In my opinion, Freud was a wack-job in a lot of his theories of psychology. While I can’t endorse a lot of his ideas in psychoanalysis, I fully agree with the theory of Defense Mechanisms. I think the idea that we, as humans, constantly use these mechanisms to protect our fragile egos and guard ourselves from perceived harm is a totally reasonable notion.
As far as defense mechanisms go, there are a lot of options for your brain to choose from; denial, reaction formation, projection, sublimation, etc are all great ways to make yourself feel better about something (sigh of relief). But my personal favorite, apparently, is Intellectualization. This refers to the process of taking emotionally-charged subject matter and translating it into cold, hard analytic reason. This is how I operate. Emotions have no business in my thought processes. I look for logic in every situation. About 98% of the time, I think my brain is very successful and keeping emotion at bay. However, life sucks sometimes for no apparent reason and it can be illogical, and that is where I really struggle. That 2% of emotion that I have to deal with, when I can figure out WHY something is happening, is debilitating to me.
Apparently, my mode of subconscious defense is really helpful in the career I am planning on entering. Doctors don’t enter the Operation Room saying, “Gee, folks, we need to fix the heart of a wonderful husband and father of 3 children…” That’s not conducive for creating a calm environment in which to perform surgery. Rather, a doctor intellectualizes the patients into a series of tasks to fix. Otherwise, all of the emotional aspects of holding someone’s life in your hands would be crippling and overwhelming, thereby making you a horrible doctor.
I’m not saying that I am a robot or anything, but sometimes I think its easier to look at life as a series of puzzles rather than a cluster of feelings. Feelings can’t be solved, puzzles can.
Lawyers have similar issues, but clients don’t react quite the same way. I find myself telling my clients “If I were the other side’s lawyer, here’s what I would do…” and many of my clients apparently feel that this makes me untrustworthy. Guess I’m supposed to be so thoroughly committed to my client’s point of view that I can’t DREAM of putting myself in the other guy’s place.
Only a rogue or a knave could side with anything other than your client’s point of view. :-)
” Doctors don’t enter the Operation Room saying, “Gee, folks, we need to fix the heart of a wonderful husband and father of 3 children…””
Actually, we do. We are very aware of who our patients are. It is a real pleasure to work on decent, nice people. Most of us make a point to get to know our patients as much as we can within our time limits. We often spend the first few minutes of a CABG or valve replacement talking about some social aspect of the patient. Now, in the trauma room, the talk is often a little bit different, noting the positive drug screens and the prior surgeries for other trauma (trauma is a chronic disease). But, you just set it all aside and do your best.
Just to further the thought, I have lots of anecdotes about OR teams going way beyond the normal call of duty to help people, especially people they perceived to be a wonderful mother or father.
Steve