ABSTRACT
We are able, at this point, to see a consistency in all the various instances we have considered of the effects of the avoidance or surrender of responsibility for what one says and does and thinks. Let me list those effects: relief of emotional distress in the cult members; dispelling or forestalling of the anxiety of internal conflict in neurotic conditions, and mitigation of the anxiety or terror of external threat in the form of coercion or intimidation; excitement of a kind of liberation in certain group or crowd situations; impairment of purposeful, coherent thinking; and direction of attention in schizophrenia. The list comprises a great variety of individuals and situations and, therefore, also of effects. Yet all are effects of the person’s estrangement from, and less than complete sense of ownership and direction of, what he, himself, does. Where the sense of ownership of what one says, does or thinks is surrendered or avoided by the individual, it is experienced by him to be elsewhere. For the person under the sway of what he “should” think or do, for example, responsibility is shared with seemingly authoritative internal, quasi-moral rules. For others, responsibility is assigned to some authoritative external figure or movement, or to the urgency of one’s immediate emotional reaction or “impulse,” or, in schizophrenia, to some compelling associative thought or idea. In these ways, the person, the author of the thought or action, hides, and is hidden from himself. We may note that in its most subtle form, this phenomenon is what Hellmuth Kaiser (1955) observed, and we described at the beginning of this book, as a certain artificiality in his patients. They seemed quite sincere, but they did not know what they really believed or felt or wanted to do. We remember, though, that all these kinds of self-estrangement are incomplete. What is hidden is not gone, but only, at least for the time being, out of reach.130
