The timid man, ever fearful of offending, effaces himself before others, and thus becomes the instrument of their will rather than the master of his own. The most conscious, and in a way realistic, basis is that of his endeavors to make himself agreeable and useful. Varying with his temperament, his neurotic structure, and the situation, he may be charming, compliant, considerate, sensitive to the wishes of others, available, helpful, sacrificing, and understanding. It is but natural that he overrates what, in this or that way, he does for another person. He is oblivious to the fact that the latter may not at all like this kind of attention or generosity; he is unaware that there are strings attached to his offers; he omits from his consideration all the unpleasant traits he has. And so, it all appears to him as the pure gold of friendliness, for which he could reasonably expect return. Another basis for his claims is more detrimental for himself and more coercive of others. Because he is afraid to be alone, others should stay at home; because he cannot stand noise, everybody should tiptoe around the house. A premium is thus set on neurotic needs and suffering. Suffering is unconsciously put into the service of asserting claims, which not only checks the incentive to overcome it, but it also leads to inadvertent exaggerations of suffering. This does not mean that his suffering is merely “put on” for demonstrative purposes. It affects him in a much deeper way because he must primarily prove to himself, to his own satisfaction, that he is entitled to the fulfillment of his needs. He must feel that his suffering is so exceptional and so excessive that it entitles him to help. In other words, in this process, the self-effacing person actually feels his suffering more intensely than he would without having acquired an unconscious strategic value. #RandolphHarris 1 of 16

Another basis, still more unconscious and more destructive, is his feeling abused and being entitled to having others make up for the injuries perpetrated on him. In dreams, he may present himself as being ruined beyond repair and hence entitled to having all his needs fulfilled. To understand these vindictive elements, we must survey the factors that account for his feeling of being abused. For a typically self-effacing person, feeling abused is an almost constant undercurrent in his whole attitude toward life. If we wanted to characterize him cruelly and glibly in a few words, we would say that he is a person who craves affection and feels abused most of the time. Others often take advantage of his defenselessness and his overeagerness to help or to sacrifice. On account of his feeling unworthy, and his inability to stand up for himself, he sometimes does not take conscious cognizance of such abuse. Also, due to his shrinking process and all it entails, he often does come out on the short end, without there having been any harmful intent on the part of others. Even if, in actual fact, he is in some regards more fortunate than others, his taboos do not allow him to recognize his advantages, and he must present himself to himself (and hence experience himself) as being worse off than others. Furthermore, he feels abused when his many unconscious claims are not fulfilled—for instance, when others do not respond with gratitude to his compulsive efforts to please, to help, to make sacrifices for them. His typical response to the frustration of claims is not so much righteous indignation as a self-pitying feeling of being unfairly treated. Probably more poignant than any of these other sources is all the abuse he inflicts upon himself, though self-minimizing as well as through self-reproaches, self-contempt, and self-torture—all of which is externalized. The more intense the self-abuse, the less can good external conditions prevail against it. He often will tell heartbreaking tales of his woes, arouse sympathy and the wish to give him a better deal, only to find himself in the same predicament soon after. In actual fact, he may not have been so unfairly treated as it seems to him; at any rate, behind the feeling is the reality of his self-abuse. #RandolphHarris 2 of 16

