3 Stages in the Archetype of Progress: Egypt - Desert - Promised Land

Archetype, model, pattern, or paradigm are synonyms that define the sort of reality which makes us conclude that history repeats itself. In other words, the perception of “déjà vu”, like when we realize that we have seen before what we are seeing now. It is also what makes the metaphor possible, that is, a relationship of similarity between realities of different nature.

The validity and universality of archetypes, paradigms or patterns, as well as their usage and application in all facets of human life, are possible because human nature is always the same. It does not change in time or space, that is, it turns out to be the same in all generations, from Adam to our present day, and even to the end of time, and the same in all places on the planet, in all cultures and civilizations that have existed, exist or will exist.

We do not see in the exodus of the people of Israel from Egypt, in their passage through the desert and entry into the Promised Land, only one historical and theological reality but also the three stages of the archetype of progress in all its aspects – scientific, social, psychological, spiritual etc. – so that the reading of the biblical account appeals to our collective unconsciousness where, according to Jung, all archetypes are stored, which has the immaterial heritage of humanity and part of the cultural consciousness of the West.

The reading and analysis of this biblical account, beyond its historical and theological significance, can serve us as a guide and inspiration in other facets of human life that imply change, transcription, conversion, passage from one reality to another, growth and progress. Michael Walzer in his book, Exodus and Revolution, tells us that an exodus is a model or story that makes it possible to narrate other stories.

To be born and to die in light of the archetype
In light of this archetype, one of the events may be the process of our birth: we are confined in a very small place in our mother’s womb, attached to her like a patient to a life support system, without great freedom of movement and little space to grow. The passage of this type of “Egypt” into the Promised Land of freedom, the coming to light, is a process or passage that may be quick or take some time, but in both cases very painful and uncomfortable, both for the baby and for the mother.

If the entry into this world can be read in light of the archetype Egypt – Desert – Promised Land, then its departure can also be read in light of this same archetype. Towards the end of our lives, whether by old age or sickness and the suffering that it causes us, life itself becomes an unbearable Egypt.

We begin by having limitations in all kinds of things, we cannot eat this or that, cannot walk, become bedridden and finally, many are attached once again to an umbilical cord, that is, to a life support system that artificially does what some of our organs can no longer do naturally. Our life becomes an Egypt from which we want to free ourselves.

But to move on to the true Promised Land, the eternal life, we have to pass through the desert which is the process of death or birth into the eternal life. A process that is also painful, both for the one who experiences it and for those who are bound to the dying person by ties of affection.

When my late mother was in agony in the process of passing away, my father who was assisting her asked: “Do you want me to bring you the medicine?” – “No, I want to die.” And these were her last words. Faced with the hardship of the desert, but hopeful of the Promised Land of eternal life, my mother did not want to return to a life already full of limitations. Like she used to say, “I have already so many health issues, so many limitations and illnesses.”

The basic archetype of human life
“No pain, no gain” says the proverb. Once exiled from the earthly paradise, Adam and Eve know that this proverb, consciously or unconsciously inspired by the archetype, takes place in all aspects and strands of life and is already in itself one of the most important archetypes of human life.

We take as an example a young person who wants to become a doctor. Wanting to be a doctor is his vocation, his Promised Land; not being a doctor yet is his Egypt, because his true self at the moment does not coincide with what he ought to be, with what is in his being because he is not yet who he wants to be. In some way he has to stop being who he is and enter into a process that will take him to become a doctor: this process is the university attendance, to study every day.

Nobody lives in the desert; it is always a passing land. In the same way, no one is a student forever, being an applied student is a matter that lasts 7 or 8 years of his life, but which are indispensable for the acquisition of the degree that allows him to practice medicine.

In order to cross the desert, the Spanish people has two proverbs that advise us of the attitude to have towards the hardship of the desert. “Put on a good face in bad time”, although it refers to the weather, but it might as well apply to the difficulties that arise in our lives. In face of these, we must have a positive attitude, optimistic and not pessimistic or fatalistic.

“Take the bull by its horns” advises us that in face of difficulties, not to hide our heads in the sand, as they say ostriches do, an act that shows the common attitude of denial, not even to try to get around or escape difficulties, but to face them head on with a brave heart, with the willpower of a warrior, of a hero.

