Ozodi Osuji: Profile of @ BNW Magazine: Writer of the the Osuji Papers @ Biafra NigeriaWorld BiafraNigeriaWorld.

Some of you asked: who is this Ozodi Osuji? He seems to have come out of nowhere and is making a whole lot of noise. None of you at this Forum know me in person, and some wonder whether I exist as a real person? For all you know, I could be planted by foreigners in Nigerians’ midst? To answer your questions, I have decided to be narcissistic and spend some time talking about me. However, I will do it in such a manner that folks learn about the human personality in general and, hopefully, their own specific personalities. We Africans need to become a bit more introspective and reflect on our personalities. Perhaps, in so doing, we shall learn to stop making a royal mess of our continent, as we currently are doing.

The science of human thinking and behavior, psychology, observes human thinking and behavior, as they are, in fact, not as one morally or ideally wishes that they be, and accepts them as they are.

Science does not first posit ideals and uses them to compare the real world and judge it, good or bad, as old time philosophers did. Science does not compare reality to ideal states.

The human mind has a tendency to construct mental ideals, and is tempted to think that just because it can imagine ideals, that there are ideals in nature. Plato believed that there are ideal archetypes, to which our imperfect world is a variant of. Plato and similar philosophers used to think that imperfect things deviated from perfect things that existed out there. They then struggled to make things perfect, to approximate their alleged perfect nature. Alas, you could try forever to make things perfect and you cannot make them perfect.

Perfection is a mental construct and does not exist apart from the mind that thinks it. Moreover, the mind is always changing its idea of what perfection is; as one idea of perfection is attained, the goal post is extended, and different ideas of perfection enter ones mind and beckon one to attain them. There is never an end to what is perfect hence no amount of trying would ever make a human being attain perfection.

Reality is not our mental models of it. Reality is not of our making; instead, we have to make our mental constructions of reality approximate it, and not the other way around.

Psychology is a science that attempts to describe human beings as they are, not as they should be. As they should be, human beings should be perfect, whatever that is. But in reality, as they are, human beings are imperfect animals. It is the job of psychology to understand human beings as they are, imperfect, and not dwell on impossible imaginations of how they should be.

Among other things, Psychology studies the human personality. Personality is the specific manner individuals relate to their social and physical world.

The term personality is derived from Greek for mask. It implies that personality may not be the same as the real self. Personality, mask, denotes the bundle of habits and patterns of behavior that characterize the empirical individual. Each person has a specific pattern of relating to his world, his personality, but that is not necessarily all there is to him. Beneath the mask of personality, some believe, is another self, what they call the spiritual self.

Those who call themselves metaphysicians believe that personality, aka the ego, is a picture, a role that people invented for themselves and act out. As they see it, the human personality is not the real self, but is a dream self. Helen Schucman (A Course in Miracles) believes that our lives on earth are as in a dream and that in the dream each of us, with the help of all of us, invents a personality/ego-separated-self for himself or for herself. That self is housed in body and made to seem real. That ego, false self is deliberately made to feel, upon attack, pain. Feeling pained, it feels fear and defends itself. Defense makes it, the false, seem real. As she sees it, we are all like mad men trying to actualize our personalities; we all try to make what is not real seems real in our awareness. And this applies to both the so-called normal and abnormal personalities.

According to Schucman, each of us is in a personal battle to make a self he made for himself, a self that is not real, seem real in his consciousness. She wants us to stop defending our personalities with the various ego defenses, particularly with fear. As she sees it, when the unreal is not defended, its unreality becomes apparent.

Relax, Schucman tells us, because we are not our personalities, we are not the roles we are playing in the dream of space, time and matter. We should stop trying to make our personalities seem real. We should be quiet and do nothing and in silence, aka meditation, our real self, who she says is spirit, will reveal itself to us. Who we are is the role maker, the inventor of our personality and our world; we are not the personality/ego and the world. The ego and the world are dreams; people on earth are like dream figures, seemingly real, but, in fact, not real.

