Repression and Perversion
Thesis, Antithesis and Synthesis in Human Evolution
Book Contents
Introduction
The Natural Order (Thesis)
The Early Natural Order
The Pleasure Function
The Destruction of the Natural Order (Antithesis)
Reductionism and Moralism
Repression and Perversion
Love vs. Split-Love
The Disintegration of Sexual Paraphilias
Parent-Child Codependence and Emotional Child Abuse
The Oedipal Mold and Oedipal Culture
Mysticism and Atheism
Narcissism
Denial of Complexity
The Plague of Sadism
Conspiracy Thinking vs. Critical Thinking
Youth Fascism
The New Natural Order (Synthesis)
The Eight Dynamic Patterns of Living
The Holistic Science Paradigm and Worldview
The Twelve Branches of the Tree of Knowledge
The True Religio
Toward a Science of Life
Primary Power and Permissive Education
Page Contents
Repression
—Repression and Denial
—Repression and Regression
—Repression and Retrogradation
—Repression and Projection
Perversion
—Cultural Perversion
—Legislative Perversion
—Religious Perversion
——Calvinism
——Puritanism
——The Inquisition
Repression
Repression and Denial
Repression is a term coined by Sigmund Freud that describes a function of the psyche in the case consciousness meets a desire that is strongly prohibited by the inner controller.
—Eric Berne recognized three essential inner selves: Inner Child, Inner Parent and Inner Adult. In my own research and work with the inner dialogue during a two-years Erickson hypnotherapy, I encountered the presence of additional entities such as the Inner Controller or Inner Critic as the instance in the psyche that represents the societal, cultural and moralistic values that we have internalized through education and conditioning. If the Inner Controller is hypertrophied and thus dominating the psyche, the result is that we are unable to realize our love desires.
What happens in this case is that the psyche will repress the desire into the unconscious in order to uphold the functioning of the ego which would otherwise be disturbed in maintaining the integrity of the psyche.
—The function of the ego is not to dominate any of our inner entities, but to orchestrate them, to direct them in a team-like cooperation, such as for example the conductor of an orchestra leads more than one hundred musicians to play in sync in order to reproduce a musical score with accurate precision and harmonious sound. This is the function of the healthy ego within the multidimensional psyche. Needless to add that with most people the ego and the inner controller are hypertrophied and dominate if not suppress all other inner entities which is the explanation why such a high percentage of the world’s population is completely uncreative, dull and imitative in their behavior, and why they use only about eight percent of their creative intelligence.
At the starting point of repression is denial. All repression starts with a denial, the denial of one of our inner entities or energies, as they are part of our inner selves. Denial is mainly the result of moralism, the quite arbitrary and culturally conditioned split between good and bad emotions, good and bad feelings, good and bad desires, good and bad behavior, and so on.
Repression and Regression
It has to be seen that regression, while a familiar term in psychology, is entangled with repression. Every form of repression results in regression. When I repress my sexual desire for copulating with adult women, for whatever reason, I will regress in my sexual maturity, and the result is that I will turn the wheel of sexual evolution backwards, to enter the realm of the paraphilias. In most cases, I will not be consciously aware of the fact that a repression takes place, or that I deny my desire. I will not be aware that I block my emotional flow, and that I am in a fear-condition.
Regression in psychology is not usually linked to repression. While repression always leads to regression, regression can also occur independently of repression, and then we talk about an entirely different set of phenomena. Regression in psychology and in natural healing typically is the fact of leading the patient back to the original wounding as from a point of effectiveness and natural psychosomatic dynamics, without the encountering of the original wounding in the dream, hypnotic or trance state, a full healing can generally not be accomplished.
Repression and Retrogradation
When a desire is repressed, this results in the bioenergy beginning to retrograde and change polarity. I have adopted the term retrogradation from astronomy and astrology, and was inspired insofar by the humanistic astrologer Dane Rudhyar as it is really a lucid metaphor: retrogradation means that the energy of the planet becomes introvert for the time of the retrogradation. And the similarity to psychological retrogradation is striking! When a child’s primary emonic vitality is impaired by moralistic education, the child looses spontaneity and becomes shy and introvert, thereby dramatically reducing communication strings with the outside world, and at the same time begins to communicate more strongly on the inside level. This leads to timidity and can result in impaired communication ability for life, such as stuttering or extensive sweating when being around people.
In the extreme case, under conditions that amplify the original retrogradation of the natural drive for full bioenergetic satisfaction, sadism begins to develop and can become an obsession that dominates the whole sexual life of the person. Another consequence that repression brings about, is regression, which means a devolution of consciousness, a backward development in terms of psychosexual maturity — a state that is undesirable socially, because it involves a reduction of consciousness.
