Rant: When your own readers disgust you...

Damn, I guess that I accidentally stirred up a hornet's nest! For the record, the biggest concern I had was with the admission on his part of ACTUALLY doing that kind of shit, not merely of fantasies. It was the overt admission of a criminal act that bothered me the most. THAT was why I would have to report him if I ever had the means to identify him.

Holy fuck, this is getting out of control.

I didn't mean to cause that, but oh well.

BlackShanglan said:

I quite agree that there are many schools of psychology, although I hope you will pardon me for taking issue with the theory that those you prefer are necessary "deeper." While recognizing that the issues you suggest are possible, I think we both realize - hence I shan't tediously elaborate - that there are much simpler ways of viewing the school, i.e., as one that quite forthrightly accepts that there are a wide variety of influences and desires in one's life, and offers a one a way of working with them to achieve one's desired goals.

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By "deeper" I do not mean "better." I do not take "depth" as a value judgement, but, rather as a qualitative descriptor. The perspective I draw on for the meaning of "depth" is primarily from depth psychology (see this for explanation: http://www.tearsofllorona.com/depth.html ). It is a body of work within psychology that I personally value more than other bodies of work in psychology such as cognitive behavioral, rational emotive or developmental. Within depth psychology, I gravitate most strongly toward acrhetypal psychology (also called imaginal psychology) which is a body of work originated by psychologist James Hillman and his colleagues.

I have known cognitive behavioral pracitioners, and even strict behavioralists, who have a quality of depth of soul, which they would of course deny, that infuses their work and deepens their mechanistic method into fine art and heart. Depth, the way I see it, isn't a quality of some ideologies and not others. Rather, it is a quality that is brought to any given perspective by the practitioner. Even more, depth is not only a quality, but is a way or style of perpsective or of seeing that sees through thoughts, feelings and behaviors into their underlying dynamics.

I do feel the schools of psychology to which I refer are deeper, because depth is a quality that they directly consider, cultivate and value. The main focus of them is not behavioral change, the cure of mental illness, nor the psychopharmacological comfort of individuals within our social context. The main focus of depth psychology is to cultivate and be guided by "soul," which is the English word for "psyche."

I'm curious both about what you mean by this and how you come by the theory. Is this an expression of unity of nature - i.e., we're all essentially similar - or unity of understanding - we are manifold in our difference, but somehow universally united on a spiritual level?

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I would say it is an archetypal perspective. By archetypal, I mean the collective and universal level of psyche/soul shared by all humans (and all beings). Jung brought this ancient image back into our contemporary world through his idea of the collective unconscious.

The most accessible sources for this idea or image are the platonic and neoplatonic traditions, the hermetic tradition, the gnostic tradition, the alchemical traditon, and our contemporary depth and archetypal psychologies. Joseph Campbell is one person who brought the concpet into the main stream through his exposure of the universal themes in world mythology throughout all times and places.

I draw essentially on a platonic paradigm and see our existence as being structured on a threefold altar of Matter, Soul and Spirit. I feel we share more in common in each of these arenas than we do not share in common. We are all made up of the same matter, the stuff of worms and stars. We all share a collective human experience that is expressed as imagination (fantasy being the particular flow of the imagination we are paying attention to in any given moment). And we all share one infinite heart on the spiritual level.

Could you describe what this proposed mode of treatment might be like? It would help to clarify your approach for me. I actually agree that at the moment, we have no realistic options for curing repeat sex offenders. I have hunches as to where we might differ, but I'd like to see more of your perspective to avoid misconstruing your ideas.

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I feel it has to be addressed at the cultural and individual levels simulataneously for the best outcomes. I believe the problem exists in large part because we culturally deny and repress certain images, in this case, sex with children. If we do not give a cultural context for the images we are trying to eradicte, then we are mostly doomed to failure because we cannot eradicate any image from the cultural and individual imagination, we can only force superficial behavioral change, which is ineffective from my perpspective. As it stands, anyone consciously experiencing fantasies of sex with children is socially and culturally suspect, which sets up a conflcit with the natural flow of psyche, which does not judge any image. So, we repress these images from consciousness, and some of us experience such a great conflict in doing so that we obsess and are compelled to act them out or we impulsively act them out.

