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Archive for the ‘Psychology’ Category

Have you ever had a sense that there is more to something than what appears on the surface? As a child, you may have walked by a pond and picked up a pebble. Then, energy grew inside you directing your mind to send signals within you and pick up this rock with your hand. As your mind, body, and spirit united, a coordinated effort took place resulting in a thrust of energy tossing this rock into this pond.

The effects of this driving force created a ripple affect on the surface of the pond making its way to the outer edges of the pond. You and I are this same driving force at the core of our being. Everything is energy. We all know its there even though we may not readily see it.

There are five experiences in our life allowing us to touch this energy or our soul.
Remember this: “What is the most human to us, often, is the most sacred.”

We touch our soul in the following ways:

1. The Sense of Smell.

When we breathe, we embrace our world. We draw in various aromas into our inner self. It is our opportunity to take in the world around us, and allow it to fill us with its essence. As we breathe, our soul absorbs the world around it through identification with the earth merging into what cannot be seen. It is the experience of spirit expressing itself in unlimited ways.
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Pedophiles are attracted to prepubescent children and act on their sexual fantasies. It is a startling fact that the etiology of this paraphilia is unknown. Pedophiles comes from all walks of life and have no common socio-economic background. Contrary to media-propagated myths, most of them had not been sexually abused in childhood and the vast majority of pedophiles are also drawn to adults of the opposite sex (are heterosexuals).

Only a few belong to the Exclusive Type – the ones who are tempted solely by kids. Nine tenths of all pedophiles are male. They are fascinated by preteen females, teenage males, or (more rarely) both.

Moreover, at least one fifth (and probably more) of the population have pedophiliac fantasies. The prevalence of child pornography and child prostitution prove it. Pedophiles start out as “normal” people and are profoundly shocked and distressed to discover their illicit sexual preference for the prepubertal. The process and mechanisms of transition from socially acceptable sexuality to much-condemned (and criminal) pedophilia are still largely mysterious.

Pedophiles seem to have narcissistic and antisocial (psychopathic) traits. They lack empathy for their victims and express no remorse for their actions. They are in denial and, being pathological confabulators, they rationalize their transgressions, claiming that the children were merely being educated for their own good and, anyhow, derived great pleasure from it.

The pedophile’s ego-syntony rests on his alloplastic defenses. He generally tends to blame others (or the world or the “system”) for his misfortunes, failures, and deficiencies. Pedophiles frequently accuse their victims of acting promiscuously, of “coming on to them”, of actively tempting, provoking, and luring (or even trapping) them.

The pedophile – similar to the autistic patient – misinterprets the child’s body language and inter-personal cues. His social communication skills are impaired and he fails to adjust information gained to the surrounding circumstances (for instance, to the kid’s age and maturity).

Coupled with his lack of empathy, this recurrent inability to truly comprehend others cause the pedophile to objectify the targets of his lasciviousness. Pedophilia is, in essence, auto-erotic. The pedophile uses children’s bodies to masturbate with. Hence the success of the Internet among pedophiles: it offers disembodied, anonymous, masturbatory sex. Children in cyberspace are mere representations – often nothing more than erotic photos and screen names.

It is crucial to realize that pedophiles are not enticed by the children themselves, by their bodies, or by their budding and nubile sexuality (remember Nabokov’s Lolita?). Rather, pedophiles are drawn to what children symbolize, to what preadolescents stand for and represent.

To the pedophile …

I. Sex with children is “free” and “daring”

Sex with subteens implies freedom of action with impunity. It enhances the pedophile’s magical sense of omnipotence and immunity. By defying the authority of the state and the edicts of his culture and society, the pedophile experiences an adrenaline rush to which he gradually becomes addicted. Illicit sex becomes the outlet for his urgent need to live dangerously and recklessly.

The pedophile is on a quest to reassert control over his life. Studies have consistently shown that pedophilia is associated with anomic states (war, famine, epidemics) and with major life crises (failure, relocation, infidelity of spouse, separation, divorce, unemployment, bankruptcy, illness, death of the offender’s nearest and dearest).

It is likely – though hitherto unsubstantiated by research – that the typical pedophile is depressive and with a borderline personality (low organization and fuzzy personal boundaries). Pedophiles are reckless and emotionally labile. The pedophile’s sense of self-worth is volatile and dysregulated. He is likely to suffer from abandonment anxiety and be a codependent or counterdependent.

Paradoxically, it is by seemingly losing control in one aspect of his life (sex) that the pedophile re-acquires a sense of mastery. The same mechanism is at work in the development of eating disorders. An inhibitory deficit is somehow magically perceived as omnipotence.

