Pathwork Lecture #93: Main Image, Repressed Needs & Defenses Linked: Conflicts Before Clarification

Summary of Pathwork Lecture #93:
Main Image, Repressed Needs & Defenses Linked: Conflicts Before Clarification

For a deeper, more rewarding experience of these teachings, consult the Lecture itself, available free of charge at: http://www.pathwork.org/lectures/unedited/P093.PDF

 

As we work on the Path, we are bound to experience confusion and depression before we reach an overall understanding of our inner conflict. Our psyches are threatened and tend to resist when we grow towards letting go of our defense mechanisms. We also resist because of our discouragement about our relapses, which must necessarily continue to occur until we understand, on a personal, emotional level, the nucleus of the problem of our life.

In the work discussed in the previous Lectures, we encountered our images about life. There is always a single primary image relating to the main unfulfillment in our lives. We also have dealt with repressed needs, and with defense mechanisms such as aggression, submission and withdrawal. There is a basic defense within us which we have to come to FEEL, so that we may understand its destructive influence upon us. We also need to BECOME AWARE of the specific, personal connections between our images, needs and defenses.

An image is a rigidified over-generalization about life based on early painful experience. It incorporates an equally rigid pseudo-solution, which is ineffective because of its rigidity and actually tends to bring about that which it is meant to avoid. As the pseudo-solution brings more pain, we try harder to make the pseudo-solution work, and thus we create a vicious cycle. We also initially repressed the hurt we experienced in childhood, and because we want to avoid the memory of the humiliation and have concluded that our needs can not be met, we repress our needs as well.

As an example, a male child who experiences his mother as cruel will form the image that women are unloving and rejecting, and this image will cause him anxiety as an adult when it clashes with his desire for female affection. If this child’s mother also conspicuously approves of the child when he succeeds in school, he may relate to approval for his success as a second-best substitute for the love he isn’t getting. Thus, there may be an image that success brings approval and that approval is tantamount to love. As an adult, he may be successful, at the expense of balance in his life, but his need for love will not be met by his external strivings. Moreover, he will repress the need because he prefers to avoid his pain, and because he resists confronting the error of his underlying assumptions. Also, his unbalanced striving for success, and the underlying arrogance and fearfulness, will actually make it more difficult for him to receive the love he longs for. Such a man would do well to push through his fear of discovering that he is intrinsically unlovable and bring the whole unconscious mechanism to light, whereupon he would make the vitally important discovery discovery that it is his defense, rather than his essential nature, which operates to make him unlovable. It should be noted that even if a person’s preferred “solution” to the problem of life is submissiveness, there will be the same rigid arrogance at the core, with the same distancing influence on other people.

The process of bringing the underlying assumptions and the defense mechanisms to awareness is a gradual one, requiring us to OBSERVE ourselves persistently over time. As we do so, we will gradually let go of our superimposed defenses, and our true, undefended self will emerge. Letting our true self manifest will be a challenge, because it will run so counter to our lifelong habits of being. We will also have to grapple with the confusion between the healthy letting go of arrogance and an unhealthy drifting into submissiveness. Submission comes from our unconscious attachment to needs we are unwilling to relinquish — we give ourselves away in order to avoid the “defeat” of not having those needs be satisfied. This process of submission causes us to feel contempt for ourselves, and to compensate by moving towards arrogance and aggression. The uncomfortable conflict between our submissiveness and our aggressiveness may also lead us to withdraw from life, as a false solution to the conflict.

We would do well to CONTEMPLATE our main image, or if we have not yet found it, to consider our main problems in life and then to FIND it. From that starting point, it is productive to DETERMINE the part of the defense mechanism which did work for us, and the hidden claim which the defense failed to satisfy, as well as the needs involved with our image. We need to FEEL our real needs, our superimposed false needs, and the defensive wall in ourselves, and then NOTICE the difference in our behavior and reactions when we are feeling the defensive wall and when we aren’t. This will help us see the effect that our defense has on others, so we can understand how the defense only brings us more of the unfulfillment it was meant to avoid. When we understand that our defense doesn’t work, we will be willing to let it go.

Questions and Answers:

A person who is aware of his or her defense and stuck between not wanting to act on it and not wanting to suppress it knows that the defense is destructive but still has an unconscious belief that the defense is advantageous. When we get that the defense isn’t productive, then we can let it go, even though we may feel some anxiety around the feeling that we are defenseless and vulnerable. The process of letting the defense go is one of relaxing the energetic hardened mass within us, as opposed to straining to hold back the expression of the defense.

The fact that a defense mechanism may “work” for us on one level does not mean that it doesn’t also have all sorts of subtle destructive effects. If we FIND our unpronounced claim and desire, we will find our repressed and neglected need and see how the defense inhibits the full expression of who we are. Automatically, energy will shift away from the pursuit of the defense and towards fulfillment of our real needs.

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