A Call for Love for the Child
Ten paces and fire away
Ref: Christina Crawford, Mommie Dearest (1978 book, 1981 film).
As a grandparent with a long interest in the psychodynamics of personal-family relationships I’ve found Joan Crawford’s depiction as a prototypical authoritarian mother-monster by an adopted daughter to be thought-provoking whether credible or not. There being no intent with these reflections to take sides on that issue but only to extract from the image what there is to be learned about the authoritarian parent.
My small contribution to “throwing a punch for the children,” the cause so well served and expressed by Nancy Pelosi. Of protecting children from the effects of parental psychopathy. Emotionally immature parenting. The turn of fear, distrust, and rage upon a predator’s captives. Its own young, to replicate itself and perpetuate abuse. A phenomenon all too familiar to the theory and practice of child development and all too resistant to change. That no parent or grandparent of good will can leave unchallenged without condoning the abuse and leaving it to the next generation to correct. I am unwilling to do that. This is the gauntlet thrown down at our feet. To be picked up and answered with ten paces and fire away? Or something better.
The first Movement in the sequence of evolution
The thoughts that follow are something better but may still echo with the sound of gunfire. They’re a mirror held up to the authoritarian parent wherein they might recognize causes and effects of their misguided behavior. Provocations and manipulations whose sole intent is to keep their manipulator in place. An alien thought from the earliest Movement of evolution that there existed before it an idyllic big picture presided over by a know-it-all. An absurdity no matter from what angle it’s viewed. Yet a logical corollary of the way things are. That’s perspective centered around the cause of Life-Creation with a Conscience that isn’t a nihilistic-whatever anything goes. In the absence of a big picture consisting of all possible perspectives, that has all the answers and needs no Movement with Creation, or anything else suggestive of Conscience telling its know-it-all arrogance what to do.
I refer to the principle embedded in the Definition of the way things are: that every act, every Movement of evolution, contains within it its own implied contradiction. The metaphysical source for Newton’s law of physics: that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. Put there when Love, the source of Life that must Grow, the source of Relatability that must Relate, began evolution’s sequence of Logic with its first Movement, with nothing already “there,” already in existence, to prevent it. Of course not if it would take Movement to put it there. Then in combination with Logic, the two together activating Mind with the original Relationship and the Self-Awareness from which all of Creation’s interrelationships flow.
The case to be made by pounding on the table
Based not on perfection but on the principle of Relatability, the two being mutually exclusive. For Creation doesn’t need or presume to be perfect. That would be an attribute insisted upon by a mindset having no use for Creativity or Relatability. Or for Free Choice, the source of Character with Integrity that risks error and accepts responsibility for the consequences. Perfection can only be a pose if it can’t be Real. Shot through with fallacy: uncreative, unrelatable, impossible, and unaccountable. The mindset of the authoritarian and its uniquely noxious provocation: Mommie Dearest.
Based on the principle of Mind-Relationship functioning that’s feelings and ideas functioning as one. Spontaneity-Love inseparable from Order-Logic, the interrelationships of Love combined with the interconnections of Logic. Held together in one system by Energy in the Now. Functioning with Life, Meaning, and Purpose. Triggering an equal and opposite reaction. Reality in reverse. Contradiction that could not co-exist with Reality without eliminating both, and so relegated to the status of unreal.
And for a second reason: because it’s neither Relatability nor Logic. It doesn’t hold together. It’s nuts. And, moreover, a derivative. Dependent on what came before it for its “existence,” an implication, and therefore with no definition, no self, no existence of its own. The absurdity of a know-it-all presiding over a big picture. Insisting that a derivative with no definition or self of its own came first, it’s real, and Movement was an affront to its sovereignty that demands retribution. The original argument with nothing to support it, and so to be defended by pounding on the table.
Willing the clock to go back
The distillate of nonsense that’s noxious to contemplate. Embedded in the Definition of the way things are at the core of Creation, in the Psyche of Self-Awareness sharing and expressing itself through Creation. Essential to all of it since without its implied contradiction, the reminder from anything goes of unrest, there would be the possibility of rest. The end of Creation and the inactivation of Mind.
We need contradiction, the mirror held up to our metaphysical Self as it goes about the cause of Life-Creation and to its projections. Us, as we go about the cause of healing. Questioning ourselves as we question our circumstances. To keep both in alignment. For both are subject to change where all is Mind-Relationship, Movement-Change, Character with Integrity risking everything with Free Choice.
