Internally displaced person

“ I will allow every person to speak for himself upon this point, and to ascertain if there are not some actions which have not this lustful basis; and when we find that there are such actions arising within ourselves which are not contaminated with this selfish thought, and which go forth to seek expression out of ourselves, we may know that they do not belong to the first, but to the second sphere of action, I mean the sphere of relation, as separate from the individual considered in his individual love or individual selfish impulse. ”

“ Under the strain of this continually impending doom and by the sleeplessness to which I now condemned myself, ay, even beyond what I had thought possible to man, I became, in my own person, a creature eaten up and emptied by fever, languidly weak both in body and mind, and solely occupied by one thought: the horror of my other self. ”

“ The abnormal mind is quick to detect and attach itself to this quality when it appears in a normal person, and so it came about that in college I was unjustly accused of being a politician, because I was privy to the secret griefs of wild, unknown men. Most of the confidences were unsought—frequently I have feigned sleep, preoccupation, or a hostile levity when I realized by some unmistakable sign that an intimate revelation was quivering on the horizon; ”

“ A little reflection will enable any person to detect in himself that setness in trifles which is the result of the unwatched instinct of self-will and to establish over himself a jealous guardianship. ”

“ Under certain conditions a cleavage may occur between the two selves, and then the subwaking self may rapidly grow, develop, and attain, apparently, the plane of self-consciousness, get crystallized into a person, and give itself a name, imaginary, or borrowed from history. This accounts for the spiritualistic phenomena of personality, guides, controls, and communications by dead personalities, or spirits coming from another world, such as have been observed in the case of Mrs. ”

“ September 12, 1861.—In me an intellect which would fain forget itself in things, is contradicted by a heart which yearns to live in human beings. The uniting link of the two contradictions is the tendency toward self-abandonment, toward ceasing to will and exist for one’s self, toward laying down one’s own personality, and losing—dissolving—one’s self in love and contemplation. What I lack above all things is character, will, individuality. ”

“ He lived, this man of the long-forgotten past, as all men live—getting his food, begetting his kind, loving, hating, fighting, rejoicing in the coming of the spring, pleased with his own person and its adornment, repeating the tales of his forefathers about the fire—then vanishing into the all-containing soil of the earth whence he came.
What man, once quickened by the spirit of the earth and touched by its thousand sweet influences, would ever think of resigning this mortal inheritance, with all its certainty of dissolution, for an immortality in some unknown, untried sphere of existence? ”

“ And all engage in the work; all take hold with a will, even with joy. For they feel the blood course more freely in their veins, hear the wind breathe sweeter music, and see the light weave a more lovely world of colors. Their dormant energies are awakened, the heightened color on the cheek, the lustrous laughing eye, the merry mobile lip, the fair white hand, the whole person speaks in eloquent language the pleasure which springs from progress, or a work well done. ”

“ I experience the feeling of peace, of satisfaction, when I am ill, when there takes place in me the destruction of the limits of my personality. As soon as I get well I experience the opposite: restlessness, dissatisfaction. Are these not obvious signs that the destruction of the limits of personality in this world, is the entrance of life into new limits? ”

“ I alone am to blame and am deservedly punished. In my youth I was absorbed by one thing—my precious self; I took my simple-hearted self-love for modesty; I avoided society—and here I am now, a fearful bore to myself. What am I to do with myself? There is no one I love; all my relations with other people are somehow strained and false. ”

“ When will we learn that it is only our emotion-backed demands that make us create the internal experience of unhappiness?
Our egos and rational minds are so good at making us feel and think that the problem of human separateness lies in the outside world — and not inside ourselves! ”

“ These moments of self-revelation come in the life of all of us, when our ordinary every-day self, familiar to ourselves and our home circle, is suddenly brought face to face with that other deeper lying and often semi-barbarous self, which crouches hidden beneath the veneer of civilization and the mask of social habit, and we are forced into a swift mental comparison of the two. ”

“ The occurrence of definite dissociation with altered personality may be regarded as an attempt at solution, especially when it takes the form of the fugue with its independent activity and its independent consciousness. ”

“ Was a split personality a real concept? She had her doubts. There were many erratic whims in any human being. It was only by divorcing oneself from certain whims that one might assimilate two or more spurious personalities, which would only come about from being abused in extreme torturous cruelty. What was thought as split personalities existed, she theorized, to reduce one's interaction with others whom have brought him or her horrific trauma. ”

“ Wherever she was, at school, among friends, in the street, in the train, she instinctively abated herself, made herself smaller, feigned to be less than she was, for fear that her undiscovered self should be seen, pounced upon, attacked by brutish resentment of the commonplace, the average Self. ”

“ Nothing ever comes back. He saw it clearly. The respect and admiration of them all, the old habits and old affections finished abruptly in the clear perception of the cause of his disgrace. He saw all this; and for a time he came out of himself, out of his selfishness—out of the constant preoccupation of his interests and his desires—out of the temple of self and the concentration of personal thought. ”

“ Again she experienced that disintegration of will which once had left her at the mercy of that instinct for destruction which is one of the essential particles of the ego.
Her brain was almost torpid. The want of exhilarating exercise, the long dearth of companionship, the terrible monotony of her life, the restless nights, the dank gloomy atmosphere in which she had her perpetual being, were, she told herself dully, doing their work. And she did not care. But if her brain was sodden, her nerves felt as if on the verge of explosion. ”

“ The burden and mystery of life lay heavily on him—its lasting calamities and vanishing joys, its trials and disappointments. He would try whether, in a new state of life, the same distorted individuality was a necessary possession. ”

