Abreaction -

Examples

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

Minor abreactions
These can be difficult to detect in all their stages if a parent or a partner is not around to be a source of conflict. As conflict intensifies, so abreactions intensify too.

Major abreactions
These can last for many days, even weeks ; their length allows deep insights into one’s attitudes, beliefs and motivations to occur. Complex patterns of attitudes and beliefs and motivations need time for their exploration.

When I abreacted my sense of spiritual idealism, the stage of bitterness alone lasted several weeks. My idealism still remains, but what was actually abreacted was some of the immaturity within it. Previously I had viewed idealism as something that was romantic and adventurous. It made life exciting. It was this attraction to glamour and excitement that was abreacted. A sense of spirituality has to mature just as much as anything else in life has to mature.

However, what is considered to be mature at one stage of life may well be re-classified as immature at a later, more evolved, stage of life. So the abreaction of immaturity is an on-going intermittant process, as long as the person continues to change.

Intense abreactions
It is these that can effectively change character, though they rarely last more than a few days.

I illustrate my experiences of the last type.

Example A
I was on holiday in the autumn of 1991 ; my holiday reading was the books of R.D. Laing. I was analysing my thoughts on compliance, and this made my anxiety level increase over a period of a few hours. [²]. I was in a local café when the anxiety began to escalate beyond my ability to control it in public ; I had to retreat into the solitude of my room. The degradation of compliance was eating deeply into me. I thought of my job – the compliance of staying within materialistic rules and regulations for years, instead of having the courage to be free. I could not face my cowardice. Then wave after wave of bitterness swept over me. [³]. The psychic pain was almost beyond anything that I had ever experienced up till then – only catatonia had been a greater pain. I could do nothing but lay on my bed and cry.

What I was doing was abreacting my childhood attitude of compliance and the bitterness that it engendered in me. The intensity of my pain represented the intensity of the pain that I felt in childhood.

During this abreaction I at last solved the problem of what it is that rapidly ages a person – it is bitterness ! Years later, during another intense abreaction, I felt the ageing process in the front part of the brain. Bitterness ages the frontal lobe.

The difficulty with understanding abreaction is that no internal voice tells you what is happening ; figuratively speaking, no book of instructions comes with the experience. The person has to make his own interpretation, depending upon the ideas that he was reflecting on before abreaction began.

For three years I thought that the abreaction of compliance represented the elimination of the inferiority complex. [4]. Then I thought that it represented the elimination of my schizophrenic state of mind. Now I accept that it represented the elimination of the view that schizophrenia is a ‘bad’ state of mind. In some conditions, schizophrenia can be quite a useful skill, especially in the way that a person learns the value of privacy (by separating his internal life from social necessities).

This view of the abreaction of compliance does not mean that this abreaction actually eliminated compliance ; only that it eliminated compliance as an automatic behavioural response in states of high anxiety. I can still choose to be compliant if I want to. It is always some aspect of determinism that is eliminated by abreaction. [5]

Why is such intense bitterness linked to crucial experiences of sorrow or failure in life ?

Whenever a child or an adult adopts a belief or persistent state of mind which demeans his sense of nobility or spiritual idealism then a counter-belief is always induced as well.

This counter-belief generates either bitterness or sorrow at the person’s failure. So bitterness or sorrow always accompanies the abreaction of the demeaning belief.

Example B
My second intense abreaction occurred some fifteen months later. I was reflecting on the contrast between the romanticism and heroism of narcissism (which I identified with) and the attitudes of morality within jealousy (which I did not identify with). My thoughts turned to the need for social approval ; some more analysis cleared up my ideas about it. [6]. I now understood that this need was more insidious that I had previously realised. I felt so humiliated by this need. Then the floodgates of sorrow opened. I became overwhelmed by grief and crying. As the tears poured out of me I felt my head and hands become bathed in tingling sensations : my astral friends (my friends in heaven) were giving me psychic help. In my grief I wanted nothing but to disintegrate my consciousness. I needed to reject everything.