Are people on earth mere figures in a dream? Is Schucman’s philosophical solipsism true? I do not know. What is apparent is that personality is formed in childhood and can be understood.

Personality could be helpful or not helpful in the individual’s efforts to adapt to the exigencies of his environment. Where the individual’s pattern of relating to his environment is adaptive to the demands of his world, he is normal. Where the individual’s personality does not enable him adapt effectively to the demands of his world, he has personality disorder.

Persons who have personality disorders tend to have problematic relationship with other people, and generally do not do what needs to be done to effectively cope with the realities of their world. Thus, for example, a chap with outstanding intelligence and education may have so much interpersonal problems that he is unable to make it on the job and fails at it. Ordinarily, intelligence and sound education are correlated with success at work; but the individual’s inability to get along with other people contributes to his failure at work.

Each of us has a specific personality, normal or abnormal. It behooves the individual to understand his personality, and where there are issues in it, attempt to change them, as much as is possible.

It is doubtful that personality can be made perfect hence the individual has to live with some problematic aspects to his personality.

The reason why the individual is not ever likely going to make his personality perfect is that personality is largely a product of the individual’s inherited biological constitution. The individual child is born with a set of genes, body, and those interact with the physical and social environment he is born into. The child’s body interacts with the exigencies of his physical and social world, and forms a personality for him, a specific pattern he employs in responding to stimuli emanating from his environment.

Personality is that which the child’s experience informs him is the best way for him to relate to his world; personality is what he believes works for him in his efforts to adapt to his world.

Given the incomplete information on the nature of the world and what works in adapting to that world available to the human child, he may be wrong in adopting the personality he has.

Those with personality disorders still believe that their disordered personalities are best at enabling them to cope with their world and are unwilling or afraid to give up their disordered personalities. May be their personalities worked in their childhood but does not work in their current adult situations? Nevertheless, their personalities are all they know, and they are unwilling to give them up, and risk other forms of personality, ones they have not known to work through actual experience. For example, one may be told that serving other people is good for one. But if all that one knows to work for one is selfishness, one would be cautious trying service oriented lifestyle. One does not know for certain that being altruist would contribute to ones survival. One knows for sure that looking after ones interests conduces to ones survival.

Simply stated, the individual does not easily give up his personality, for it is what he believes enables him adapt to his world; to him, talk of alternative personalities is hypothetical and not based on experience. In life and death matters, experience supersedes mere intellectual talk.

I believe that personality is formed, beginning in the womb, and is complete by the first year of existence on earth. I believe that personality is 90% biologically determined.

The role of social factors in the formation of personality is overrated by social psychology. When psychology becomes a true science, it will be rooted in biology (and chemistry and physics), not social psychology.

I reached the conclusion that personality is primarily a biological phenomenon by observing my own personality. I have been the person I know myself to be now, right from the time I was born, certainly from the time I developed consciousness of who I am, age five. I know myself from age five and have remained the same person.

My parents and those around me tell me that my behavior from age one to age, when I can speak for myself, is the same. I take it that they told me the truth when they told me that I was late in walking, late in talking, was shy, and avoidant of other children. These traits I know to be in me since at least age five.

I believe that I have been the same person from the moment of my birth. Indeed, my father and grandfather were like me. Therefore, I believe that biology determines personality. I see much of the emphasis on sociological causation of personality as so much nonsense.

I believe in learning theory because I know that we do learn many things, but we learn those things with our inherited body, and that body affects how we learn them.

Why did I learn to walk late and to talk late? I believe that it is for the same reasons that I did not learn well at school.

When I was at elementary school, I was preoccupied with how other pupils and our teachers saw my performance. I wanted to be seen as always doing well. I feared not doing well at anything that I was doing, be it schooling or participating in sports. The worst thing that could happen to me was for the teacher to call on me to answer a question. I feared giving him the wrong answer. Coming up with the wrong answer made me feel small, imperfect and like I was insignificant.

