How many hundreds of people have I seen who are at odds with themselves? The answer is, hundreds!  In fact, probably every person I talk to in therapy.  It goes back to Freud really.  How to make the ‘id’ acceptable to the ‘superego’.  And for those who know nothing about Freud, he asserted that the id was the part of us that is driven by gut instinct, the ego was the bit that moderated the id’s behaviour with sensible precautions.  And the superego is the judgement centre:  the part of us that wants us to be accepted by society.  And this happens, not just in individuals, but in whole communities and even countries.

Let’s take a famous international conflict. The twin towers terrorist attack and the resultant Iraqi persecution by the US.  I’ve deliberately loaded both events with emotional language so I can’t be deemed to be on one side or the other. The initial US response to the twin towers must have been of wanting to hurt someone else as much as they’d been hurt.  This is the id.  Then the ego would have agree but said, ‘Yes, but you can’t just go and retaliate now without finding a target!’.  The superego would have said, so how can I retaliate legitimately?  Now comes the spin and justification for war from the superego.  See?  If the spin is emotive enough and expresses enough outrage and outcry, collectively we can work quite harmoniously together for a greater perceived cause.  So strong emotions, whether they are ours or we have tapped in to a greater groundswell of feeling, cause us to form a social cohesion for war.

However, as with all things, there is always a minority of people who understand the strategising of war, see into the situation far more deeply and protest the futility of escalation.  But their emotional pull isn’t strong enough, isn’t emotional enough, nor their ranks numerous enough, to recapture the mood of the people away from outcry, outrage, and the eye for an eye type of philosophy that not only causes international conflict but that prolongs it at times, indefinitely, persists.

And since I’m using Freud’s theory I’ll stay with it.  On an individual level, we may have a part of our psyche, perhaps our ego, that questions whether our ‘superego’s’ judgement is valid.  However, if our superego has been socialised to not cause anyone to think badly of them or is constantly thinking up ways of not stepping outside of the ring of safety, then we will overlook that part of our psyche’s consciousness.  The need for conformity is too great.  People that allow their superego full reign over their id and their ego may find themselves suffering under intense judgement that can even, at times, cause full blown depression.

So how have some of us learned to suppress our natural desires so repressively?  Well, it starts with our parents and extended families, then other authority figures such as teachers or priests and then our peers.  Sometimes even the words we think aren’t our words at all.  They are the regurgitated injunctions we received through all our formative years that have etched themselves deeply into our hearts and mind. 

So therapeutically, we need to strengthen that voice that questions our superego.  We need to fan the flames of discontent that this voice speaks so that we can learn to hear it more clearly and have a fair and equal debate with our overbearing superego.  In other words, we need to take out the emotional sting of our superego and get back to assessing with the ego whether it is necessary for us to judge ourselves so harshly.

One fantastic therapeutic way of doing this is by using EMDR.  That is, Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing.  You’ll find out more about it on http://www.openmindtherapy.co.uk/emdr.html .  I’ll write more about EMDR soon.