Concept of the Day - Deferred Obedience

From Wikipedia:

Deferred obedience: again, 'a deferred effect...a "deferred obedience" under the influence of repression'. Thus for instance Freud explored the different phases of a man's infantile attitude to his father: 'As long as his father was alive it showed itself in unmitigated rebelliousness and open discord, but immediately after his death it took the form of a neurosis based on abject submission and deferred obedience to him'. 

I believe that I have had this experience.

Concept of the Day - Mindblindness

Mind-blindness can be described as an inability to develop an awareness of what is in the mind of another human. It is not necessarily caused by an inability to imagine an answer, but is often due to not being able to gather enough information to work out which of the many possible answers is correct. Mind-blindness is the opposite of empathy. Simon Baron-Cohen was the first person to use the term 'mind-blindness' to help understand some of the problems encountered by people with autism or Asperger syndrome or other developmental disorders. Generally speaking, the "Mind-blindness" Theory asserts that children with these conditions are delayed in developing a theory of mind, which normally allows developing children to put themselves "into someone else's shoes, to imagine their thoughts and feelings."^[1] Thus, autistic children often cannot conceptualize, understand, or predict emotional states in other people.^[2]

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Concept of the Day - Covert Incest

The term covert incest (also known as emotional incest or psychic incest) is used by some mental health professionals to describe a relationship between parents and children that is sexualized and expects a child to fulfill adult emotional roles, though without actual incest. Proponents of the concept describe the relationships as harmful and one-sided, and similar to a relationship between adult sexual partners, but without the type of physical contact, that would be considered as child sexual abuse, and describe its effects as similar to, though less severe than, that of actual incest.

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Concept of the Day - September 29, 2010

A double bind is a dilemma in communication in which an individual (or group) receives two or more conflicting messages, with one message negating the other. This creates a situation in which a successful response to one message results in a failed response to the other, so that the person will be automatically wrong regardless of response. The nature of a double bind is that the person cannot confront the inherent dilemma, and therefore cannot resolve it or opt out of the situation.

...the essence of a double bind is two conflicting demands, each on a different logical level, neither of which can be ignored or escaped. This leaves the victim torn both ways, so that whichever demand they try to meet, the other demand cannot be met. "I must do it, but I can't do it" is a typical description of the double bind experience.

For a double bind to be effective, the victim must be unable to confront or resolve the conflict between the demand placed by the primary injunction and that of the secondary injunction. In this sense, the double bind differentiates itself from a simple contradiction to a more inexpressible internal conflict, where the victim really wants to meet the demands of the primary injunction, but fails each time through an inability to address the situation's incompatibility with the demands of the secondary injunction. Thus, victims may express feelings of extreme anxiety in such a situation, as they attempt to fulfil the demands of the primary injunction albeit with obvious contradictions in their actions.

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Example: Judge to young man: "Leave that woman alone!", while the man knows the woman will approach and antagonize him to get into trouble.

Concept of the Month - September 23, 2010

Double Standard

The term double standard, coined in 1912,[1] refers to any set of principles containing different provisions for one group of people than for another, typically without a good reason for having said difference.[2] A double standard may take the form of an instance in which certain applications (often of a word or phrase) are perceived as acceptable to be used by one group of people, but are considered unacceptable—taboo—when used by another group.

A double standard, thus, can be described as a sort of biased, morally unfair suspension (toward a certain group) of the principle that all are equal in their freedoms. Such double standards are seen as unjustified because they violate a basic maxim of modern legal jurisprudence: that all parties should stand equal before the law.

Example: