I regret sins of thought (innocent yet toward the dark side). I have had an oppor-tunity to reflect on my youth, where my dark side had its role in my unconscious, pre-conscious, and play. I was outwardly submissive, picked on by my big brother, inwardly a conqueror, reading about conquerors of the past, and drawing sadistic pictures, because drawing ugly is a lot easier than drawing pretty\u2014 and I was lazy. I read as a pre-teen about torture, which fascinated me\u2014I\u2019m now ashamed to admit. Then I came to be more conscious that torture hurt! Duh! And I could no longer entertain it.<\/p>\n
However, I continued my interest in the history of warfare, battle, armaments\u2014 until only a few years ago! Consciousness grows slowly. Now I reject even that. But Hallowe\u2019en is upon us and I\u2019ve been reflecting on what the psychiatrist and ana-lytical psychologist Carl G. Jung called \u201cthe Shadow complex,\u201d referring to all the images and thoughts that partake of that which we are afraid of, that which we unconsciously entertain a little, that of which we are ashamed.<\/p>\n
Not as bad as ending a sentence with a preposition, which I learned I shouldn\u2019t do\u2014but as Winston Churchill once wrote: \u201cThis is the sort of nonsense up with which I will not put!\u201d<\/p>\n
Anyway, I am consciously aware of my past torture fantasies as a pre- and early teen, and regret them, and while I was at it, I became aware of the way I uninten-tionally tortured patients during my internship, drawing blood or doing painful procedures. I rationalized rather deeply that I was only doing this to help them, maybe even saving these patients\u2019 lives, but it broke though that defense this morning and I had to face the fact that whatever the rationalization, I tortured a lot of patients in my training. Aughh, regret! I didn\u2019t do it for fun, I must note. But indeed I did it. We no longer accept the Nazi concentration camp officers\u2019 excuse that they were \u201cjust following orders,\u201d but that\u2019s what I did.<\/p>\n
My intent was to help. That was my conscious purpose. My unconscious repressed that I was hurting them in order to help. I fear some of this dynamic even over-lapped into my practice of psychiatry, alas. The power of defense mechanisms should not be underestimated. So there is a measure of regret about my life, even as for the most part my conscious memories go towards more pleasant memories.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I regret sins of thought (innocent yet toward the dark side). I have had an oppor-tunity to reflect on my youth, where my dark side had its role in my unconscious, pre-conscious, and play. I was outwardly submissive, picked on by my big brother, inwardly a conqueror, reading about conquerors of the past, and drawing […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2639","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2639"}],"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=2639"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2639\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2640,"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2639\/revisions\/2640"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2639"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2639"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2639"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}