The connection between a sudden rise in self-accusations and the subsequent feelings of being abused is not too difficult to observe. In analysis, for instance, as soon as self-accusations are aroused by his seeing a difficulty of his own, his thoughts may immediately take him back to incidents or periods of his life when he actually was badly treated—whether they occurred in his childhood, in previous medical treatment, or in former jobs. He may dramatize the wrong done to him and dwell on it monotonously, as he had done many a time before. The same pattern may occur in other human relations. If, for instance, he is dimly aware of having been inconsiderate, he may, with the speed of lightning, switch to feeling abused. In short, his terror of wrongdoing simply compels him to feel himself the victim, even when in actual fact he has been the one who failed others or who, through his implicit demands, has imposed upon them. Because feeling victimized thus becomes a protection against his self-hate, it is a strategical position, to be defended vigorously. The more vicious the self-accusations, the more frantically must he prove and exaggerate the wrong done to him—and the more deeply he experiences the “wrong.” This need can be so cogent that it makes him inaccessible to help for the time being. For to accept help, or even admit to himself that help is being offered, would cause the defensive position of his being altogether the victim of collapse. Conversely, it is profitable at any sudden rise in feeling abused to look for a possible increase of guilt-feelings. We can often observe this in analysis that the wrong done to him shrinks to reasonable proportions, or indeed ceases to be wrong, as soon as he recognizes his share in the particular situation and can look at it in a matter-of-fact way, id est, without self-condemnation. #RandolphHarris 3 of 16

The passive externalization of self-hate may go beyond merely feeling abused. He may provoke others to treat him badly, and thus transfer the inner scene to the outside. In this way too, he becomes the noble victim suffering under an ignoble and cruel world. All these powerful sources combine to engender his feeling abused. However, closer to the observation shows that he not only feels abused for this or that reason but that something in him welcomes this feeling, indeed may avidly seize upon it. This points to the fact that feeling abused also must have some important function. This function is to allow him an outlet for the suppressed expansive drives—and almost the only one he can tolerate—and at the same time cover them up. It allows him to feel secretly superior to others (the crown of martyrdom); it allows him to put his hostile aggression against others on a legitimate basis; and finally allows him to disguise his hostile aggression because most of the hostility is suppressed, and expressed in suffering. Feeling abused is therefore the greatest stumbling block to the patient’s seeing and experiencing the inner conflict for which his self-effacement was a solution. And, while analysis of each individual factor helps to diminish its tenacity, it cannot vanish until he comes face to face with this conflict. As long as this feeling abused persists—and usually it does not remain static but increases as time goes on—it makes for an increasing vindictive resentment against others. The bulk of this vindictive hostility remains unconscious. It must be deeply suppressed because it endangers all the subjective values he lives by. It mars his idealized image of absolute goodness and magnanimity; it makes him feel unlovable and conflicts with all his expectations of others; it violates his inner dictates of being all understanding and all forgiving. #RandolphHarris 4 of 16

Therefore, when he feels resentful, he not only turns against others but simultaneously against himself. Hence, such resentment is a disruptive factor of the first order of this type.  Such a man is less than a somebody in any category; he is more nobody than at any other time. And in the anonymous period immediately ahead of him, he finds decided happiness—for a while. This may seem rather understandable to those who see Prince Lestat either as a bland young man and gifted good fellow under God’s orders to proceed as told, or as a very sick young man in search of a spiritual hospital for lack of a mental one. Our own sense of the inner economy of man, however, insists that in this interim, this quiet before the real store, we must account for some of the psychological problems inherent in the historical fact that this same young man, only a decade later, emerged as his time’s greatest orator, publicist, showman, and spiritual dictator. We can only account for this fact by assuming a fierce, if as yet quite dumb, struggle in him between destructive and constructive forces, and between regressive and progressive alternatives—all in balance at this time. It is probable that in all historical periods some—and by no means the least gifted—young people do not survive their moratorium; they seek death or oblivion, or die in spirit. Prince Lestat must have seen such death of mind and spirit in some of his brethren, and came to feel cost to it more than once. Those who face the abyss only to disappear, we will, of course, never know; and once in a while, we should shed a tear for those who took some unborn protest, some unformed idea, and sometimes just one lonely soul, with them. They chose to face nothingness rather than to submit to a faith that, to them, had become a cant of pious words; a collective will, that cloaked only collective impotence; a conscience when expended itself in a stickling for empty forms; a reason that was a chatter of commonplaces; and a kind of work that was meaningless busy-work. I am speaking of those “outsiders” who go their lone way, not those who come back to poison the world further with a mystical literature which exhorts man to shun reality and stay outside, like Onan. #RandolphHarris 5 of 16