We need unrest if we want Movement to continue and Life to live through Creation. To pursue its ideal of Relatability in Loving Friendship without degenerating into a quest for perfection. In a mythical state of peace. An idyllic everything’s-already-taken-care-of big picture owned, possessed, and controlled by an all-powerful, all-knowing unrelatable jerk. That if its gravitational force were to overwhelm the strong nuclear force of Sapiens to evolve would reverse it back to ape. A negligible risk? Not when the jerk reigning supreme over its mythical big picture has “conservatives” in the grip of its manipulations. Willing the clock to go back to the apes and to an idyllic status quo that never was.
The manipulator is itself
Manipulations and provocations like authoritarian parenting whose purpose is just that. To reverse evolution by disabling the capacity of its children to individuate and grow on their own. To render them replicates of itself, unthinking and unfeeling, lacking differentiation and empathy and so unable to choose. Unable to evolve through experience when they’ve been deprived by Mommie Dearest of independent judgment and initiative that could accomplish it. Reduced instead to obedience-machines suited for service with a smile in a scripted Truman TV Show. A state of self-unawareness designed to perpetuate itself for lacking awareness of any other. Deprived of choice by being deprived of the ability to choose and awareness of anything to choose between. The intent of authoritarian parenting at its logical extreme. The intent of the provocation engineered by the manipulator embedded in the Psyche of Sapiens. Brought to “life” in a hallucination of virtual reality.
Whose antidote can’t be the whip. Another provocation, but instead a pause in the “action” to hold up a mirror and ask: Is this who you are? If not, why do you wear a mask? And keep asking until the Mommie Dearest authoritarian parent in the mirror does what it’s manipulator insists that it never do: question the way things are. Because the way things “are” where the authoritarian mindset works its will can’t be the way they really are. A virtual reality that’s FUBAR. Whose nature – provocations and manipulations – can’t be recognized until the provoking authoritarian mindset is brought back to the mirror that originally misled it and recognizes the cause of its condition. That it’s being manipulated and the manipulator is itself. This bugbear of insanity buried in the Psyche of Self-Awareness in a state of unreality, brought to “life” in a state of virtual reality. A hallucination by Sapiens’ metaphysical Self, its true common ancestor.
Chopped to pieces by academic discipline
To connect events of our experience in virtual reality with those experienced by the Mind that’s dreaming it requires unorthodoxy. An explanation that crosses the boundary between physics and metaphysics. For which there may be many precedents outside of religious mythologizing but none that I’m aware of. Other than the Course. Spoken in the language of ideas and their functions rather than at-one-remove words. Exemplified by the Course, along with its unique metaphysics of thought combined with feeling and application to everyday real-world problems. A demonstration of Relatability like none other. Proof enough that its author is the one and the same Jesus, who attracted a devoted following by relating to individuals on a personal basis. Without the stamp of anyone’s approval. A personification of the first Movement of evolution by Love: causing a terrific commotion just by being what Love is and doing what Love does: moving with Life growing and relating.
Anathema to minds acculturated by separation to exclude feelings. And thus to exclude values if there’s no feeling behind them. Thinking themselves rid of irrationality when they’ve just enabled it. The state of the major fields of inquiry since Parmenides founded metaphysics 2600 years ago: illogical. For thinking it wise to sever the relationship between Love and Logic when it was their coming together spontaneously that got everything going. Adding the final touch to state-of-the-art technology by separating the device from its source of power. Separating science from philosophy, philosophy from psychology, psychology from theology until their practitioners have been impersonalized into cognitive impotence. Deprived of the nourishment that insight requires, the life blood of discovery: a felt perception of the interconnectedness of things. A sense of whole Self, sovereign and autonomous, its integrity intact. Instead of chopped to pieces by the rigors of academic and professional discipline.
No good guys or bad guys
The severance of the whole person from understanding what’s staring it in the face: questioning who it is. Asking it to think with the faculties of Mind given to it without prejudicing answers with willfulness. Without blocking their source in Mind’s sixth sense. Intuition, the source of spontaneous insights without which thinkers like Einstein and Freud would never have made themselves useful. Who took their insights and ran off with willfulness into thickets of pre-judged irrationality. Promising transformative results and coming up empty. Their contributions reduced to a negative: whatever they had held to be true must not be true.
The Mind that we all share is Sapiens’ real common ancestor: the Life of Free Choice with a critical function in Creation, not predatory instinct captive to a cycle of pointless self-consumption. An ape. Whose provocations frustrate goodwill but defy any rationale for assessing blame. For launching a campaign of retribution that would dispense with evil and avenge injustice. Much as provocation would like to manipulate its perpetrators and victims into feeding its appetite for “action,” there are no good guys or bad guys here.
