Are you easily upset: feel angry, anxious, sad, paranoid, manic and schizophrenic? If your answer to any of these questions is yes, you probably desire ego ideal, you want to be an ideal, perfect person; you mentally constructed an ideal person and want to be him. The answer to your upsets is very simple: do not desire ego ideal; give up your identification with the perfect self that you want to become.

If you do not desire ego ideal your upset would be reduced to absolute minimum (to that level found in all animals, human beings included).

I generally write from personal experience and this essay is not different. I had an experience that led me to realize the role of ego ideal in emotional upsets. I had not felt upset for a long time. Recently, a woman who had read what I wrote somewhere and felt that I should not have written it deliberately made an effort to belittle me. She knows my name and instead of using my name she said in reference to the material she read: “this person does not know what he is talking about, do not read what he wrote; instead, this is what you should read” (and she gave reference to her religion).

In a perfectly rational mood, I would appreciate that for some reason she decided to attack me, to slight me and shook off her attack and not feel upset. I would recognize what she is doing: by not using my name she attempted to deny my humanity, to reduce me to an object; she objectified me; she treated me as prisoners are treated when they are referred to by their prison numbers; as black Americans are treated, humiliated, when they are called boy or girl even though they are adults. It is not difficult to understand what she was trying to do. A little reflection would lead me to understand why she felt it necessary to attack another person, to put him down. In all probably she feels inferior, tries to compensate with fictional superiority and her neurotic false superior self felt threatened by whatever it is that I said that triggered her verbal attack on me.

If you looked into her background you would probably find that she pretty much does the same thing to other men; that is, she deliberately degrades them (and does so with childish giggling to make her seem innocent). You would also find that the men in her life felt degraded and the more aggressive ones probably slapped her around, physically or verbally abused her. I will bet that she has been abused by men whom she attempted to belittle. But, of course, she would not see the part she plays in her abuse but, instead, would see herself as an innocent victim unto whom bad other people abused.

Human beings attack others, physically or verbally, and when in self defense those they attacked attack them they suddenly feel innocent, and seek audience from those who would sympathize with them and see them as victims and call for the punishment of their apparent victimizers. The victimizers, in turn, feel innocent and see themselves as blameless.

There are no innocents in this world. In adult relationship both parties are equally responsible for their behaviors. In the above scenario, if a man did not pursue ego ideal he would not feel slighted and would not feel the need to defend himself. The fact that he felt slighted means that he identified with a false self and tried to defend that fictional self by attacking the person he felt attacked it by belittling it.

Both the attacker and the attacked are equally responsible for their actions. They are equally guilty.

Before the law, American type law, anyway, it is the person who physically attacks someone that is considered guilty and judges punish him. These days there is mandatory jail time for abusers and subsequent requirement for them to attend one year of anger management classes.

Punishment breeds resentment, anger and need to defend ones self. Obviously, there is a better way of dealing with such matters than punishment. We can all learn to understand the psychodynamics of why people feel attacked and solve it at the psychological level.

For our present purposes, I observed that a woman attempted to degrade me and felt upset and decided to understand why I allowed her obvious neurotic behavior to disturb my peace. Why didn’t I ignore her, shine her off as a neurotic girl? Why was I upset when I should not have been upset?

It is in thinking about this episode that I came to the conclusion that if you are upset, any form of upset, you desired ego ideal. If you do not ever want to be upset then understand the nature of ego ideals and stop desiring them.

Ultimately, there is a biological aspect to emotional upsets, and those, too, can be studied and understood and held in check. All animals do feel upset but some feel more so than others; for example, all animals do feel fear and or anger when attacked but some feel more so than others.

WHAT IS THE EGO IDEAL AND WHY DO WE DESIRE IT?

I intend this essay to be read by any one who wants to do so regardless of his level of education. I will, therefore, make it as simple as I can. Nevertheless, it seems inevitable for me to do some literature review.

Each of us has a sense of self, an I. Each of us feels separated from other people and from the entirety of existence.