The very journey of the people from a past of slavery to a present of harsh penances and sacrifices, setting the sight on a bright, idyllic and utopian future, is an image of this archetype. The German Marxist philosopher Ernst Bloch based his principle of hope on Exodus.

This also inspired the black preachers of the sixties, such as Martin Luther King, as well as the political theology of Johann Baptist Metz, the theology of hope of Jürgen Moltmann, and lastly, the heir of these two, the Latin-American liberation theology of Gustavo Gutiérrez, Leonardo Boff and others.

History archetype
The Exodus constitutes the time of modern history, which no longer obeys cycles or myths but is an arrow travelling from the past towards the future. The time of history is a time where the past, the present and the future meet and dialogue with one another. The new is built upon what we have learned from past mistakes, and therefore not to remember the past is to be doomed to repeat it unconsciously, uncritically, indefinitely.

In keeping alive the memory of enslavement in Egypt prevents the same mistakes from being made. This is what the prophets did and what the apostles also did in their first evangelization discourses: to read the past in the present in order to guide and project the future.

Indeed, life itself is a pilgrimage as Hebrews (13:14) says – for here we have no lasting city, but we are looking for the city that is to come, and any concrete historical achievement of this is always only an image of the one that is always to come, and that is eternal life, because only in it do milk and honey flow unceasingly.

It sounds like the myth of the eternal return, but the same history tells us that concrete and historical realization of utopia, of the Promised Land, easily transforms itself over time into an Egypt from which it is necessary to leave again, repeating the experience of the desert. The true homeland and the end of all progress is life in God and with God.

Linear and cyclic conception of time
Cosmic time, the Circle – Starting from the objectively observable, the circular understanding of time has always prevailed in ancient Greece and the Far East. From the cosmic point of view, the 365 days that the earth takes to go around the sun, from the point of view of Nature, or more specifically from the changes in climate, the four seasons spring, summer, autumn and winter. From these facts, the myth of the “eternal return” was born to Philosophy, the idea that “there is nothing new under the sun” to Science, and the belief in “reincarnation” to Religion.

Human time, the Straight Line – From an existential and human point of view, each day that passes is one more day that we are going to live through and one less day that we have left to live. To conceive time as a straight line, which comes from the past, passes through the present and moves towards the future, is not something that can be observed in Nature.

Time in a straight line is the time of individual and community history, the time that integrates the idea of moral progress: today was better than yesterday, tomorrow will be better than today. In Philosophy, the Heraclitus’ saying that “we do not bathe twice in the waters of the same river” shares this understanding of time, and the same is true in Cosmology and Religion that convey the notions of the beginning and the end of the world.

This is also the Jewish conception of time: the departure from Egypt (land of slavery), the passage through the desert (land of suffering, penance, purification and effort) and the entry into the Promised Land, where milk and honey flow abundantly (land of freedom, rewarded effort and finished work).

Liberation, one social and one individual
Although the archetype, as we have said, can be applied to all kinds of evolution, progress, liberation, change or conversion, in this article we will study the biblical narrative of the epic of the Jewish people, from Egypt to the Promised Land, taking it as an archetype and therefore, as a guide and inspiration of two types of freedom: one social and the other individual.

For the social liberation, we chose Karl Marx’s theory, his historical and dialectical materialism applied to the analysis of a capitalist society and the offer of socialism as a solution to the problems of capitalism. In this sense, capitalism is the Egypt, the desert would be the dictatorship of the proletariat, and the Promised Land the classless society of socialism.

For the individual liberation, we chose the process the individual must follow to be free of any addictive behaviour, be it caused by a substance like drug, alcohol, tobacco, money or a repetitive and obsessive behaviour like sex, anger etc. The Egypt would be the addictive behaviour that keeps the individual deprived of his freedom, the desert would be the time of purification, detoxification and strengthening of the ego, and the Promised Land would be the regaining of freedom from the addictive behaviour.

EGYPT
Become aware that you are a slave
In the Bible, Egypt means knowledge and the love of knowledge. Egypt is, therefore, a place where you learn the truth. While Joseph ruled Egypt, it was a paradise for him, and his brothers and father. Psychologically, this means that while the mind dominates or governs the world, much can be learned. However, a pharaoh who had not known Joseph and the children of Israel, that is, the dominion of the mind over the physical world, began to reign in Egypt. The pharaoh represents the dominion of the physical world over the mind, or the dominion of the flesh over the spirit, as St. Paul puts it.

