{"id":1472,"date":"2013-10-23T14:34:15","date_gmt":"2013-10-23T22:34:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/?p=1472"},"modified":"2013-10-23T14:34:15","modified_gmt":"2013-10-23T22:34:15","slug":"my-quiet-rebellion","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/?p=1472","title":{"rendered":"My Quiet Rebellion"},"content":{"rendered":"

Me? a rebel? No way. I was so intimidated by everyone who was so sure of themselves and I certainly wasn\u2019t. But on the other hand, as mind is wont to do, I did secretly rebel. I didn\u2019t know that it was a rebellion until a few decades ago. It was disguised as a simple interest in folly, in self-deception.<\/p>\n

Certainly I wasn\u2019t a rebel in the image of the mid-1950s kid, a hot-rod-driving, greased-duck-tailed-haircut, low-slung jeans-wearing, near juvenile delinquent. My big brother caught hell for that. (He did drive a bit fast and had a few dent-accidents, but back then that was real bad. He really wasn\u2019t all that wicked, just a tinge.)<\/p>\n

I didn\u2019t even consciously enjoy the thought of being a rebel, but I did enjoy, as Puck said in A Midsummer Night\u2019s Dream, \u201cWhat fools these mortals be!\u201d I was fascinated with learning about how whole countries and popular crowds got caught up in folly: I discovered propaganda analysis in Junior High School and Semantics in High School and I strongly suspect this theme affected my choice of major in college, Cultural Aspects of Religion.\u201d Looking back, it was not that big a leap to my choice of specialty in medical school\u2014i.e., psychiatry. (That was back when psychiatrists did therapy, as there were few medicines prescribed back in the 1960s.)  And indeed, I have always been more interested in the cultural aspects of neurosis than any other aspect of this field: I wanted to know what there is in common beliefs that feeds into folks getting messed up?<\/p>\n

The rebelliousness is a psychological analogue of the little boy\u2019s sexual curiosity, the desire to peek under a girl\u2019s skirt, not to see a woman\u2019s genitalia or even panties (big thrill of the forbidden!); well, I had my share of enjoying naughty magazines. But at another level, I sublimated my scoptophilia<\/a>\u2014the forbidden urge to peek\u2014aiming it at (or under?) the outward show of confidence and exposing the underlying illusion. <\/p>\n

I\u2019ve vaguely sensed that the world is not what it\u2019s made out to be, but few people admit this, or explain how it\u2019s so. Some folks go into science to discover the hidden workings of nature; I was curious about the hidden workings of mind, individually and collectively.<\/p>\n

My quest continues to expose layer upon layer of self-deception, collectively and individually. This is more than psychoanalysis. This reaches over into culture-wide illusions, basic tendencies of human nature to become overly fixated on this primal symbol or that experience. All illusions! Yikes! But also fun! I do think it\u2019s valuable, exposing this. Wise men in the East spend lifetimes pursuing ways to better dissolve the subtle nets of Maya, the Goddess of Illusion. But I confess to realizing there lies at the heart of this impulse just an edge of the snickering kid who recognizes that it\u2019s fun seeing the forbidden when all around people are pretending it\u2019s not there. (To Be Continued.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Me? a rebel? No way. I was so intimidated by everyone who was so sure of themselves and I certainly wasn\u2019t. But on the other hand, as mind is wont to do, I did secretly rebel. I didn\u2019t know that it was a rebellion until a few decades ago. It was disguised as a simple […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[24,11,12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1472","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-autobiographical","category-literacy","category-psychotherapy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1472"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1472"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1472\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1473,"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1472\/revisions\/1473"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1472"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1472"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1472"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}