerable emotional suffering that requires consolation.
It seems that society in ancient times intuitively grasped the idea of the need to work with strong emotions, and once it was conducted within the framework of religious practices, but in modern societies, the development of psychoanalysis at the intersection of other sciences offers new opportunities, and each of us can choose the approach that closer to him.
