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.
What is science?
Science is a methodological approach to phenomena. Science seeks to understand
phenomena, as it is, not as one wants it to be.
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. (See the chapter on Ontology, in my book, Real Self Psychology.)
What seems to exist, eternally, is the agent that constructs the ego,
the intelligence in us, aka spirit self. I believe that there is a universal intelligence that manifests in all living things. I believe that the real
self is part of that universal intelligence. As I see it, unified intelligence enters space, time and matter and
uses them to construct separated selves and bodies and defends them. When it stops defending them, defending human
personalities, and the bodies they manifest in, they die and that universal force reverts to being only aware of
itself as pure intelligence.
PERSONALITY
DISORDERS
Western psychiatry has done an excellent job describing the various personality
disorders. At
present, American Psychiatry recognizes eleven personality disorders.
The eleven personality disorders are paranoid, schizoid, schizotypal;
narcissistic, histrionic, borderline, antisocial; avoidant, obsessive-compulsive, dependent and passive aggressive.
Briefly, paranoid personality disorder is characterized by feeling of
inferiority and inadequacy and compensatory desire for exaggerated adequacy and power. The individual assess himself
as inferior but resents being so and does everything not to seem inferior and inadequate. He works very hard to
seem adequate, powerful and superior. He so wants to seem adequate that sometimes he pretends to be adequate, rather
than own that he is feeling inadequate. Sometimes, he behaves “as if” he is the superior and powerful person he
would like to be but knows himself not to be.
He is Alfred Adler’s neurotic personality. He hates being seen as inadequate and imagines that people
around him see him as inadequate. He fears being demeaned, belittled, degraded, humiliated, criticized and ignored.
If he feels that other people treated him as an insignificant nobody, he feels angry at them. He is suspicious
and untrusting. He feels like only he can defend his own interests. He is very rationalistic and not sentimental or poetic.
He wants to seem like a man and hates whatever makes him seem like a woman: weakness and softness. He wants to be an important
person, a social somebody, and detests being a social nobody.
He is usually very argumentative and wants to win all debates he is involved
in, even if his position is wrong. Winning is all that matters to him, not the right or wrong answer. To win makes
him feel like he is important, perfect and ideal, and to loose makes him feel like he is an existential nobody,
a situation he dreads more than death. He is guarded and scans his world expecting danger and defends himself.
Physically and emotionally, he looks proper and stiff, dignified and lacks spontaneity in behavior. He is rigid
and inflexible and finds it difficult to relax and flow with life. He must do everything to conform to his desired
existential importance. As it were, he is forever playing roles, the role of “I am a very important person; treat
me so, or I would be angry at you.”
He lacks genuine sense of humor and is almost always serious. People
generally stay away from him, for they never know what they could say that might offend him. Besides, since he
seldom laughs and people enjoy the company of those who laugh, they do not enjoy his company and avoid him. Thus,
he is generally left alone.
His loneliness is compounded by his tendency to pursue ideal self and
that self’s allied ideal standards. He mentally constructs ideal “how people ought to be and behave”. He then uses
those ideas to judge real people. He is always judging those around him, pointing out their imperfections, relative
to his ideal standards. Nobody likes to be constantly reminded that he is not perfect, even if that is true, so
people resent him for being judgmental and critical. People avoid his company, like the plague, to avoid being
criticized. To be criticized makes people tense and anxious and nobody likes to be emotionally upset, so people
avoid the critical paranoid person.
Although he has something in common with the deluded person, the paranoid
personality is different from such persons. In delusion disorder, the individual has systematic delusion, and believes
in what is not true as true. For example, the individual may believe that another person is out to kill him, poison
him, and persecute him, when no one wants to do so. True or not, the deluded person defends himself, as if he is
actually being attacked. His life is guarded and uptight; he is like a soldier at the battlefield, all of life
is a warfront, and he is always defending himself, lest he be killed by a world he perceives as dangerous and does
not trust.