How did the sense of self come to be? No one knows for sure. All we know for certain is that upon birth the child does not appear to have a pre-existing sense of self. It appears that we are born tabla-raza and our experiences on earth help something in us to construct a self.

Upon birth we inherited a nervous system. Somehow our nervous system, obviously a product of our genes, interacts with our social and physical environment and eventually constructs a sense of self for us.

None of us can explain how his sense of self came into being. We seldom remember anything before age three. Age five and onwards appear to be the time most of us can remember what happened to us. It would seem that during the first five years of our lives we somehow develop a sense of self.

George Kelly, an American psychologist, believes that the human child is like an engineer or philosopher and uses the biological constitution that he inherited and his social experiences to construct a sense of self. The self, he believes, is conceptual, is ideational, something each of us constructs in childhood.

Each child constructs a self concept for himself and concepts for other people and for everything he sees in his world.

By age twelve the human child has a stable sense of self; he thinks that he knows where he begins and ends: in his body. His body is the boundary between him and other people. He knows that there are a him and other people. He is him and other people are them. There is space and time separating him and other people.

From adolescence onwards the human person has a stable self concept. If you look at yourself today you are probably who you were at age thirteen (unless you had a traumatic brain injury that led you to develop other selves, such as organic personality).

Alfred Adler writes that each child struggles to adapt to his world. Initially, Adler believes, each child feels inadequate Vis a Vis his environment. The child feels small, weak and vulnerable and develops a sense of inferiority. But somehow the child knows that to survive on this impersonal earth that he has to adapt to his world and that it requires effort and power to adapt, so he must refuse to accept a sense of inferiority and powerlessness. He juxtaposes a sense of superiority and power and aspires after it.

As Adler sees it, the human child initially feels inferior and compensates with drive for superiority. Adler believes that all children do so. However, they do so unconsciously. In the neurotic child, perhaps due to inherited weak body and or adverse social conditions, the child feels extraordinary sense of inferiority and powerlessness. He reacts with conscious desire to seem superior and powerful. The neurotic child consciously feels inferior and consciously desires superiority and power. He consciously identifies with a superior self. In fact, he so identifies with the superior self that if he is not treated as a very superior self he feels slighted and angry. His life is motivated by the struggle to seem important, significant and all powerful.

The neurotic child is on a quest to become a fictional special, superior self and so totally identifies with that false self that he is arrogant. He imagines himself the special self he wants to become and that he is better than other people and feels superior to other people whom he sees as not as good as himself. The neurotic is always a proud, vain, haughty, narcissistic human being.

Karen Horney built on Adler and believes that most societies accept children only when they seem to do what the society approves. The child desiring to be accepted by his society develops fear of not been approved. He, therefore, constructs an imaginary ideal self that seems to do all those things that his society wants done by children.

The neurotic child wishes to be like the ego ideal he posited and is afraid of being his real self, a real self that may not be able to do what other people would approve. The neurotic child pursues ego ideal and is afraid of being his real self; he lives in constant anxiety, anxiety from not been able to approximate his ideal self and anxiety from fear of other peoples rejection.

Carl Rogers essentially agrees with Horney, stating that parents’ conditional acceptance of children leads children to develop neurotic life styles, and that if we want to produce normal children that we should accept them in an unconditional positive manner.

R.D Laing goes as far as to suggest that those adults who become insane were children who felt the pressure to conform to society and chose to drop out and create different selves and standards for themselves and live apart from the rest of the world.

In other words, that Harry Stack Sullivan is correct in stating that psychosis results from distorted interpersonal relationship, that when children are not loved in a positive manner that they may hate themselves and use their thinking, minds, to construct the type of persons that seem loved by all members of society; unloved children construct grandiose selves.

Indeed, Gregory Bateson tells us that there are schizophregenic parents whose double bind manner of relating to their children leads such children to become psychotic. As it were, psychotic to become adults were in a no win, catch 22 situation and no matter what they do they loose. The parents give double messages to them: come and go at the same time, so that no matter what the child does he loses, hence he is confused.