This abreaction was difficult to understand. I seemed to have abreacted forms of self-pity, such as the need for social approval, the desire for oblivion, and perhaps autistic tendencies. This abreaction took the longest of any abreaction to work its changes in my consciousness – probably about ten months. The abreaction did not last this length of time. The abreaction took only about a day or two, but the recovery from it is that which takes the time since the person is changing his beliefs.

During the time of change I was still susceptible to the need for social approval, but its intensity gradually diminished to a level that was much easier to handle. This need is perhaps too deep to be eliminated, since it is a part of a person's identity. What happens is that the person's attitude to it changes : the introvert no longer feels it to be degrading. When this change of mind occurs, then the need for social approval can be used in a beneficial way.

Example C
Five weeks later, in February 1993, I was reading about the way that the eagerness and thirst for wisdom that some people show early in adult life ends by getting smothered and buried by the demands of materialism – the philosophic quest to understand life cannot usually transcend economic necessity. I thought of my own particular nightmares that the pursuit of wisdom had brought me. Soon I was crying over all the horrors that I have been through in my quest. Again I felt my scalp tingle as my astral friends gave me psychic help.

I am not completely certain of my interpretation of this abreaction. I think that I abreacted infancy trauma itself, but it was in no way as bad as the abreactions of compliance / schizophrenia and of the need for social approval. This view suggests that the abreaction of a trauma is less intense than the abreaction of the corresponding counter-belief that the experience of trauma generates. [7]

Example D
A year later I was reflecting on the difference between will power and idealism. I had just finished my long-running analysis of sexuality. There was an enormous yearning in me to go into solitude in order to develop my will. Yet sexual analysis made the cultivation of will power impossible. The need to let my mind function through free-association precluded the possibility of developing one-pointed concentration. My idealism needed to understand sexuality, yet I found sexual analysis to be so degrading. My life was a conflict between my will and my idealism. Traditional spirituality (within the context of meditation and contemplation) requires intense will power. So I could not follow it. Then understanding dawned on me. Idealism always requires sacrifice ; it is not an inferior mode of spirituality.

Floods of tears poured out of me. I could not stop crying. Again I felt my astral friends give me help as I went through an intense abreaction. Every time in the past when I had attempted to escape from my self-analysis, fate had blocked my way. Fate had kept me trapped in sorrow so that I was forced to think my way out of that sorrow. Now I could let go of the sense of inferiority at not being allowed to follow the classical yoga path. This sense of inferiority was very deep : it made me disdain tradition and conventional teachers. And now my tears were abreacting this stigma. I was abreacting my inferiority complex !

There was a challenging consequence to this abreaction. Next day the world became dead to me. Alfred Adler was right. All desire for achievement in the material world is simply a compensation for the inferiority complex. Eliminate the inferiority complex and there is nothing that a person needs to achieve within materialism. Eliminate the inferiority complex and the desire for power becomes valueless. Eliminate the inferiority complex and only spiritual development retains any meaning. (As previously mentioned, what is eliminated is compulsion ; in this case it was the compulsiveness of feeling inferior, which in turn leads to the compulsion to achieve). For the spiritual idealist the purpose of life is only to collect experience in order to be able to help others to help themselves.

Example E
My next intense abreaction took place in December 1994. I had ceased to take any intellectual interest in what was happening to me, as a way of trying to stop the seemingly- endless psycho-analysis (which began in late 1986). I considered that it was over. In this situation, where intellectual analysis is not present, then intense abreactions produce symbolic imagery to indicate what is happening.

One night catharsis started. The following night the stage of guilt was reached. As I lay in bed I had to constantly swallow the saliva that my mouth was copiously generating. I was gulping every couple of seconds. I had to sleep with my head propped up. Obviously my throat chakra (which is the seat of problems with purity, especially those deriving from guilt) had gone into overdrive.

