Sometimes, as in modern psychotherapy, there are layers
upon layers of memory reaching back to infancy, which have to be
separated and named.
The effect of naming, the effect, that is, of saying that the labor
groups C and M, but not X, are underpaid, instead of saying that Labor
is Exploited, is incisive. Perceptions recover their identity, and the
emotion they arouse is specific, since it is no longer reinforced by
large and accidental connections with everything from Christmas to
Moscow. The disentangled idea with a name of its own, and an emotion
that has been scrutinized, is ever so much more open to correction by
new data in the problem. It had been imbedded in the whole
personality, had affiliations of some sort with the whole ego: a
challenge would reverberate through the whole soul. After it has been
thoroughly criticized, the idea is no longer _me_ but _that_.
It is objectified, it is at arm's length. Its fate is not bound up with my
fate, but with the fate of the outer world upon which I am acting.
5
Re-education of this kind will help to bring our public opinions into
grip with the environment. That is the way the enormous censoring,
stereotyping, and dramatizing apparatus can be liquidated. Where there
is no difficulty in knowing what the relevant environment is, the
critic, the teacher, the physician, can unravel the mind. But where
the environment is as obscure to the analyst as to his pupil, no
analytic technic is sufficient.
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