B. F. Skinner, Hans Eysenck and other behaviorists believe that the child is born tabla raza and that whatever selves he has is learned. Through classical and operant conditioning children learn what type of selves their society accepts, and try to become them; moreover, society positively reinforces appropriate behaviors in children and punishes inappropriate behaviors.

Carl Jung believes that the human child somehow tunes into the species past experience, the collective unconscious, and that what is in that unconscious affects his present behavior.

This is sort of like the Oriental belief of reincarnation whereby folks believe that children are reincarnating from people who lived in past lives, died and come back. There is absolutely no evidence to support this hypothesis.

Freud believes that the interaction of Id, Ego and Superego and how they are balanced in the child’s psyche influences his personality. Where there is a misbalance, for example, if the Id is not suppressed by the superego, if the ego is too weak to balance the Id and superego, neurosis may ensue. Freud’s views at one time used to dominate psychology but today are hardly worth a footnote in textbooks. Today, psychologists study the human brain and reduce most aspects of human behavior to the dance of neurotransmitters.

Contemporary neuroscientists would seem to suggest that the balance of certain neuro transmitters in the individual’s brain determined his personality. Serotonin, dopamine, norepinephrine, GABA, endorphin, acetylcholine etc are said to have something to do with the development of the self.

Obviously, none of these personality theorists know what they are talking about; they are speculating and speculation is not facts. Let us just say that no body knows how the human self came into being.

All we know for certain is that from about age five onwards each of us has a sense of self, a self that he believes is separated from other selves; and a self he struggles to make sure that it survives. Most of the things we do on earth, be them foraging for food, medications, clothes, shelter etc are meant to make our separated self survive.

Animals, human beings included, perceive attacks that could destroy their lives and defend themselves, either by running away or fighting back. Human life can pretty much be summed up as one continuous struggle to survive. It is offense and defense, attack and defense. People stop defending themselves when they die (and, as they say, finally rest in peace).

For the purposes of comprehensiveness, I should say that there are religious explanations of the origin of the self. The Bible (Genesis) writes about God creating Adam and Eve. Clearly, the Christian story of creation of the self does not appeal to any one with a smidgeon of intelligence and we need not pursue it further.

Other religions also tried to explain the origin of the self. Hinduism talks about how God, Brahman, cast Maya, magical spell, on himself and went to sleep and in his sleep dream that he has many selves. One God, Brahman, as it were, becomes infinite Atmans. Brahman is the whole, Atman is the part of the whole; whole and part are the same and are one.

Whereas they remain as one, the parts of Brahman forget that they are his parts and are one now see themselves as separated from Brahman and from each other. Each of them now sees himself as Ahankara, an ego.

Hinduism aims at helping people to recognize their true self which is deemed no other than Atman who is Brahman. Hinduism is fascinating but in as much as there are no way we can verify its views we shall leave it alone.

An American clinical psychologist, Helen Schucman, translated the categories of Hinduism, Buddhism and Gnosticism into Christological and psychological language. In her book, A Course in Miracles, she restated what Hinduism and Buddhism and Gnosticism have taught for thousands of years: that there is only one self, God, and that God extended himself to all of us and that we separated from him and from each other. As she sees it, we are on earth to live as separated selves, rather than the unified self we are in truth. Of course there is no proof for this view.

What is self evident is that each of us has a self concept, a personality and that none of us exactly knows how that self came into being. It would be speculative to say that it came into being through this or that way.

THE EGO

The Anglo-Saxon word self is called psyche in Greek and ergo in Latin. We shall employ the Latin term here and call it ego.

Each of us has an ego, a separated self housed in human body. Each of us lives to defend his ego separated self and its body. He does so for about one hundred years and dies and that self is seen or heard from no more.

What happens to that self after its body dies is not known to those of us still living on earth. Some say that it ends with the end of the human body; others say that it lives after the body decomposes. Nobody knows for sure.

THE EGO IDEAL

Whereas all of us have a sense of separated self housed in body and defend it when it is physically attacked, some people additionally pursue an ego ideal. These people see their real selves, their egos as not good enough and posit an ideal self and want to become that ideal self. That ideal self is strictly conceptual, is ideational is of the mind. It is not their body selves, it is an image, a picture of who they want to become.

