Flexibility of the self is REAL power
Those people are STRONG who can withdraw a pseudopod at will from trifles as well as from important matters. The individuals who are strong enough to control the ego rather than the ego being in control is indeed master of their domain.
One of lifes more urgent and difficult problems is learning to set the boundaries of the ego. Such control represents true maturity of character and personality.
The self is in the body but is not part of the body; it is symbolic and is not physical. The human can be symbolically located wherever s/he thinks part of her really exists or belongs. The more insecure we are the more important these symbolic extensions of the self become. In conceiving our self as a container that overflows with various and important extensions that our technology provides us we might appear like a giant amoeba spread out over the land with a center in the self.
Because the child has no such control and is almost always identified through the parent, the child reflects the parents point of view. The child is the parent before s/he is his or her self; psychoanalysis call this repression. This simplified discussion of the ego and its boundaries take us right into the heart of psychoanalytic theory, and to one of its true and lasting discoveries: the famous mechanisms of defense.
These mechanisms describe how the child stakes out the extensions of the self. Introjection is the taking the parts of one person into the image of the self. Projection is the placing of the childs desires and thoughts into others. Each of us is in some ways a grotesque collage, a composite of injected and ejected parts over which we have no honest control Little wonder that we spend our lives searching in mirrors to find out who we really are.
Ideas and quotes from The Birth and Death of MeaningErnest Becker
Those people are STRONG who can withdraw a pseudopod at will from trifles as well as from important matters. The individuals who are strong enough to control the ego rather than the ego being in control is indeed master of their domain.
One of lifes more urgent and difficult problems is learning to set the boundaries of the ego. Such control represents true maturity of character and personality.
The self is in the body but is not part of the body; it is symbolic and is not physical. The human can be symbolically located wherever s/he thinks part of her really exists or belongs. The more insecure we are the more important these symbolic extensions of the self become. In conceiving our self as a container that overflows with various and important extensions that our technology provides us we might appear like a giant amoeba spread out over the land with a center in the self.
Because the child has no such control and is almost always identified through the parent, the child reflects the parents point of view. The child is the parent before s/he is his or her self; psychoanalysis call this repression. This simplified discussion of the ego and its boundaries take us right into the heart of psychoanalytic theory, and to one of its true and lasting discoveries: the famous mechanisms of defense.
These mechanisms describe how the child stakes out the extensions of the self. Introjection is the taking the parts of one person into the image of the self. Projection is the placing of the childs desires and thoughts into others. Each of us is in some ways a grotesque collage, a composite of injected and ejected parts over which we have no honest control Little wonder that we spend our lives searching in mirrors to find out who we really are.
Ideas and quotes from The Birth and Death of MeaningErnest Becker