“ Now in all of us, however constituted, but to a degree the greater in proportion as we are intense and sensitive and subject to diversified temptations, and to the greatest possible degree if we are decidedly psychopathic, does the normal evolution of character chiefly consist in the straightening out and unifying of the inner self. The higher and the lower feelings, the useful and the erring impulses, begin by being a comparative chaos within us—they must end by forming a stable system of functions in right subordination. ”

“ At times the whole world seems to be in conspiracy to importune you with emphatic trifles. Friend, client, child, sickness, fear, want, charity, all knock at once at thy closet door, and say,— `Come out unto us.' But keep thy state; come not into their confusion. The power men possess to annoy me, I give them by a weak curiosity. No man can come near me but through my act. "What we love that we have, but by desire we bereave ourselves of the love." ”

“ Sometimes under my contemplation I see him writhing like a thing in a trap—the semblance of myself. How the woman despises him now! Sometimes I feel deeply sad at my own ruthlessness. It is frightful to contemplate the physical wreck of a being whom, in some strange and hideous way, one always feels to be oneself. ”

“ In judging of our own powers we are just as likely to under- as to over-estimate them, and the results are equally painful.
How acute are the sufferings of a diffident, shy, self-distrustful, over-sensitive disposition! Such a temperament is a sad make-weight in the struggle of life. ”

“ But the gist of the whole matter is this: in a neurosis, certain forces of the personality—instincts and their accompanying emotions—which ought to work harmoniously, having become tangled up with some erroneous ideas, have lost their power of coöperation and are working at cross purposes, leaving the individual mis-adapted to his environment, the prey of all sorts of mental and physical disturbances. ”

“ Because we can never wholly get rid of self, in this lower life, does it therefore follow that we must concentrate our thoughts and aims upon it? Must we forever deny ourselves the ennobling, elevating, softening influence of a duty and a hope outside of ourselves; an object of affection, trust, and desire, higher than ourselves? ”

“ And here I must make you acquainted with that great mystery which constitutes your despair, since you are ignorant of the malady that devours you. We have a twofold existence, 'm'amie': our internal life, that of our feelings powerfully works within us, while the external life dominates despite ourselves. ”

“ And to pry one's self loose, to break or tear one's self away from such a mental view and condition as heredity and such years of rigorous restraint have developed, is no small task. Indeed, it often takes months, and sometimes years, wholly to rid one's self of these deep seated and powerful, wrong views and prejudices. ”

“ As he resolves, and breaks his resolutions; as he finds evil thoughts and feelings continually coming up from the deep places of his heart; he discovers his spiritual impotence,—his lack of control over what is deepest, most intimate, and most fundamental in his own character,—and cries out: "I am a slave, I am a slave to myself." ”

“ Where, it may well be asked, was this man’s original self during these two years? What had become of his normal ego, the ego of which alone he had formerly been aware? Yet at no time [295] throughout the period when he lacked knowledge of his identity, and was without memory for his earlier life and social relationships, did he display the slightest sign of mental aberration. ”

“ Bodily imperfections, infirmities and disease, unless retained psychologically by having constantly encroached upon the mind, or deformities that are dwelt upon mentally, are dropped with the body; but such infirmities of mind as are born of an undue “egotism,” undue self love, (the capital “I” around which the universe revolves) , must be removed before the spirit can enter upon real work. ”

“ His inner life—does it seem hard to realize that in that uncouth personality concentred the complex, incomprehensible, ever-shifting emotions of that inner life which, after all, is so much stronger, and deeper, and broader than the material? ”

“ Instead of starting from a root-conception of a telepathic impulse merely passing from mind to mind, I now start from a root-conception of the dissociability of the self, of the possibility that different fractions of the personality can act so far independently of each other that the one is not conscious of the other's action. ”

“ These counsels will not appear minute to those who know that the soul is always ready to fall in with the body, and that the inner man sets himself naturally to the outer man. Disorder in manners, dress, words, bring insensibly with them disorder in thought, and the outward dignity is but the reflection of the dignity of the soul. ”

“ Indeed, our reactions to the environment, our moral and social conduct, the affective reactions of our sentiments, instincts, feelings, and other conative tendencies, our “habits,” judgments, points of view, and attitudes of mind—all that we term character and personality—are predetermined by the mental experiences of the past by which they are developed, organized, and conserved in the unconscious. Otherwise all would be chaos. We are thus the offspring of our past and the past is the present. ”

“ I have said that you cannot change your mind by changing your behavior, but I have also said, and many times, that you can change your mind. When your mood tells you that you have chosen wrongly, and this is so whenever you are not joyous, then know this need not be. In every case you have thought wrongly about some brother God created, and are perceiving images your ego makes in a darkened glass. ”

“ Is your heart constituted differently from every other human heart?—I have lately observed an inequality in your behaviour, that has whispered something flattering to my heart. Examine yourself—Have you felt no peculiar interest in what concerns me—would the idea of our separation affect you with no more than a slight and common emotion?—One more question propose to yourself, as a test—Could you see me form a new, and more fortunate, attachment, with indifference? ”

“ For the phenomenon, shifting its field of action, abruptly became mental, and the singular change of focus took place now in his mind. Events magnified or contracted themselves out of all relation with their intrinsic values, sense of proportion went hopelessly astray. Love, hate and fear experienced sudden intensification, or abrupt dwindling into nothing; the familiar everyday emotions, commonplace daily acts, suffered exaggerated enlargement, or reduction into insignificance, that threatened the stability of his personality. ”