That ego ideal is not real for it is not tangible and cannot be seen by other people. It is an internal self that the individual wants to become. The individual usually feels that his real self, the self of his body is worthless, valueless and pointless. The individual feels that life on earth is meaningless and purposeless and uses his mind to invent a self that in his estimation is meaningful and purposeful and strives to bring it about.

The imaginary ideal self is not affected by the realities of the environment, space, time and matter and, as such, can seem perfect.

But in the real world, the real self is buffeted by space, time and matter and therefore is never perfect. Time ages the human body; diseases ravage the human body; the body is in reality weak and vulnerable and all sorts of things attack it, including bacteria, virus, fungi; natural forces eradicate it at any time: tsunami, floods, hurricanes, draughts, earthquakes, volcanoes etc. The point is that the real self is weak whereas the mental self can be made all powerful and perfect, albeit fictional power and fictional perfection.

Some psychoanalysts call the ideal self the neurotic self (a false self). But I will stay away from terms with different meanings for different persons (Freud’s concept of neurosis is different from Adler’s, from Horney’s etc). I will stick to terms that all of us can understand from our daily experiences.

All of us can understand that each of us has a sense of self and that most people’s sense of self is realistic whereas some people have unrealistic sense of self; those with unrealistic sense of self want to seem ideal and perfect.

Those with unrealistic sense of self tend to exaggerate all the human affects: fear, anger, depression, paranoia, mania, and schizophrenia.

In this essay I will concentrate on showing how the individual can reduce emotional upsets by reconceptualizing his self concept and making it less grandiose, less idealistic and more realistic.

EXAMPLES OF HOW IDENTIFICATION WITH AN IDEAL SELF LEADS TO EMOTIONAL UPSETS

ANGER

If the individual has an inflated idea of him and takes pride in being that grandiose self concept he is bound to notice it when other people do not treat him as the important self that he wants to become. His big self is likely to feel slighted by every day lack of courtesies folks show each other. Such a person is going to be angry when he feels that other people slighted him.

It is his ego ideal that feels angry. If one does not identify with the ego ideal, even if other people deliberately attempt to slight one, as they sometimes do, one would not be angry; one would see what they did as symptomatic of their issues not ones problem.

If a white person, for example, calls a black person a derogatory name, the idealistic black person is likely to note it and feel offended. If, on the other hand, his self concept is realistic and he does not go about with an exaggerated self that asks every person to acknowledge it, as Mr. Importance, he is likely to overlook the attempt to belittle him.

It is those who want to be seen by all persons as respect worthy and as dignified persons that are likely to fly into rage when they are treated as unimportant persons.

Anger from a sense of slight is the product of identification with a false self concept. The only anger that is realistic is in response to physical attack. If another person physically attacked you, it is natural for you to defend yourself by either walking away or fighting back. But most anger responses are not this natural kind but instead psychological: when the individual’s dignity feels outraged by other person’s assault on it. This type of anger can be ameliorated when the individual gives up his desire for ego ideal, for a sense of importance. If you do not have exaggerated importance other people treating you as if you are not important would not bother you. (And as long as they treat you as if you are not important, you reciprocate in kind and treat them as if they are not important; the circle of human unimportance is thus closed.)

The above statements are addition to the usual anger management methods: walking away from whatever made you angry, and if you cannot walk away to count up to twenty before you respond; to take deep breathes, to do whatever you can to feel calm before you say and or do anything when angry. In the state of anger the individual’s body is aroused and the fight response has kicked in and he wants to fight back, physically or verbally. If he does he is likely to do damage (physically or verbally) so he needs to take a walk and go calm down before he responds from a place of reason rather than anger to whatever he perceived as angering.