The treatment methods currently accepted are medically modelled and aimed at stopping behavior and arresting the underlying psychological process. Thus, we get ever-growing institutions and not healing. Our "mental health" treatment system is based on a mediacl model which considers measurable empirical evidence to be the sole indicator of acceptable success. Our system is based on an empirically measureable medical model because our culture is based on money, and the thrid-party pay system (insurance companies) drive what is considered to be acceptable and non-acceptable [mental helath] treatment and outcomes.

I believe superficial behavioral change is ineffective because I happen to find the closed system fluid dynamic metaphoric model of psychic energy a valid and valuable image. Within that model, if we repress a fantasy image, it will try as hard as it can to get back into consciousness, even to the point of causing us psychological, physical and/or social harm in its quest to reach the light of day. If we change the behaviors driven by the fantasy that have caused us problems without integrating it into our consciousness, then the fantasy will take another form and manifest in some other area of our life until we get the message.

Our measure of sanity in our contemporary culture is essentially social congruence. So, while, for example, the sociopathy of many politicians, CEO's and corporations is acceptable because it is socially and culturally congruent, having sex with children is not because it is not socially congruent. I do not measure sanity (or morality) by how socially or culturally congruent it is. Behavioral change, to me, is at best, a band-aid that makes social and individual life less conflictual and more comfortable.

Pedophiles, back-ward psychotics, catatonic depressives and other "hopelessly" disturbed individuals have had their problems resolved through depth work, as is detailed in Bleueler's and Jung's work, and in the work of numerous contemporaries such as Thomas Szass, Johnathon Weir Perry and Peter Breggin (see Breggin's book Toxic Psychiatry for an interesting perpsective and survey of these treatment ideologies). Basically, if it is not congruent with our cultural consciousness and values, we call it "hopeless," or "untreatable." Actually, the denial of such images is part of what causes the problem in the first place.

Depth psychology treatment is based on accepting the fantasy underlying the behavior as a valid reality, accepting that all [psychological] disturbances are a natural attempt of the psyche to heal the organism and help it to become more whole and conscious; allowing the fantasy to be expressed and manifested in a metaphoric and/or ritual form (such as various forms of the creative-expressive arts); and facilitation of the re-integration into consciousness of the newly emerged and previously unconscious material.

Culturally and socially, giving a threatening fantasy room to grow and be safely expressed is unacceptanble, and insurance companies won't pay for treatment and research in that vein. Most people support the insurance companies on this, so we take a Nancy Reagen approach to such psychological disturbances; "Just Say No," which we do through treatments such as psychopharmacology, ECT, mental institutions, and prisons.

With pedophiles or others, the real treatment starts when we create a psychologically safe, trusting and transformative container within which the work can happen and in which the stuck fantasy material is validated as reality and not morally judged and we then say, "Draw a picture of the fantasy, or dance it, or write a story about it, or talk about it." The psyche does not care about nor know the difference between metaphoric thought, ritual behavior, and literalized or acted out fantasy. Doc, like the rest of the main stream, would stop there and call simply expressing the fanatsy nonsense and dangerous, which it is if the process stops there. He would be right. Catharsis is only one aspect of the healing process and is not nearly sufficient in and of itself.

Alas, I feel we have no cultural or social context for such a healing treatment process, and we won't any time soon because, as a culture, we are threatened by the irrationailty of the unconscious and like to pretend it doesn't exist because we fear losing the illusion of ego control over our lives and world, and thereby losing our comforts.

S&D

One psychological model not discussed here is information disease. The link is to an essay I did last year for the Free Speech Contest.

I've found it a very useful model for explaining behaviour of all types.

Threadjack aborted. New thread begun on the topic of S&D's cultural/psyche model. Link here:

https://forum.literotica.com/showthread.php?p=16334047#post16334047

You could do the story and have the cops show up