I wanted to seem important, perfect, ideal, superior and powerful. I felt like I was not good enough and compensated with desire to be good, in fact, to be perfect.

I was born with two medical disorders, Spondilolysis and Mitral Valve Prolapse. My body produced pain for me at most times. My body felt very weak and unable to cope with the exigencies of living on planet earth.

Given my weak body and the toughness of the physical environment that I had to adapt to, I necessarily felt physically weak, and developed psychological sense of inferiority. As Alfred Adler pointed out, the demands of the physical environment is such that the human child must have power if he is to cope with them. It takes power to adapt to our world. Power is instrumental in coping with the impersonal nature of the physical environment. The human child, therefore, desires power with which he adapts to his world. If he does not have that power, he imagines that he has it. The weak feeling child restitutes with desire for power and perfection.

In learning situations, I felt like I could fail and not learn what I was supposed to learn. To fail made me feel inadequate. Apparently, I did not want to seem inadequate and not good enough. To avoid failing and seeming not good enough, I hesitated learning new tasks, particularly difficult tasks.

In not learning, not trying, I did not fail. In not failing, I retained the illusion that I was not a failure. In not trying, in not competing, and not failing in learning and competitive situations, I retained an imaginary sense of perfection, power, adequacy, ideal, superiority etc.

I did not learn to talk when I was supposed to talk. I believe that the psychological dynamics going on then was the same as what happened when I was at school. I felt that I could make mistakes in learning to talk. If I made mistake learning to talk, I would be shown as not good enough. I did not want to seem not good enough, so to not fail, I did not learn to talk. I kept quiet.

I probably understood what those around me were talking about, but did not want to hazard talking lest I made mistakes hence be seen as not good enough and lose social face. I know this to be the case for when later on in school I was learning Latin and French I felt the same dynamics going on in me. I loved the two languages and would have liked to speak them. But in class, when called upon to speak them, I felt embarrassed at the prospect of making mistakes, particularly mispronouncing words. Not pronouncing words properly made me feel small.

To avoid making mistakes, I did not even try to speak the languages I was learning in front of my peers. By not speaking them, I did not make mistakes and was, therefore, not seen as imperfect.

I believe that the same phenomenon took place when I tried walking. I felt that if I took my first baby steps learning to walk, that I would fall down, which is true. A child cannot learn to walk without falling down. No one can learn new tasks, particularly difficult ones, without making mistakes. I did not want to fall down, that is, I did not want to make mistakes. To fall down is to be embarrassed and lose social face. To fall down is to seem like I am not good enough. To fall down is to seem imperfect and powerless. I wanted to seem perfect and powerful, so to avoid their opposite; I did not learn to walk until I was reasonably certain that I would not fall down when I tried walking. Thus, I waited until I was a bit older, when my leg muscles were strong enough to support my Weight and prevent my falling down, before I walked.

I was told that I learned to walk at age two and half, around the same age that I learned to talk. Most children learn to walk and talk before age two. I was at least six months late learning talking and walking.

At elementary school, I feared making mistakes. I particularly feared failing examinations. I also feared not doing very well at sports. The mere prospect of not doing anything well filled me with anxiety. I had anticipatory anxiety of examinations, sports and competition.

Any thing that I could not do well at made me feel tremendously anxious. To avoid failing and feeling anxious, I avoided doing many of the things done at school, things my cohorts seemed to be enjoying.

I tried not to take examinations or show my assignments to my teachers. I hesitated in turning in my homework assignments. I felt like the teachers would give me poor grades, or any grade less than perfect grade. The prospect of not making good grades filled me with anxiety. It was like I would die if I had less than perfect grades.

To avoid imperfection and failure, I did not really compete with the other children at school and sports. I kept to my self. I was mostly on the sidelines when sports were taking place.

While not participating in competitive activities, I imagined myself not failing. In idle imagination, I felt like I was perfect at whatever I feared failing at. Thus, I visualized myself the best student in my school work, and the best student at sports. I imagined myself an Olympian athlete, even though I did not participate in competitive sports. One must first participate in sports to win and, in as much as, I was not participating, I could not win, could I?

