1 It is possible that the word “dick” has much more universal applications—as the book, How Not to Be a Dick, was written by a woman, and the female inmates at Litchfield Prison in Orange Is the New Black regularly use the term in reference to each other. Also, Aaron James (2012) suggests that some slurs are gendered—e.g., asshole is male, bitch is female. Though dick is still open, ironically, gender-wise (p. 90).
2 I see things in thoroughly relational terms (e.g., Irrelationship and Relationship Sanity) and find that there are many times (especially in romantic relationships and family systems) where one person takes ALL the blame for things that are related to the system itself (the couple or the family). The family therapists call this “identified patient”—and it is relevant to our study of dicks in systems.
3 See Borg, Brenner & Berry (2015, 2018) for an overview and analysis of how we jointly create psychological defense systems to protect ourselves from the very things that we “want” from long-term love.
4 DeMello, Anthony. Awareness: The Perils and Opportunities of Reality. New York: Image, 1990, p.5
5 See Borg (2010) from a detailed overview, description, and analysis of character as the “sum total of psychological defense” (p. 22).
6 Sullivan, Harry Stack. The Interpersonal Theory of Psychiatry. New York: W. W. Norton, 1953, p.158.
7 Sullivan, Harry Stack. The Interpersonal Theory of Psychiatry. New York: W. W. Norton, 1953, pp. 178–182.
8 Though the term enactment is a contemporary psychoanalytic concept that goes well beyond the scope of this book, it is necessary to give a brief definition to help understand the community dynamics explored in this chapter. One approach to understanding transference-countertransference interactions is by analyzing patient-analyst enactments. Irwin Hirsch defines these as “what happens when the analyst unwittingly actualizes the patient’s transference and, together with the patient, lives out [the] intrapsychic configurations … [enactment] is viewed as the patient’s unconscious effort to persuade or force the analyst into a reciprocal action: a two-party playing out of the patient’s most fundamental internalized configurations” (Hirsch, 1998, p. 78). Similarly, Edgar Levenson believes that change in a system is created through a practitioner’s “ability to be trapped, immersed, and participating in the system and then work his [or her] way out” (Levenson, 1972, p. 174). In its broadest sense, the enactment concept can also be used to describe and address how all interactions—in analysis as well as in our daily lives—are tainted by the unconscious dynamics of the enactors. This raises the question of whether enactments are so ubiquitous in our daily lives as to be increasingly useless (at least as special cases of unconscious material) in analytic settings. From this perspective, Lewis Aron (2003) asserts that “we are correct to ask, ‘What is not an enactment?’” (p. 623). However, he goes on to suggest that enactments “may well be a central means by which patients and analysts enter into each other’s inner world and discover themselves as participants within each other’s psychic life, mutually constructing the relational matrix that constitutes the medium of psychoanalysis” (Ibid., p. 629).
9 Klein, Melanie. “Notes on Some Schizoid Mechanisms.” International Journal Psycho-Analysis, 27 (1946): 99-110.
10 Rycoft, Charles Frederick. A Critical Dictionary of Psychoanalysis. New York: Penguin, 1995.
11 Freud, Sigmund. “Remembering, Repeating and Working Through.” In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. 12, translated and edited by James Strachey, 145- 156. London: The Hogarth Press, 1914, p. 150.
12 Freud, Sigmund. “Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria.” The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. 7 translated and edited by James Strachey, 3-122. London: The Hogarth Press, 1901, p. 119.
13 Lacan, Jacques. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. New York: W. W. Norton, 1998.
14 Slavoj Žižek. The Parallax View. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006.
15 Borg, Jr., Mark B. “Venturing Beyond the Consulting Room: Psychoanalysis in Community Crisis Intervention. Contemporary Psychoanalysis, 40 no. 2 (2004): 147-174.
16 In behavioral probability statistics, regression toward the mean is the tendency for scores—and/or behaviors—to average out. The idea is that we typically revert to our average, expectable way of being.
17 Alcoholics Anonymous World Services. Alcoholics Anonymous. New York: AA World Services. Inc, 1997
18 Emotion is associated with mood, temperament, personality, and disposition. The English word “emotion” is derived from the French word émouvoir. This is based on the Latin emovere, where e- (variant of ex-) means “out” and movere means “move”. The related term “motivation” is also derived from movere.
No definitive taxonomy of emotions exists, though numerous taxonomies have been proposed. Some categorizations include:
• “Cognitive” versus “non-cognitive” emotions
• Instinctual emotions (from the amygdala), versus cognitive emotions (from the prefrontal cortex).
• Basic versus complex: Where base emotions lead to more complex ones.
• Categorization based on duration: Some emotions occur over a period of seconds (e.g. surprise) where others can last years (e.g. love).
A related distinction is between the emotion and the results of the emotion, principally behaviors and emotional expressions. People often behave in certain ways as a direct result of their emotional state, such as crying, fighting, or fleeing. Yet again, if one can have the emotion without the corresponding behavior then we may consider the behavior not to be essential to the emotion. Neuroscientific research suggests there is a “magic quarter second” during which it’s possible to catch a thought before it becomes an emotional reaction. In that instant, one can catch a feeling before allowing it to take hold.
