On The So-called Infantilism Of Clients

2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43

They say (they also write on this website) that our society has become infantile, people are now growing up to be infantile, psychologists and psychotherapists treat poorly, they wait, they demand something, they themselves do not want to work for their own good.

Truth?

Here it is time to think, how many years have I lived to compare people of different generations, modern youth, today's middle-aged people with those that were before? Is it really already 90 years old or all 300 have been lived? Immediately I remember the devil performed by Oleg Basilashvili at the Patriarch's Ponds.

But something, of course, can be remembered within the framework of your age. Comparing myself, for example, thirty years ago soviet with today. What was I dreaming about then? Finish college, specialize in psychiatry, become a psychotherapist and work in a psychiatric hospital with borderline clients (I didn't really want to work with psychotics), sit in my office in a resort border department, become a good specialist, receive a guaranteed salary of 200 rubles, buy a car, a summer residence, and in retirement plant tomatoes in the garden.

Isn't it infantile - the expectation of predictability, stability, regular salary with bonuses for seniority, a good pension with a bonus for harm. Infantilism of pure water!

And then there was a firm and fantasies to strain now, so that later on to receive passive income. And the word "passive" sounded like manna from heaven. You sit, read books, work on the sly for your own pleasure, and premiums like mom's milk drip from their tits by themselves. You doze and suck. Unbreakable infantilism!

I don’t know about all my colleagues of my age, only about those with whom they were then next and with whom they fantasized about the same thing. But something went wrong, it didn't work out, I had to study again and again and still have to work almost daily, and that passive income and quiet little office on the psyche dissipated like a fog.

So maybe from the height of the past, hiding from yourself your own infantile dreams, it's time to creak what kind of infantile clients are now?

What about today's clients?

I think they are okay. On sick days they sit out, work, study, suffer from their problems, wait for qualified help, they can be angry, offended, tired, confused, anxious, make claims and also sometimes wait for a miracle.

And they also live in a very unstable and alarming time, much more alarming than our soviet stagnation or the time of "great opportunities" of the 90s, when it was possible to get rich in three months. Now, except that casino advertising offers this. Social elevators for honest, hardworking and intelligent people that once existed in Russia have been broken off and are lying around in mines. We can only rely on ourselves.

You have to be distrustful and self-thinking, because, unlike in past years, the lie has become total from top to bottom. And in order not to turn into liars, swindlers, lackeys or suckers ourselves, today it is not enough to be just educated and smart. You need skills that will be in demand, as well as a stable and flexible psyche. And for a new life, you need to take value and moral guidelines from somewhere. From whom? From mothers and fathers who hoped that they would be rewarded with a guaranteed pension for honest work? Parents may not be able to teach bad things, but it’s more difficult about what is useful for modern life. They had no such experience.

If in the days of our parents it was possible to change a couple of specialties and 2-3 jobs, now it can be 10 and 30. If it was enough just to unlearn at the institute and go through a couple of formal internships, now, in order to be afloat, you really need to study, constantly, all my life.

Is this all about the infantile generation and infantile clients?

Maybe I'm lucky, but I meet different people in my work, who are healthier, who are sicker, but not infantile. They don't come to me with such labels on their foreheads.

Now quite seriously about human so-called infantilism

In the structure of consciousness of each person there is a subordinate, underdeveloped, childish and, as it may be, an infantile function. But this is not about a person, but about one of his mental functions. Someone will have such an infantile function thinking, someone will have feelings, someone will have intuition, someone will have a feeling.

The subordinate function is called our personal personal Ivan the Fool (Maria Louise von Franz). And the only real fools are those who think he doesn't have that.

Many texts have been written about each of these functions of consciousness, but here, for illustration, only one example about the infantile subordinate function of the senses.

An inferior (inferior) feeling is laden with anger and rage, ambition and aggression, greed and desire. Here we are confronted with our enormous claims of love, our exorbitant demands for recognition, and we discover that our sensual connection to life is one huge expectation made up of thousands of tiny grievances. This expectation is called the fantasy of omnipotence, the expression of the feelings of an abandoned child who believes that no one cares about him; - but is that all? Omnipotence is more than content; rather, it expresses, like the child, impoverished functioning that insists on greater influence and expression. Without this manifestation, the feeling turns against ourselves in a painful way, we become envious, jealous, plunged into depression, inflame our needs and the demand for their immediate satisfaction, then rush to find someone to help him or he would help us. An abandoned cat turns into an unconscious tiger (J. Hillman, 1971).

Why don't you want to call a subordinate function infantile? Because of this negative and derogatory meaning of the word "infantile". Through a subordinate function, Angels and Demons (Maria Louise von Franz) come to us, bringing with them the hope of renewal. Only she remains when everything in your power is done. And even though there will still be hope for a miracle, one does not want to and is not right to label her as infantile. It is more about sensitivity to the challenges of life, about the potential and the need for development, in which not only our intellectual and volitional qualities are involved.