I’ve finally gotten around to writing a glossary of terms for my books and the articles on this site. This glossary appears in the Appendix of my latest book, which is scheduled for publication by this summer or sooner. Eighteen terms are listed here, all common English words, that explain as simply as possible the basic principles and dynamics of depth psychology. Reading this glossary should bring new clarity to one’s personal issues and help to resolve them.
Psyche — The psyche is an operating center of our emotional and mental life. The psyche consists of our unconscious mind, and it is both the leading edge of human progress and the seat of chaos where progress is blocked. With insightful access to our psyche, we become more capable of achieving self-actualization. The psyche contains processes and channels of energy that shape our personality, conjure our thoughts, manage our emotions, drive our behaviors, liberate or block our creativity and intelligence, and govern our ethical and moral awareness.
Inner conflict — Inner conflict exists, in varying degrees, in the psyche of most people. It generates a wide range of unpleasant and painful experiences and outcomes. The dynamics of the conflict are usually unconscious, but people consciously experience their disagreeable symptoms. These symptoms include anger, defensiveness, cynicism, apathy, jealousy, envy, bitterness, and self-pity. The main inner conflict is between the conscious wish to feel strong versus the unconscious readiness to feel refused, helpless, criticized, rejected, abandoned, or betrayed. Inner conflict disconnects us emotionally and mentally from an appreciation of what is good and right about us. It also puts us in danger of underperforming and failing to reach our potential.
Inner critic (superego) — This energetic drive in the psyche is a main dynamic in inner conflict. The inner critic is a drive of self-aggression that develops biologically in early childhood when instinctive aggression, blocked from fully expressing itself into the environment, turns against the child’s vulnerable sense of being. The inner critic is compulsively mocking, rejecting, critical, and sometimes hateful, and it consistently alleges that we deserve to be punished for wrongdoing or unworthiness. It is a command center that expresses a crude, primitive sense of authority, however irrational and arbitrary that might be.
Inner passivity — This center of primitive intelligence in our psyche is another key player in inner conflict. Lodged in the unconscious ego, inner passivity resists the pronouncements and judgments of the inner critic, but it does so ineffectively and defensively, with excuses and blaming of others among its defenses. Inner passivity is a weak link and blind spot in our consciousness, and it is a primary reason that inner conflict exists within us. Inner passivity gives license to the inner critic and thereby to inner conflict. This passivity often causes us to experience ourselves as weak and fearful. It uses psychological defenses to protect itself from the inner critic, but these defenses are a problem for us because they tend to be irrational and self-defeating. This passivity fails to protect us adequately from the inner critic’s trumped-up charges or overblown decrees.
Unconscious ego — This is the underside of the conscious ego. Our unconscious ego is likely the weakest point in our psyche, the place where our consciousness has the least penetration. Nevertheless, the unconscious ego has an ingenious intelligence: It produces clever, misleading defenses that can deceive our mind, conscious ego, and superego. Inner passivity hides out in the unconscious ego, and it is difficult at these depths to clearly differentiate the two.
First hurts of childhood — These eight hurts are emotional sensitivities to feeling refused, deprived, helpless, controlled, criticized, rejected, betrayed, and abandoned. First experienced in early childhood, the first hurts are carried forward into the emotional life of adults to be compulsively recycled and replayed in the context of daily life. Processed through inner conflict, these hurts are core emotions we are unconsciously tempted to replay and recycle. They can originate as actual hurts inflicted by parents’ ignorance or stupidity, but often the hurts arise as infantile misinterpretations derived from immature subjectivity. The hurts are the emotional content that fuels inner conflict. When these hurts are experienced in interactions with others, they are simultaneously being experienced deep within oneself.
Nonsexual masochism — This flaw in human nature consists of the compulsion to recycle and replay the first hurts of childhood, leading to behavioral reactions in daily life that precipitate painful, hurtful outcomes. A masochistic compulsion to repeatedly experience what is unresolved psychologically, particularly the first hurts of childhood, is deeply repressed in our psyche. This masochism is a psychological potency that binds to inner conflict, largely in the distressful back-and-forth defenses of inner passivity and attacks of the inner critic. The existence and extent of nonsexual masochism in the human psyche, identified in classical psychoanalysis, is the dark secret that modern psychology has failed to expose.
Psychological defenses — Psychological defenses are unconsciously formulated rationalizations—arising as words, beliefs, actions, and attitudes—that we unwittingly employ to protect both our egocentricity and our unconscious, masochistic willingness to continue recycling the first hurts of childhood. The most common defenses are misguided rationalizations and reactions such as blaming, complaining, excuses, denial, hostility, stubbornness, self-righteousness, and willful ignorance. Psychological defenses can be quite elaborate and ingenious. They consist of the various ways we lie to ourselves. They are instruments of resistance to liberating ourselves from inner conflict.