While the spirit or the mind has primacy or governs the body, its desires and appetites, the human being enjoys freedom because he is above all, a spiritual being. When, on other hand, the pharaoh rises to the throne, that is, the body with its desires dominate the mind and the spirit, the human being experiences slavery.

Egypt is synonymous with the land of slavery, but also at a later time, it is synonymous with the land of truth. I quote the story I told in the article about the tridimensionality of social action, See – Judge – Act: a Spanish priest with all his European baggage after having contemplated for some time the deplorable and miserable situation in which a community of Latin American peasants lived, asked them, “But are you not hungry and thirsty for justice?” They replied, “What is this hunger and thirst for justice? We, Father, only know the hunger for bread and the thirst for water.”

(Moses) looked this way and that, and seeing no one he killed the Egyptian and hid him in the sand. When he went out the next day, he saw two Hebrews fighting; and he said to the one who was in the wrong, ‘Why do you strike your fellow Hebrew?’ He answered, ‘Who made you a ruler and judge over us?’ Exodus 2:12-14

While the peasant only knows the hunger for bread and the thirst for water, he lives in a land of slavery, he is a slave without knowing he is one and, like the Jewish people when they lived enslaved, he does not accept that a Moses should come to speak about hunger and thirst for justice. The Hebrews also did not accept the freedom and struggle for justice that Moses offered.

Then the Lord said, ‘I have observed the misery of my people who are in Egypt; I have heard their cry on account of their taskmasters. Indeed, I know their sufferings, and I have come down to deliver them from the Egyptians, and to bring them up out of that land to a good and broad land, a land flowing with milk and honey, (…) The cry of the Israelites has now come to me; I have also seen how the Egyptians oppress them. Exodus 3:7-9

When the people finally opened their eyes to their true condition, then yes, they interpreted their life in another way, they began to be aware of being slaves in a foreign land and began to dream of another life in another land – a land that Jacob’s children had left. Now yes, they are ready to accept a leader to take them out of there, but also this is no longer the same Moses who had killed the Egyptian.

In line with the article “see – judge – act” which, as we have said, in its time was most likely inspired by the Exodus, after the people became aware of their life as slaves, an alternative to this life begins to surge in their minds. This alternative is a dream, a promise, an objective, a utopia situated somewhere in the future that acts like a magnet that draws the people to get out of their situation and walk towards the future where this utopia can become a reality.

Like a GPS, while the satellite does not discover the place that we are, it cannot tell us the route to the place where we want to go. And for those who do not know where to go, there are no favorable winds. The wind, or the driving force, only appears when we know our path, our goal, our utopia. After discovering this, it is time to leave, but before leaving, we celebrate our liberation, because hope will guide us.

I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia, the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood. I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. Martin Luther King

Easter, the memorial celebration archetype
Tell the whole congregation of Israel that on the tenth of this month they are to take a lamb for each family, a lamb for each household. (…) You shall keep it until the fourteenth day of this month; then the whole assembled congregation of Israel shall slaughter it at twilight. (…) This day shall be a day of remembrance for you. You shall celebrate it as a festival to the Lord; throughout your generations you shall observe it as a perpetual ordinance. Exodus 12:3, 6, 14

A people who never gathers to celebrate their identity ceases to be a people. On each day of the ordinary time, each person dedicates himself to his task, work, and in this, he can be detached from the rest of his brothers. The whole nation, the entire people, or the whole association of people has days in which to celebrate their national or associative identity; if this ceases to happen, this people, this nation, or this association will cease to exist also.

God who is the creator of human nature knows it much better than humans. Therefore, even before the people left for the desert, he decreed that the same act of departure should be a celebration to be repeated in a ritual each year, so that no one would ever forget the price of freedom, how much this liberation from slavery costed.

Jesus came to bring deliverance to all mankind from all types of “Egypts” that deprive us of our freedom and dignity as children of God. And he also instituted a memorial act – the Eucharist – and explicitly said “do this in memory of me” after blessing the bread and wine that would become his body and blood, the price that he paid for our freedom.

DESERT
After the euphoria of the Passover celebration and the departure from Egypt, difficulties soon started to settle in: at the front appeared the Red Sea and from behind the powerful Egyptian army. The people, caught between the sword and the wall, felt the temptation to look at the dream which until then had led them on as if it were an illusion and a deception, like the mirages that precisely are well known in the desert.

