artemis: *howls with raucous laughter* You actually said that? You told even most of the whole truth to a psychologist!?
I bow before you in friendship! There have existed necessities which prevented me from doing such with most of the psychologists I have had...so Ooo, I feel envy. Not enough to go out and hire me a shrink just in order to mess with them, but plenty. ^_~
But, rather than banishing, why not give it something useful to do? After all, it has been trying to get your attention, and it has succeeded. You can always banish it later if it can't behave.
Worked for me.
And yes, it is extremely sexy. Er, in the engineering sense, mostly. ^_^
To misquote you a bit Isis...
The mad magician makes a nasty reality not a fantasy and magick is the area where he can
[...]
I once called magick the psychopaths way to enlightenment. I don't know if I was kidding.
The crazy person who turns to psychology to cure him can resist it, reject it, and stay crazy. The crazy person who turns to magic to fulfill his insane desires might actually fulfill them--and have to live with the results. Which might kill him or even others, but in the process is a helluva lot more likely to give him a reality check than your average therapist! 'S one of the reasons I was so enamored with Satanism as a teen--the "left hand path" is all about giving in to the bits of yourself that other traditions try to scrub away, with the idea that you will pretty quickly get sick and tired of the unpleasant reality produced by acting on delusions. Unless said unpleasant reality kills you, or lands you in jail. ^^;;
I liked the idea that we all have multiple personalities (I think Pete mentioned this early on in the class). In mosbunall people, it seems to me that our personalities tend to get along mostly, in sombunall people, one personality amy appear more dominant... in a few people, perhaps a couple personalities are actively competing for dominance (MPD). Maybe we could compare it to an equalizer, sometimes we need to invoke the bass to a higher level and banish the treble to a lower level.
The whole idea of "personality" I think may generate the same kinds of dangerous misconceptions as the verb "to be." A person's ideas about what they want, what roles they have in relation to others, what modes of interaction they find most pleasing and/or effective--all those things and many others besides we refer to as "personality", without distinguishing between functions and forms. The point of consciousness, the part that says "I" looks like a teeny-tiny mewling naked thing in the wash of all those influences--experience, memory and situational necessity. You can, if need be, strip absolutely everything else away except that tiny spark of consciousness. But catatonia is the most likely result. XP
There's two metaphors I like to use for the personality. One is a computer, which can swap data and even bits of code with other computers, but has its own standalone system. The other is a unicellular organism, which is built around a nucleus (the prompt of consciousness) but has all sorts of little dealies inside it which perform various functions. Oh, and a semipermeable membrane. Understanding the properties of one's own mind's semipermeable membrane--where you draw the line between "me" and "not me"--can make the difference between competence and total breakdown in periods of great stress.
Jungian,
Maybe you could try the technique of 'self-liberation'. One merely is aware of owns condition, and the nuerosis untangles itself. The habit will undue itself on its own with the space of awareness.
Space seems to liberate everything naturally. 'Space is the place!'
H
I think with a problem of this nature, the real difficulty lies in being able to think about the problem clearly enough to have an awareness of its true nature. I would have to advise against attempting to banish an aspect of the personality without knowing exactly how it got in there, its internal structure, and its relation to other parts of the personality. The problem may arise from a place deeply entangled with something vital to your psychic (or even physical) survival.
So IMO, you
need to know everything you can possibly find out before you go banishing something. Or else you may find yourself in the unpleasant position of having it come crawling back to you through another, even more destructive pathway. DO anthropomorphize--give the problem a name, several use-names, a face, an image or series of images. Spend time watching it like the mouse watches the cat, like the slave watches the whip. Know it inside and outside.
Then you can begin to bite and chew it, little piece by little tiny piece, because your mind must digest it, and make it into new and better self-bits.
Always remember:
When you change a man's way of life you had better have something of value with which to replace it.