Defensiveness — Defensiveness is a primitive variation on psychological defenses. It consists of the weak and passive impulse to come up with words or thoughts that deny weakness or wrongdoing or any suggestion of weakness or wrongdoing on our part. People are often unaware of the extent of their defensiveness. If aware, they often feel unable to change the behavior. Defensiveness is an instinctively passive reaction on the part of both the conscious and unconscious egos.
Conscious ego — For most people, the conscious ego floods the sense of self to become our primary sense of self. It is, however, a second-rate stand-in for our better or best self. We tend to identify with our conscious ego; the more we do so, the weaker we are psychologically. The more we depend on our ego for a sense of self, the more exposed we are to its frailty and the less expansive we are. Our conscious ego spends much of its time fretting about our place and standing in the world, persistently contrasting itself to others.
Mind — Our mind is, ideally, a powerful faculty for reasoning and for producing rationality. However, it can be highly susceptible to the irrationality stirred up by inner conflict. The mind, in partnership with our conscious ego, can become an agent and spokesperson for our aggressive inner critic and our lamenting inner passivity. Our mind, churning with reactions to inner conflict, supplies “good reasons” for being, say, critical of others or angry at them. It also processes our whiny, self-pitying, defensive reactions, reflecting inner passivity’s participation in inner conflict. Our mind also repeats and “affirms” our conscious ego’s perceptions of reality. Much of the time our mind also serves up, through conflicted inner dialogue, the inner critic’s admonishments. In this way, our mind can be very passive to our psyche.
Sublimation — This is the process whereby inner conflict is alleviated or overcome, if only temporarily, when an individual creates some interesting, useful, or excellent product as a reaction to the chaos of inner conflict. Sublimation is, short of a cure for neurosis, a limited success in overcoming the misery of inner conflict. The energy to achieve sublimation often arises out of some measure of healthy aggression and belief in self. However, sublimation can also arise from one’s narcissistic defiance and spite against a sense of weakness, defeat, or an oppressive inner critic. When the underlying inner conflict remains unresolved, sublimations may dry up (as in writer’s or artist’s block) and be unavailable to the sufferer.
Transference —This distortion of reality describes the act or process of seeing and experiencing other people through our willingness to feel that they are seeing us according to how we are prepared to feel about ourselves. For instance, when we chronically subject ourselves to self-criticism and self-rejection, we are likely to transfer on to others the expectation that they also see us critically and rejectingly. We “see” coming from them what we are prepared to feel in ourselves. Transference is one of the many ways we can absorb displeasure.
Projection — This distortion of reality describes the act or process of “seeing” in other people what we unconsciously hide or repress within ourselves. We project on to them and attribute to them the undesirable traits and identifications that we unconsciously disown within ourselves. Projection is a psychological defense that enables us to falsely claim that the problem is with them, not us. Projection causes us to dislike or hate others as we set them up as “the causes” of our self-induced suffering. Essentially, we are willing to hate others and act against them in order to protect our ego.
Displacement — This is a process whereby the distress and misery of inner conflict are compulsively inflicted upon others. For example, the man who feels mistreated and disrespected at work comes home and mistreats and disrespects his wife and children. He then, unconsciously and masochistically, generates within himself another version of his torment by identifying with them as victims of injustice and disrespect.
Neurosis — Neurosis is a widespread condition of humanity, caused by the hurtful effects of inner conflict. Most people are somewhere on a spectrum of neurosis. Neurotics suffer needlessly in the sense they have not integrated the psychological knowledge that would liberate them from inner conflict. Modern psychologists, declining to use the term “neurosis,” have unwittingly normalized everyday experiences of misery and self-defeat. Neurotic people are more prone to experiences of transference, projection, and displacement. They are more likely to be thin-skinned, plagued by self-pity, weak at self-regulation, and operating beneath their potential.
Resistance — Psychological resistance is a passive, unconscious process that inhibits personal growth. It consists often of a repressed fear of letting go of one’s primary identifications, particularly the identification with ego as the central agency or experience of mind and self. Resistance is an inner battle between the wish to know versus the wish to not know. It’s the unconscious expectation and fear of transitioning from an ego-identification to a more evolved sense of self. Resistance is also activated to “protect” the individual from inner truth, particularly the humbling knowledge of how we unconsciously participate in generating misery and self-defeat.
Better self — This self is experienced as the growing realization of our potential. Here we experience the growing benefits of self-actualization. Through our better self, we possess greater capacity to enjoy truth, beauty, and integrity. We maintain equanimity in challenging situations and let go of the hurts of the past. Our better self has escaped from needless misery and folly. Becoming our better self (and perhaps our best self) is likely a requirement for saving civilization, democracy, and our planet.