Some today seek psychiatric help—strange young creatures of pride and despair, of sick minds and good values, of good minds and fractured perspectives. Often, of course, therapists can only note that their pride in not having wanted to adjust is a cover-up for not having been able to do so from way back. However, not always, by any means. Sometimes a fierce pride of long standing can be detected which makes it very hard to decide whether the inability to adjust to a given available environment, with the means demanded by that environment, had not also meant an unwillingness to forgo the nourishment of latent needs deeply felt to be essential to the true development of an identity. The therapeutic problem in such cases transcends the questions of what environment a young person should have adjusted to and why he was not able to do so, and rather concerns a delineation of those means of adaptation which the patient can afford to employ without losing an inner coherence. Once he knows his cure and his goal, he must become well enough to make the “environment” adapt to him—an intrinsic part of human adaptation which has been lost sight of in popularized versions of Darwinian and Freudian imagery. The fact that psychiatric treatment today has become a sanctioned form of moratorium in some countries and classes does not mean, of course, that the diagnoses which go with the treatment exhaust the problem at hand. On the contrary; the diagnoses merely serve to circumscribe the existing dangers of malignancy and to point up to warning signals not to be taken lightly under any circumstances. We are, of course, concerned with a general delineation of life crisis, a delineation which is indispensable to the search for avenues of therapy, and for an understanding of the ego’s task at the height of youth. #RandolphHarris 6 of 16

That extreme form of identity diffusion which leads to significant arrest and regression, is characterized most of all by a mistrustful difficulty with mere living in time. Time is made to stand still by the device of ignoring the usual alternation of day and night, of more active and less active periods, of periods given more to work and talk with other people, and of those given over to isolation, rumination, and musical receivership. There also may be a general slowing up that can verge on catatonic states. It is as if the young person were waiting for some event, or some person, to sweep him out of this state by promising him, instead of the reassuring routine and practice of most men’s time, a vast utopian view that would make the very disposition of time worthwhile. Unless recruited outright, however, by an ideological movement in need of needy youths, such an individual cannot sustain rigidly regimenting time; we will see what he did with this utopia. There is, of course, also a torturous self-consciousness, characterized at one time by shame over what one is already sure one is, and at another time by doubt as to what one may become. A person with this self-consciousness often cannot work, not because he is not gifted and adept, but because his standards preclude any approach that does not lead to being outstanding; while at the same time, these standards do not permit him to compete, to defeat others. He thus is excluded from apprenticeships and discipleship which define duties, sanction competition and, as it were, provide a status of moratorium. #RandolphHarris 7 of 16

Most of all, this kind of person must shy away from intimacy. Any physical closeness, with either gender, arouses at the same time both an impulse to merge with the other person and a fear of losing autonomy and any individuation. In fact, there is a sense of bisexual diffusion which makes a young person unsure about how to touch another personal sexually or affectionately. The contrast between the exalted sexual fusion and his autoerotic dreams and the complete sense of isolation in the presence of the other gender is catastrophic. Here again, whatever sexual moratorium the society’s mores offer most young people in a given setting cannot be shared by the patient, whether it is determined abstinence, sexual play without genital encounter, or genital engagement without affection or responsibility. In adolescence, a compulsive person may attempt to free himself with maneuvers expressing a wish to “get away” with things and yet find himself unable to get away even with the wish. For a while, such a young person learns evasion from others, his preconscious conscience does not let him really get away with anything, and he goes through his identity crisis habitually ashamed, apologetic, and afraid to be seen; or else, in an “overcompensatory” manner, he evinces a defiant kind of autonomy which may find sanction and ritual in the shameless defiance of gangs. The rise of gangs in the 200s and beyond is tied to rapid inflation and the turbulence it created in family life. Gangs reflect deeper social issues such as poverty, immigration, and crime. Many gangs operate like proto-organizations, offering roles, income, sometimes housing, and a sense of purpose. Members of gangs are sometimes given “criminal assignments” and quotas for illegal activities, functioning almost like a workplace for the excluded. Gangs offer camaraderie, masculine identity, a sense of belonging, a structured hierarchy, and are the social world for young men and women who lack family stability or community recognition. #RandolphHarris 8 of 16

