Thursday Link Encyclopedia and Self-Promotion | Clarissa's Blog

“\\ Mothers may dominate their little girls and expect them to share their troubles, but domination has been found to be far less damaging to the child’s psyche than abandonment and routine distancing.”

Give me distancing from the parent folk any day. The fact that I had earlier had this distancing was the only reason I was able to pull myself out of a nose dive.

You just have to be really careful of pseudo-feminism, which makes out that materal overparenting may be a good thing. Even relatively. Feminist is off the rails because of this stupid mode of superiority thinking, that tries to reassure the collapsed ego of the battered and bruised that they are still good people who have something to say. It’s not so. You need to look at everything from an engineering perspective and see the structure for what it is, without emotional evaluation or judgements about individual identities and their capacity for good or evil. First just simply see things as they are, in a structual sense. Otherwise you are running around trying to affirm yourself and affirm your experiences when this precludes seeing things as they are.

may be expanded

From what I recall, the Western panacea for what ails you is more and more sensitivity.

That is entirely wrong in my view.

The real solution is character structure and being with those who are like thou.

What has helped me tremendously is to understand what some call the psychology of fascism.  I can try to explain it this way, that people who have made a deal with the devil to get material goods or honors at the expense of actually living their real lives, as very real people, are very, very hostile to innocence and exuberance.  Seriously, you need to read up on this stuff, perhaps even read some Erich Fromm, on Escape from Freedom.  But there is some other even better stuff, too, that I have since forgotten where to find.  If you read some stuff about the real fascists, say in Germany, you can sometimes find talk about the inner drive to crush childlike innocence, because it seems offensive to those who have to live their lives in misery.  But this is not just fascism.  It's really common in people, actually.  You need to be able to set up some guards against it.  Specifically it is childlike innocence that is attacked.  Just so you know.

Well this is brilliant.  I've had exactly the same experience, above all with my memoir, which I wrote in a way to expore whether I had a nefarious inner identity.  Of course, people had already proclaimed I had a negative outer one, because of my historical origins.  But I needed to find if my inner one -- my actual self-- was at all negative.  What I did find was nothing pretty much, because people hadn't given me the leg-room to act; they were too much on my case about the negative external identity.  

The strangest by-product of my writing, though, was that I got to know all about people in ways I couldn't even have imagined.  People expressed absolutely astonishing levels of insecurity toward me, always in the form of a projection.  I couldn't have been all of those negative things as they were all rather specific and in some cases represented the precise opposite character structure to the kind of person I am -- I AM very, very emotionally dry, which is why I took to writing -- to try to get more emotional flow happening:  But by golly, people projected their emotional wetness onto me, and what I saw reflected back was not me at all (which is what I had been hoping), but a reflection of the contemporary Western personality in its different manifestations.  And when I reflected deeply about what people had said, I did conclude that those people had revealed to me what was deeply personal about themselves.