I have been trying a new psychotherapy out on myself–always be your own guinea pig–and it seems to be working. I have a benchmark for myself, and when I achieve it, I will post the method and results.
For the moment, I was in the grocery store, and by habit I am one of these fast moving, impatient, irritable people. Someone who has a blog called the Goodness Movement should not be like this, but regretably I am how I am, and not yet how I ought to be. The best I can do most days is recognize it and tone it down.
Yet, today, the thought popped in “no nausea”. Now, I don’t ever feel nausea. I don’t get sick with anything. I don’t even get headaches from hangovers. But I thought about it, and I think for some people–the number is hard to estimate since we are less than fully honest with one another–life is something to be feared, and holding back in anxiety a “rational” reaction to this fact. I do this. I always have. I literally think it started in the womb.
But these reactions must ALWAYS be considered as habits that are provisional, mutable, and which can be altered. It does not matter if literally every waking moment of your life you have had some feeling: it can still be reduced in size, and quite possibly erased as a significant factor in your life. No matter what neuroscientists tell us, I will believe the brain remains plastic, potentially, for the duration of our lives.
That wasn’t the point I wanted to make though. The point I wanted to make was this: Jean Paul Sartre, in his “Nausea”, was pointing to a psychosocial dysfunction not “out there”, not existential in the human condition, but rather something that was definitive FOR HIM. He claimed we choose our own emotions, but one is hard pressed to see why if this is the case he would choose anxiety and nausea.
Rather, I think we need to look at him as a malignant narcissist, almost certainly raised in an emotionally detached and yet emotionally demanding family, and who reacted with clinical narcissism of his own.
Virtually everything he wrote had one purpose: elevating him in the eyes of the masses. Yet, one could easily see clinical sadism in a philosophy which condemns you to freedom without giving you any idea what to do with it; which equates authenticity with morality, and both with anxiety and angst; which in the end insists on perfect conformity to a political doctrine oriented around what I term Cultural Sadeism, of which the Stalinism Sartre and de Beauvoir admired so much was an excellent example.
Why are these people studied by philo-sophers, “lovers of wisdom”? Can not all “philosophies” in some measure be reduced to the psychologies of their creators, UNLESS they are practically valuable in some measurable way for the general population?
Few thoughts.