Wish Fulfillment or Bad Habits

Consider this a gloss on my prior post about the wife who is frustrated because her husband does not turn out the bathroom light. Several commenters wrote in with suggestions about motion sensor light switches. Apparently, they turn on when you walk into the room and turn themselves off after you leave. Surely, they will solve the problem, without very much therapy.

Anyway, the problem raised an interesting psycho issue, one that I avoided yesterday. So, here it is for today. According to therapy culture principles, and according to Freud and a bevy of other therapists, the man who is not turning the lights out is enacting some hostile feelings toward his wife. These feelings might be a replay of feelings he had toward his mother, his aunt, or his sister. 

If that is the case, proper therapy would require him to get in touch with his hostility-- manifestly misogynistic-- and then to resolve the feelings by gaining insight and awareness into the true cause, the true object and whatever. How would he do this? He would recollect his past ill feelings toward a woman, he would narrate his hostility, make it a part of his life story, feel guilty about what a bad man he is and do proper penance for his sins. Proper penance would mean doing the laundry for a month, voting for Hillary Clinton or burning down a federal court house.

Anyway, the key is that the man’s bad behavior would be rendered meaningful by being placed within a life historical narrative. Some therapists would then want to weave the new story into some pagan myth or legend. The man would then know why he feels such hostility toward his wife.

As you can see, such was not my approach. I took a different tack, one that did not require us to accuse him of anything or even to lay a guilt trip on him. I was assuming that the action did not express any dark, repressed hostility to his wife. I was assuming that it was a bad habit. And thus, that if we can find a way to break the habit, perhaps by installing motion sensors in the bathroom, the man will not automatically find another way to express his hostility. The reason is, he does not feel especially hostile toward his wife, and will not feel thusly unless we manage to persuade him that he is.

You can find a variant of this theme in Malcolm Gladwell’s book, Talking to Strangers. In it Gladwell argues cogently that suicidal behavior is not merely an expression of suicidal intention. This means, if a suicidal individual does not find a way to kill himself, perhaps because, as happened in the case of the Golden Gate Bridge, construction workers have put up netting that makes it far more difficult to jump into the bay, he will not necessarily find an alternative way to kill himself. He might as well give up on the idea of suicide. Statistically, such appears to be the case with bridge jumpers in San Francisco.

Freudian theory declares that unconscious wishes will necessarily express themselves, whether we like it or not, whether we choose to or not. We might decide not to express something, but it will express itself through other means-- through symptoms, through slips of the tongue, through bad behavior. 

Now, the new theory suggests that we have more of a choice about what we choose to express. It suggests that even a wish to commit suicide can be rejected if the means are not readily available. By Gladwell’s theory, the suicidal individual enters into a dialogue with reality. (or perhaps with God) And he is capable of not acting on his impulse if reality seems to be saying No to him.