1. Pleasure is what we want, and wishing is pleasure’s chief representative. So, it all starts with trying to get wishes met so that we can have our pleasures.
2. When a wish is blocked, the person feels frustrated. In this sense, having pleasure is now postponed.
3. The result of a blocked or thwarted wish (and its frustration) is that the person feels helpless or disempowered.
4. The emotional reflex to disempowerment is to feel angry. Anger in itself is a pleasurable release of frustration. The anger reaction is natural because when someone feels disempowered, anger frequently becomes the only way to regain the power—that is, to become reempowered. And to become always reempowered is what we always want.
5. But in many cases, for one reason or another, it is difficult to want to express the anger or even to know that you have it. So what people do is to suppress or repress the anger—push it down and out of conscious awareness.
6. As a natural by-product of this repression of anger, emotional/psychological symptoms appear because the nature of anger is that it is an attack emotion. So when the anger is repressed (along with the wish) it attaches to the self, and when it does that, it therefore attacks the self. The symptom becomes the result of the self attack.
7. Freud discovered that, in the person’s psyche, no wish will be denied. Thus, when in reality a wish is actually denied, nevertheless, in the psyche that same wish becomes achieved in the form of the symptom and as the symptom. Therefore, it could be said that we love our symptoms—even those that are painful—because they are our wishes gratified, though disguised.
8. Because of this process of the anger being repressed and the symptom then representing the gratified wish, rules regarding anger and symptoms are formed that indicate:
As far as anger is concerned
and
As far as the wish is concerned:
a. Where there is repressed anger along with the repressed wish, not only will there be a symptom, there must be a symptom; and,
b. Where there is no repressed anger and no repressed wish, not only will there not be a symptom, but there cannot be a symptom.
As far as a symptom is concerned:
a. Where there is a symptom, not only will there be repressed anger along with the repressed wish, there must be repressed anger along with a repressed wish; and,
b. Where there is no symptom, not only will there not be repressed anger and not be a repressed wish, there cannot be repressed anger and there cannot be a repressed wish.
9. The reaction of anger is always about a person, a who. The emotion cannot just hang there suspended in midair. The anger seeks the who.
10. At times, when the other person is absent, or for whatever reason is unavailable, or cannot be directly confronted, then the self becomes the target of the anger. Thus, the emotion of anger still has a person to attach to—the self.
11. When the target of the anger—the who—is identified, and the anger toward this who becomes conscious, then the strength of the symptom is challenged and the symptom may instantly disappear.
12. The symptom will be challenged more decisively if, after the who is identified and the anger becomes unrepressed and thus conscious, the person then becomes actively involved in a to do activity involving the original wish. This doing activity will strengthen the erasure of the symptom. The doing activity places the person in front of the line—in a reality place and out from behind the line, that is, from withdrawal, where symptoms thrive.
13. When the symptom results from a major explosion inward (an implosion), of anger, so that the magnitude, intensity, penetration, and chronicity of this anger maximally radiates the psyche, then the symptom can only be defeated through the use of medication.
14. Otherwise, the symptom can be cured through the one, two, three, and four of our symptom code; by knowing the wish, the anger, and the who, and by implementing the to do.