How does Psychology work?
...OEDIPUS: Yea, I am wroth, and will not stint my words,
But speak my whole mind. Thou methinks thou art he, who planned the crime,
aye, and performed it too, all save the assassination; and if thou hadst
not been blind, I had been sworn to boot that thou alone didst do the
bloody deed.
TEIRESIAS: Is it so? Then I charge thee to abide by thine own proclamation;
from this day speak not to these or me. Thou art the man, thou the accursed
polluter of this land.
OEdipus
the King by Sophocles
[Picture: OEdipus by Salvador Dali]
Wo Es War sollt Ich werde
Where it was shall I become
Sigmund Freud
It = chaos, unconscious, problem, symptom...
I = grammatically the first singular person, pro-nom personal...
There is a sine equa non condition to benefit from Psychology:
a person (individual or collective) who want to benefit from psychology must show a real commitment to work out the truth and, therefore, a willingness to examine one's own subjectivity in order to reach to the roots of any problem or conflict, aiming to solve it.
This condition implies that the first step would be to formulate the problem and to find out if there is room for treatment, in the mathematical sense of the expression. For the key to solve any problem is to be found in undoing its enigma and deconstruct whatever elements were beyond one's control, thus causing troubles in body (individual or collective) and the mind, blocking one's own resources or hindering one's creativity, etc.
Having outline these factors, you may start to realize why true psychological discipline encounters irrational resistance. The human species is not keen to examine one's heart, let alone the dark side of it. For it does not flatter the ego to find an unconscious at work behind the scenes and to have to take responsibility in order to govern henceforth its forces creatively. However, such is the road to personal fulfillment, as an individual as well as a collective (which is obviously made up of individuals). To take the path to understanding if the proper way forward if one desires to get really rid of any illness or sicken situation.
Yet, well thinking, rather than wasting our life in blinding oneself, like an ostrich does, it would be wise to take the care to know one's own heart. Afterwards, nobody escapes from the Delphic oracle: only truth can set us free, as individuals as well as a human group or society.
That is why the great teachers of humanity (Socrates, Siddharta, Moses, Jesus, Muhammad, etc) had invited their disciples to understand truly, by carefully examining their hearts, this through the words escaping by the mouth and thus revealing the unknown, dark side of one's heart. Jesus of Nazareth, for instance (Mt. XV 16-20), followed therein the Socratic method of getting rid of problems by discovering the real reason of being for each thing that happens, even without our conscious will. A method always valid when dealing with human beings, which Aristotle encapsulated in this memorable definition: "An education which is not examination of one's heart is not at all a true one". These great teachers of humanity, after careful examination of human matters, all concluded -however different their backgrounds and perspectives, that our heart is the soul of everything human, from hell to heaven.
This heart at work in human matters is, after Freud (who was an educated Classical scholar and not the 'fraud' made by bad translators and worse sycophantic interpreters), what we call since the unconscious.
In other words, to discover the light of the spirit, and to set its resources in action, a 'good conscience' does not suffice. For as the proverb says: good intentions pave the road to hell. It is therefore worth taking care of going beyond the veil and masks of the mere obvious and, with ethical courage, to examine one's point of view towards oneself and towards others; to set in motion the creative change so long desired.
Briefly (right in opposition to fashionable sycophantic credo or psycho-idiotlogies of brain-programming-behaviors), true Psychology will ever signify: intellection of the soul. In order words: it is the Socratic, maieutic discipline wherein the cure or the solution is (beyond past frustrations) to understand as gymnastics of the soul's faculties - above all the faculty of intelligence - in order to create one's own well being.