Repression and Projection
Projection is a psychic automatism that is a by-product of repression. When an emotion or desire gets repressed, projection sets in and what is blinded out from wake consciousness is projected upon others — who then get the blame for what is originally a part of the person’s own life. This is the true meaning of Matthew 7:1–5 which says:
Judge not, that you be not judged. 2 For with the judgment you pronounce you will be judged, and with the measure you use it will be measured to you. 3 Why do you see the speck that is in your brother’s eye, but do not notice the log that is in your own eye? 4 Or how can you say to your brother, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye,’ when there is the log in your own eye? 5 You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your brother’s eye.
Perversion
Cultural Perversion
Perversion, in a general non-moralistic sense, is to put nature upside-down, to replace natural healthy organismic processes by artificial unhealthy mechanical processes. In a metaphorical sense, perversion is the image of the dethroned, ravished and reversed goddess, or the reversed Lunar Bull as her traditional consort.
—See Peter Fritz Walter, The Lunar Bull: About the Spiritual Signifiance of Matriarchy, on Scribd.
The quintessential example of a perversion is the repression of natural desires because they are judged unwanted under a certain ideology or contrary to well-defined forms of conduct. What then happens is namely that the bioenergetic continuum and equilibrium that is part of all natural desires is disturbed or disrupted, and the result is a reversal of bioenergetic polarity that brings about a retrogradation of the original impulse.
This retrogradation is the actual perversion of the impulse. The following quote from Emerson’s essay Compensation says it very clearly:
The history of persecution is a history of endeavors to cheat nature, to make water run up hill, to twist a rope of sand. It makes no difference whether the actors be many or one, a tyrant or a mob. A mob is a society of bodies voluntarily bereaving themselves of reason and traversing its work. The mob is man voluntarily descending to the nature of the beast. Its fit hour of activity is night. Its actions are insane like its whole constitution. It persecutes a principle; it would whip a right; it would tar and feather justice, by inflicting fire and outrage upon the houses and persons of those who have these. (Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays (1987), 69 ‘Compensation’)
Perversion appears to be produced by fear. And it is equally true that psychological fear is perversion, an upside down of the élan vital, a retrogradation of the love energies, an obstruction of the life force.
The most important thing to know about perverse desires is that they come about through the repression of original desires; thus, the perverse desire kind of replaces the original desire and compensates for its lack. In other words, the perverse desire has two functions, a replacement function and a compensation function.
Perversion, we could attempt to define, then, is a strongly distorted form of sexual love, a sexual desire that is mutilated in a way to result in its very contrary. Instead of love and life, what comes out in perversion is hate and death. In the Freudian terminology, we would say that perversity is not a form of libido but a variant of the death instinct.
Legislative Perversion
Sex laws, the laws that persecute lovers for certain forms of love, are truly a legislative perversion. One may argue that rape is a perversion from natural consenting love, and I think much speaks for that view, but it does not help us to understand sexual paraphilias in general, and pedophilia, in particular.
Rape occurs equally in the marriage bed and supposedly much more often as it happens in pedophile relations. Thus, even if one may consider rape as an act so hostile and so far removed from normal love that it has in itself to be considered a perversion, this is by no means a criteria to be applied only for adult-child erotic relations.
Certainly, some pedophiles rape, but also some heterosexuals rape, and some homosexuals rape. Rape has reasons that are not related to a person’s sexual orientation. It has primarily power reasons.
—See Nicholas A. Groth, Men Who Rape (1980).
Rape is a form of compensation for feeling powerless that uses sexuality as a weapon against another rather than a loving exchange as it is in normal sexuality. I think when we seriously consider these implications, we can even learn a lesson about human love, namely by looking at its very contrary.
Krishnamurti once said that we cannot define love while we can define and look at all what is not love. Looking this way at perversion, we can see that in all perverse behavior there is a residual form of cynical love that, if it was not so tragic, could be considered as clownish in some way, or scurrilous. When we look deeper, we encounter fear, much fear. We can then see that it is fear, and nothing but fear that originally distorted love into perversion. In love there is no fear; love is carefree, love is abundant and it is giving.
Perversion is paranoid, it is avaricious and takes only, unable to give, utterly narcissistic. Love is sharing, and shared pleasure, while perversity is egotistic and lonely enjoyment at the cost of another, even at the cost of their life. Thus, while in love there is always natural care, perverted love typically is little or not caring about the love mate.
What is the fear, then, or what are the fears that distort natural love into various forms of perversion, and violence? A generalized answer is difficult to give. There are complex reasons, individual and collective.
Since childhood I doubt that ours is a natural and loving culture. I always found our culture unnatural and perverse in its very roots. To prohibit the child to live their natural emotions and sexuality is perverse. There is no argument to be brought up against that. This millenary practice in itself is a flagrant violation of nature in its most tender origins.
Another example for a true legislative perversion is the fact that most governments have declared certain plants illegal, calling them drugs — persecuting their use and even their mere possession. As Terence McKenna rightly pointed out, it borders mental derangement to declare certain plants illegal.
