A psychotic aversion to self-learning?

[coberst]

A psychotic aversion to self-learning?

There is strong evidence that our educational system has graduated students with a neurosis directed at self-learning; there seems to be a strong aversion to serious scholarship that is without an educational institution’s imprimatur.

What is neurosis?

Becker says “isn’t the development of the ego the key to the general problem of neurosis?” The ego grows by putting anxiety under its control; thoughts and feelings are dangerous for the existence of the organism, ergo the ego “vaccinates itself” with small doses of anxiety as a defense mechanism against anxiety.

The ego controls our levels of anxiety by a restriction of our allowed experiences. The ego develops by “skewing perceptions and by limiting action”. The ego grows by “a dispossession of the child’s own inner world”. The ego’s technique mechanism is one of the best, it is self-deception. The child’s humanization is accomplished by giving over her aegis to the parent. Are the child’s educational efforts at humanization also accomplished by giving over its intellectual aegis to the teacher?

Our motives are buried deep in the unconscious and are veiled by our ignorance of our self. “One’s motives reside in his skewed perceptions, in the way he dispossess himself of genuine self-reliance”; Freud discovered “conscience as limited vision and as dishonest control over one-self…Neurosis is merely a process of interference with simple animal movements, of the blocking of the forward momentum of action.”

Neurosis blocks our most “eager and engrossing acts, acts of an excited infant [and of an excited adult] in a world of wonders”. The result being that we all tend to earn a sense of support passively, by “renouncing action and the satisfaction of making [our] own closure on action.”

Quotes and ideas about neurosis (not about self-learning) are from “The Birth and Death of Meaning”—Ernest Becker