The Psychology of Believing

More and more often i see gratuitous fallacy and hypocrisy in the words of those that speak or share.

I could go into several different subjects, but the one that seems to be the most expressive is that of the UFO phenomenon, namely the idea that extraterrestrial's exist.

According to Freud's "Ego-defense mechanism" theory, unknown or “unconscious” anxieties were the result of the Id (desires, basic wants and needs) spilling over unconscious information into the conscious, leading to a “free-floating anxiety” with little to no idea what is causing the feeling of this anxiety (Hock, 2009, p.238). He postulated that to compensate for this, the ego supercharges itself with ego defense mechanisms, ultimately acting as a neural flood gate, performing against the Id’s inundation of the conscious with desires.

Through his observations of subjects and people around him, Freud determined that there were five main defense mechanisms: repression, regression, projection, reaction formation, and sublimation. The first of the mechanisms, repression, was believed by Freud to be the most common type of defense. Although at first Freud believed repression was the only mechanism, he later “acknowledged that repression was one of many psychological processes available to protect a person” (Hock, 2009, p. 238). The idea of repression is that a person’s mind will not allow certain information to be assessed consciously as it will create anxiety. An example of such would be a young boy who was picked on in school, teased, and physically threatened and abused by his peers. To compensate for this conscious anxiety, the individual may force the memories into the unconscious to “forget” about them, although they are not simply gone. The thoughts may externalize in the form of dreams or tongue slips, among other outlets.

The second, regression, involves the reorientation of a person’s behaviors to a previous state, a less anxious state. Think of a teenage girl whom began dating a boy she loved and swore she would marry him - her first relationship. They had a passionate, intimate relationship, and it was suddenly ended when the boyfriend was thrown in jail for life for having his own regressive meltdown, say, went back to old ways of stealing and just received a third strike. The anxiety created by the loss of her “lover” may result in the girl’s mind regressing to the state it was in before she ever had a relationship with a person; blissfully ignorant to the glory or ghastliness of love.

The following aspect of ego defense, projection, can be difficult to detect because of its paradoxical nature. Projection is characterized by a person “projecting” their unconscious anxieties onto another, or that the person projecting will “see [their] unconscious urges in other people’s behavior” (Hock, 2009, p. 239). A way to look at projection is in the case of a boy who just turned 16. He dreamed of owning and driving a muscle car all his life. He graciously received one from his parents, but a few months later, his best friend bought a similar car then began to modify it, making it even more “muscley.” The boy begins to talk about how lame his best friend’s car is out of his unconscious need to have the coolest muscle car. He is relieving the anxiety of not having the coolest car, in his perception, by projecting how inadequate his own car is in his eyes compared to his best friend’s.


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[edit on 18-7-2010 by Ex Plures-Unus]

The final two aspects of defense, reaction formation, and sublimation, are unique unto themselves. Reaction formation is characterized, according to Freud, as an opposite to projection style defense. Rather than projecting your unconscious anxieties as you see them in others, an individual whom is forming reactions will “engage in behaviors that are the exact opposite of the id’s real urges” (Hock, 2009, p.240). To give the reader an idea of this defense, a person who is made anxious by the unconscious idea that they are not dating enough, will behave in a way that is directly conducive to not dating. They would claim that almost every relationship around them is superficial, that the people in the relationships “don’t know” what true love is, or the person may directly avoid relationships entirely.

The last, sublimation, is the most unique in that it is the only defense mechanism not considered to be a neuroses. Sublimation involves a more “therapeutic” process in which the person finds reasonable and acceptable ways to externalize the unconscious anxiety without harming oneself or society. If a person has an unconscious desire to be a child, one could say they used sublimation if they became a pre-school teacher with the intension to “feel” young by proximity, while helping children learn and grow.


If you don't understand where i am going with this, let me spell it out for you. Even all of you self proclaimed "rationalists" with the "right" way of thinking, the empirical line of clarity, yes?

Wrong. Unless you are a genetically modified android, you experience one of these defenses on a daily basis. What this means, is that even if you virulently deny that UFO's are of any spectacular origin, your mind may not only unconsciously believe, but it may even know of the existence of incredible aircraft and the possibility, or inevitability of their origin.

Are they of spectacular origin? We do not know, but the deniers act as if they do know...



[edit on 18-7-2010 by Ex Plures-Unus]