However, gangs are not merely groups of unruly youths—they are viewed as dangerous, destabilizing forces that threaten public order, civil life, and the fragile social fabric of rapidly growing cities. Gangs usually quickly stake their claims to control city life, usually through violence.  Gangs are dangerous because they act as private militias, enforcing their will through force.  Gangs are dangerous because they also replace legitimate authority with criminal governance, weakening trust in institutions. Some gangs are tied to political movements or use violence to influence elections and public life. And they are dangerous because they amplify existing social problems, turning hardship into organized criminality. Approximately 40-60 percent of homicides in the United States of America are gang-related. Aggravated assaults account for 39.4% of all gang‑related incidents. (Aggravated assault is the category most associated with non‑fatal gunshot wounds and serious injuries.) Weapons were used in 80.4% of gang‑related incidents, meaning most assaults have the potential to cause serious injury. Most people who end up in gangs describe a life where no one protected them, no one listened to them, no one believed in them, and no one saw their pain. Gang members are children and sometimes elderly, whom society has forgotten, wandering the streets unclaimed by any hearth. However, inside the gang, individuality disappears again. The gang makes you visible to outsiders but invisible as a person. Inside the group, you are replaceable, you are valued only for usefulness, your emotions are liabilities, your pain is mocked or punished, and your individuality is swallowed by the collective. This is what is known as the subsuming of the self into the will of the band. Also known as self‑effacement under coercive group identity. #RandolphHarris 9 of 16

Violence becomes the only language that gets attention. When someone feels invisible, they often learn that kindness is ignored, vulnerability is punished, achievement is dismissed, but violence gets a reaction.  So the gang member becomes visible only when they are dangerous. This is why so many describe violence as “the only time anyone noticed me.” It is tragic, but it is psychologically consistent. The invisibility becomes existential. It is chronic dehumanization—a sense that your life has no weight outside the group. And the group exploits that invisibility. When someone believes they do not matter, they take risks others would not, they accept violence as normal, they sacrifice themselves for the group, and they stop imagining a future. This is why gangs are so dangerous—not just to others, but to their own members. A person who feels invisible is easier to control. People join gangs because they feel invisible, and gangs keep them by making them invisible in a different way. One invisibility is born of neglect. The other is born of control. Both are forms of erasure. The man who distrusts his own impulse becomes a shadow among men, moving only as others move him. Doubt is the brother of shame. Whereas shame is dependent on the consciousness of being upright and exposed, doubt has much to do with a consciousness of having a front and a back—and especially a “behind.” Shame fears being seen; doubt fears being seen through. Shame flushes the face; doubt hollows the spine. #RandolphHarris 10 of 16

The self‑effacing person lives at the intersection of these two invisibilities. Neglect teaches him that his presence carries no weight; control teaches him that his will carries no authority. He learns to shrink himself not only to avoid punishment but to avoid the humiliation of being noticed at all. In such a man, the inner voice grows faint, then foreign, then suspect. He begins to regard his own impulses as intruders, as if his very desires were plotting against him. Thus, he moves through the world as a figure half‑present, half‑absent—visible enough to be used, invisible enough to be ignored. His gestures are borrowed, his convictions second‑hand, his courage deferred. He becomes, in the 19th‑century sense, a “creature of circumstance,” shaped not by his own nature but by the pressures that surround him. And yet the tragedy is not merely that he is unseen by others. It is that he no longer sees himself. Despite this pervasive suppression of resentment, reproaches will occasionally be expressed in mitigated form. Only when he feels driven to despair will the locked gates break open and a flood of violent accusations rush out. Though these may express accurately what he feels deep down, he usually discards them on the grounds of having been too upset to say what he means. However, his most characteristic way of expressing vindictive resentment is again through suffering. Rage can be absorbed in increased suffering from whatever psychosomatic symptoms he has, or from feeling prostrate or dressed. If in analysis, such a patient’s vindictiveness is around, he will not be outright angry, but his condition will be impaired. He will come with increased complaints, and indicate that analysis seems to make him worse instead of better. #RandolphHarris 11 of 16

