Sunday, April 22, 2007

Alfred Adler's insights into VT shooting

The goal of the mental life of man becomes its governing principle, its causa finalis. Here we have the root of the unity of the personality, the individuality. It does not matter what the source of its energies may have been. Not their origin but their end, their ultimate goal, constitutes their individual character.
Inanimate nature obeys a perceptible causality, but life is [subjectively]a demand.
The human mind shows an urge to capture into fixed forms through unreal assumptions, that is, fictions, that which is chaotic, always in flux and in comprehensible. Serving this urge, the child quite generally uses a schema in order to act and to find his way. We proceed much the same when we divide the earth by meridians and parallels, for only thus do we obtain fixed points which we can bring into a relationship with one another. In all similar attempts with which the human psyche is filled, it is always a matter of entering an unreal, abstract schema into real life.

No matter at which point one investigates the psychological development of the healthy or the neurotic person, one always finds him enmeshed in his schema, the neurotic believing in his fiction and not find his way back to reality, the healthy person using it to attain a goal in reality.