One rather lively offline discussion about the Roots of Ambivalence prompts me to clarify a couple of basic assumptions.
What I described is obviously not The Ultimate Truth about any particular person as he/she is; nor does this text pretend to be a full picture of the human being as such. I simply attempted to outline, based on personal experience and on some reading and reflection one of the defence mechanisms that we tend to develop in early childhood as a means of coping with reality. I have been dealing with what Richard Rohr calls “shadow”, and Thomas Keating “false self”: emotional and behavioural patterns that hinder our development and prevent us from reaching our full human maturity in God.
Thus, in a sense, I have been describing what we are not, because of course there is much more than just these patterns to the human being as a whole. The question of what we can know at all about human souls as a whole is open to debate. Meanwhile, knowing a tiny little something about our limitations and the way they affect us and other people seems to me not only feasible, but positively desirable and necessary if the Christian call to conversion, new being and life in God is taken seriously.
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