The analyst may know what has hit the patient in the previous session and may try to bring it to the patient’s awareness. However, the patient is not interested in seeing a connection that might relieve his suffering. He simply re-emphasizes his complaints, if he must make sure that the analyst gets the full impact of how bad the depression was. Without knowing it, he is out to make the analyst feel guilty for having made him suffer. This is often an exact replica of what happens in the domestic scene. Suffering thus acquires another function: that of absorbing rage and making others feel guilty, which is the only effective way of getting back at them. All of those factors lend a curious ambivalence to his attitude toward people: a surface prevalence of “naïve” optimistic trust and an undercurrent of just as indiscriminate suspiciousness and resentment. The inner tension created by an increased vindictiveness can be enormous. And the puzzle often is not that he has this or that emotional upset, but that he manages to keep a fair equilibrium. Whether he can do it, and for how long, depends partly upon the intensity of the inner tension and partly upon circumstances. With this helplessness and dependence upon others, the latter are more important for him than for other neurotic types. An environment is favorable for him that does not tax him beyond what, with his inhibitions, he can do, and that affords such a measure of satisfaction as, according to his structure, he needs and can allow himself. Provided his neurosis is not too severe, he can derive satisfaction from leading a life dedicated to others or to a cause; a life in which he can lose himself by being useful and helpful, and where he feels wanted and fulfilled. #RandolphHarris 12 of 16

However, even under the very best inner and outer conditions, his life rests on a precarious foundation. It can be threatened by a change in the external situation. The people he takes care of may die or no longer need him. The cause for which he has worked may fail, or lose its significance for him. Such losses, which a healthy person can weather, may bring him to the verge of a “breakdown,” with all his anxiety and feelings of futility coming into the foreground. There are just too many factors in his avowed hostility against self and others that may give rise to a greater inner tension than he can bear. Or, in other words, the chances of his feelings abused are too great to make any situation safe for him. We call all self-images, even those of a highly idealistic nature, which are diametrically opposed to the dominant values of an individual’s upbringings parts of a negative identity—meaning an identity which he has been warned not to become, which he can become only with a divided heart, but which he nevertheless finds himself compelled to become, protesting his wholeheartedness. Obviously, such rebellion can serve high adventure, and when joined to a great collective trend of rebellion, can rejuvenate as it repudiates. In miliginant cases, however, the search for a negative identity soon exhausts social resources; in fact, no rebellious movement, not even a self-responding delinquent gang, would consider taking such an individual as a member. For he rebels and surrenders on the spur of the moment, and cannot be relied on to be honestly asocial unto death. When such young people become patients, they illustrate the depth of regression which can ensue from an identity-crisis, either because the identity-elements they were offered as children were not coherent—so that one may speak of a defect in this connection—or because they face a perplexing set of present circumstances which amounts to an acute state of ideological undernourishment. The dramatic characteristic of work with such patients is their tendency to make intense and yet contradictory demands of the psychotherapist. #RandolphHarris 13 of 16