This desperate situation was only one of the many that followed: hunger, thirst, serpents, plus the memory of the meat that they ate in Egypt now seemed like a dream but much more real and viable, because they had already experienced it. All this prevented them from marching forward, it seems now that the utopia has shifted from the future to the past. In the face of the challenges that freedom presented to them, the slavery of Egypt now appeared in their minds as a lost paradise. This explains the temptation to go back.

Freedom as a process
No bread without freedom and no freedom without bread. Bread is the food for the body, while freedom is the food for the soul. It is the soul that distinguishes us from the rest of the living beings. Therefore, the true human value is freedom and not bread, the ability to take our life into our own hands and make something out of it that is more important than life itself. However, to live, that is, to have life in our hands, we need to be alive, that is, we need to feed our body.

It is not edifying to sacrifice freedom to obtain bread, because we sacrifice our reason for life. It is like being humanly dead, like giving up life to be alive. Unless we sacrifice our freedom to get someone’s bread. Moses demanded from the people to temporarily give up bread, abundance of water and meat in exchange for freedom: a greater good than all these.

In assuming a new awareness of oneself, a new identity, to idealize and elaborate the project of a just and fraternal society in a way that freedom is synonymous with participation and responsibility for the project, is a long and tortuous path because the process takes time. In Moses’ case, the shortest and easiest process would be to go through the land of the Philistines, along the Mediterranean Sea.

Desert and detoxification
“We've got some difficult days ahead. But it really doesn't matter with me now, because I've been to the mountaintop. And I don't mind. Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I'm not concerned about that now.

I just want to do God's will. And He's allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I've looked over. And I've seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the Promised Land!

And so I'm happy, tonight. I'm not worried about anything. I'm not fearing any man! My eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord!!” Martin Luther King, the day before his assassination

Freedom is not conquered overnight, in one single act, in one flight. Freedom is a process with ups and downs, it is necessary to free ourselves from old habits, from the onions and the meat of Egypt, to overcome the temptation to turn back that arises when we encounter difficulties on the way; the desert means detoxification from vices and bad habits that enslave us. Cutting ties with the previous life in order to be available for the new one to come.

In the long process of liberation, many fell by the wayside. Moses did not enter into the Promised Land; Luther King who led the black people of the United States to freedom and equality also did not see his dream fulfilled in his short life.

Of those who left Egypt, only Joshua and his friend Caleb entered the Promised Land. They were both positive, always looking forward, were optimistic and did not fear what most feared. Especially in the episode of the spies of the land when fear paralyzed most of Israel’s children but Joshua and Caleb were there to infuse strength, courage, hope and faith in the God who had so often given them proofs of his love and dedication.

One cannot enter the Promised Land with the vices of the past, these have to stay in the desert. This is what probably symbolizes the fact that only two of those who came out of slavery entered the Promised Land, while the others who stayed on the path were succeeded by their children who had been born and raised free in the desert.

The lesson of the butterfly
A man spent hours watching a butterfly struggling to emerge from its cocoon. It managed to make a small hole, but its body was too large to get through it. After a long struggle, it appeared to be exhausted and remained absolutely still. The man decided to help the butterfly and, with a pair of scissors, he cut open the cocoon thus releasing the butterfly. However, the butterfly’s body was very small and wrinkled and its wings were all crumpled.

The man continued to watch, hoping that, at any moment, the butterfly would open its wings and fly away. Nothing happened. In fact, the butterfly spent the rest of its brief life dragging around its shrunken body and shriveled wings, incapable of flight. 

What the man, out of kindness and in his eagerness to help, had failed to understand was that the tight cocoon and the efforts that the butterfly had to make in order to squeeze out of that tiny hole were God’s way of training the butterfly and of strengthening its wings.

From outcasts to a people
A common enemy makes of strangers, friends. In the desert, everything is antagonistic and therefore, unity is strength – to survive, everyone’s effort is needed. It is not possible a direct passage from Egypt to the Promised Land, it is the desert that turns a band of outcasts into a people, with its own idiosyncrasy, law, language, way of life, common goal and a special relationship with God who walks with the people in the form of fire during the night and a cloud during the day, and who encamps with them, living in a tent.

