I am not done with this section. First I just want to present a table of some of the combinations of the more commonly used coping (defense) mechanisms and then there is one last subsection in this discussion of Blame Yourself First.

Table 1 lists some of the possible combinations. It is not exhaustive, but does give you some feel of how you can chew over your behavior.

Table 1: Some Combinations Of Coping Mechanisms

12. Now Look At The Other Person's Contribution

To review: the approach of blaming yourself first (1) tends to short-circuit psychic masochism and injustice collecting; (2) allows you to focus on what you can change (yourself) instead of what you can not change (the other person); (3) allows you to recognize (as a habit of mind) that you are the source of your emotional reactions, you are not the passive object of events that is 'made to' feel anything; (4) allows you to learn to apply coping mechanism thinking to your own behavior; and (5) once you have fully examined how and why you caused the incident — and that most definitely includes looking at why you did not see the potential for the incident to occur — why you were blinded to the nature of the other person(s) involved — then you can always look at what the other person did or did not do that caused the incident.

C. The Adlerian Early Memory Technique

When Freud returned from his adulatory time with Janet in France, he was convinced that the cause of all mental illness is childhood forgetting. The technical term is childhood anamnesis and the 'reason why' that Freud settled on was repression rather than the term "dissociation" that was used by Janet.

So children repressed ideas and memories that did result or might result in unpleasant affect (that is, in the final analysis, feelings). In a characteristic form (for Freud) of circular reasoning, the fact that we don't recall much from our childhood was because of repression and the proof that repression existed is that we don't recall much from our childhood.

Alfred Adler took the opposite side of that situation. If we don't recall much from our childhood; still there are for each of us some memories from our childhood that stand out. Why is it, Adler asked, if we forget most of our childhood that we do remember some of it and usually in particular detail?

Freud wanted, through psychoanalysis, to recover these repressed memories and Adler wanted, through individual psychology, to understand why we remember specific scenes from our childhood.

If we forget most of it, there must be something about the remembered memories that make them especially important. These stand-out memories, Adler wrote, give rise to what he termed "the style of life." Now, even before proceeding, it is important to understand that it does not make any difference if these memories are veridical or whether they are, in Freud's term, screen memories.That is, it does not make any difference whether the memory is of something that actually happened or whether the memory is an invention of the subconscious which, of course, the person thinks most definitely did happen if, as Freud maintained, we repress because an idea or memory would result in unpleasant affect; then, by like reasoning, we remember because the memory results in pleasant affect. Now before you dismiss this because you have early stand-out memories that were anything but pleasant; recall the issue of the incident repetition compulsion. The memory, for Adler, is pleasant in that it explains and justifies our character (our style of life in Adler's terms).

Footnote 108. Freud was so taken by Janet's hypnotic recall method that he translated Janet's works into German. Freud started his psychotherapy practice by using hypnosis as he had seen in use by Janet.

Footnote 109. Whether dissociation and repression are just two different words for the same thing or whether they are different mechanisms is a subject of continuing debate in the psychology literature.

Footnote 110. Individual psychology was the name Adler gave to his approach to therapy.

I'll give you one from my store of Adlerian early memories. I am with my parents and sister at a winter resort outside of Chicago where I grew up. It is getting late in the day and I am playing with the other children in building a snow man. My father comes over and says it is getting late and we have to go home. I don't want to, I want to continue building the snow man. My father grabs my wrist and drags me off to the car.

That is the clear memory. But what does it mean? Why that memory? It took me several years of periodically returning to that memory to figure out its meaning, its relation to my style of life.

Footnote 111. This phenomena does not relate to the "recovered memory syndrome." Recent study of recovered memories — memories that were ostensibly repressed and then recovered, often under hypnosis — shows that the recall is, at best, dubious. Research on memory shows that it is seldom veridical (true to fact). For further study see: Loftus and Ketcham, 1994; Ofshe & Watters, 1996; Baker, 1998; Pendergrast, 1996; Crews, 2006.

In being dragged off, I was (1) helpless before superior strength and (2) my sense of justice was violated. Looking at myself as an adult I recognized that I had never in my life engaged in any physical violence (I had never used my superior physical strength to impose my will on anyone) and I had an exaggerated, perhaps overdeveloped, sense of justice. I had a profound distaste for our gladiator system of courts and my politics was libertarian, a political philosophy that eschewed as a basic moral principle the imposition of state authority on anyone who was not himself employing physical violence. Thus this early memory served to explain and/or predicate my style of interpersonal relationships and my sense of justice/injustice and my politics.

