Psychology
_I: Today I went to bed thinking about all the things we talked about day after day, very personal things, emotions that we don't usually share with anyone; At least I feel as if by writing the post every day I was sitting on a psychologist's couch, although instead of remaining confidential, what I say is made public to thousands who read me. And I have had some comments from people who are amazed by the courage to share such personal things in an open way, something that at some point I mentioned that caught my attention, but that makes me see more and more how difficult it is for many to share. his internal world. I was always struck by how many people call “going to the psychologist” as “going to the shrink.” Many people in the world consider that psychology, sharing and talking about personal conflicts, is almost considering oneself crazy, schizophrenic, having a mental problem, and seeing that the other goes to the psychologist, it immediately seems to be a way of judging the sanity of one. this person. Anyway, in Argentina this is a little different, at least in the last generations. Despite being a country with Catholic roots, what has differentiated it from the rest of the Latin countries, along with Uruguay, is that the majority of people left the Church to enter Psychoanalysis. It is much easier to find people in Argentina who say that they go to the psychologist as a normal and everyday thing than in other parts of Latin America, and yet it is still sometimes a taboo subject. For me it was normal growing up with the question of going to the psychologist, for me it was like another class, like a normal extracurricular activity. But what makes people still so against psychology?
_AM: The simple fear of change. We could say that the greatest human fear is knowing the truth, that is, the truth of who we are, facing what lies within us. But this is actually too deep, something that the average human generally fails to conceive. What goes through every human being is the fear of changing, of discovering that what they can see inside forces them to leave things, to break ties, to see that they are not as they believe, to have someone know more about them than they do themselves. . That gives insecurity, it makes you feel defenseless, without weapons, without armor, showing your greatest weaknesses and on top of that, being forced to change. Remember that the constant search for life is not change, but stability, even if it is achieved due to the adaptation of change. The only real constant is change, and therefore, the search for this constant is the moments of season, stability. For this reason, when a person achieves stability, or what they believe to be stability, on a physical, emotional or mental level, whether from an attitude, an attachment or a belief, they cling to that as the greatest anchor to remain present. and on axis, in balance, fearing to face the weakness that comes with letting go, losing security, control over your life.
_I: And psychology questions those anchors…
_AM: Psychology was precisely developed to question the individual. The question is the only way the individual can discover the answers that lie within. The ability to ask questions awakens more consciousness than the ability to give answers. And a being that defends his integrity interprets the question as a threat, an interrogation typical of a prison, of war, of a captive being interrogated by the oppressor. He who asks questions opens an infinite Pandora's Box, which will awaken never-before-seen aspects of himself, which will make him question the reality in which he lives, seeking to transform it. And this is something that breaks with collective security, since it goes beyond the “norm”, the public law established by a culture, causing the world to be colored with an intention of “normality”. Being “normal” implies that the person follows a law limited to a cultural group, in a specific time and space. Whoever leaves this normality becomes crazy. A madman, then, is one who leaves his place (from the Latin “locus”: located). Whoever is not in the norm is misplaced. In English, “crazy” comes from “crack”, that is, to break something, something that breaks into pieces, that is not complete, and the interesting thing is that in some places, this anglicism is used as a synonym for genius. Well, normally, geniuses are crazy, since they not only break the mold, but also go outside the established place.
_I: So for fear of losing security, in history many geniuses were classified as crazy. Which is why humanity didn't advance faster than it could have. But... Why don't religions, based on crazy stories and hallucinations of people who "talk to invisible beings", go through the same process?
_AM: Because a religion is born from a shared tradition, from a group that follows the same idea, and that gives security to the pack, to the clan, ensuring survival and stability through tradition. In many cases, faith is not as important as religion, not even taken into account, since many people can belong to religions for the security they provide, without having faith in the philosophy that said religion professes.
_I: Like Catholics who don't believe in the appearance of angels...