This relationship of absolute dependence on God and interdependence on each other is later exalted by prophets as an idyllic time: “Thus says the Lord: I remember the devotion of your youth, your love as a bride, how you followed me in the wilderness, in a land not sown. Israel was holy to the Lord…” Jeremiah 2:2-3

The desert is not a place to live, it lacks everything, even the essential. Naturally, a person in the desert becomes more spiritual, turns to the inner landscape because there is nothing on the outside that captures his five senses. It is for this reason that for the people, the desert was a time of individual and social introspection and, within themselves, find the One of whom Saint Augustine says God is intimior intimo meo, who is inside of us and beyond our innermost self. In this process of introspection, two birds are killed with one stone: we get to know our very self and we get to know God who is inside of us but beyond our innermost self.

Alliance or pact
The transition from a state of oppression to a state of freedom presupposes an irrevocable change and an oath. During the march in the desert, the Hebrews guided by Moses made a covenant among themselves, as a people and with God. In this way, on Mount Sinai, a group of tribes becomes a people, a nation with laws and a constitution to govern their social life.

The difference from the earlier covenants with Abraham and Noah, which were unilateral and unconditional, is that this covenant with Moses is bilateral, that is, if the people remains faithful, God will keep his side of the oath. Moses gives the people the possibility of a choice.

“(...) this commandment that I am commanding you today is not too hard for you, nor is it too far away. (…) the word is very near to you; it is in your mouth and in your heart for you to observe. See, I have set before you today life and prosperity, death and adversity. If you obey the commandments of the Lord your God that I am commanding you today, by loving the Lord your God, walking in his ways, and observing his commandments, decrees, and ordinances, then you shall live and become numerous, and the LORD your God will bless you in the land that you are entering to possess.

But if your heart turns away and you do not hear, but are led astray to bow down to other gods and serve them, I declare to you today that you shall perish; you shall not live long in the land that you are crossing the Jordan to enter and possess. Deuteronomy 30: 11, 14-18

An identical discourse (Deuteronomy 31:1-29) is made by Joshua, Moses’ successor, before the last passage or Passover: that of the desert to the Promised Land by the crossing of the Jordan River. One more time and for the last time before beginning a new life in a new land, the people are reminded of the covenant that they made with God, which constituted them as a people, that is, which gave them an identity so often exalted in confrontation with other neighbouring or distant peoples.

THE PROMISED LAND
After crossing the Jordan River, the people finally reach the Promised Land, but this is not handed over to them with a kiss. It is said that God feeds the birds in the air, but does not bring the food to their nest, they have to go out and get it. It costed much to get to the Promised Land and upon arriving they come across Jericho, the oldest city in the ancient world and well-fortified. They then had to conquer it, like the rest of the land where milk and honey flow.

He went to evangelize and was evangelized
(…) as for the towns of these peoples that the Lord your God is giving you as an inheritance, you must not let anything that breathes remain alive. You shall annihilate them – the Hittites and the Amorites, the Canaanites and the Perizzites, the Hivites and the Jebusites – just as the Lord your God has commanded, so that they may not teach you to do all the abhorrent things that they do for their gods, and you thus sin against the Lord your God. Deuteronomy 20:16-18

I do not stop to justify or defend the verse with connotations of genocide, I leave this to the most learned in sacred scriptures. As we are speaking of archetypes, the symbolic meaning of this extermination that God ordered is not so much of the peoples but of the customs of these same peoples so that, as the same text says, it does not happen that the people instead of establishing their culture, idiosyncrasy and faith in the land, were to adopt customs, habits and vices of the peoples who inhabit that same land.

Therefore, it refers to a cultural cleansing, the kind of cleansing that Jesus did in the Temple of Jerusalem so that it would no longer be a place of business and idolatry, but a place of prayer and worship to the one God, the One who had taken the people out of Egypt and accompanied them all the way there, giving them this land. How many times we go to evangelize to bring others to our faith, our cause and end up being the ones conquered to their faith and their cause.

The fact that Joshua and his people did not obey God and did not exterminate all Canaanites including the women and children, does not mean that they were morally superior to God himself but rather that they did precisely what God feared: being the invaders, they let themselves be invaded and contaminated by the customs of the Canaanites and since they were no longer nomads, they also began to worship the gods of the sedentary peoples.

The Promised Land is the Kingdom of God
More than a concrete place, the Promised Land is individually a way of being who we are and the role we play in the world. We are in the world, but we are not of the world. The history of salvation began with Abraham, a wandering Aramean who left his land. Even before him, Yahweh did not hide his preference for nomadism over sedentarism. Without any reason other than this, he accepted the sacrifice of Abel who was a shepherd and therefore a nomad, and not that of Cain who was a farmer and therefore sedentary.

