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Who does he think he is ?
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TOPIC: Who does he think he is ?
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Re:Who does he think he is ? 7 Years, 1 Month ago
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Jo wrote
He seems to be attracted to gruesome and lurid stories. A criminologist with a selective interest in that kind of crime rather than in boring crimes like fraud, burglary or blackmail.
That’s an astute observation, Jo.
I find myself lapsing into psychoanalytic mode when listening to (or reading) the outpourings of militant paedofinders (the same applies to militant radical feminists, militant Islamists, and perhaps to all militants who take delight in accusing others of various ‘isms,’ ‘phobias’ and politically incorrect speech).
He does seem rather obsessed with this stuff, despite the fact that the gruesome and lurid stories he’s addicted to are vanishingly rare. The vast, vast majority of us do not abuse our own or anybody else’s children. Most adults, I believe, are hardwired to protect, enlighten and nurture children. So why the overarching compulsion to elevate these albeit unpleasant but very uncommon events into some kind of spurious epidemic?
If someone undergoing psychoanalysis consistently recounted endless stories of pervasive paedophilic torture, if he (or she) repeatedly insisted, without evidence, that we were merely seeing “the tip of iceberg” of child sexual abuse, if he or she devoted their lives to rooting out hidden paedos (or at least accusing others of being so), an analyst would become increasingly sceptical, not to say positively suspicious.
The militant desire to combat a perceived massive threat of rapacious paedophilic abuse might lead an analyst to speculate that the dangerous desires being discussed only appear to be out there in the world because they’ve been projected there.
If I’m not only divided between my conscious self and my unconscious (as I believe all human beings are) but am also fundamentally dishonest, I will seek to manage the desires I despise in myself by attributing them to other people. Other people who I will then persecute not only pitilessly but ceaselessly. The persecution has to be unending because the disavowed desire is relentlessly insistent, and has to be constantly evacuated onto others.
If he were on an analytic couch instead of blurting self-promoting Tweets to his fellow paedo-obsessives, he would be invited to explore the inner origins of the paedo-desires he depicts himself as valiantly at war with. An analyst might point out to a patient preoccupied with this stuff that he seems unable to mention the word “child” without immediately contemplating violent sexual assault.
But there may be another dimension to this venomously embattled posturing, too. Some people have never managed to take responsibility for (and control) violently aggressive drives. And that means that they’re continually looking for opportunities to discharge this pent-up violence. What better opportunity than to endlessly target the socially-sanctioned imaginary bogeyman?
Imagining that a designated scapegoat has access to a form of filthy enjoyment that makes your own satisfactions seem deeply unsatisfying only intensifies the problem. Those unmanageable aggressive drives start to seethe dangerously and threaten to boil over. Channelling the aggression onto the designated scapegoat purchases transient relief – but only until they start seething and boiling over again.
Neither of these two possibilities need be mutually exclusive. But they both betoken malignant psychopathology, in my view.
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