Abreaction -

Effects . on . Identity

The links in the table on the left take you to sub-headings in this article.

Whereas, times of social change indicate that needs and opportunities are changing ; beliefs have to change too so that each person can meet the new challenges and continue to make sense of life. Abreaction becomes a regular aspect of human life in times of change.

Abreaction revolves around belief systems. Belief systems that are self-contradictory or are out of harmony with evolving needs will, sooner or later, generate abreaction.

As the child grows up, its immediate task is to create an identity for itself. It experiences different areas of life repeatedly – politics (of the family), religious beliefs (of the family), sexuality (both its own and the parents), social relationships, etc. These different experiences generate different beliefs, which may or may not be harmonious with each other. For example, its political beliefs may orientate around power, its sexual beliefs may orientate on fear, and its religious beliefs around guilt. [ This is why I focus on systems, or patterns, of beliefs, rather than individual beliefs].

The child creates its identity by the way that it learns to put value on its systems of belief. In effect, an identity is an ideology, or a system of beliefs where some are valued more than others. [²]

When a child has a happy upbringing, any belief is likely to be harmonious with the other beliefs. On this basis the child can construct a stable identity.

The outcome is different for a child who experiences dominant fear and anxiety during its early childhood. When fear and anxiety become dominant in one area of life, then the beliefs generated in that area are not harmonious with the child’s beliefs in other areas of its life. Its identity is potentially unstable.

Fear and Confusion

Fear creates barriers in the mind. These barriers separate the mind into compartments that do not inter-act with each other.

Another complication is that due to confusion. Confusion produces the opposite effect to fear : it produces fuzzy boundaries between different needs and different beliefs. The child may not be able to separate its own sexuality from the sexuality of its mother and / or its father. It may not be able to separate its own needs from the needs of its parents. [³]

Likewise, for example, the child’s sexual beliefs may shape its religious beliefs. Beliefs that sexual activity should be free and unrestrained by social mores may stimulate religious beliefs that incorporate ‘free love’ in the community (such as the anabaptists of the 19th century). Beliefs on the grandeur of sexual purity may fertilise bleak and intolerant religious views (such as Puritanism).

Confusion is the result of a lack of awareness : the child is not aware of the manner in which its needs shape its beliefs.

Overall, the child’s sense of identity is fragmented and confused to the extent that its mind’s contents are either compartmentalised by fear or blurred together by confusion. The unhappy child has a patchwork pattern of beliefs, and so has a patchwork identity. The happy child has a consistent pattern of beliefs, and so correspondingly his sense of identity is harmonious. In the modern Western world, a happy childhood is an unlikely event. Whence the difference between stability and instability is a relative one, depending on the intensity of fear and anxiety that maintain the barriers in the mind, aided by a lack of awareness. [4]

Function of Abreaction

In the process of personal growth, beliefs that are no longer useful or productive need to be dissolved and then replaced by more adequate ones. Since many important beliefs are subconscious ones, a process is needed to bring them into awareness. This is what abreaction achieves. Abreaction ensures that beliefs, whether conscious ones or subconscious ones, that are relevant to any particular current problem become susceptible to analysis and evaluation.

Abreaction gives the opportunity to update beliefs ; this is an on-going process, since any belief is only adequate for a time. No matter how adequate and effective a belief is at the moment, sooner or later it will need updating. [ This is why I classify beliefs as adequate or inadequate, rather than good or bad, true or false. Even present ‘good’ beliefs will eventually need to be replaced as the person evolves.] [5]

In effect, personal evolution is a process of continually updating the person’s sense of identity.

The child creates its sense of identity from its various patterns of belief. As the normal child grows into the adult, earlier patterns are replaced by more mature ones – this process is continuous and relatively free from difficult problems since fear is not a big barrier in the mind. The adult has learned to define his ego boundaries fairly clearly. Stability of identity has been attained because consistent patterns of belief create a stable structure of mind. Identity is always a construction that the ego has to achieve.