Towards morning I had two dreams. The first one lasted just a few seconds and was a scenario of explosion. It seemed as if the Earth itself had exploded ; I was being propelled through space, with other debris, at a very fast velocity. The second dream explained the first one. It was a dream of sexual innocence. I therefore interpreted the first dream as indicating the demolition of my sexual guilt. After the dreams ceased my swallowing slowly ceased as well. This abreaction eliminated the compulsiveness of my sexual guilt. This result means that now when I experience guilt in self-hate mode I no longer need to resort to sexual phantasy as a compensation or escape. [8]

Fear versus Anxiety

Abreaction does not eliminate any actual trait of character, even if the person wanted some trait to be purged from him. In fact, until the roots of fear are eradicated, no undesirable trait can be fully eliminated. Abreaction removes anxiety from association with traits, and anxiety includes a factor of fear. [anxiety = fear + vanity]. So abreaction reduces the influence of some traits, but that is all. Fear, when it is just by itself and not a part of anxiety, cannot be removed by abreaction and psycho-analysis ; instead, the person has to learn to manage it by using other methods.

The difference between fear and anxiety is related to the issue of reincarnation.
Most, perhaps all, problems that originate in a person’s present life give rise to anxiety rather than fear. When a person dies his problems are put on hold whilst he sojourns in heaven. But these problems will re-appear once he reincarnates back to Earth. But now there is a difference. It seems that anxiety cannot be ‘reincarnated’ along with the person. Instead, the old anxieties have transformed into fear. When the person is born once more on Earth his old problems are now associated with fear instead of with anxiety. [9]

The difference between fear and anxiety shapes the boundaries of psycho-analysis. Psycho-analysis can treat the anxieties of the present life, but not the fears of former lives.

I give an example. Suppose that a person incarnates on Earth with a major problem concerning external authority : he prefers to rebel against all forms of authority because he fears it. During his life he will experience many situations of conflict because of this particular attitude. He will associate much anxiety with the memories of these conflicts. If the person eventually goes into a psycho-analysis, he can get rid of all the anxieties that these conflicts have caused him. But he will not be able to get rid of the actual fear of authority that he was born with. Hence any future conflict with authority is likely to generate anxiety again.

Problems can be viewed within the framework of form and content. The fear of authority can be considered to be ‘form’. The actual experiences of conflict that this problem causes can be considered to be ‘content’.

For any problem,
psycho-analysis can get rid of content but not form.

In the next article, I describe the idea of Abreaction as creative illness.

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

[²]. Compliance is the root of schizophrenia. See article Narcissism & Schizophrenia, section Compliance. [2]

[³]. Bitterness is analysed in the fourth article on Abreaction. See Resentment and Bitterness. [3]

[4]. The inferiority complex is analysed in the article Aspects of Personal Identity on my website The Strange World of Emotion. Also, in the article Social Approval and Inferiority on my website The Subconscious mind ; and in the article Approval & Inferiority & Power, on my website Discover Your Mind. [4]

[5]. There is an article on Determinism on my websites Discover Your Mind and A Modern Thinker. [5]

[6]. The need for social approval is analysed in the same articles as in footnote 4. This need and the inferiority complex are binary states of mind. [6]

[7]. Infancy trauma is my name for psychological trauma that occurs in the first years of childhood. 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.

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 two articles. The first article, Vulnerability of the Ego, focuses on the origins of violence. And the second one, Guilt & Meaning - part 2, centres on why trauma can occur unintentionally. [7]

[8]. A summary of the factors of some important emotions is :
Guilt = self-pity + self-hate.
Pride = vanity + hatred of other people.
Narcissism = love + vanity.
Jealousy = love + self-pity.
Anxiety = fear + vanity.

My definitions, descriptions, and analysis of emotions are given in the three articles on Emotion. See Basic Ideas page. [8]

[9]. There are two articles explaining my views on reincarnation on my website Patterns of Spirituality, section Reincarnation. [9]

My website that specialises in psycho-analysis is The Subconscious Mind.

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

www.confusion.discover-your-mind.co.uk/index.htm

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