The Secret of Human Misery 

The idea that we are psychologically attached to negative emotions was developed by the brilliant psychoanalyst Edmund Bergler. Bergler gave us a comprehensive framework for understanding our emotions and for learning to regulate them. He wrote twenty-two psychology books and 273 published articles, and a 400-word obituary was written about him in The New York Times when he died in 1962. (Many of his titles are in print and available from International Universities Press in Madison, CT.)

Bergler, an Austrian Jew who fled the Nazis in 1938, challenged the notion that we are simply the product of what is done to us in childhood. He said that, as children, we form subjective interpretations that, interwoven with the reality of how we were treated and conditioned, grow into fixed negative messages and expectations about ourselves, others, and the world.

Bergler determined that humankind suffers from a condition he called psychic masochism. This term refers to an unconscious willingness we all have as adults to experience or indulge in our unresolved childhood emotions. These include feeling deprived, refused, controlled, criticized, disappointed, rejected, betrayed, and so on. This inner condition through which we maintain and reinforce our negative beliefs and emotions is defended (covered up by us) through our conviction that external situations, other people, or certain flaws in ourselves are responsible for our failures and unhappiness.

He challenged the notion of "innocent victim" and proposed that, unconsciously, we look for, set up, and feed off of the negative dramas in our lives. According to Bergler, we have become attached to and identified with our suffering and our self-defeating thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. Experiencing ourselves as victims, and being immersed in self-hatred and self-defeat, we resist experiences of happiness, success, fun, pleasure, self-love, and self-acceptance.

His theories help us understand contemporary society, for they explain the roots of our self-defeating entanglement with passivity, victimization, helplessness, paranoia, violence, and even terrorism. He contended that unconsciously we are perceiving and interpreting reality from the infantile, emotional, or child-part of ourselves. To put it another way, we have an inner need to continue to experience unresolved feelings such as deprivation, domination, control, rejection, and self-hatred.

Bergler was aware of the enormous resistance to his ideas and understood that we are determined emotionally, through our defenses, not to disturb the psychic status quo. He once said his books were time-bombs that would go off in 100 years. Perhaps now, faced in these critical times with the need to break out of our personal and national malaise, we can speed up the timetable.

It is an axiom of history and philosophy that the greater the truth, the more we resist it. Humanity took centuries to accept that the earth was round, that it was not the center of the universe. Bergler's theory also threatens our notions of who and what we are, for it asks that we open our minds to the possibility that an unconscious part of ourselves orchestrates an agenda of emotional suffering and self-defeat.

Because we remain so strongly in denial and project our inner conflicts onto others, we resist the notion that a secret program beneath our conscious awareness holds such a dominant position and manifests such a malignant nature.

Freedom from this emotional tyranny comes only when we begin to understand the extent to which we maintain unconscious infantile interpretations and realize how these feelings and beliefs control our reactions and behaviors.

A good way to understand Bergler is to read our books, which are based on his profound understanding of psychology. Our books provide a deep understanding of the critical factors required in order to choose health and wholeness over self-defeat and self-limitation. Such factors include:

* an awareness of what constitutes self-sabotage and how it operates within our psyche;

* an acknowledgment of the consequences and repercussions of our actions and behaviors on ourselves and on others;

* an awareness of the unconscious perceptions and assumptions that generate our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors;

* an understanding of our unconscious collusion in our problems and how we can shift permanently from a victim mindset to an understanding of co-creative participation in the experiences of our lives, thereby opening ourselves up to positive, creative possibilities;

* techniques to help us shift from a self-centered insecure perspective from where everything has to do with us, to one of trust, self-acceptance, and compassion toward ourselves and others.