There are five types of delusion disorder: grandiose, persecutory, erotomanic,
jealous and somatic. In
grandiose delusion, the individual feels like he is very important and powerful, when he is clearly not so. He
wants to be treated as the most important person in the world, if a woman, the most beautiful woman in the world,
and if you did not relate to him as such, he feels angry at you.
In persecutory delusion, the individual feels like other people, or a
particular person, has it in store for him, and wants to kill him, when that is clearly not so. He defends himself
from anticipated attack, when no one is attacking him. (Eventually people do attack him. He stimulates such attack by accusing people of doing
what they did not do to him. This is called paranoid self fulfilling prophesies; here, the paranoid accuses people of trying
to harm him, when they had no such intention, and they feel angry at him for falsely accusing them, and then do
to him the things he had falsely accused them of doing.
This hostility from people confirms his earlier belief that people and the world
are hostile to him. What he does not realize is that he generated the hostility that came his way.)
In jealous type, the individual has insane jealousies and accuses those
around him, particularly his girl friend or wife, of cheating on him; he may even follow her around, trying to
catch her with other men, and when his suspicion gets the better of him, he may beat her up, and wound up in jail
for domestic violence. This type of person wants to control every aspect of his spouse’s life and makes her life
a living hell. Generally, she resents him and seeks out of their relationship. Thus, he is left alone and he muses
about how unjust people are towards him. As long as he sees people as property to be owned, and nobody is his property
to do with as he likes, people would continue resenting his presence.
In erotomanic type, the individual believes that a famous person is in
love with her, when that is not the case. Such a woman may believe that she is married to Jesus Christ. Apparently,
it makes an inferior feeling woman feel important to believe that famous persons are in love with her or that Jesus
is married to her. To let go of such delusions, the individual must stop wanting to seem existentially important
and accept our reality, our existential nothingness. If one accepts that one is insignificant, one would not be
deluding ones self with the idea that important persons want to marry one, or that one is married to important
persons; one would not stalk famous persons, trying to convince them that one is their spouse. The cure for delusional
disorder is to give up all desire for special ness and accept that one and all humanity is not special.
(By the way, every normal human being is a bit deluded, and paranoid,
therefore, I am describing every human being and you, the reader, not just some mentally ill person in a psychiatric
hospital, though that too. As long as the individual desires to seem important, he will sometimes act like the
deluded character. Delusional
disorder is a reaction to our perception that we are nothing, that we are not special and do not matter, as far
as nature is concerned. Delusional disorder is the product of our efforts to make ourselves seem important when we know
that nature does not see us as important. Those who are more sensitive and are therefore more acutely aware of
the human condition, unimportance, struggle the mightiest to seem important, hence develop clinical delusion disorder.
The so-called normal person has mild delusions.)
In Somatic type, the paranoid person believes that there is something
wrong with her body, when clearly there is nothing wrong with her body. She runs from doctor to doctor, trying to get a medical
diagnosis that confirms her imaginary illness. Actually, there is always some somatic issue in the paranoid’s physical
make up, except that that underlying medical disorder is exaggerated and used to make excuses for not doing productive
work, to malinger and have society support her, via putting her on the welfare dole.
All paranoid persons inherited problematic bodies; sicknesses that make
them feel bodily weak and inadequate and psychologically react with their compulsive quest for power. Their inherited
physical disorders are generally not pronounced, it could be organs that work slowly or are weaker than the average.
For example, some people’s intestines digest food slowly, they have weak intestine. Such persons tend to be constipated.
Their constant constipation prevents them from enjoying food.
Their stomach distress makes them feel like there is something wrong with their
body, and that is generalized to belief that there is something wrong with them as persons. They then compensate
with effort to seem powerful.
Adolf Hitler could not handle most foods. Food caused him stomach pains.