One thing is very clear to me: I wanted to seem perfect. Withdrawal from social activities, from schooling, sports, and later on, from work, is a maneuver to avoid failing.

The desire to avoid not failing is motivated by the desire to be perfect, powerful and ideal. I wanted to be special, ideal and perfect. Perfection, ideal and superiority are compensatory, for I saw my real self as not special, as weak and not good enough.

Later on in life, I developed an interesting lifestyle. When I did not immediately get what I wanted, I felt angry. For example, if I was kept waiting on a line before the school clerk etc got to me, I felt furious at her. To this day, I feel angry when I stand on long lines, waiting my turn to be served. For example, if a bank teller is taking a long time getting to me, I feel angry at her. Of course, I keep quiet about it and do not tell her what I feel. I know better than to tell her so.

When I entered the job market, I recognized that I would like to be the boss and enter the work world at the top. I resented being at the bottom of the employment ladder. Moreover, if I applied for a job and was not offered it, I felt angry. I desired big jobs and felt angry that I did not obtain them.

To avoid being rejected for the big jobs that I desired, I stopped applying for them. I would simply take the most unchallenging job that I could obtain. Since I could do such jobs with my eyes closed, there were no prospects of making mistakes in them hence I was not likely to be judged as not good enough at doing them. Thus, I wound up performing unchallenging jobs, rather than go out there and compete for more difficult jobs and show that I can do them competitively.

To compete is to make mistakes and I did not want to make mistakes. To make mistakes made me seem not perfect and all powerful. In not competing and not making mistakes, I retained imaginary sense of perfection, power and superiority.

In interpersonal situations, I hated being treated as an insignificant person. If people dared treat me as if I was not important, I felt angry. I used to fly into rage at the slightest indication that others treated me as insignificant. I recall in secondary school when other boys did not invite me to participate in their activities. I felt demeaned, slighted and angry at them. On a few occasions, I actually yelled at them and asked them who they thought that they were not inviting me to their parties. If I was excluded in what seemed to me significant meetings, I would feel so offended that I would confront the person who excluded me and asked him to not do so again in the future. To be ignored by my peers made me feel like I was nothing, and I did not like to feel like an unimportant person. To this day, I still fear being ignored by people.

I did not want to seem subordinate to others. To avoid subordination to other persons, I avoided them.

Generally, I felt tense in interpersonal situations. I anticipated being treated "as if I was unimportant" and resented that. To avoid being treated as a worthless person, I did my utmost best to seem good at whatever was being done in situations I was in. I was always acting “as if” I was good in all situations I found myself in. I was Mr. Proper person in my behaviors. I conformed to most socially expected behaviors.

I tended to be stiff and proper in social situations. To relax was to be seen as not good enough, and possibly be rejected, and I feared rejection.

Boy friend-Girl friend situations were particularly difficult for me. I would like a particular girl. I would hesitate approaching her for friendship. I would anticipate her rejecting me. Her rejecting me filled me with anxiety. To avoid that anxiety, I did not approach her. I kept to myself while wishing that the girl that I liked would approach me for friendship. Unfortunately for me, society expects boys to take the initiative in approaching girls for friendship, so, very few girls approached me for friendship. I wound up lonely, even though I wished for the company of girls.

During my late teenage years, boys talked a lot about sex. Like most of the boys around me, I desired to experience sex. But to have sex with a girl one must be sociable and less stiff. I could not relax. I was always stiff in such situations. I felt like if I relaxed that girls would see me as not important enough. I always tried to seem important and that made it very awkward to have intimate relationship with girls.

I have been a failure in many areas of my life. I have been a failure at school, sports, interpersonal relationships, work and making money. The reason for my failure in these various arenas of life is my underlying sense of inferiority and desire to seem superior. I want to seem important and fear being unimportant.