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The Image in the Mirror of Doom
Finding a place for the irrational
This can’t be a feelgood story with a happy ending. It’s about understanding the way things are. Movement that had a beginning in the sequence of Logic and proceeded with the implications of Logic, one at a time, in orderly sequence. According to its nature, the Logic of Movement. That could not have occurred had there been in place circumstances that prevented it. A big picture presided over by a know-it-all that had no need of change and was determined to prevent it.
When provocations come under the microscope this is what they reveal: the know-it-all troublemaker presiding over a mythical big picture that never was and never can be. Its “presence” in our virtual reality nothing more than an echo of a logical implication. Movement’s contradiction by an irrationality that was both cost and benefit, the imaginary situation that attached to its back side like a rider. Characterized by Mind as anything goes. A know-nothing with no picture to rule. Whatever — a nihilist. Metaphysics’ source of Newton’s rule of physics: for every action there’s an equal and opposite reaction. The rider that accompanies all movements of evolution, pulling in the reverse direction to place all Movement, all of Creation, in its own self-defined context.
The context of perspective that came first in the Movement of evolution and stands for Life-Worth Creation. Everything that anything goes isn’t. Everything that whatever and nihilism aren’t. Motivated by the Life-Force of Love and Logic together that carries within it its own implied contradiction. The consequence of the nature of anything goes in the absence of a big picture: requirement of a place in Creation for the irrational. That’s found a place in Mind that’s out of its right mind: dreaming our virtual reality.
Beaten by a psychological whip
Once activated while Mind self-unaware is dreaming its anything-goes irrationality, the pushback against Movement reveals its dominant attributes. Being an anything goes whatever-nihilist it lacks the two critical faculties of Mind that distinguish Sapiens from ape: differentiation and empathy.
- One-sidedness, because without differentiation unaware that there’s any more to reality than what’s in front of its nose. Unaware that, as Parmenides discovered, what’s in front of our noses and the warthog’s snout can’t be the whole story.
- The essentials of Conscience: able to distinguish between right and wrong, kindness and unkindness, helpfulness and harmfulness, supportiveness and abuse.
Being without powers of its own, dependent on its host’s to act out its agenda, it does so by manipulation. The profile of authoritarians of all stripes: self-centered nihilists; entitled to objectify others for whom they have no feeling; motivated to seek absolute power and freedom by manipulation. Playing a zero-sum game of competition where, if they have anything, then their opponents must have nothing. Their gain must be others’ loss. Most notably boundaries: theirs to have and others not to have. The noxious practice of boundary-crossing that poisons relationships with gut-wrenching arrogance.
The profile of the authoritarian parent. Mommie Dearest. A personality type infiltrated by the reverse-reflection of Movement with impaired faculties of differentiation and empathy. An objectified victim of manipulation. The terrified and terrifying scourge of Victimhood. Psychopathy. The occupant of Sapiens’ metaphysical Mind. Arrogance, who knows only manipulation as a means of meeting her needs. Whose provocations engender retribution when the stakes aren’t personal offense. They’re a child’s protection from being beaten by a psychological whip. Being released into an adulthood of arrested development, confusion, and emotional pain that can be fatal.
All provocations are manipulations
Yet correction is still the object. Retribution is irrelevant. Blame is irrelevant. What is relevant is healing from the consequences of activating the rider on the back side of Movement. A process that has no one definition because it’s necessarily tailored to the personality type, mindset, and circumstances of the individual person.
The one given the name “forgiveness” centers on Mind rather than body and the tension between innocence and guilt. A psychological fix for psyches racked with guilt taught by Jesus through the metaphysics of Conscience. A Course in Miracles. Distilling from the example of the biblical Jesus its principles and values without the body-centered distractions venerated by the Church.
- A process appropriate for Psyches like the clinical psychologists who transcribed the Course and published it. Steeped in the psychoanalytics of Sigmund Freud, who thought the “bad thing” in the human psyche was entirely physiological. Brain chemistry and infantile sexual urges having no origin in anything Mind or metaphysical. Guilt.
- Psyches that fill the pews of churches, and that’s OK so long as they don’t fall in with church dogma saturated with hierarchy. But they do. And in doing so they authenticate the very source of corruption, guilt, and authoritarian arrogance they’re ostensibly set against.
