Skip to main content

Masks


Psychologist Wilhelm Reich argued that our character is a mask or a set of masks.  We constantly encounter various pains in our life, pains caused mostly by other people.  “The other is my hell,” as Sartre put it tongue-in-cheek.  Our parents are our first hells, as little Wilhelm learnt personally.  His father used to beat him frequently.  His mother was a pain because she refused to intervene between little Wilhelm and the father’s cane.  When his mother started an affair with Wilhelm’s tutor, she added another pain to the boy’s psyche.  When the boy took revenge by informing his father about her affair, the boy added another pain to his mind because his father now started employing his cane on both of them until his mother committed suicide.

Our leaders have a different sort of Power Point
Parents, teachers, the society, priests of the religion – the list of hells that we have to endure is endless (especially in childhood, though pain seems to be the only faithful lifelong companion).  They invariably inflict some pains on us and we put up self-defence mechanisms.  These defence mechanisms create our personality, argued Wilhelm Reich. 

We describe persons as introverts or obsessive perfectionists or clumsy... The simple fact is that nobody wants to be an introvert, or an obsessive perfectionist or clumsy.  The introversion or the clumsiness is a mask, a defence mechanism, put up for shielding the individual from potential threats emanating from the hell that the other is.

We live in a world where masks are becoming increasingly important.  People who consider themselves religious are turning into menacing hells for us circumscribing our choices.  They insist on choosing the books that we will read, the movies that we will watch, the clothes we may wear, the food we can eat, the person one may marry...  They insist on writing or rewriting our history.  They insist on converting us into palimpsests.  Worst of all, they impose themselves on us as our leaders. 


Comments

  1. I agree totally we live in a world where masks are important, because people are not ready to accept if we remained ourselves or same with everyone, the mask change by the role we play and the transaction we are in. Very though provoking :)

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. The very word 'persona' means 'mask'. To some extent masks are unavoidable; we have to apply the gloss over the dark side of our selves :) But what's happening now is terrible: masks are sold to us with brute force!

      Delete
  2. I agree with you Sir, mask we all have donned because it's the pain, the society that are not ready to accept us without it. The real faces behind the masks are often Satanic....

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Interestingly, Maniparna, Indian philosophy (call it Hinduism, if you prefer) never had the concept of the Satan. Thus it remained superior to the Western thoughts by refusing to polarise the good and the bad. But now we are bringing those polarities and making our philosophy inferior!

      Delete
  3. Masks are unavoidable.Some are determined by others and some are preferred by us.Maybe our lives are there for understanding the masks..!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I like your final sentence. Very deeply meaningful.

      Delete
  4. Thankfully, such religious people have not interfered with my life directly.. still, you know what, I put on that mask. Third para touched me!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Reich had such a terrible life that he was considered insane by many. His theories emerged from his experiences. This also illustrates how psychological and intellectual approaches are rooted in one's lived experiences.

      Delete
  5. so true sir, unfortunate and how! takes real mental strength and grit to be a person of your choice these days and not roam around with a mask!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Yeah, we are even denied the freedom to think freely.

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Prelude to AtoZ

  From Garden of 5 Senses, Delhi [file pic] Hindsight gives an unearthly charm and order to the past. There can be pain too. A lot of things could have been different, much better, if only we possessed the wisdom of our old age back in those days. As a writer put it, Oedipus, Hamlet, Lear and a lot of those guys must have thought, “I wish I had known this some time ago.” Life is a series of errors with intermittent achievements. The only usefulness of the errors may be the lessons they teach us. Probably, that is their purpose too. We are created to err so that we learn, I dare to put it that way. I turn 64 in a month’s time. It’s not inappropriate to look back at some of the people whom life brought into my life so that I would learn certain lessons. No, I don’t mean to say that life has any such purpose or design or anything. Life is absurd. People come into your life as haphazardly as vehicles ply on your road or birds poop on your head. Some of these people change the chemist

Why I won’t vote

From Deshabhimani , Malayalam weekly Exactly a month from today is the Parliamentary election in my state of Kerala. This time, I’m not going to vote. Bernard Shaw defined democracy , with his characteristic cynicism, as “ a device that ensures we shall be governed no better than we deserve .” We elect our government in a democracy. And the government invariably sucks our blood – whichever the party is. The BJP and the Congress are like Tweedledum and Tweedledee though the former makes all sorts of other claims day in and day out. BJP = Congress + the holy cow. The holy cow has turned out to be quite a vampire and that makes a difference, no doubt. In our Prime Minister’s algebra, it is: (a+b) 2 which should be equal to a 2 and b 2 . There is an extra 2ab which is the holy cow. In George Orwell’s Animal Farm , the animals revolt against the human master and set up their own nationalist republic. Soon politics develops in the republic and some pigs become leaders. The porcine

How Arvind Kejriwal can save himself

Narendra Modi and Amit Shah have a clear vision. Eliminate all opposition. Decimate them or absorb them. My previous post [link below] showed a few people decimated by them. Today let’s look at the others: those who are saved by joining the Bharatiya Janata Party [BJP]. 1. Himanta Biswa Sarma  This guy was in Congress and faced serious charges related to the multi-crore Saradha chit fund scam. He also faced corruption charges related to drinking water supply in Guwahati. His house was raided by the Central Bureau of Investigation [CBI]. Then he switched over to BJP and all his crimes just vanished. It’s as simple as taking a dip in the Ganga and all your sins are forgiven. Today he is the chief minister of Assam. Nothing is heard of all the charges that were levelled against him. 2. Amarinder Singh  This former Captain in the Indian Army was a Congressman until Modi’s Enforcement Directorate [ED] started raiding him, his son and his son-in-law. He put an end to all those raid

The Good Old World

Book Review Title: Dukhi Dadiba and irony of fate Author: Dadi Edulji Taraporewala Translators: Aban Mukherji and Tulsi Vatsal Publisher: Ratna Books, Delhi, 2023 Pages: 314 If you want to return to the good old days of the late 19 th century, this is an ideal novel for you. This was published originally in Gujarati in 1913. It appeared as a serial before that from 1898 onwards in a periodical. The conflict between good and evil is the dominant motif though there is romance, betrayal, disappointment, regret, and pretty much of traditional morality. Reading this novel is quite like watching an old Bollywood movie, 1960s style. Ardeshir Bahadurshah, a wealthy Parsi aristocrat in Surat, dies having obligated his son Jehangir to find out his long-lost brother Rustom. Rustom was Bahadurshah’s son in his first marriage. The mother died when the boy was too small and the nurse who looked after the child vanished with it one day. Ratanmai, Bahadurshah’s present wife, takes her

Kejriwal’s Arrest in Modi’s Kurukshetra

For some mysterious reason, Arvind Kejriwal’s arrest reminded me of Haren Pandya. Maybe, because Pandya’s 21 st death anniversary is approaching (26 March). Have you forgotten Haren Pandya? He was the Home Minister of Gujarat before Narendra Modi assumed dictatorial powers in that state. Modi chose to teach humility to Pandya by making him the Minister of State for revenue. Pandya chose not to learn humility from Modi and resigned from that post in Aug 2002. Remember Gujarat of 2002? You should. A fire engulfed a train on 27 Feb 2002 killing 58 Hindu pilgrims who were returning from Ayodhya where they had gone to discover their god, not very unlike Christopher Columbus undertaking a voyage to discover India and messing it all up. What caused the fire in the train? Lord Ram knows probably. The upshot was that there was a riot in Gujarat by Hindus against Muslims. Haren Pandya is one of the BJP leaders who gave statements in many places indicting Modi for the riots. He asser