When I see myself as unimportant, I pretend being important. For example, I did not attend the best secondary school in town. I wanted to do so. One time, I was with my friends and they were bragging about their elite private schools and I told them a lie regarding the school I attended. I said that I attended an elite secondary school, when, in fact, I did not. (Many of those boys who attended elite schools like Kings College, Lagos, the envy of my peers and I, ended up with crummy grades in their final results. Since I had mostly As in my final examination in secondary school, GCE Advance Level, I suppose that my non-elite school was, after all, not that bad?)

I tend to feel angry when I am actually treated as if I am unimportant. I remember yelling at people who treated me as if I was not important. In my work life, I have actually fired subordinates who dared talk back at me. I felt: how dare such persons talk to me, their boss, in that manner?

I have had the same personality since I was born. I have had the same sense of inadequacy and desire for adequacy. I have had the same fears of failure and imperfection. My personality, contrary to what behaviorists say, is not learned.

In as much as personality is shaped by our inherited physical constitution, we might as well say that personality is partially inherited. I inherited my personality. My father and grandfather were like me. I believe that our inherited bodies made our personalities inevitable.

The individual's inherited body shapes his personality, at least 90% of it. Social factors are over rated in shaping personality. I am willing to grant less than 10% to the role of social variables in influencing personality.

Biology mostly determines the formation of personality. If you want to change the individual's personality, you first have to understand the role his body plays in it, and where possible change his body, before you talk of changing his personality. And since body cannot be completely changed, I doubt that personality can be completely changed. Perhaps, in the future when the science of genetics is fully understood, and we develop genetic engineering to correct our problematic genes, we shall be able to change the human body, and in doing so, change human personalities. Until then, all we can do is understand our personalities.

Because personality is shaped by our bodies, I believe that when we die, our personalities die with us. I do not believe that our personalities survive our physical death.

If there is an immortal aspect to us, it must transcend our bodies and personalities. It is conceivable that an intelligent force exists apart from matter, space and time, and that it enters our bodies, or seem to do so, and body and social experience shape its personality. When our body dies, our personalities also die. The intelligent force, spirit, that had entered our bodies, and through them formed our personalities, probably continues to live without being aware of the life and death of its past bodies and personalities.

The individual’s thinking and behaviors are literally shaped by his body and personality. In fact, thinking and behavior are body and personality at work.

The individual's personality shapes everything he does. Consider my fear of being ignored. It disposes me to do everything I do. I fear society ignoring me.

(I feel that white Americans ignore black Americans; that feeling is rooted in my personal feeling of being ignored by other people. I projected out what is in me to society at large. Of course, white Americans do ignore African Americans. However, if I did not fear being ignored, I would not be acutely aware of being ignored by white Americans.)

My desire to seem important affects everything that I do. I tended to seek friends that seemed socially important. I wanted to marry a woman that seemed important (the daughter of a medical doctor.) I did not want to marry persons from the lower classes or from those groups considered not good enough.

EGO DEFENSE MECHANISMS

Once the child invents a separated self, the ego, for himself, he defends it. The separated self is that which must be defended to seem real in our awareness. If we did not defend the ego, it dies. The unreal needs defense to seem real. That which needs defense to seem real must not be real.

The child employs the various ego defense mechanisms to defend his ego. There are many ego defense mechanisms, some known, and others still unknown to psychology. The major ones are: repression, suppression, denial, dissociation, displacement, projection, rationalization, reaction-formation, sublimation, intellectualization, and minimizing, adjusting, blaming, perfection, avoiding, fantasy and so on. Please see any text book on psychology for detailed explanation of the defense mechanisms; here, what I will do is briefly define them.

