Alienation in the Post Cold War Era
How Alienation Affects
Our Basic Psyche
(page 3)
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Compensatory Measures to Ease the Pain of Separateness
The feeling of separateness that comes from the basic antagonistic human relations in this society, cannot remain on a conscious level most of the time. The pain of separateness can only drive us to insanity. Thus, to forget about the separateness the individual must use the hundreds of social and psychological compensatory measures to maintain the anxiety from separateness at a tolerable level. Without such compensatory measures the individual anxiety will reach unbearable proportions and drive him/her to edge of insanity. In the final analysis, insanity is just the sharpest compensatory measure in which the external world and the pain from the failure to unite with it disappear and replaced by the close circuit of the internal world of the insane person. The essence of compensatory measures was put very succinctly by Fromm:
“While psychiatry is concerned with the question of why some people become insane, the real question is why most people do not become insane. Considering man’s position in the world, his separateness, aloneness, powerlessness, and his awareness of this, one would expect his burden to be more than he can bear, so that he would, quite literally, ‘go to pieces’ under the strain. Most people avoid this outcome by compensatory mechanisms like the overriding routine of life, conformity with the herd, the search for power, prestige, and money, dependence on idols — shared with others in religious cults — a self-sacrificing masochistic life, narcissistic inflation — in short, becoming crippled. All these compensatory mechanism can maintain sanity, provided they work, up to a point.”[5]
Thus, the majority of the people in our society are crippled. They cannot experience their deeper inner self and their human potential as a positive growing life, and they stay stuck in compensatory mechanisms that help them to keep the horrifying feelings of acute separateness and loneliness at an “acceptable” level. Such compensatory mechanisms are mostly obtained in early childhood when the child is most susceptible to social programming. The family which represents the primary (but not only) social and psychological agent of this society instills the parents own insecurities (and sometimes their own compensatory mechanisms) into the psyche of the child. In the isolation of the nuclear family, the weak and helpless child develops his/her emotional world primarily through interacting with the parents and other members of the family. The tender and sensitive psyche of the child must get first of all emotional security from the parents and benefit from closeness to them. This security must be obtained even if it is done paradoxically through the internalization of anxiety and other disruptive defense mechanism that the parents possess (or more accurately possessed by). For before the fragile child is capable to achieve independent existence, the child must experience belonging and oneness with the immediate family. Thus, he/she would rather takes in the disruptive emotions of the parents, which are better than the scary experience of isolation without any connection with them. It is very sad of course that such anxious and insecure early emotional formation sinks in deeply and it is difficult to shake it off later.
The specific type of compensatory mechanisms develop in accordance with the specific environmental social pressure as manifested in the specific historical, social and economic development of society. For the lack of space this book cannot elaborate on the fundamental type of personalities and how the compensatory mechanisms to “defend” them develop in childhood. I just bring some examples to illustrate typical personalities as they develop from the lack of positive love from the parents, and how the social environment of today’s capitalism keeps such persons crippled. The key is that as adults we rely on compensatory mechanisms that we learn early in our life to deal with our failure to overcome separateness in the daily life. We use the early-learnt compensatory mechanisms because we fundamentally fail to reconnect to the world from the strength of our independent reasoning and love. Thus, the compensatory mechanisms described below do not just “defend” the individual from leftover pains from childhood, the way the majority of psychologists see it — but as importantly, they also maintain the adult’s fear of overcoming separateness when the adult’s ability to develop his/her positive humanity is stunned by society. The more society makes people lonely, isolated, and/or stressed-out, the more such people use their compensatory mechanisms as a coping device.
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[5] Eric Fromm, Psychoanalysis and Zen Buddhism, page 122.