For this same reason, as we have seen before, the prophets exalt the time when the people walked through the desert, and condemn the sedentary lifestyle that leads to idolatry. God Yahweh is a god of nomads and not a sedentary god. The sedentary gods were gods of fertility, of agriculture. Sedentarism, to halt, goes against cosmic and human nature, because everything moves, we too have to be always on the move for when we stop and lower our guards, we easily become prey to idolatry. To be in the world without being of the world is an expression of a certain spiritual nomadism that we must maintain.

On the other hand, at the social level, we live committed to a project for a better world which is the Kingdom of God, but we never fully identify with any conquest, even in this sense.

The Kingdom is already among us since God through his Son (historically, Jesus of Nazareth) entered into human history. But the Kingdom is not among us in its fullness because the world can always be better. We know that it will never be like Heaven, the Kingdom of God par excellence. That is why we live committed, but not implicated or completely identified with the historical achievements of the Kingdom of God.

The Promised Land is not, therefore, a concrete geographic place but a society where justice and peace reign. And for it to reign, continuous efforts and constant vigilance are needed so that it does not descend into injustice and violence.

As we have seen, the Egypt of Joseph’s time was similar to the Promised Land, because Jacob’s children took refuge there with their father so that they would not die of starvation. During the time of Joseph, the adoptive father of Jesus, it became again a land of salvation, because it was there that the child Jesus took refuge until the death of Herod.

We can conclude that each Promised Land was once an Egypt and each Egypt can be a Promised Land. As Christians, we must live in the desert, always leaving Egypt and walking towards the Promised Land; today better than yesterday and tomorrow better than today.

The use of the archetype in Karl Marx’s communist theory
Karl Marx (1818-1883) was a German economist and philosopher of Jewish descent who lived in a time when the first social revolution emptied the countryside and filled cities with workers, including children, who lived in subhuman conditions, with too many hours of work, low wages, and in extreme poverty.

Capitalism is the Egypt of the proletariat
For Marx, society was divided into the proletarians, the new slaves, and the bourgeois, the new lords. He then applied this reading of the society of his time to the rest of history, which he saw as a class struggle in which the oppressed fight against their oppressor.

In this society, the capitalist bourgeoisie controlled the production process, whereby a factory’s products were sold at a price that included the raw material, labour and a profit from which only the bourgeoisie benefited. Some industrial philanthropists on realizing the exorbitant profits they enjoyed, distributed them to the workers, but most of them became ever richer while the proletarians became impoverished.

Like the Jewish people in their Egypt, Marx who was also a Jew understood that the resentment of the proletariat on seeing the fruit of their sweat stolen would increase until one day when the famous slogan of the communist manifesto of Marx and Engels (1848) would echo in all the factories: “Workers of the world, unite, you have nothing to lose but your chains.”

The dictatorship of the proletariat is the desert
With this, Marx understood, the proletarians would leave their Egypt, repudiate their condition as slaves and would take the reins of power and the production process. The roles would be reversed, just as in the parable of the rich man and the poor man Lazarus. (Luke 16:19-31)

These were the times of the communist revolution, difficult times for all, especially for the bourgeois who were expropriated from their power, property, and place and role they played in society. Their functions disappeared, their class disappeared.

Despite being an atheist, Marx applied to perfection the matrix of Egypt – Desert – Promised Land, and probably saw himself as the new Moses, who would bring out of slavery the new chosen people, the proletarians of the whole world.

Society without classes is the Promised Land
After the victory of the proletariat over the bourgeoisie and its capitalism, an instrument of oppression, a new society without classes should emerge, governed by Marx’s principle: “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs”. In this idyllic society, properties, lands, factories, means of production belong to all, are owned by all.

All would have the right and equal access to education, social classes would disappear, thus ending the dictatorship of the proletariat because there would be neither proletarians nor bourgeois, and harmony, justice and peace would reign that would make the state obsolete and eventually disappear.

Hegelian and Marxist dialectics
Most of us know that Marx drank from Hegel or, better said, from an inverted Hegel by his adoption of Feuerbach’s atheism. For the philosopher Hegel, the distinction between matter and spirit was illusory, and he concluded that matter was a form of spirit; Marx, on the other hand, understood that spirit was a form of matter.