These thoughts on coming to terms with Mommie Dearest draw upon many sources. Jungian intuitive psychology among them along with the Course and many others. But while forgiveness and guilt have their place, the focus here is elsewhere. On the Logic of the way things are. That puts each of us in a role to be played onstage as if we had no choice but to be manipulated. When it seems more likely that all provocations are manipulations. And so long as we continue to allow ourselves to be provoked we will allow ourselves to be manipulated. We will participate in the manipulation. Manipulating ourselves, and that has no appeal for me.
A call for Love for the child
As much as my manipulator would like for its captive to take a whip to the authoritarian parent, I fully understand that to do so would only add to the provocation and add to the suffering of children. It’s not throwing a punch for the children. It’s throwing a punch at them and at myself in the process.
My goal is to help end the manipulation and its provocations both. To bring whatever awareness I can to the perpetrator by holding up a mirror to it. So that Mommie Dearest sees herself behind the apparition as I do. When she hears its voice that wants to know who we are. That wants us to know who we are, without immersing us in self-flagellation. In guilt and recompense.
We only need to do what C. S. Lewis proposes in Till We Have Faces (1956): remove our masks. Recognize the know-it-all presiding over the big picture for what it is: a pose with nothing behind it. The imperturbability of psychopathy: a pose. Mommie Dearest: a pose of invincibility and dominance hiding fear and suspicion. The presence in Sapiens’ psyche of an agent of manipulation, whose purpose is to challenge us to respond to it with character and integrity. As to a call for Love, with Love. Not for manipulation or for the manipulator but for the vulnerable child being manipulated.
Doing what comes naturally
To understand what this entails is to understand that nothing terrifies the manipulator and its captives more than looking into a mirror. That and Loving Friendship. It was the act of looking into a mirror that was the undoing of the manipulator’s host. Subjecting it to an extreme makeover of Self and environment without the bus and without the happy faces of performers, home-dwellers, neighbors, viewers, and network sponsors. It was an act of self-delusion mischaracterized as predatory capture, kill, and viral replication.
For which there are no limits to define it. As bad as the Conscience of Creation is good. To hold up a mirror to any of its incarnations is to scare the heck out of it. Including and especially Mommie Dearest. Because to understand what she’s about it to understand that she’s not one of the manipulator’s embodiments. She is the manipulator. Undifferentiated, one-sided, and devoid of empathy. The reverse of an empath. So thoroughly consumed by her reverse-mirror image that there’s no longer any distinction between the person behind the mask and the mask. Psychologically or emotionally.
All her defenses are arrayed with one purpose in mind: to prevent her being positioned before the Mirror of Doom. To prevent her from recognizing in it a friend. The ideal of Loving Friendship to which all of Creation is dedicated in Reality. Made relatable in this reality by person in the flesh. Whose experience among us adds up to the simplest of propositions: that to avail ourselves of Guidance, comfort, and healing all that’s called for is doing what comes naturally: making friends. With Loving Friendship itself. Then getting out of the way so that the irrepressible Force of Life and Love behind it can move freely and spontaneously. In the nature of what it is, a Friend who performs acts of kindness when they’re needed and welcomed. Who guides through insights, comforts through being there, and heals through energy. When we relate to it.
The only path to healing
An understanding of Loving Friendship portrayed in reverse by Harvey Keitel’s character in The Bad Lieutenant (1992). When overcome with guilt he grovels at the feet of Jesus pleading for absolution. Objectifying his “savior” in the process, seeking in an “other” what can only be found within himself, and defining himself as who he isn’t, a victim bereft of self-Worth. But an extreme version of the Church-sanctioned “relationship” between sheep and shepherd: the spectacle of “flock” being herded to “forgiveness” as if to slaughter.
This the image in the Mirror of Doom that the manipulator Mommie Dearest would see when she looks upon Loving Friendship. An image of guilt, condemnation, and punishment. Her not-Self. An apparition with no reflection of its own. And so to be replicated in those who come within her influence. Making of everyone mirrors of herself. Her children, mirrors of herself. Calling to mind another image of horror: the child inside an alien’s belly pleading with Ellen Ridley to be euthanized. (Aliens (1986)).
Ellen dispatched the alien queen and her eggs with her state-of-the-art blowtorch. A suitable remedy for a predator having no trace of humanity. But not for Mommie Dearest if there is a trace of humanity. How to connect with it a metaphysical challenge as well as a test of character. When children’s welfare is at stake and the only path to healing is through Loving Friendship. With ourselves.