As a therapist, I routinely employ the Adlerian Early Memory

Technique. Early in my work with someone, often in the first session, I solicit my patient's early memories. I ask for the following: (1) describe the scene — it may be just like a still photograph or it may be just like a few moments of film, (2) what approximate age where you, (3) what were your thoughts at the time, (4) what were your emotions at the time, and (5) what has this memory meant to you since (that is, what meaning do you attach to the memory in terms of your life)?

The beauty of the early memory technique is that it is a quick way into the person's character. It is often the case that it is difficult to sort out the relevant issue in the memory; but the issue(s) is (are) there; the memory is important else it would not be remembered, it is only an issue of seeing all the implications of that memory.

In your self-study, I urge you to use this technique on yourself. Actually write out your 1/2 dozen or so early memories. Record the five elements: (1) scene, (2) age, (3) thoughts at the time, (4) emotions at the time, (5) meaning since.

Once you have those memories down on paper, then start to explore each one.

Footnote 112. Actually, there is much more in this memory that corresponds to who I am as a person, but this is not an autobiography and what I have provided demonstrates the concept.

Footnote 113. One warning: don't search for memories. Take only the ones well known to you without you having to search for them. If you undertake a deliberate process of trying to recall early incidents, what you will get is defensive memories of the subconscious designed to lead you in the wrong direction.

You may take it as a given, an axiom even, that there is profound meaning in the memory and it but needs honest study and analysis to see its derivatives manifest in your life. Further in using this technique, don't ignore the operation of defense mechanisms. True, these memories are hallmark incident repetition compulsions but that does not mean that you have not, for example, employed reaction formations and projections on elements of the memory. Just keep probing and analyzing; it will be worth your time and effort.

To complete the exploration of this technique, also keep in mind that as you do the Reichian work, new early memories will emerge. These new memories are not less important, they are more important. They will give you a window into deeper and more covert aspects of your character.

D. Exploring Your Definition Of Emotive (Feeling) Terms

On pages 396-400 I discussed the problem of having a limited emotional vocabulary or of having emotive words which are mis-defined. I also mentioned (page 310) that emotions are rarely singular, there are, as a rough guide, six emotions all going at the same time.

I mentioned in discussing defense (coping) mechanisms, that it is not the answer which is important, it is the investigation. This same principle applies here. If you have a poverty of emotive words (nowhere near that over 550 emotive words in the English language) or you have an unknown mis-definition of an emotive term, it is unlikely that you can easily correct either limitation. What you can do is take any suspected feeling and, after exploring yourself in the context of that suspected feeling (and using the techniques presented here to find other same-time present feelings) you can then use a different word to describe or name the feeling and then start the exploration with that new word.

As always, you make the assumption for exploration purposes that any word you apply is the correct word. When you have gotten all you can from that first word substitution, try another one and yet another one.

Here is a simple example. You note a sensation in or near the stomach. At first it seems to you to be disgust. All right, you feel disgusted. Now, why?, what does it say about you that you would respond to the given situation with disgust?, is it a familiar feeling or an unusual one?, do you approve, disapprove, or are you neutral about that feeling in this situation?, what is the strength of the feeling?, is it growing, disappearing, staying with you?, can you logically validate that feeling (i.e. it is reasonable that given the situation that one would feel disgust)?, what is the intensity of the feeling and is that intensity logically appropriate?, what memories, especially early childhood memories, can you associate to that same feeling?

Now change. It is not disgust, it is revulsion. Go through the above sequence all over again now with the assumption that your are feeling revulsion.

Change again. It is not disgust, it is anguish. It is not disgust, it is anxiety. It is not disgust, it is defeat. It is not disgust, it is futility. It is not disgust, it is longing. You get the idea.

Reichian will result in your being sensitive to body sensations and thus better able both to note that they are present and to label them as particular feelings. However, we have discussed that the character is everywhere and that includes the creation of emotions which are ego-syntonic to the character. So what you think you are feeling might be a manifestation of a defensive operation and your job is to not let your subconscious get away with the deception.

Footnote 114. In addressing the issue of logically appropriate intensity, don't consider yourself; consider the hypothetical person and ask whether most anyone would feel that emotion and with that intensity.

Footnote 115. Sorry, I can't give you the exact translation. The translation of Spinoza's On the Improvement of the Understanding that I have now in my library translates this passage in a way which to me is very clumsy and lacks the lucidity of the passage as I quote it here.