FEAR

Fear response is natural when the individual feels physically threatened. Fear is a response to perception that ones life is endangered. In fear the individual feels involuntary urge to flee from whatever he perceives as threatening his life or to fight it. This involuntary response is mediated by biochemical responses in his body: his body releases adrenalin, which excites his body to work fast: his heart pumps fast, blood is carried to all the muscles faster; his lungs work fast and inhale oxygen which blood carries, as well as sugar, to all the muscles that are working faster to defend the individual; his nervous system works very fast sending messages to the brain, where they are quickly processed and feedback sent to other parts of the body, to flee from the danger or to fight back. In a slit second the brain makes a decision whether to stay and fight back or to flee from the danger. Either response is meant to preserve the individual’s life.

It is doubtful that an animal organism can survive if it does not have fear. In situations where children inherited deficient pain and fear response, anhedonia, they tend to die young. If a child can place his hands over fire, get burned and not feel pain, he is likely not to develop fear of fire and fear of danger and would not anticipate danger to his life and defend against them. Such children tend to die from injuries.

Whereas fear is necessary for the defense of human existence there is a type of fear that is strictly psychological and is unproductive. Here the individual posits a grandiose self concept and fancies himself a very special and important person. The person generally perceives threats to his important self and feels fear, feels fear as if he is actually physically attacked and defends himself.

Here the false big self feels fear of been diminished and fights to seem important. Often times such persons avoid situations where they feel that they would be disrespected and not loved. In shyness the individual has a very important self and feels that other people would not validate that false important self. He fears rejection and to avoid rejection avoids people. In keeping away from other people he manages to preserve his false big self. Shyness (avoidant personality) is really an attempt to protect a false important self.

If the individual lets go his desire for an important self then he wouldn’t have fear of it been rejected by other people and would not experience anxiety. He would relate to other people more rather than avoid them.

SADNESS/DEPRESSION

In sadness the individual feels like other people do not respect him or her. Here the individual has a false big self that he or she wants other people to acknowledge and respect. When the false big self is not validated the individual feels like he or she is worthless hence becomes sad.

Depression or feeling of sadness is largely a product of the individual’s frustrated desire for false importance. If the individual has no desire for false importance he would not feel worthless if other people did not treat him as if he is unimportant.

PARANOIA

In paranoia the individual has a false big self and fears that other people would not accept that false self as who he is. Here he fears been demeaned and if he feels demeaned and slighted he flies into rage and quarrels with the person he feels is not validating his imaginary important self.

The paranoid person fears been degraded, disgraced, belittled, humiliated and criticized. All these fears are rooted in his wish to be an important self. If he did not wish a false important self he would not feel these negative affects; he would not be accusing people of demeaning him and quarreling with them. Even if, in fact, other people attempt to demean him, as sadistic persons do, he shines them off, ignores them.

MANIA

In mania the individual actively wishes to be a very important self. He identifies with those his society considers very important persons. If his society admires the rich he wants to be rich and selects out the person his society considers the richest man and calls himself that person. (Today, that means that he would convince himself that he is Bill Gates.)

Mania is a product of intense wish to be important and famous. This person sees his real self as not good enough and posits a very famous person and identifies with him to a point where he takes on the identity of that person. Thus you would find a manic fellow saying that he is John Lennon, or a manic woman saying that she is Cleopatra. In each case the person rejects his or her real self and identifies with a false self, a self perceived to be very important.

Identification with a false big self leads to inflation of the body hence in mania the individual’s body is excited. If you postulate a false self and work to become him, you excite your body; you use your wishes to speed up the workings of your body. You release excitatory neurochemicals in your body and use them to excite your body into the euphoric level seen in mania.

Manic persons believe what is not true as true. In mania there is always delusion and poor judgment.

In mania there is a desire to seem important and when other people do not affirm that wished for important self the manic person tends to feel angry. The woman who presents her as Cleopatra and you treat her as the ordinary woman and her feels angry at you is obviously deluded. If she did not identify with a very important self she would not feel angry at you for treating her as an ordinary person.

SCHIZOPHRENIA

In schizophrenia the individual completely denies his or her real self and identifies with a false important self, usually the false self is so grandiose that those around the individual laugh at his efforts to seem all important and powerful. One may say, oh yah, you are Lennon, to a boy who claims to be Lennon, and brush it off, but what do you make of a boy who claims to be god? You laugh, of course. He is of course not god.