_AM: Madness is characterized by being the product of the vision of a single individual. Moses, Abraham, Muhammad, Jesus, Buddha, and many others were mad geniuses, misunderstood, but whose words brought stability to many people, and they built religions around them, giving greater security. But in Greece, as well as in some other regions of the world but with less influence, free thinkers emerged outside of religions and traditions, those who loved questions more than the gods, because the gods had rules, they did not have freedom, and The question granted the true love of existence: knowledge. This is how Philosophy emerged, which is the art of questioning the soul, the inner world, about its perception of the world. The questioners were crazy, artists of the mind, of diction, people who spent their lives imagining, daydreaming.
_I: Daydreaming is a good Pisces attribute…
_AM: They believed that questions and ideas would free humans from the oppression of beliefs and traditions. There was true freedom. The Body was considered almost like a prison for the Soul, clinging to living in a world of limits and patterns. But the philosophers loved life, so they considered freeing the soul from its cave, from its prison, so that it could express itself freely in word, thought and action. Alma is movement (from the Latin “anima”, “animated”), but in Greek, soul is called “psijé”. While for religions the soul was a spiritual attribute that had to be freed from sins or their punishment in the world, for philosophy the soul was the essence of every living being that had to be nourished with knowledge, through incessant search. But monotheistic religions prohibited philosophies, since they attacked dogmas by questioning the norm. Thus, for centuries, the question was silenced. Until, during the Renaissance, scientific methods began to question the world again, and to develop paths of knowledge and study that allowed us to know the world. These groups of concepts and studies were called “logos”, from the Greek “treatise, word, study”. For centuries it was prohibited to perform autopsies to recognize the causes of death of a deceased person, since dismembering bodies was considered a sin and sacrilege. It would be a long time before scientists could investigate how the human body and its organs worked, but above all, when they opened it, they asked themselves something fundamental: where is the soul? They understood that what moves the body was not a soul stuck inside a body, but a set of biological mechanisms, and that the connector and mobilizer par excellence was the brain and its nervous system. Thus, the soul came to be understood as a functioning of the brain, and the only way to access said functioning was not through an autopsy, but through cognitive tests, experiments with mental games and questions, to analyze the way in which the brain processes this knowledge. To this end, Wilhelm Wundt, in Germany in 1879, founded the first scientific laboratory for the analysis of the mind, and called his research “Psychology”: the study of the soul.
_I: So psychology is very recent.
_AM: It was always present in some form, but not as a possible science. Experimental Psychology tried to place itself at the same level as the other sciences, although they would never accept it as such. The different psychologists in history demonstrated human responses to certain stimuli, through various experiments; demonstrating that there are strategic paths to reach hidden places of the mind. Thus, psychology is founded as a therapeutic method to identify traumas and repair them through questions, activities, and mental experiments. Psychology is not for crazy people, it is to resolve hidden traumas that you cannot discover for yourself, psychology is a map, a GPS that helps identify those hidden places inside.
_I: Those who, upon discovery, drive us to healing, and therefore to change, which leads us to the same thing as before, the fear of change. Many cling to trauma so much that they consider it their nature, their form of well-being and survival, and prefer to defend themselves so as not to disturb that apparent security, even if it is like clinging to the idea that a tumor makes you feel whole.
_AM: A human who does not open his soul is a rock in an organic body. Immutable, rigid, that will never transform unless it experiences great crises that break it. And when it breaks...
_I: Go crazy…
_AM: And there arises the reason why psychological centers are considered the places where the crazy, the broken, the abnormal go; because "normally", seeking to survive, people take refuge in their lives not seeking to change anything, accumulating conflicts until the moment they explode in crisis, breaking into pieces, losing their bearings, losing the meaning of things, breaking away from the norm, which makes them broken individuals, synonymous with madness.
_I: But if people learned to open up, to share their souls, their feelings; to talk about the things that go through their hearts and minds, if we practiced speaking, letting go of control, the need to defend ourselves and share what we feel, then psychology would not be to care for the broken, but to accompany the sane…
_AM: Psychology is the technique of empathy, the methodology of compassion. If you practice it from childhood, there will be no one normal, nor anyone abnormal, because we will all be geniuses of our own existence, we will all be free, because we will know that the question leads us to the empathy of constant transformation.
_I: A free soul is a spirit capable of manifesting in matter.
_AM: Ask yourself the question, and you will find the genius of the answer. In the questioning of your mind lies the key that frees your soul.