However, for the person who has experienced mental disorder this construction of a stable identity with clear ego boundaries does not happen ; the person can have access to all the past patterns of belief because he cannot disentangle himself from them. He is unable to face the fear. Past patterns remain a permanent feature of his subconscious mind. His ego boundaries may be blurred in situations that he finds difficult to handle. So in some situations of high anxiety the disturbed person will react from subconscious beliefs still anchored in his childhood, or even from a pre-verbal level of infancy.

A happy childhood and a stable identity are a sign of good fortune but not necessarily a sign of evolutionary blessing. A contented adult is likely to have a narrow horizon of ideals. Whereas the discontented adult has to keep moving, has to keep exploring regions of the mind as he seeks to surmount his sorrows and misery.

Advantages of Instability

I have had more than a fair share of sorrow in my life, and this has led me to develop my mental abilities. Once I embarked on the development of my intellect and self-awareness within the framework of a psycho-analysis I accessed innumerable instances of intuition and insight. My schizophrenic mentality has kept open to me all my previous patterns of belief. And my introverted mentality has given me the sensitivity to be aware of all the disharmonies. Hence in my reveries I could reach down into my subconscious mind and make contact with these confused responses of my childhood.

But there is also a disadvantage : my schizophrenic mind is slow to understand experience. To understand means to change the level of awareness from confusion to clarity, and this takes time, time in which the person still experiences psychological pain. [6]

The mind of a schizophrenic person is more amorphous than the structured mind of a normal person. The normal person keeps his stability through his habitual desires and ambitions and fixed beliefs. But there is a disadvantage here. The structured mind prevents insight and intuition. The structured mind prevents the recognition of the need to change. Only in times of acute stress, when the structure is breaking down, is insight facilitated. My amorphousness is one of the main reasons that I have had more intuition than other, more conventional thinkers. [7]

No one who is conventional, who is relatively stable, could have produced a theory of psychology similar to mine, since intuition would not have functioned to the extent necessary to penetrate the darkness of the confused mind. Only a schizophrenic person can understand schizophrenia, though the psychiatrists Harry Stack Sullivan and R.D. Laing did pretty well for their times.

A stable thinker may have the occasional insight into a problem, but for regular periods of creativity, some degree of instability is required. This is a one-way relationship. A creative thinker (or artist) needs instability, but many people who are unstable are not creative.

I came out of the old school : stiff-upper lip, never show negative emotional responses (keep them repressed), and keep yourself to yourself whenever possible. The irony here is that in order to journey to the end of a complete psycho-analysis (and I am probably the first person who has achieved this) I had to develop my subjectivity and live in full awareness of all my negative emotions.

In stressful social situations the adult can react from a pre-verbal level of infancy. What is the significance of this ? . It indicates that the person had suffered psychological trauma, in some degree, in his infancy. This distress occurs when the stresses and negative states of mind of the parents’ own lives are transmitted to the fledgling ego of the infant. The difficulties of childhood lie mainly in the first eighteen months, for it is in this period that trauma can occur most easily. [8]

Trauma in infancy indicates that it occurred before the establishment of a stable ego, before any significant range of verbal capacity existed. Such sorrow sensitises the child to abreaction (even children experience abreaction). Once the person has become an adult, he can use abreaction to bring up all the non-verbalised beliefs (and attitudes, desires, etc) so that they can be examined and conceptualised. The beliefs have been repressed. Therefore to initiate abreaction he has to establish contact with the feelings that maintain these repressed beliefs. Intellectual knowledge alone cannot do this.

Not all repression, and subsequent abreaction, originates during this early period of childhood. Nevertheless, infancy problems set the framework within which later difficulties are handled.

Not all psychological trauma may have originated in the present life of the person. Within my perspective of reincarnation, I accept that some psychological distress will be the effects of trauma experienced in past lives.