Briefly, the individual represses whatever he does not want to consciously think about. If an issue is too dangerous to think about it he represses it, that is, he puts it into his subconscious mind, from which it exercises unconscious effects on his behavior. Sex is a topic that most societies repress. Very few persons talk about their sexual organs, their penis, and vagina and or having sexual intercourse. That subject is shrouded in hush-hush. People are embarrassed to talk about their sexual activities. Sexual intercourse is seen as animalistic and not thought about, while more moralistic issues are talked about. From its unconscious repository, people engage in sex in perverted forms, such as homosexuality, pedophilia and other products of sexual repression. The Catholic Church represses sex in its priests, and unwillingly makes them pedophilic homosexuals. In cultures where sex is more openly accepted, it is doubtful that these absurd sexual practices exist? Traditional Alaigbo (Africa) was realistic about sex, and there was no homosexuality in it. (Homosexuality seems a product of repression of heterosexual sex in so-called civilized societies.)

Whereas repression is done early in life, and, in fact, is imposed by the culture on the individual, the individual can consciously decide not to think about a subject, this personal repression is called suppression.

The individual can deny a subject. What is repressed, suppressed or denied is still there, of course, and affect behavior, albeit indirectly. One may deny that one has an addiction problem and go ahead and drink or smoke cigarettes. Mood altering drugs have adverse side effects and produce them for the individual, denied or not. If you smoke you risk getting cancer, whether you deny that you have a smoking problem or not, does not matter.

If an event is too painful, the individual may dissociate from it, and pretend as if it did not happen to him. If a woman was, for example, raped by a close relative, that experience is so embarrassing that she might dissociate from it. Dissociation often results in developing an alter ego, an altogether different self. In multiple personality disorder, the individual has many ego selves, many personalities, each unaware of the existence of the others.

When it seems dangerous to express an opinion, to preserve their security, individuals might not do so. For example, if one is angry at ones boss, to express that anger at him, one might get fired from ones job. Therefore, one desists from expressing the affect and swallows it. Then one goes home and displaces that anger to ones wife. She, in turn, displaces her anger to the children, who displace their anger to the family pet. We displace anger to weaker objects, those not likely to fight back and harm us.

Sometimes, society says that it is too dangerous to own some feelings and one projects them out to others. For example, if society prohibits sex between certain classes of people, they are likely to project out their sexual desires for each other. In racist America, society prohibited sex between whites and blacks. Whites who desired sex with blacks denied it and projected it to blacks. They then believe that blacks want to have sex with whites, true, and there is nothing wrong with that. Members of the same animal species desire sex from each other, and in as much as all human beings belong to the same species, they will desire sex from each other; prohibiting it is social constructed reality, and is futile. The salient point is that the white person who projects his sexual feelings to blacks is talking about his own desire to have sex with blacks. If one feels hostile to other persons and believes that if one expresses that affect that they might harm one, one might say that they are hostile to one. Blacks resent being socially marginalized by whites and feel hostile to whites. They then deny their hostility.

Sometimes, we know that we should not do something and go ahead and do it, anyway. We then rationalize our actions and attempt to make them seem rational. This is pretty much like making excuses for our actions.

Sometimes, we see something is us and instead of accepting it (reaction formation), we see it in other persons and, perhaps, fight it in them. A man who is interested in pornography (there is nothing wrong with that), might see other people as interested in it, and fight it. In so doing, he sees more pornography than the average person does. The crusading anti pornographic minister sees more smut than the peddlers of smut; he gratifies his prurient interests by examining smut, to decide whether to censor it or not.

Sometimes, we redirect, sublimate, what we see in ourselves, that society prohibits, to more socially acceptable ends. If one likes to see nude women, one might paint nude pictures, a more acceptable form of that desire.

Sometimes, we think about things but lack the courage to do them. We intellectualize but fear doing what we think and talk about lest society punishes us. You can talk about sexual freedom, but engaging in it is a different matter, for that requires courage to defy your society’s mores and the injunctions of your religion.

Sometimes, we minimize the effect of what we are doing. You discriminate against people and see it as not a big deal.

We all adjust to the situations we find ourselves in. Bad situations are adjusted to, perhaps with hope of a better future. Even slavery is adjusted to.

