R.D.

What a relief to come across, say, Nietzsche! “The truth is the lie that enables a species to survive.” Not because it is necessarily true, but because he was at least able to think and say it before he was taken off to the madhouse

It seems to be done, in part, by a kind of projection. Each generation projects onto the next, elements derived from a product of at least three factors.

What was

(1) projected onto it by prior generations,

(2) induced in it by prior generations, and

(3) its response to this projection and induction.

A simple way to get someone to do what one wants, is to give an order. To get someone to be what one wants him to be, or supposes he is or is afraid he is (whether or not this is what one wants), that is, to get him to embody one’s projections, is another matter. The best way is, within a hypnotic (or similar) context, not to tell him what to be, but to tell him what he is. Such attributions, in context, are many times more powerful than orders (or other forms of coercion or persuasion).

In the family situation, however, the hypnotists (the parents) are already hypnotized (by their parents) and are carrying out their instructions, by bringing their children up to bring their children up … in such a way, that includes not realizing that one is carrying out instructions: since one instruction is not to think that one is thus instructed. This is a state easily induced under hypnosis.

The “deeper” social laws are implanted in us, the more “hard-programmed”, the more “pickled” into us, the more like “natural” laws they come to appear to us to be. Indeed, if someone breaks such a “deeply” implanted social law, we are inclined to say that he is “unnatural”

Freud’s view was that what people think they “naturally” don’t want to do may be a product of repression, and other operations, at the behest of rules against even thinking much less doing it.

Negative rules may themselves generate actions they prohibit. If you want people not to do something, they are not doing, do not forbid it. There is a better chance that I will not think what I have not yet thought, if you do not tell me not to.

Introjection is an operation by me on my experience, which is identical in principle with projection, the only difference being that the locations of the transference are different, namely: from any region of what is taken to be not-me, or not-self, or not that with which I identify myself (e.g., my family), on to what I take to be “me”, “self”, or that with which I identify myself