Abstract
This paper develops an integration of psychoanalytic and wisdom tradition concepts to answer the question as to why nature does not turn off neurosis, The proposed answer is that nature wants a person to exploit the neurosis for two gains, one being the increase in adaptive capacity resulting from releasing it and the second involving the difficulty in the release itself, the latter related to gains proffered by the world’s wisdom traditions. These see a movement from the psyche’s creation by passive, unconscious means of finite promise rooted in parental love to creation by active, consciously chosen means of unlimited promise involving a direct relationship with nature and the Cosmos.
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Notes
The phrase ‘has them synthesized’ is used because the synthetic function is not part of the primary process, which manages classes of objects and the selection of objects from within classes, but is a separate and distinct psychic power; in Freud’s model it is an ego function.
A guide is usually part of the process but the guide’s role is not the same as a therapist.
This dissolving of difference is not the same as psychotic merging where a person loses his sense of the boundary dividing self from non-self. The present experience is one in which the subject senses the continuity of his ‘isness’ or being with that of the Cosmos, resulting in an increase of the person that enables this to repeat, without limit.
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Badalamenti, A.F. Why Nature Doesn’t Turn Off Neurosis. J Relig Health 52, 196–207 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10943-011-9482-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10943-011-9482-8