The schizophrenic sees himself as God because God is seen as the all important self and he wants to be that all important self and takes on the god persona to seem all important.

Naturally people would not see the human being calling himself god as god. Soon people would not know how to talk to him for how do you talk to God? He is socially abandoned. He feels all alone and lonely.

Thereafter he reduces his loneliness by having his unconscious self contrive to invent voices that talk to him. He begins to hear voices and sometimes see people that are not there talking and relating to him. He experiences hallucinations as well as delusions. In schizophrenia there is desire for a very important self and identification with that imaginary important self leads to what is now construed as psychosis.

OVER SIMPLIFICATION?

Folks like to make things very complicated. The more complex they make things the more they like it. Thus mental health professionals make complicated the various mental disorders. These days’ mental disorders are presumed to be caused by chemical imbalances in the brain and treated with psychotropic medications.

Schizophrenia is deemed due to excess dopamine and treated with neuroleptic medications that reduce the level of dopamine in the brain; mania is deemed caused by excess norepinephrine in the brain and treated with anti mania medications that reduce the level of that neurotransmitter in the brain; depression is deemed caused by deficient serotonin and treated with medications that boost the level of that neurotransmitter in the brain; fear, anxiety and paranoia are deemed caused by deficient GABA and other inhibitory neurotransmitters and treated with anxiolytic medications that boost the level of those neurotransmitters in the brain.

Psychotropic medications seem to work in the short run but in the long run they do not cure mental disorders.

What would heal mental disorders is change in self concept, from desired important self to acceptance of ordinary self. When the individual does not have an ego ideal that he wants to become, he is not going to feel inordinately slighted, anxious, sad, paranoid, manic, and schizophrenic? But this solution seems too simple to be taken seriously.

We are in the age of neuroscience and its bag of medicines. It, too, like the other approaches to psychology: behaviorism, psychoanalysis etc would pass, as the passing fancy it is.

Man is that creature that thinks. He uses his thinking to posit a big self for himself and tries to become that big self and in the process makes life miserable for himself.

EXISTENCE, WORTHLESSNESS, MEANINGLESSNESS AND PURPOSELESSNESS

All human beings are perceptive. They perceive their human condition. By adolescence they are aware that they are nothing, literally. They are born and must die. Their bodies are food been prepared for worms. Their bodies would die, rot and smell to high heaven. This awareness is a direct slap on their earlier childhood perception of themselves as very important and special selves.

In early adolescence all people become aware of the worthlessness and valuelessness of the human body. Yet folks would like their bodies to seem important. Indeed, all their activities on earth are meant to earn the means for supporting their much valued bodies.

That which they value, their body has no intrinsic value, literally. If you melt down the human body the minerals in it is worth about a dollar!

The human body is composed of the various elements (carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, magnesium, phosphorous, calcium, sodium, potassium etc) in trace amounts and if you collect them they do not amount to much. At any rate peoples bodies do die and the elements decompose and return to their state in nature, and eventually decay into atoms, which further decay into particles (protons neutrons and electrons).

At the mental level each adolescent knows that just about all that his society tells him about the meaning and purpose of life is a lie. He sees through his society’s religion and knows that it is make belief. God, Satan and all the mumbo jumbo about spirits are lies. As far as reason is our guide there is no apparent meaning or purpose to life. People are just animals that happen to think and give themselves false meanings and purposeless.

The discovery of worthlessness, valuelessness, meaninglessness and purposeless deflates the adolescent’s hitherto sense of specialness. His narcissistic desires take a beating. He may resolve to struggle to convince himself that he has worth, value, meaning and purpose. If he goes that route he is likely to develop one of the mental disorders. If he accepts his existential nothingness and still makes the best of being without any delusion of importance he turns out normal.

Mental illness results from folk’s pursuit of importance and meaning where none exists.

The healing of mental illness lies in accepting reality as it is: acceptance of ones existential nothingness, ones worthlessness, ones valuelessness, ones lack of meaningful existence, ones lack of purposeful existence.

Having accepted this reality one still makes the most of the here and now world. One figures out what interests one and what one has aptitude in doing and studies it.