Sometimes, we blame other people for our problems. If we can blame others for our issues, then we are no longer responsible for them. Blaming is used to retain a sense of perfection, while one is imperfect. A girl, who dropped out of school hence feels like she was a failure, may blame her parents for dropping out of school. She exaggerates their imperfections and faults to make it seem like they made her drop out of school. If it is their fault then she is good. This is, of course, an infantile attempt not to take responsibility for ones action and feel imperfect.

We all desire perfection, superiority and ego ideal; it takes courage to accept ones imperfection.

Sometimes, we avoid what makes us feel anxious. The shy child anticipates rejection and feels anxious from it, and to avoid rejection he withdraws from people and keeps to himself.

When life is tough, we tend to escape into fantasyland, into wishful thinking, into dreams of what could be that is not in fact what is. If one is poor one dreams of wealth, if one is socially powerless one dreams of power. In America, white society marginalizes black people and blacks often escape into the fantasy world and, in it, imagine themselves powerful. The weak feeling child tends to over utilize fantasy. The psychotic person, in fact, lives in his own fantasy world where he is whatever he dreams that he is.

Fear, anger, shame, pride, guilt and the other emotions are really ego defense mechanisms. We feel fear of what could harm or destroy our bodies and our psychological selves and fear makes us flee from them or fight them, and in so doing protect our bodies and egos.

Sometimes, we feel angry when our bodies and psychological selves ere attacked…if you humiliate a person, he feels angry at you, and may attack you to protect his pride.

We feel proud of our ego selves, our sense of importance, significance, and dignity. Pride is mostly an empty affect for human beings are not different from animals and trees. Neurotics who over identity with their imaginary ideal, superior selves and take pride in those false selves tend to over utilize pride defense.

We feel shame when our sense of dignity is affronted…such as falling down in the presence of other persons, or being seen by others having sex etc.

We feel guilty when we do something that our sense of right and wrong tells us is wrong. The ego has a sense of right and wrong, and that makes it feel proud of itself. But in the natural world there is no right and wrong. Nature will destroy you in a jiffy without respecting whether you are right or wrong. Terrorists will kill you despite your sense of being innocent. Criminals will steal from you despite your working hard for your money. In short, there is no right or wrong in nature. Right or wrong is a social construct. Clearly, we need socially constructed morality if we are to get along with each other and survive in society. Nevertheless, the fact is that morality is a socially made up variable and does not exist in nature. When ones survival is threatened, even stealing is engaged in by the most moralistic person. Guilt feeling is a social thing and an expensive thing at that. It assumes that one did wrong. In a world where there is no right or wrong, how can one do wrong? Anti social personalities do not feel guilty or remorseful for their hurtful actions. They just take what they want to survive with. American whites needed land and took it from Indians and do not feel guilty from doing so. Guilt feeling is a neurotic thing, a luxury a rational person cannot afford.

Helen Schucman (A Course in Miracles) gave the ego defense mechanisms religious coloration. In her view, we separated from God and feel guilty from doing so, and we fear punishment from God. To be human is to feel existential guilt and fear punishment. She then tried to persuade us that we did not separate from God hence are not guilty and, therefore, should not fear God’s punishment. Her views are interesting but we are not at present discussing metaphysics, but psychology.

For our present purposes, human beings have a sense of separated self housed in bodies and employ the various ego defense mechanisms to defend those self invented selves. How the individual defends his self characterizes his personality. The avoidant personality, my personality, aka shy child, employs avoidance, and fear, excessively. The paranoid personality excessively employs the ego defense of projection. The multiply personality over employs dissociation. The antisocial personality over employs the ego defense of denial.

You can figure out which ego defense mechanisms you frequently employ. That would give you insight into your personality type. Then try to reduce the employment of the various defense mechanisms. To the extent that you are less defended, to that extent are you relaxed, peaceful and happy? However, it is impossible not to employ ego defenses and still be alive on earth. If you did not feel fear and run from danger, or fight it, you would be killed and not live in this world. The world is a place where our selves are made up and, as such, must be defended to seem to exist.

When you no longer defend your body and ego, they die and disappear into the nothingness from where they came