THE HOLOCAUST OF THE HUMAN SELF

The “self” is that body of information I -and others- call “me,” “Joaquin” -the protagonist of this lifetime script that is CALLED “life.”

We don’t know much about that entity and for good reasons. In ancient times it was of great interest and the “nosce te ipsum;” “Know Thyself”, was considered to be a high form of wisdom. It was deemed fundamental to be a human being. No longer! In 1968 I graduated from the Diploma Course in Psychiatry at McGill University without knowing an iota about who I was. What I had learned at home and in the streets was considered sufficient. And we, psychiatrists, felt comfortable with that junk-thank you!

Yes, I earned to make diagnostics and to prescribe medication and a lot of unbelievable Freudian jargon. It follows that, of the two branches of Psychiatry: the Psychological and the Biological the former was doomed to go the way of the dodo -that unfortunate bird of New Zeeland which having no enemies, its wings became atrophic and he could not fly. With our flippant lack of respect for any flesh which is not human, in no time we exterminated such an easy prey!

We are man of “action” that I would instead qualify by our behaviour, as “men of prey.”

The field of action of psychological psychiatry is mostly psychotherapy; -the understanding of the mind and alleviation of its suffering is its field of practice-. That of biological psychiatry is mostly medication and physical intervention upon the hardware, the brain or information processor itself.

But men are uniquely ill-qualified to understand and be interested in the mind for several reasons:

1. Number one that would involve first and foremost to accept that we have feelings; and it was only until recently that the existence of an analogically coded emotional self appeared in the psychiatric literature (Sousa-Poza The Role of Emotional Trauma in Neurosis, Part 2: Method of Treatment). And the macho-man code strongly opposes such a proposition since feelings are equated to “weakness” sissy-female things. A real man “bites de bullet “preferably with “an stiff upper lip.”
2. Thus, as to explore the emotional self we have of necessity to feel, (you will seldom see a man crying) the emotional self has been ditched aside and atrophying for centuries…and our field of inquiry has been relegated, almost uniquely to the digitally coded mental self (Sousa-Poza The Role of Emotional Trauma in Neurosis, Part l:Theory (An Attachment-Informational Viewpoint))
3. The mental-self is a self of thinking and acting. Not of experiencing states of being via feeling. It perfectly suits the -action-no-feeling deformation of macho-man. Furthermore, you can make much more power and money on that mode than on the feeling-experiencing-mode. -Pity the art of being involves mostly experiencing! Pushing a bit further, we could say that to be is to experience. And that thinking is to being what the map is to the territory.

And finally; the information about the Separation