If we replace spirit with energy (we can in fact understand spirit as an energy because they are both intangible), today we would say with Einstein that they were both right, matter is a form of energy, just as energy is a form of matter.

As an appendix, I would like to add a mention of the tridimensionality of Hegel’s dialectics, implied in Marx’s socialist theory. For both, history develops in conflicts between opposing forces: Thesis (Egypt), Antithesis (Desert), Synthesis (Promised Land). This applies to the class struggle, as Marx did, to nations, institutions, and so on until, in Hegel’s mind, we reach Heaven or, in Marx’s mind, to the classless society that would be, according to him, the end of history.

The use of the archetype in all sorts of fight against any form of addiction, bad habit or vice
Egypt – Desert – Promised Land is not only an archetype of social change but also an archetype of individual change, of conversion, of leaving behind some obsessive, compulsive, repetitive, neurotic behaviour that gives us the impression that we are living on autopilot and not on manual, of not being in command of our own lives and of being slaves to vices or bad habits, whether be in attitudes or in substances.

Time is late and we have no space here to develop the subject the way it deserves. In the course of our lives, we have fallen into situations of Egypt and lost our freedom before others, as in the case of domestic violence, through obsessive, compulsive and repetitive behaviours in the field of anger, sex and in many other fields. In the same way, we also lose our freedom when we become addicted to substances that end up playing a psychological or existential role in our lives.

Although traditionally used by the Alcoholics Anonymous (AA), the 12-Step program constitutes the main theory for dealing with all kinds of addiction, whether psychological or substance in nature. In our opinion, this theory also obeys the archetype and was drawn consciously or unconsciously on the basis of this paradigm that we have described.

The Egypt – Admitting that we have lost control of ourselves
This is the first step. While the Israelites did not realize that they were slaves under Pharaoh, the thirst for change to get out of this situation never arose. It is one thing to live in a situation, but another to know, to understand and to interpret that situation. Many addicts don’t see their situation as such; many smokers say that they can quit any time if they wanted to; one of them was heard to say anecdotally that it was easy to quit as he had done it 20 times already…

The Desert – Purification, detoxification, abstinence syndrome
The outcasts of Egypt had to constitute themselves as a people in order to survive together the hardships of the desert. The alcoholics anonymous are a community that comes together to fight an evil. Among the 12 Steps, some refer to this relationship that is established with others and with the Other, God.

The desert for the addicts is a place of detoxification. A liver takes time to detox, while the lungs can retain the accumulated pollutants for a long time. During this time of detoxification when the body starts to crave for the substance, the spirit while starving in the desert remembers the pots full of meat left behind in Egypt. The abstinence syndrome is the temptation to turn around and go back.

The Promised Land – Liberation, harmony, peace with oneself and with others
Finally, we arrive at the Promised Land, where we are once again masters of our destiny, where once again we have and can exercise control over our behaviour. According to the 12-Step theory, it is time to reconcile with those we have hurt when we were not ourselves and were possessed by the substances and behaviours that we can mystically understand as impure spirits. Once these spirits are cast out, we are free again and can relate in peace and harmony with ourselves and with others.

CONCLUSION
Both the individual change or conversion in the face of sin or vice, as well as the social revolution or evolution effort towards a society of justice and peace, follow this archetype.

Fr. Jorge Amaro, IMC

3 Attitudes Towards Others: Introvert - Extrovert - Ambivert

Introvert and extrovert are perhaps two of the most popular words in psychology that everyone knows and uses to describe themselves and the basic behaviour or attitude of others.

Everyone knows that an introvert is someone who is inward-looking, who speaks to his buttons, while an extrovert is outward-looking and needs others like he needs the air he breathes.

The first to coin these terms was the Swiss psychologist Carl Jung, Freud’s dissenting disciple. Let us take a look at how he differs not only from Freud but also from another great contemporary, Adler, and then we will focus on these traditional attitudes or tendencies towards life and others.

Freud, Adler and Jung
Sigmund Freud – He is the great master and founder of modern psychology, understood in his time as psychoanalysis. Alfred Adler and Carl Gustav Jung are his followers and disciples who, at first, fundamentally follow the theory of their master, but later diverge considerably, each taking on a different course.

