Deborah asked:

Hello. My name is Deborah Lyu from Virginia high school. Recently, I was assigned to write a
persuasive essay for my English class. I questioned myself why we unintelligently redo the things that
we hated? For example, I read from the Reader's Digestthat one male had hated his father because
the father did not care about him but when we grew up and got married, he was doing the same thing
his father did. I think people hate something that they will unintentionally accept without looking within
themself. Do you understand my point? If you do, I would like to hear your opinions about this.
Thanks.

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Augustine of Hippo wondered about this kind of thing in North Africa in the late fourth and early fifth
centuries. The questions were already old. Why do we do what we hate when others do it? Why do
we end up like the person we strove not to emulate? Why do we repeat the mistakes of the past
generation when we are conscious they were mistakes? You will find as many explanations of this as
there are schools of psychology. A lot of philosophers will take the 'cognitive' approach. This seems
reasonable because of its scientific pretension. The more Antique approach, my own, would be to
think as follows.

Although physically and materially individuals appear to be separate entities, as verified by sense
certainty, at the more personal level, that of an individual's thoughts, values and attitudes, beliefs,
limits and language they are not. We are dictated to by our nationality, locale, history, historiography
(there is a great difference here), educational and political systems. We belong to all these things not
just as 'individuals' but as leaves of a tree.

There is a living and real sense in which we are very much part of each other. The individual is the
illusion of a certain mind set. In reality we belong to necessary forces which we are, but which are not
reducible to you or I. Just because our body is not that of our father (in your example) much of the
rest of us — the necessary forces — is. Further, our father is not just our father, he is his father and
his brother and so on back and besides. We are contained by larger forces and the whole not by
ourselves. Therefore it is not enough, as the individual will be inclined to do, to 'look within'. This is
psychology's (mis)take. To Know Thyself you must start the journey of philosophy, on which thinking
really begins. Hope you get my drift!

Matthew Del Nevo

http://www.sicetnon.com

Freud would say that the man who has a father who did not care about him represses the hurt (i.e. it
becomes removed from he conscious to the unconscious) but the hurt lingers within him even though
it is not conscious and it will have its effect on behaviour in a way that the man cannot control
because the cause is in his unconscious. A person with bad memories does not want to repeat the
experience, but is driven by repressed memories. According to Freud, if such a person can be
brought to remember the initial fact of not being cared for, he can break out of repetitive behaviour.

At a more accessible conscious level, the lack of love may lead to a lack of self-regard or a feeling of
unworthiness. If a such a person had self-regard, he would not behave in a way which ideally he
would know from experience is harmful to others and that it is unworthy of him. It is sad that a person
who has suffered himself to such an extent that he cannot recognise or think about the past truthfully
goes on to behave in such a way that he becomes like the person who caused his suffering. Because
the person cannot look within his consciousness to cure himself there is a sense in which he is not to
blame. There is a protective mechanism at work in his mind.

Of course, there be a genetic explanation and then there would be little possibility of behaving
otherwise.

Rachel Browne