The Origins and History of Consciousness, pg 96

“In the myth of Narcissus, the ego, seeking to break the power of the unconscious through self-reflection, succumbs to a catastrophic self-love.  His suicidal death by drowning symbolizes the dissolution of ego consciousness, and the same thing is repeated in modern times in young suicides like Weininger and Seidel.  Seidel’s book Bewusstsein als Verhängnis and the work of the misogynist Weininger bear the clear imprint of having been written by lovers of the Great Mother.  They are fatally fascinated by her, and even in the futile resistance they put up they are fulfilling their archetypal fate.”

What Do You Say After You Say Hello?

“A flyer looks at his map and sees a telephone pole and a silo.  He looks at the ground and sees a telephone pole and a silo.  He says: ‘Now I know where we are,’ but he is actually lost.  His friend says: ‘Wait a minute.  On the ground area telephone pole, a silo, and an oil derrick.  Find those on the map.’  ’Well,’ says the flyer, ‘ the pole and the silo are there, but the derrick isn’t.  Maybe they left it out.’  So his friend says: ‘Lend me the map.’  He looks over the whole map, including sections that the flyer ignored because he thought he knew where he was.  The friend finds, twenty miles off their charted course, a pole, a silo, and a derrick.  ’We’re not here,’ he says, ‘where you had your pencil mark, but away over there.’  ’Oh, sorry,’ says the pilot.  The moral is, look at the ground first, and then at the map, and not vice versa.

“In other words, the therapist listens to the patient and gets the plot of his script first, then he looks in Andrew Lang or Stith Thompson, and not vice versa.  In that way he will get a sound match, and not just a bright idea.  Then he can use the fairy tale to predict where the patient is headed, verifying from the patient (not from the book) all the way.”

What Do You Say After You Say Hello?

“It may be pointed out that Freud himself was a script-ridden person, a fact which he openly acknowledged.  His heroes were military ones, and he passionately admired Bonaparte.  His metaphors were often taken from the battlefield, and so was some of his vocabulary.  His slogan is given in the epigraph to his book on dreams, which in my edition reads: ‘Flectere si nequeo Superos, Acheronta movebo,’ roughly translated as “If I can’t bend the heavens, I’ll raise Hell,’ which he did.”

What Do You Say After You Say Hello?

“The unconscious has become fashionable, and hence grossly overrated.  That is, by far the larger percentage of what is called unconscious nowadays is not unconscious, but preconscious.  The patient, however, will oblige the therapist who is looking for ‘unconscious’ material by advancing preconscious material with a spurious label.  This is easily verified by asking the patient, ‘Was it really unconscious, or was it just vaguely conscious?’  True unconscious material (for example, the original castration fear and the original Oedipal rage) is truly unconscious, and not vaguely conscious.”

What Do You Say After You Say Hello?

“Nearly all anger is part of a game of ‘Now I’ve Got You, You Son of a Bitch’ (NIGYSOB).  (‘Thank you for giving me an excuse to get angry.’)  Jeder is in fact pleased at being wronged, since he has been carrying around a bag of anger since early childhood and it is a relief to vent some of it legitimately.  (‘Who wouldn’t get angry under such conditions?’)  The question here is whether abreaction is beneficial.  Freud long ago said it didn’t do the job.  Nowadays, however, for most group therapists it is the mark of a ‘good’ group meeting , and leads to lively staff conferences.  Everybody is delighted and exhilarated and relieved when a patient ‘expresses anger.’”

What Do You Say After You Say Hello?

“The commonest breathing sounds and their usual meanings are as follows: coughs (nobody loves me), sighs (if only), yawns (buzz off), grunts (you said it), and sobs (you got me).

What Do You Say After You Say Hello?

“Script analysis is then the answer to the problem of human destiny, and tells us (alas!) that our fates are predetermined for the most part, and that free will in this respect is for most people and illusion. For example, R. Allendy points out that for each individual who faces it, the decision to commit suicide is a lonely and agonizing and apparently autonomous one. Yet whatever vicissitudes it goes through in each individual case, the ‘rate’ of suicide remains relatively constant from year to year.

“What, then, is the responsibility of the parents?  Script programming is not their ‘fault,’ any more than an inherited defect is, such as diabetes or clubfoot, or an inherited talent for music or mathematics.  They are merely passing on the dominants and recessives they got from their parents and grandparents.  The script directives are being continually reshuffled, just as the genes are, by the fact that the child requires two parents.

