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KimE — University of Nebraska Press / Page 97 / DEC . 14 . 2005 / Fascism and Democracy in the Human Mind / Charny 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 [First Page] [97], (1) Lines: 0 to 55 ——— 8.00009pt PgVar ——— Normal Page PgEnds: TEX [97], (1) chapter four The Fascist Slave Obedience, Conformity, and Intolerance of Dissent 1. Obedience, Conformity, Intolerance of Dissent versus Freedom, Respect for Dissent, and Responsibility to Make Choices Abandoning or submerging one’s identity to another identity, whether to one’s family or a group such as a religious order or nation is an important and almost frightening issue that has been sidestepped in much professional psychological writing. I suggest that we would do well to add the following to our concepts of psychopathology: descriptions of the extent to which a person abandons their individual identity and self to their family, to a group, or to any collective process or ideology. We should define such situations as problematic, disturbed, and psychopathological. One of the most significant events in the first decades of family therapy was the identification of the myriad of serious disturbances generated by the patterning of family groups in “pseudomutual” or “enmeshed” patterns.1 The basic disturbance is a state of undifferentiation, blending or fusion that does not permit individual growth. A variety of serious psychiatric symptomatology can result,including psychosis,severe learning disorders, or severe psychosomatic conditions, conditions that in their own right have long been recognized but not necessarily as having derived from conditions of enmeshment and lack of separation. In family relationships,enmeshment also was found to result in some major family breakdowns, such as a sudden flight from a longstanding conflict-free or conflict-avoidant marriage in which one of the ostensibly happy spouses suddenly announces that he or she is leaving! The abandoned spouse is 97 KimE — University of Nebraska Press / Page 98 / DEC . 14 . 2005 / Fascism and Democracy in the Human Mind / Charny part one 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 [98], (2) Lines: 55 to 60 ——— 14.0pt PgVar ——— Normal Page * PgEnds: Eject [98], (2) characteristically left crushed in unexpected horror after years of a“good marriage.”Similarly, there are cases of children breaking away from their ostensibly good families and taking on an entirely different lifestyle. To date, traditional psychology and psychopathology have no names for these kinds of behaviors and conditions. Aborting and withdrawing from relationships has long been “‘celebrated ”in psychiatry, but I propose that we need to expand definitions of abnormality to include also entering into overly enmeshed relationships in which people abandon and lose their individual identities and integrity within a relationship with another or others. Many emotional and psychiatric problems are based on and derive from overconnection, overdependence, lack of separation, enmeshment, blind obedience,and surrender of autonomy and personal integrity to an outside identity – whether it be one’s family, a group, or a larger societal collective or ideology. Although in conservative traditional psychiatry one is disturbed only after one begins to act disturbed, psychotherapists have always defined disturbance on the basis of earlier unhealthy and unwholesome personality processes and patterns of feeling and behavior, even if major psychiatric symptoms have not yet appeared, or in family therapy terms even if the symptoms as such appear in someone else in the family; for example, in a symbiotic mother who is dependently clinging to her child but whose child looks all put together for now but who surely will show symptoms of emotional disturbance at a later time. A truer map that looks at all parties to overconnection, unseparatedness, fusion, and loss of self will identify emotional disturbances in all parties to the excess, in whoever demands the exaggerated closeness, such as the parents, and in whoever is the object of the demands for closeness, such as the children, even before actual symptoms of psychiatric disturbance show in either party. Family therapy, in particular, has shown that there are many seemingly normal and even ostensibly outstanding superior people headed for breakdowns because they are too emotionally “enmeshed” in their families. Blending into a family, overreliance on a mate, being part...

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