The Master Terrorist of Emotional Life by Robert Langs, M.D.

Many things about human life involve circles of mutual influence in which one element is dependent on another. This holds for the basics of emotional life, as seen in the following questions:

What are the root causes of emotional suffering and pain?

This is the basic question of what makes us neurotic and drives us crazy. Identifying the ultimate enemy is essential to knowing the ultimate cure.

How does the mind cope with these sources of emotional pain?

This is the basic question of how the mind operates.

And how does the mind do its job?

This is the basic question of the evolved design of the emotion-processing mind. The more we know about this design, the more we can do creatively to shore up its operations and defeat more of our emotional enemies than other wise.

The basic causes of emotional illness and pain fall into three classes: Genetic, environmental, and psychological. Each is an area of vast complexity. This holds especially true for the psychological causes, which is my concern here.

There are many proposed reasons for emotional ills, and each of them has a grain of truth. Each cause of illness is the basis for a theory of emotional life. None of these causes has as yet been proven to be more compelling than the rest. The field lacks a clear measure through which we can identify factors of greater and lesser importance.

Emotional problems may stem from any of the following:

Conditioning - disturbing habitual reactions to emotional events.

Theory of the mind - A conditioning machine. For example, an event is connected with anxiety. It follows that whenever a similar event occurs, the anxiety also will materialize.

Cure - Deconditioning.

Upsetting patterns of thought - poor and self-harmful ways of thinking.

Theory of the mind - A thinking machine. This so-called cognitive theory of the mind states that disturbed ways of thinking cause disturbed ways of feeling and living. For example, depressing thoughts makes a person depressed.

Cure - Cognitive or thinking retraining through exercises that change harmful ways of thinking into helpful and positive ways.

The mind at war with itself - Unconscious conflicts in which forbidden wishes are pitted against the conscience, in response to which conscious defenses create symptomatic compromises. Later versions: Unconscious id drives pitted against superego condemnations, with the ego's defenses arranging for symptomatic compromises; also, the ego's search for loving others pitted against the failure of significant others to provide the sought-for nurturance. Also: The past haunting the present.

Theory of the mind - A seething cauldron of unconscious, id drives and wishes seeking expression in ways that are opposed by moral values and one's self-image and ideals. The mediator is the conscious system or ego, and it invokes psychological defenses of repression and disguise in order to work out a compromise that satisfies all parties, many of them, symptomatic. Memories of past traumas also overwhelm the ego and cause symptoms.

These are the prevailing theories of present-day psychoanalysis.

The mind at war with external and internal predators and the prospect of death - The root cause of emotional suffering is traced to outer and inner (bodily) traumas and to three forms of death anxiety—predatory (sources of outer and inner threat of annihilation), existential (the recognition of human mortality—the inevitability of personal death), and predator (the attempt to harm or annihilate others).

Theory of the mind - A two system mind, one system using conscious perception and attached to awareness, the other system using unconscious perception and unable to reach awareness directly, without disguise. The relative independence of the operations of each system, each working with its own intelligence, coping strategies, and moral values. An unconscious mind that expresses itself, i.e., reaches awareness—through encoded narratives.

Cure - Decoding disguised narratives in light of their triggering, emotionally-charged events, and then being able to appreciate consciously the nature of one's unconsciously experienced traumas and their meanings, as well as the death anxieties that they evoke the resolution of inner conflicts and the working through of active forms of death anxiety.

There is enormous clinical support for the view that death and its nefarious consequence, death anxiety, are the root psychological cause of emotional ills. In this light, other causes must be seen as secondary contributors to emotional ills. In addition, focusing on these lesser causes should be understood as, in part, a way of using lesser truths to obscure greater and far more critical truths about trauma and death.

Go to Top of Page