II. Sex with children is corrupt and decadent

The pedophile makes frequent (though unconscious) use of projection and projective identification in his relationships with children. He makes his victims treat him the way he views himself – or attributes to them traits and behaviors that are truly his.

The pedophile is aware of society’s view of his actions as vile, corrupt, forbidden, evil, and decadent (especially if the pedophiliac act involves incest). He derives pleasure from the sleazy nature of his pursuits because it tends to sustain his view of himself as “bad”, “a failure”, “deserving of punishment”, and “guilty”.

In extreme (mercifully uncommon) cases, the pedophile projects these torturous feelings and self-perceptions onto his victims. The children defiled and abused by his sexual attentions thus become “rotten”, “bad objects”, guilty and punishable. This leads to sexual sadism, lust rape, and snuff murders.

III. Sex with children is a reenactment of a painful past

Many pedophile truly bond with their prey. To them, children are the reification of innocence, genuineness, trust, and faithfulness – qualities that the pedophile wishes to nostalgically recapture.

The relationship with the child provides the pedophile with a “safe passage” to his own, repressed and fearful, inner child. Through his victim, the pedophile gains access to his suppressed and thwarted emotions. It is a fantasy-like second chance to reenact his childhood, this time benignly. The pedophile’s dream to make peace with his past comes true transforming the interaction with the child to an exercise in wish fulfillment.

IV. Sex with children is a shared psychosis

The pedophile treats “his” chosen child as an object, an extension of himself, devoid of a separate existence and denuded of distinct needs. He finds the child’s submissiveness and gullibility gratifying. He frowns on any sign of personal autonomy and regards it as a threat. By intimidating, cajoling, charming, and making false promises, the abuser isolates his prey from his family, school, peers, and from the rest of society and, thus, makes the child’s dependence on him total.

To the pedophile, the child is a “transitional object” – a training ground on which to exercise his adult relationship skills. The pedophile erroneously feels that the child will never betray and abandon him, therefore guaranteeing “object constancy”.

The pedophile – stealthily but unfailingly – exploits the vulnerabilities in the psychological makeup of his victim. The child may have low self-esteem, a fluctuating sense of self-worth, primitive defence mechanisms, phobias, mental health problems, a disability, a history of failure, bad relations with parents, siblings, teachers, or peers, or a tendency to blame herself, or to feel inadequate (autoplastic neurosis). The kid may come from an abusive family or environment – which conditioned her or him to expect abuse as inevitable and “normal”. In extreme and rare cases – the victim is a masochist, possessed of an urge to seek ill-treatment and pain.

The pedophile is the guru at the center of a cult. Like other gurus, he demands complete obedience from his “partner”. He feels entitled to adulation and special treatment by his child-mate. He punishes the wayward and the straying lambs. He enforces discipline.

The child finds himself in a twilight zone. The pedophile imposes on him a shared psychosis, replete with persecutory delusions, “enemies”, mythical narratives, and apocalyptic scenarios if he is flouted. The child is rendered the joint guardian of a horrible secret.

The pedophile’s control is based on ambiguity, unpredictability, fuzziness, and ambient abuse. His ever-shifting whims exclusively define right versus wrong, desirable and unwanted, what is to be pursued and what to be avoided. He alone determines rights and obligations and alters them at will.

The typical pedophile is a micro-manager. He exerts control over the minutest details and behaviors. He punishes severely and abuses withholders of information and those who fail to conform to his wishes and goals.

The pedophile does not respect the boundaries and privacy of the (often reluctant and terrified) child. He ignores his or her wishes and treats children as objects or instruments of gratification. He seeks to control both situations and people compulsively.

The pedophile acts in a patronizing and condescending manner and criticizes often. He alternates between emphasizing the minutest faults (devalues) and exaggerating the looks, talents, traits, and skills (idealizes) of the child. He is wildly unrealistic in his expectations – which legitimizes his subsequent abusive conduct.
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“The more I became interested in psychoanalysis, the more I saw it as a road to the same kind of broad and deep understanding of human nature that writers possess.”

Anna Freud

Towards the end of the 19th century, the new discipline of psychology became entrenched in both Europe and America. The study of the human mind, hitherto a preserve of philosophers and theologians, became a legitimate subject of scientific (some would say, pseudo-scientific) scrutiny.

The Structuralists – Wilhelm Wundt and Edward Bradford Titchener – embarked on a fashionable search for the “atoms” of consciousness: physical sensations, affections or feelings, and images (in both memories and dreams). Functionalists, headed by William James and, later, James Angell and John Dewey – derided the idea of a “pure”, elemental sensation. They introduced the concept of mental association. Experience uses associations to alter the nervous system, they hypothesized.