Study an aspect of science and technology (say psychological science) and devote your life to doing it and using that knowledge to improve human living.

Since we must live in body we might as well optimize that living, make it as enjoyable as impossible. Science and technology makes it possible to live well.

Some people flee from our existential reality into religion. Here they posit an imaginary god and proceed to worship him. They forget that it is they, human beings, who construe god. It is people, religionists that invented God and then tell themselves lies; the lies that God created them. Whatever idea of God people have in their heads is their ideas. None of them has seen God, and he has not talked to any of them.

Religion is a magical attempt to make ones life seem important and special; its postulation is, if one behaves appropriately, that the presumed all powerful God would protect one…protect one, indeed; plagues, virus, bacteria, fungi, natural disasters like tsunami can snuff ones life at any time.

This does not mean that life in body is all that meets the eyes. There are experiences folks have that lead them to believe that there is life outside body, outside matter, space and time. They honestly believe that there is a unified spirit life outside our physical earth.

As long as people do not foist there religious beliefs on any one they are entitled to them. All that we need to note is that humankind’s religions are efforts to seem special in a world that they do not seem important in.

QUESTION

You may ask: how come people have a need to seem important? Could it not be that before they came to this world they lived in a situation where they felt important and on earth feel its absence hence seeks it?

This type of questioning and thinking would take us smack back right into religion. It is like the awareness that one feels separated from other people and the inference from that that one must be unified with other people, hence the postulation that spirit is unified by the more intellectual religions like Hinduism and Buddhism.

Folks should accept their existential reality and still live comfortably in this world.

You can look at yourself in the mirror and tell your self that you are an animal and accept that reality without trying to convince yourself that you are more than animal. You are an animal. How so? Any one who so desires it can pump a bullet into your head and kill you. You experience the fate of all animals: death and temporality. That which dies must not be important, except the make belief importance we give ourselves.

CONCLUSION

Generally, we attribute our emotional upsets to what happens outside us. This is true in the sense that we see what other people and that seems to upset us. But this is not quite true, for, as Albert Ellis used to say in his Cognitive Behavior therapy, it isn’t what happens out there that upsets us but how we interpret them.

Different people interpret the same situation differently hence respond to them differently. Ellis says that the individual is responsible for his interpretation and his reaction to the external world.

Ellis is right and wrong. He is right in that we interpret how other people responded to us. He is wrong in that other people can deliberately do things to us to annoy us; such as racism and discrimination. Walking away from such situations is not always an option. Of course one can walk away but one must deal with the situation eventually. You cannot walk away from racism in the job place, for example.

Whereas it does not do you any good to be overtly angry because of racism, somehow you must fight to end racism. Ellis solution, which, in effect, is to reinterpret situations so that they are seen as benign does not always work or works in such a way that one remains a slave. Human begins can be oppressive and abusive and sometimes they have to be forcefully stopped from being so.

Experience has shown me that human beings add to their burden by pursuing ideal selves. Those who want to become important persons, especially if they wish to be significant in the eyes of other people, are almost always feeling upset by how other people treat them. These people can reduce their constant emotional upsets by changing their self concepts, from seeking ideal selves to being ordinary selves. They have to, in Carl Rogers terms, accept themselves in an unconditional positive manner and quit trying to become important before they accept and respect themselves.

Existentially, human beings are nothing. They can accept that reality and not try to run from it by seeking fictional important selves.

A person can decide to be happy with life as it is, not as it could become. If he accepts life as it is he tends to be peaceful and happy and joyous. Accepting what is and not seeking what could become is the best recipe for peace.

Since we are also creatures that ask metaphysical questions, such as wanting to know where we came from, where we are going to when we die etc there is no reason we should not ask these questions. However, one must watch out for the trap of religions that provide speculations as answers to questions.

It is good enough to know that somehow all people are related and are one, and since what each of us wants most is love, love all people.

Love all people regardless of race or gender and work for our mutual well being. In love and working for our common interests is happiness.

If you want to reduce your tendency to emotional upsets then reconceptualize your self concept and now see yourself as just a human being, an animal that somehow thinks and can think about things in the universe.