The James-Lange theory posits that emotional experience is largely due to the experience of bodily changes. The functionalist approach to emotions (e.g., Nico-Frijda) holds that emotions have evolved for a particular function, such as to keep the subject safe.
19 Sullivan Harry Stack. The Interpersonal Theory of Psychiatry. New York: Norton, 1953.
20 Freud, Sigmund. “Mourning and melancholia.” The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, 14, translated and edited by James Strachey, 237-258. London: Hogarth Press, 1917.
21 Dissociation, from an interpersonal perspective, can manifest as depression—and can be counted among those “things” that can alleviate our conscious experience of anxiety (Bose, 1995, 1998).
22 Ainsworth, Mary. “The Development of Infant-Mother Attachment.” In B. Cardwell & H. Ricciuti (Eds.) Review of Child Development Research (Vol. 3, pp. 1-94) Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973; Bowlby John. Attachment and Loss: Vol. 1. New York: Basic Books, 1969.
23 Bowlby, John. “The Nature of the Child’s Tie to His Mother.” International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 39, 350-371, 1958.
24 Dan Siegel, 1999, The Developing Mind, p. 26.
25 Chua, Amy. Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother. New York: Penguin, 2011.
26 Chua, Amy. “Why Chinese Mothers are Superior.” Wall Street Journal (1/08/2011).
27 Estroff Marano, Hara. Nation of Wimps: The High Cost of Invasive Parenting. New York: Crown Archetype, 2008.
28 When this kind of a dynamic plays out in therapy, shrinks see it as a meeting of the patterns of interaction that clients unconsciously bring forward and repeat in current relationships (transference) and those that the therapist brings and repeats in interaction from her or his own history (countertransference). When that meeting occurs in therapy, we call it enactment. Enactment is the way that our old and unresolved relationship dynamics manifest and are played out in contemporary relationships—and they provide an opportunity for them to be seen, addressed, and worked through (i.e., changed).
29 This section was inspired by and adapted from an exceptional article titled “Catharsis” by David McRaney from the 8/11/2011 You Are Not So Smart: A Celebration of Self-Delusion blog (https://youarenotsosmart.com/2010/08/11/catharsis/).
30 Ibid., 2011.
31 Psychologist Brad Bushman at Iowa State decided to study whether or not venting actually worked. Freud’s long shadow still tyrannized the landscape when it came to conventional wisdom on “getting the anger out,” and the prevailing advice when it came to dealing with stress and anger was to punch inanimate objects and scream into pillows.
Bushman, like many psychologists before him, felt like this might be bad advice. In one of Bushman’s (2002) studies he divided 180 students into three groups.
1. One group read a neutral article.
2. One group read an article about a fake study that said venting anger was effective.
3. The third group read about a fake study that said venting was pointless.
Bushman then had the students write essays for or against abortion, a subject for which he assumed they’d have strong feelings. He told them that their essays would be graded by fellow students—they weren’t.
When they got their essays back, half were told their essay was superb. The other half had this scrawled across the paper: “This is one of the worst essays I have ever read!” They then asked the subjects to pick an activity like play a game, watch some comedy, read a story, or punch a bag.
What happened?
The people who read the article that said venting worked, and who later got angry, were far more likely to ask to punch the bag than those who got angry in the other groups. In all the groups, the people who got praised tended to pick non-aggressive activities (reported by David McRaney, 2011).
32 Bushman, Brad J. “Does Venting Anger Feed or Extinguish the Flame? Catharsis, Rumination, Distraction, Anger, and Aggressive Responding. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 28 no. 6 (2002): 724-731.
33 Frank Lachmann (2000) addresses ways that this plays out in clinical treatment in his amazing book, Transforming Aggression: Psychotherapy with the Difficult-to-Treat Patient.
34 My wife, Haruna, and I published an in-depth analysis of this stage of relationship development: “The Borderline Stage of Relationship.” Psychology Research, 2 no. 1 (2012): 1-13.
35 Greene, Robert. The 48 Laws of Power. New York: Penguin, p. ix, 2000, p. ix.
36 Paraphrased from the “Tools of Chapter 9”—Couples in Recovery Anonymous.
37 Doherty, Meghan, How Not To Be A Dick: An Everyday Etiquette Guide, Zest Books, San Francisco, CA, 2013, p. 12.
38 Beattie, Melody. Codependent No More: How to Stop Controlling Others and Start Caring for Yourself. Center City, MN: Hazelden, 1986, p. 209.
39 A reference to 12&12 Step Four, “Our present anxieties and troubles, we cry, are caused by the behavior of other people—people who really need a moral inventory” (p. 45).
40 Tronick, E. Z. & Gianino, A. F. (1986). Interactive mismatch and repair: Challenges to the coping infant. Zero to Three, 6, 1-6.