Freud revolutionized the field (though, at first, his reputation was limited to the German-speaking parts of the dying Habsburg Empire). He dispensed with the unitary nature of the psyche and proposed instead a trichotomy, a tripartite or trilateral model (the id, ego, and superego). He suggested that our natural state is conflict, that anxiety and tension are more prevalent than harmony. Equilibrium (compromise formation) is achieved by constantly investing mental energy. Hence “psychodynamics”.

Most of our existence is unconscious, Freud theorized. The conscious is but the tip of an ever-increasing iceberg. He introduced the concepts of libido and Thanatos (the life and death forces), instincts (Triebe, or “drives”, in German) or drives, the somatic-erotogenic phases of psychic (personality) development, trauma and fixation, manifest and latent content (in dreams). Even his intellectual adversaries used this vocabulary, often infused with new meanings.

The psychotherapy he invented, based on his insights, was less formidable. Many of its tenets and procedures have been discarded early on, even by its own proponents and practitioners. The rule of abstinence (the therapist as a blank and hidden screen upon which the patient projects or transfers his repressed emotions), free association as the exclusive technique used to gain access to and unlock the unconscious, dream interpretation with the mandatory latent and forbidden content symbolically transformed into the manifest – have all literally vanished within the first decades of practice.

Other postulates – most notably transference and counter-transference, ambivalence, resistance, regression, anxiety, and conversion symptoms – have survived to become cornerstones of modern therapeutic modalities, whatever their origin. So did, in various disguises, the idea that there is a clear path leading from unconscious (or conscious) conflict to signal anxiety, to repression, and to symptom formation (be it neuroses, rooted in current deprivation, or psychoneuroses, the outcomes of childhood conflicts). The existence of anxiety-preventing defense mechanisms is also widely accepted.

Freud’s initial obsession with sex as the sole driver of psychic exchange and evolution has earned him derision and diatribe aplenty. Clearly, a child of the repressed sexuality of Victorian times and the Viennese middle-class, he was fascinated with perversions and fantasies. The Oedipus and Electra complexes are reflections of these fixations. But their origin in Freud’s own psychopathologies does not render them less revolutionary. Even a century later, child sexuality and incest fantasies are more or less taboo topics of serious study and discussion.

Ernst Kris said in 1947 that Psychoanalysis is:

“…(N)othing but human behavior considered from the standpoint of conflict. It is the picture of the mind divided against itself with attendant anxiety and other dysphoric effects, with adaptive and maladaptive defensive and coping strategies, and with symptomatic behaviors when the defense fail.”

But Psychoanalysis is more than a theory of the mind. It is also a theory of the body and of the personality and of society. It is a Social Sciences Theory of Everything. It is a bold – and highly literate – attempt to tackle the psychophysical problem and the Cartesian body versus mind conundrum. Freud himself noted that the unconscious has both physiological (instinct) and mental (drive) aspects. He wrote: Read the rest of this entry »

The relationship between the role of the Ethics Psychologist

We believe that the role of the psychologist in relation to the Ethics would be linked to these questions:

– Are ceases to be human because they psychologist? — What should I do with what I transferencialmente produces a therapeutic intervention? — How is structured properly or from an ethical point of view the technical knowledge, the knowledge that we have with the power that goes with it in a therapeutic link? — How to correctly use the information we have to make a good practice? — Can you solve a problem or another is enabled an area generating tools that allow appropriating their situation and have the freedom to choose a way forward? — Are alienates more than what they were alienated? Is it comes to “adapt” to a reality? — How the psychologist serving in any intervention inevitably being crossed by a sociocultural context? — What framework and model of society is ripe for an operating ethics of psychologist? Is there an appropriate legal framework that guarantees a good speech, or good practice for the psychologists at the national level? — And finally this question posed by Gilles Deleuze: “How can one be attracted to another to his world, or even conservándole respecting their own worlds and their own relationships?”

These questions lead us to believe that the role of the psychologist would be ethically guided by an emphasis on trying to make a good practice, heightening listening to the patient and / or demand viewing. You have to design a strategy consistent with this listening and demand raised with the use of tools and resources available to the psychologist account. Being aware and self-knowledge that account and the power it entails to know that in a therapeutic relationship or clinical intervention. Aim to use the knowledge that you have to fight replication doctor patient referral to the power of knowledge available to the technician, making a mere passive object of the intervention. While humans to be a psychologist because it is impossible. Using what gives me a link transferencialmente therapeutic for the same, trabajándolo also at the level of supervision and therapy of each staff psychologist.
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