There is a kind of dignity in our ability to think. Human beings are amazing animals in that they are able to think about themselves and about the universe. They deserve love and respect.

In the end, it is their pursuit of false importance that leads to their emotional upsets. If they quit seeking importance they would seldom be upset by other people’s good or bad behaviors towards them. That which makes one angry at people when they do not recognize and validate it, when they fail to live up to its expectations cannot possibly be good for one. That which is good does not bring one emotional upsets. That (pursuit of ego ideal) which brings one (who is one?) emotional upsets cannot be one. (What is ones real self?)

Ozodi Thomas Osuji

May 7, 2007

Dr Osuji can be reached at: ozodiosuji@gmail.com

FURTHER READING

Adler, Alfred (1999) the Neurotic Constitution. New York : International Library of Psychology, Routledge.

Allport, Gordon (1961) Pattern and Growth in Personality. New York : Harcourt College Publishers.

(1975) The Nature of Prejudice. Westport , CN: Greenwood Press.

American Psychiatric Association, Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, (1994) Washington , DC . American Psychiatric Press.

Ansbacher, Henz .L. and Ansbacher, Rowena, R. (1964) The Individual Psychology of Alfred Adler. New York : Harper Torchbooks.

Ayer, A.J. (1968) The Origins of Pragmatism. London : Macmillan.

Beck, Aaron (1990) Cognitive Therapy for Personality Disorders. New York : Guilford Press.

Camus, Albert, (2003) The Stranger. New York : Sparks Publishing Group.

Ellis, Albert (2004) Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy. New York : Prometheus Book Publishers.

Eriksson, Erik (1993) Childhood and Society. New York : W.W. Norton.

Freud, Anna. (1980) The Ego and its Mechanisms of Defense. In The Writings of Anna Freud. New York : IUP.

Freud, Sigmund (1961) The Life and Works of Sigmund Freud, Ed Ernest Jones. New York : Lionel Trilling and Steven.

Fromm, Eric (1947) Escape from Freedom. New York : Routledge.

Horney, Karen (1991) Neurosis and Human Growth. New York : W.W. Norton.

Jung, Carl G. Basic Writings of C.G. Jung. Princeton , New Jersey : Princeton University Press.

Kelly, George. (1955) The Psychology of Personal Constructs. New York : W.W. Norton.

Laing, R.D. (1960) The Divided Self: An Existential Study in Sanity and Madness. New York : Penguin.

(1961) Self and Others. New York : Penguin.

(1964) the Politics of Experience and the Bird of Paradise. New York : Penguin.

Maslow, Abraham. (1998) Maslow on Management. New York : John Wiley and Sons.

(1970) Motivation and Personality. New York : Harper

Meissner, William W. (1994) Psychotherapy and the Paranoid Process. New York : Aronson, Jason Publishers.

Rogers, Carl. (1951) Client Centered Therapy. London : Constable.

Ross, Elizabeth Keble (1969) On Death and Dying. New York : Simon & Schuster/Touchstone.

Sartre, Jean Paul. (2003) the Philosophy of Jean Paul Sartre. New York : Knopf Publishing Group.

Schucman, Helen (1976) A Course in Miracles. Tiburon, CA. Foundation for Inner Peace.

Shapiro, David (1999) Autonomy and the Rigid Character. New York : Basic Books

----------------- (1999) Neurotic Styles. New York : Basic Books.

Skinner, B.F. (2002) Beyond Freedom and Dignity. New York : Hackett Publishing.

Sullivan, Harry Stack. (1953) The Interpersonal Theory of Psychiatry. New York : W.W. Norton.

Swanson, David et al. (1970) The Paranoid. Boston : Houghlin, Mifflin.

Szasz, Thomas. (1961) The Myth of Mental Illness. New York : Harper and Row.

Underhill, Evelyn. (1911) Mysticism.

Vaihinger, H. (1935) The Philosophy of “As If.” London : Kegan Paul Publishers

Zimbado, Phillip. (1990) Shyness. New York : Addison Wesley.

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