The tender ego of the child cannot handle conflict, so some childhood experiences engender guilt automatically. Upon this guilt, resentment (and right-wing attitudes) so easily arises when the child has become an adult. Only through understanding the cause can such resentment be surmounted. There is no one to blame. Neither the mother, the father, nor the child are to blame. Childhood is simply a problem to overcome. And the practices of compassion, forgiveness and acceptance are the only ways to overcome it. [9]

Stages to Abreaction

Abreaction does not get rid of attitudes and beliefs and motivations, even if they are undesirable ones. What it does is to make them the centre of attention. Then it has to be complemented by two other aspects of mind - self awareness and idealism - in order to make one’s pattern of beliefs more harmonious and consistent. Hence there are three stages to this process.

1. First focusing attention.
Abreaction highlights the current problem and the separate redundant or contradictory beliefs that flow into it. The mood of each stage of abreaction brings in its own set of beliefs about the problem. So beliefs change as moods change.

2. Then awareness.
The person needs to cultivate and use self-awareness. This enables him to work through the stages of abreaction. With awareness comes the likelihood of developing insight into his problem. This is the crucial step, since insight removes compulsion from an issue. [10]

3. Finally idealism.
His sense of idealism facilitates the resolution of the conflict. He has learned to see all sides of the problem. He acquires a better understanding of himself. If he lacks idealism, then he may fail to learn, and hence may end up with a sour and bitter personality.

Insight gets rid of any form of compulsion that is attached to attitudes, beliefs, etc. It is important to realise that compulsion can be attached to good attributes of character as well as to bad ones. Even good attitudes and beliefs and motivations are subject to the process of abreaction. After an abreaction has been resolved by insight, a person can effectively choose whether or not to continue to be influenced by the state of mind that has been abreacted.

However, a complex problem may have many factors to it, and each factor will generate its own abreaction. Hence many abreactions will be needed to completely resolve the problem.

If the person decides to leave behind the particular problem that has been abreacted, he will still occasionally return to it, but there will no longer be any compulsion attached to it. So it loses its power over him. Then the intensity of that problem gradually fades away with time.

In the next article Abreaction 2 - Examples, I give examples of abreactions that I experienced during my self-analysis.

The number in brackets at the end of each reference takes you back to the paragraph that featured it. The addresses of my websites are on the Links page.

[¹]. My in-depth analysis of the process of abreaction is given in the five articles on Abreaction. See Basic Ideas page. [1]

[²]. There are some notes on value in the first article on Emotion, section Influence of Value. [2]

[³]. See the article on Confusion and Identity. [3]

[4]. Anxiety is an emotion, and is described in the articles on Emotion. See Basic Ideas page. [4]

[5]. There is an article on Personal Evolution on my websites The Strange World of Emotion and A Modern Thinker. [5]

[6]. There is an article on Narcissism & Schizophrenia. [6]

[7]. There is an article on Reason & Intuition on my website A Modern Thinker. [7]

[8]. For an analysis of the first 18 months of the infant's life, see the article Vulnerability of the Ego.
An article on Bonding focuses on some problems of a sensitive child and explains an unintentional source of infancy trauma. This is on my websites The Strange World of Emotion, or The Subconscious Mind, or Discover Your Mind.
In more detail, infancy trauma is explained in Guilt & Meaning - part 2. [8]

[9]. The fifth article on Abreaction describes Forgiveness and Acceptance. [9]

[10]. There is an article on Self-Awareness on my website The Subconscious Mind.

Compulsion is an aspect of determinism and subconscious motivation. See the third article on Abreaction, Catharsis and Suggestion, section Immoral Compulsions. See also the article Characteristics of a Psycho-Analysis, section Motivation and Determinism, on my website The Subconscious Mind. [10]

Books

Laing, R. D.
The Divided Self . Pelican Books, 1987

Sullivan, Harry Stack.
Clinical Studies in Psychiatry. W.W. Norton & co, USA 1973

The articles in this section are :

Abreaction 1 - Effects on identity

Abreaction 2 - Examples

Abreaction 3 - Creative illness

 

Drugs & Dancing & Conversion

Romanticism and Evangelism and Abreaction

Rites of Passage

Copyright © 2003 Ian Heath
All Rights Reserved

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Ian Heath
London, UK

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