He avoided most food and was a vegetarian, did not drink alcohol, and did not smoke cigarettes. He was constantly
experiencing stomach distress and tried all sorts of medications, seeking relief, to no avail. His constant stomach distress produced a sense of weakness
in him. He restituted with desire to be the most powerful man in the world. His politics was his battle to be the
most powerful man in the world, his Mein Kampf.
The deluded person is less disturbed than the schizophrenic, paranoid
type. In schizophrenia, there is both delusion and hallucination. Hallucination may occur in any of the five senses:
auditory, visual, olfactory, tactile etc. In delusional disorder, there is no hallucination. The schizophrenic is the quintessential mad person, he
hallucinates and is deluded.
The deluded person is a partial madman, for he only has one attribute
of mental disorder, delusion, but not the other, hallucination. A deluded person can be a professional, such as
be an engineer, whereas a schizophrenic seldom can be in paid employment; his voices so distract him that he cannot
concentrate on the abstract thinking required by most professional jobs.
The person with paranoid personality is not mentally disordered. He is
intellectually well functioning, although he experiences social and interpersonal problems. In fact, he could be
your medical doctor, lawyer, and president.
He is mentally intact and generally is able to perform abstract thinking and
work. His problem is mainly interpersonal. He feels inferior and fears being seen as such, and being demeaned.
He is characterized by suspiciousness and lack of trust in other persons.
Paranoid personalities tend to do well in jobs where not trusting other
people is a plus, such as police, immigration, customs, prosecutor, judge, prison warden and so on.
The paranoid personality is neurotic, he is not psychotic. A neurotic is a normal
person who understands reality, as it is, but does not like it. He wants to change reality into ideal forms of
it. In the meantime, he lives in reality and does not flee from it.
The psychotic (such as deluded, schizophrenic, manic etc), on the other
hand, rejects reality and uses his imagination and thinking to construct ideal reality and pretends to live in
it. Thus, a poor person tells himself that he is the world’s richest man or the most powerful man in the world
or the most beautiful and desired woman in her world and believes this falsity as true and acts as such.
(I
dwelt at some length on paranoia for a reason. I did so because I see this problem in many Africans in the USA. In fact, I am yet to see an African
without some paranoid traits. I should, however, add that this phenomenon is not unique to Africans. Immigrants to new countries
tend to exhibit paranoia at higher levels than the norm. Apparently, when people leave their countries of origin,
they tend to lose some social status. For example, a medical doctor has prestige in his world. But if he goes to
a different country, he may not be able to practice as a medical doctor, until he takes some courses and passes
some required examinations. In the mean time, he may work as a medical assistant in a hospital or even worse…I
have seen Filipino doctors working as janitors in American. These hitherto prestigious persons lose social status.
This loss of high social status does not sit well with them. They, then, try to seem important in a vicarious way:
by pretending to be important, hence become deluded. Also, we must factor in the fact that until immigrants secure
the all important green card, or become American citizen, that they tend to fear deportation to the countries they
were fleeing from. They fear police and immigration officers. If a police car passes by, they imagine that he is
out to get him; and on the job, they fear immigration officers coming to arrest and deport them. This intense fear
of deportation contributes to the etiology of paranoia in immigrants. All things considered, paranoia, the pretence
that one is important when one is not, a mask of importance, is very rampant among immigrants. Most Nigerians in
the USA are paranoid and, even worse, some are deluded. Some of these psychotic paranoids claim to have
been nominated for the Noble prize in physics, when they are not even physicists, or that they invented the internet,
when their knowledge of computers is, at best, marginal. They are given a school boy prize, perhaps for writing
a good paper, and that swells their little egos and they proceed to make outrageous claims about how smart they
are. We have too many deluded Nigerians running around the USA, so I decided to spend some time explicating the phenomenon. Hopefully, folks will know what the
insanity is and seek help from mental health professionals. I must however, warn that such persons usually do not
seek psychotherapy. Why? They like their delusions for it makes them seem important. To let go of their delusional claims
makes them feel small, feel like the insignificant persons blacks are supposed to be. And they do not want to be
seen as insignificant. In The Black middle Class, Franklin Frazier, the esteemed black American sociologist, tells
us that middle class black Americans so feel inferior that they devote most of their energies trying to seem superior.