And on the same line of thought, I call perversion the fact that most governments, based upon so-called child protection laws, can now declare writings, publications, books, as illegal, thereby reinstituting the arrogant practice of the Church that used the burning of books as one of many means to suppress truth.
The Church called any derivation from the official dogma heresy; well, today it’s called child pornography. It’s exactly the same thing, under a different name.
Another example. When pedoemotive desires are strongly repressed, as it is the case in most Western societies, and so much the more when such behavior is not socially coded, there is a danger that the original tender and caring erotic desire for love with children turns upside down; that means that the vital energies contained in the desire retrograde and turn into a violent, disruptive, abrasive, cynical and dominating drive out to achieve momentary sexual satisfaction with a child through abduction, rape, torture and abasement of the child. The perversion in this case is not, as moralists tend to argue, the original pedophile desire, but its very repression and modern culture’s persistent denial to code these desires socially. It’s through repression and denial that these originally peaceful desires turn violent.
As a result of this insight, I claim that postmodern consumer culture, through the mythic construct of child protection and the resulting fascist denial of democratic exchanges and erotic love between adults and children, and through a fervent denial to code nonviolent childlove actually endangers children and exposes them to constantly raising threats of sexual child abuse, child abduction and child murder.
This is the very contrary of caring for the safety of our children! Statistics show with striking evidence that in developing countries children are safer from abduction and sexual abuse and than in any of our highly child-protective Western consumer societies.
One of many facts that corroborate my hypothesis is that the country where the polemics on child protection is highest, where the taboo on adult-child sexual relations is strongest and where sex laws are the most Draconian on earth is the United States of America. And it is the United States that shows among all nations on earth by far the highest statistics of child abduction, sexual child abuse and child murder. This is really the culmination point of legislative perversion because it’s this country’s government that goes around to allegedly better the world, and to play the eternal judge on human behavior and morality worldwide.
Religious Perversion
Calvinism
Calvinism was an atrociously extremist perversion of the Christian dogma in its Protestant vintage. It was brought up by the French Swiss Jean Calvin (1509–1564), a lawyer and fanatic protestant reformer from Geneva. Calvinism is best known by the tortures it has inflicted upon children and even infants, to withhold them from masturbating, thus attaching their tiny hands to the bed’s wooden frame, which caused in some cases long-term paralysis and even death of the infant.
The horror of these tortures is described in many studies, and was carefully reviewed and courageously claimed as abysmal child abuse by the American psychohistorian Lloyd DeMause and the Swiss psychoanalyst Alice Miller.
—See Lloyd deMause, The History of Childhood (1974), Foundations of Psychohistory (1982), and Alice Miller, Thou Shalt Not Be Aware (1998) and For Your Own Good (1983).
Puritanism
Puritanism began in the 16th century during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I as a movement for religious reform. The early Puritans felt that the Elizabethan ecclesiastical establishment was too political, too compromising, and too Catholic in its liturgy, vestments, and episcopal hierarchy.
—See, for example, William Haller, The Rise of Puritanism or The way to the New Jerusalem as set forth in pulpit and press from Thomas Cartwright to John Lilburne and John Milton, 1570–1643, London, 1938; Christopher Durston and Jacqueline Eales (Eds.), The Culture of English Puritanism, 1560–1700, London, 1996; John Spurr, English Puritanism, 1603–1689, London, 1998; The New England Primer, Improved for the More Easy Attaining the True Reading of English: To Which Is Added the Assembly of Divines, and Mr. Cotton’s Catechism, 1991; E. S. Morgan, Visible Saints (1965); J. E. C. Hill, Society and Puritanism in Pre-Revolutionary England, 2d ed. 1967); H. C. Porter, Puritanism in Tudor England, 1970; C. L. Cohen, God’s Caress: The Psychology of Puritan Religious Experience, 1986; C. E. Hambrick-Stowe, The Practice of Piety, 1986; S. Foster, The Long Argument: English Puritanism and the Shaping of New England Culture, 1570–1700, 1991.
Calvinist in theology, they stressed predestination and demanded scriptural warrant for all details of public worship. They believed that the scriptures did not sanction the setting up of bishops and churches by the state. The aim of the early Puritans such as Thomas Cartwright was to purify the Church (hence their name), not to separate from it.
After the 17th century, the Puritans as a political entity largely disappeared, but Puritan attitudes and ethics continued to exert an influence on British and American society. They made a virtue of qualities that made for economic success such as self-reliance, frugality, industry, and energy, and through them influenced modern social and economic life. Their concern for education was important in the development of the United States, and the idea of congregational democratic church government was carried into the political life of the state as a source of modern democracy.
The Inquisition
The Inquisition was organized murder perpetrated by the Church in an unmatched holocaust in which for the most part young women and girl children were persecuted as heretics, tortured in unspeakable ways and put to death by burning. This plague of religious perversion and violence lasted for several centuries in Medieval Europe and was never really labeled by any modern human rights movement as what it truly was: the first organized global genocide in human history that cost the lives of 8 million humans.