“On the other hand, the script apparatus is much more flexible than the genetic apparatus and is continually being modified by outside influences, such as life experience and the injunctions inserted by other people.  It is only rarely possible to predict when or how an outsider will say or do something that alters a person’s script.  It may be a casual remark accidentally overheard at a carnival or in a corridor, or it may be the result of a formal relationship such as marriage, school, or psychotherapy.”

What Do You Say After You Say Hello?

“There are two requirements for the transmission of the script.  Jeder must be able, ready, and willing or even eager to accept it, and his parents must want to pass it on.

“On Jeder’s side, he is able because his nervous system is constructed for the purpose of being programmed, to receive sensory and social stimuli and organize them into patterns which will regulate his behavior.  As his body and his mind mature, he becomes readier and readier for more and more complex types of programming.  And he is willing to accept it because he needs ways to structure his time and organize his activities.  In fact he is not only willing, he is eager, because he is more than a passive computer.  Like most animals, he has a craving for ‘closure,’ the need to finish what he begins; and beyond that, he has the great human aspiration for purpose.

“Starting off with random movements, he ends up knowing what to say after he says Hello.  At first he is content with instrumental responses, and they become goals in themselves: incorporation, elimination, intrusion, and locomotion, to use Erikson’s terms.  Here we find the beginnings of Adult craftsmanship, his pleasure in the act and its successful completion: getting the food safely off the spoon and into his mouth, walking on his own across the floor.  Initially his goal is to walk, then it is to walk to something.  Once he walks to people, he has to know what to do after he gets there.  At first they smile and hug him, and all he has to do is be, or at most, cuddle.  They expect nothing from him beyond getting there.  Later they do expect something, so he learns to say Hello.  After a while, that is not enough either, and they expect more.  So he learns to offer them various stimuli in order to get their responses in return.  Thus he is eternally grateful (believe it or not) to his parents for giving him a pattern: how to approach people in such a way as to get the desired responses.  This is structure hunger, pattern hunger, and in the long run, script hunger.  So the script is accepted because Jeder is script hungry.

“On the parents’ side, they are able, ready, and willing because of what has been built into them through eons of evolution: a desire to nurture, protect, and teach their offspring, a desire which can only be suppressed by the most powerful inner and outer forces.  But beyond that, if they themselves have been properly ‘scripted,’ they are not only willing, but eager, and derive great enjoyment from child-rearing.”

What Do You Say After You Say Hello?

“Two other slogans common among therapists are also common among the general population: ‘You can’t tell people what to do,’ and ‘I can’t help you, you have to help yourself.’  Both of these are outright falsehoods.  You can tell people what to do, and many of them will do it and do it well.  And you can help people, and they don’t have to help themselves.  They merely have to get up, after you have helped them, and go about their business.  But with slogans such as those, society (and I mean all societies) encourages people to stay in their scripts and carry them through to their often tragic endings.  A script merely means that someone told the person what to do a long time ago and he decided to do it.  This demonstrates that you can tell people what to do, and are in fact telling them all the time, especially if you have children.  So if you tell people to do something other than what their parents told them, they may decide to follow your advice or instructions.  And it is well known that you can help people get drunk, or kill themselves, or kill someone else; therefore, you can also help them stop drinking, or stop killing themselves, or stop killing other people.  It is certainly possible to give people permission to do certain things, or to stop doing certain things which they were ordered in childhood to keep doing.  Instead of encouraging people to live bravely in an old unhappy world, it is possible to have them live happily in a brave new world.”

What Do You Say After You Say Hello?

“Besides the biological and psychological characteristics of the human organism which allow the preprogrammed script to become the master of personal destiny, societies are set up in such a way as to encourage this lack of autonomy. This is done by means of the transactional social contract, which reads: ‘You accept my persona or self-presentation, and I’ll accept yours.’ Any abrogation of this contract, unless it is one specifically permitted in a given group, is regarded as rudeness. The result is a lack of confrontation: confrontation with others and confrontation with oneself, for behind this social contract lies a hidden individual contract between the three aspects of the personality. The Parent, Child, and Adult agree among themselves to accept each other’s self-presentation, and not everyone is courageous enough to change such a contract with oneself when it is advisable.”