Instead of doing research and contributing to knowledge, the clowns go about presenting themselves as important
persons. See, in Nigeria just about every middle class person is deluded and thinks that being called Professor,
Doctor, Chief, Alhaji ‘Do
Nothing” is going to make him seem important, when he is clearly not so. Franz Fanon, in Black Skin, white Masks,
makes the same point that blacks feel inadequate and pretend to be adequate hence their apparent childish vanities,
their ridiculous egotism. A people that have contributed very little to science and technology ought to be ashamed
of themselves, keep quiet and work hard to make some contributions, instead of masquerading about as very important
persons. As Fela Anikulapo Kuti would say, these people are “Big man my Yass”.)
The schizoid personality does not like the company of people, or does
not care for it, and generally keeps to himself. He does not feel the urge to be with people and is not bothered
by not having friends always hanging around him. He is perfectly happy being by himself. He tends to do well in
professions where emotional independence is a plus, such as physics, engineering and mathematics.
The schizotypal personality is eccentric and odd and believes in what
most people in her world do not believe in, such as believe that she possesses sixth sense and extrasensory powers
and can predict the future. She is your neighborhood so-called psychic. She believes in aliens, UFOs and other
such unscientific beliefs. But beyond these eccentric beliefs, she might be a nurse, a doctor etc. In a word, she
is a normal person. Human beings come in all shapes and types and we have to accept them all.
The narcissistic personality believes that he is special and worthy of
other people’s admiration. He feels superior to other people, and, as the superior person, believes that he is justified in
exploiting other people, and using them to get what he wants and discarding them like scrape iron. He uses people
to get what he wants out of life and forgets about them. He may marry a beautiful wife just to have a parlor trophy
and use her to get other men’s admiration. He does not marry because he loves a woman.
Deep down, the narcissist feels inferior and inadequate and restitutes
with the mask of superiority. When finally he recognizes that he is not the important person he had hitherto imagined
himself to be, he tends to become depressed and may even commit suicide; suicide from his inability to cope with
our common human imperfection, powerlessness and worthlessness.
The narcissist is a neurotic who succeeded early in life, at school,
sports and work, and come to think that he is a special person. Whereas the paranoid child failed in childhood
activities, like play and school, and feels like a failure and restitutes with false superiority, the narcissistic
child succeeded at school, work and sports, and later, in his chosen profession, and comes to feel special and
better than other people. His success masks his underlying sense of inferiority.
The typical American is a narcissistic character, a person who feels
inadequate but had succeeded in the world hence seem superior to other races, those who seem like they are failures,
such as black persons. When the narcissist finally fails, he recognizes his underlying sense of worthlessness and
generally becomes depressed. When America’s civilization, a shallow one, is surpassed by others, as is inevitable, she would become depressed.
(What goes up must come down. Civilizations come and go. The world is littered with past civilizations and America, despite her delusion of special ness, is not an exception. America is already becoming second to Asians.) America’s narcissists will turn into depressed characters. They are almost already there, see, they are
popping antidepressants at an alarming rate. Prozac, Zoloft, Paxil and the other serotonin reuptake blockers are
perhaps the most demanded medications in America. Americans, apparently, can not handle existential depression and need to stimulate their bodies
to convince themselves that they are important persons. When Americans finally grow up, become mature, at the moment
they are adolescents, they would accept human existential reality, our worthlessness, without turning to belief
in false superiority.
The histrionic woman is overly dramatic and seeks attention from all
those around her. She feels inferior and inadequate, and getting others attention masks her underlying sense of
nothingness. As long as she obtains other persons’ admiration, she feels sexually and physically important. . She
is the drama queen. She is the female version of the male narcissist. She has shallow affect and does not really love men or
w