In this, the patient truly regresses; for either openly or covertly, they expect from the therapist the kind of omniscience an infant attributes to his mother when he seems to assume that she should have prevented the table from hitting him, or at any rate from being hard and sharp; or that she should be able to hold him firmly and to let him go freely at the same time, that is, at a time when he himself does not know which he wants. However, even the paradoxical form which the patient’s demands, to his own chagrin, can take concerns his very essence as an individual. He wants to have the right to act like nobody, and yet to be treated as quite a somebody; he wants to fuse with the therapist in order to derive from him everything the parents were or are not; yet he is afraid to be devoured by an identification with the therapist. The outstanding quality of these patients is totalism, a to be or not to be which makes every matter of differences a matter of mutually exclusive essence; every error or oversight, eternal treason. This is called the “rock bottom” attitude, and is explained as the sign of a perverted and precocious integrity, an attempt to find that immutable bedrock on which the struggle for a new existence can safely begin and be assured of a future. The patient desperately demands that the psychotherapist become for him as immediate and as close, as exclusive and as circumspect, as generous and as self-denying, a counterplayer as only a mother of an infant can be. It is clear that these patients want to be reborn in identity and to have another chance at becoming once-born, but this time on their own terms. Needless to say, we can offer the patient nothing but our willingness to jointly face the odds that are the lot of all of us. #RandolphHarris 14 of 16

Where so-called schizophrenic process takes over, the rock bottom attitude is expressed in a strange evolutionary imagery. Total feeling becomes dehumanized, and eventually even de-mammalized. These patients can feel like a crab or a shellfish or a mollusk, or even abandoned what life and movement on the lowest animal level, and become a lonely, twisted tree on the ledge of a stormy rock, or the rock, or just the ledge in nowhere. At no other time in life can severe regression play with nothingness and appear in such a systematized form, and yet be, as it were, experimental, an adventure in reaching inner rock bottom to find something firm to stand on. Here, the therapist cannot be optimistic enough about the possibility of making contact with the patient’s untapped inner resources; on the other hand, it is also true that he cannot be pessimistic enough in sustained apprehension that a mishap might cause the patient to remain at the rock bottom, and deplete the energy available for his reemergence. Other patients cling to a make-believe order of compulsive scrupulosity and obsessive rumination. They insist on what seems like almost mock order for the world of man, a caricature of logic and consistency; Prince Lestat is a classic example of this. The eyes of such young people are often lifeless and out of contact; then they suddenly scan your face for its sincerity or even its mere presence; these patients, who, according to popular judgment, could be said to be “not quite there” most of the time, are all too suddenly and flamingly there. #RandolphHarris 15 of 16

They can appear as remote, as lifeless, as impenetrable, as they say they feel; and yet, there are those moments of mutual recognition when they do seem to trust themselves and you, and when their smile can be as totally present and rewarding as only an infant’s first smiles can be as totally present and rewarding as only an infant’s first smiles of seeming recognition. However, at this point, the struggle just begins—as indeed, does the infant’s. As we have seen, the origins of any institutional order lie in the typification of one’s own and others’ performances. This implies that one shares with others specific goals and interlocking phases of performance, and, further, that not only specific actions but also forms action are typified. The typification of forms of action requires that these have an objective sense, which in turn requires a linguistic objectification. That is, there will be a vocabulary referring to these forms of action (such as “nephew-thrashing,” which will belong to a much larger linguistic structuring kinship and its various rights and obligations). In principle, then, an action and its sense can be apprehended apart from individual performances of its and the variable subjective process associated with them. Both self and other can be apprehended as performers of objective, generally known actions—motions of the body and habits of the will that are recurrent and repeatable by any actor of the appropriate type. This is the tragedy of the diminished self: to be reduced to a set of predictable gestures, to be known only by one’s functions, never by one’s depths. In such a state, a man becomes interchangeable, a figure whose movements could be carried out by anyone, whose inner life leaves no imprint on the world. The soul recovers itself in the moment it dares to act from within, and not from custom. Healing is not the polishing of one’s outward motions but the restoration of inward authorship. It is the slow reclamation of impulse, the quiet return of a voice that had long been silenced by shame, doubt, or the mechanical demands of survival. For the man who has lived as a shadow—performing the same gestures any other could perform—healing is the first moment he realizes that his actions need not be inherited, imitated, or imposed. They can be his own. And in that moment, the self ceases to be a role and becomes again a presence. #RandolphHarris 16 of 16