I have many defects in me, but I have always been proud of the fact that I have substantial (if not absolute) knowledge of my weaknesses; that I am pretty receptive to criticism from others and at least try not to be messy. However, an elaborative study of psychological theories and their introspective applications to myself have left me more confused than I was prior to the insight.
If you want to know what it is that has worried me, let me summarise it for you:
1. I crack sarcastic jokes at the expense of invariably everyone in my personal sphere of influence, sometimes humorous but often dry and cruel to the subject of the jokes.
2. I commit many follies, rather idiosyncrasies, in spite of intentions contrary to such, almost impulsively and later wonder how I could commit such
3. I am the master of indecision. I think over every issue a dozen times and end up more confused than when I start. Pretty much like ‘The Argumentative Indian’ who, according to Prof. Amartya Sen, “sometimes argues for the sake of arguing.”
4. I have been mired by seemingly illogical inferiority complexes in life. There was a period in my undergrad days when I just stayed away from people. That was a time when I was too conscious of what people thought about me, inflated what I thought people think of me to infinite proportions and stayed out of social gatherings. Indeed, it won’t be wrong to assume I was going through a period of depression and intense negative, self-defeating thoughts.
It is not that I am not in the know of these. It usually happens that many don’t understand the reasons for their follies. That, of course, isn’t the case with me since I think a lot. I have been trying hard for nearly three years now to account for these lacunae in my personality, but to no avail. I see something to be laughed at and out comes some instinctive comment from my mouth. I try hard not to make a fool of myself and ultimately make a greater mess.
An understanding of these aspects of myself can be made from a psycho-analytic perspective or from the humanistic perspective of personality. I leave out the behaviourists whose personality theories, as far as I know, aren’t exactly personality theories but just causes and effects.
Psycho-analysis
Psycho-analysts view human beings as energy systems that always try to stay at minimum energy. To stay at minimum energy, any system tries hard to come to an equilibrium state. Here ends the similarity with Newtonian physics. According to celebrated psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, every human has two basic instincts -the libido (love) and mortedo (aggression). Proper development of a child (which according to him includes suckling, toilet training and incestuous feelings for parent of opposite sex – seemingly absurd stuff that really made him popular – a period of latency and finally puberty) can lead to a proper person-environment fit in adulthood.
Any kind of maladaptive behaviour can be explained in terms of unsatisfactory gratification in an earlier stage which leads to an imbalance in the energy system of the body. People tend to push it down to the unconscious or reorient it to some other, even pro-social, activity. I believe it’s the latency period which is most important here (though Freud had ignored this period, another psychoanalyst Erikson has recognized its role in development across life-stages). In the latency period, a child learns to direct his/her libido and mortedo towards constructive things. Libido can be directed towards creativity, affection and studies. Mortedo or aggression can be directed towards activities like sports.
Think, what if some of this mortedo doesn’t get directed towards aggressive activities like sports or video games or if libido doesn’t get diverted towards constructive activity? Energy starts building up. The only outlet then will be sex (for libido) and aggression (for mortedo). If one doesn’t engage in such anti-social activity, he simply pushes these down to his/her sub-conscious. Now, this unutilised energy grows in quantity. There are two possibilities then.
1. The person starts showing maladaptive behaviour to dissipate the built-up energy
2. The person is perfectly normal from the exterior. Energy keeps building up till at a threshold, it leads to violent behaviour like rape (to leak out libido) or criminal activity (for mortedo)
The second case is obviously the dangerous one. It also explains why some criminal activities come as a shock to the people who know the criminal – they believe he was such a good chap because this chap never let the energy out.
Another effect of the second case may be suicide. Suicide results when the built-up energy becomes excessively high and the individual turns to aggression against himself to escape the agony of excess psychic energy.
I believe maladaptive behaviours are very common and affect almost everyone in some way or the other. As Erikson had said, we face numerous challenges in all stages of life. Inability to cope with one stage leads to maladaptive behaviour in the next. If it doesn’t affect some person, beware! He is a potential psychopath.
Coming back to me, I am not a very sportsmanlike person and that very much explains everything. I could never get the opportunity to dissipate my energy through constructive sports, nor was I ever enthusiastic about video games. Result was that aggressive energy (every human is aggressive by birth) kept building up till the basic structure of my personality was modified. That explains the excessive sarcastic jokes.
As for my idiosyncrasies, these result from an excess of energy in the body system. Excess energy leads to instability which in turn leads to what we call ‘instinctive behaviour’ i.e. behaving without thinking. Here, a parallel between psychic energy and Newtonian energy can be drawn. An excess of energy in any body makes it unstable and attain a high ‘excitation state.’ As such, this explains that almost everyone has idiosyncrasies. It is just the degree of idiosyncrasies where I score high.
Humanistic Perspective
Humanists like Carl Roger and Abraham Maslow take a very positive view of life. Unlike Freud, (these theories developed in reaction to Freud’s) they view human beings as positive systems intrinsically motivated towards self-actualization. They believe that humans form a self-concept of themselves. This they do by perceiving what others’ perception of self is. This part of Rogerian theory is very similar to the concept of self in Mead’s theory of social interaction. Personality is internal to the individual but is formed as a result of his interaction with others. We have a positive and healthy self-concept (conducive to realizing self’s full potential) when people we interact with are good and give unconditioned positive regard to us. Unfortunately, not all people in our social space are warm and positive towards us. People can be demanding. People can be critical of you. And people can demoralise you in the most absurd way.
This is a point that should most parents and teachers are not aware of. Luckily for me, my parents have given me lots of love. But I can’t say that about my school. I don’t remember much of my school life (is it in my unconscious?) but of what I can remember, I wasn’t happy at all. Those were the formative days of my life and as much as I can remember, I had been the target of many a bully. I was (and still am) talkative. Most schools don’t train teachers to be elastic to the behaviour of students. Small deviant behaviour like talking a lot amounted to retribution. Of the few memories I have, one is that of kneeling down on a daily basis in the class of one Mrs. Roy.
I wish punishment would have helped me. Alas, it did not.
Freud believed that personality is built in childhood and stays that way all life. Roger, however, was of the opinion that self-concept is liable to modifications and can change in any stage of life.
I found really good friends after I passed out from school. However, the self-concept one gets from childhood sustained the new environment. Fact is, it becomes a vicious circle. Due to a faulty self-concept, I couldn’t make lasting inter-personal relations. I kind of hurt many friends. They reacted. I again hurt them. They again hurt me. This way, the self-concept built in my childhood stayed and was reinforced from time to time.
The good thing is, now I know what was wrong with me. Psychology is perhaps the only discipline that helps a man to make an introspective analysis of himself. It is a discipline that has an application in every facet of day-to-day life. As such, I believe everyone should be aware of psychological theories. This way, we can stop ourselves from committing the follies that can harm others and us. I wonder how good the world would be if everyone starts dealing with all others in his social sphere with unconditioned positive regard! Juvenile delinquency, drug addiction, alcoholism, violence and hatred (including ethnic and communal ones), among other evils, will be far less (if not extinct) than they are today. The world would be a less imperfect place to live in.
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