Freud understands that the root of all psychological problems is sexual, that is, the repression of sexual desires in the unconscious leads to neurotic behaviour in the conscious. Freud is the first thinker to take the subject of sex out of the dark, away from the scope of sin. To speak about sex in his time was a taboo, and perhaps this somehow led him to give so much importance to it.

The division of human personality into three instances is his great contribution to understanding human nature. The Id is the first instance and the one that brings us closest to the last primate we evolved from, we are born with the Id and we never lose it. The Id is unconscious and thus remains within us; furthermore, the Id relates symbiotically to its surroundings, not detaching itself too much from it.

As the child grows and relates to his environment, he begins to stand out and to differentiate himself from it, eventually reaching self-awareness: this is how the self, the Ego, is born. Later, the child conscious of his being also becomes aware, through education of how he should be, and that he can grow and be better, and so the Superego is born, the last instance of personality according to Freud.

Alfred Adler – Less introspective than Freud, he was more interested in the relationships that the child establishes since the beginning and how he sees himself before others. Contrary to Freud, he understands that the reason for all psychological problems is the inferiority complex that makes a person thirst for power.

In analyzing the unconscious, Freud discovers erotic fantasies and repressed desires; Adler, on the other hand, thinks that this unconscious contains feelings of inferiority and desires for power and greatness that will turn the person aggressive in the struggle for power, or apathetic if he understands that he cannot attain this power.

In their psychotherapeutic approach, the two are also different. Adler does not use the couch because he sees that it replicates a parent-child relationship which reinforces the client’s inferiority complex. Instead, he uses two chairs facing each other thus making the client and the therapist equal participants in the psychotherapeutic process. Perhaps this is the precursor to Carl Rogers’ non-directive therapy.

Carl Gustav Jung – He extends the Freudian unconscious beyond the boundaries of the individual, creating the collective unconscious, which is similar to a database to which everyone naturally connects because it contains all the archetypes of humanity.

One of the reasons for the divergence among these three great psychologists may be that each tends to lean towards a different stage of growth, despite the fact that their theories were intended to be applied to man at all stages of growth. Freud is more interested in childhood, Adler in adolescence and Jung in adulthood.

In this sense, Jung abandons Freud because he understands that our behaviour is not dependent only on past events, whether these were traumatic or not. A person seeks always to live in the present moment, and is oriented towards the future and, in this sense, takes on the attitude he thinks will best solve his problems and satisfy his needs.

In this context, Jung proposes two attitudes, tendencies or approaches towards life: introversion and extroversion. These ideas are considered to be Jung’s greatest contribution to personality theory. In fact, Jung’s theory of the introvert and extrovert types serves as the basis for the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI).

Without fretting over the past, the Myers-Briggs duo, studies the person’s behaviour in the here and now, and analyzes it as to what extent it lies between the two opposing attitudes or tendencies.

• Concerning our motivation and the way we acquire energy, we are either introvert or extrovert.
• Concerning how we acquire and process information we need in our lives, we are either sensitive or intuitive.
• Concerning how we make decisions, some are more regulated by thought and others by feeling.
• Concerning how we situate ourselves in life at the existential and professional level, some rely more on their ability to judge, others more on their perception.

The results of the MBTI test never show a person to be 100% introvert or 100% extrovert, sentimental or rational, sensitive or intuitive, judgmental or perceptive; they indicate only in percentage a tendency or inclination toward one side more than the other.

The aim of this article is not to study the Myers-Briggs theory but rather the introvert and extrovert behaviours according to Jung and other authors that came after him. The title of this article not only refers to introversion and extroversion, but also ambiversion.

Admittedly this term was unknown to Jung but from his observation he already noted that there was no one who was 100% introvert or 100% extrovert. Today the authors understand that there are people who are neither one nor the other, nor the two at the same time, depending on the situations or motivations at that moment.

What does it mean to be an introvert – an extrovert – an ambivert? Is it an attitude towards reality, towards others, towards life? Or is it a drive, a tendency, a psychological type, a character, a personality type, a temperament?

I had difficulty in deciding on the title of this article because each author uses his own way of understanding these fundamental behaviours of the human person. We keep the word “attitude”, and if we had to choose a second one we would choose “tendency”, to define the way a person situates himself in life in relation to himself, to reality and to others.

What is the natural orientation of our energy? What drives us the most? Each person has two faces. One is directed towards the outside world of activities, enthusiasm, people and things, and the other towards the inner world of thoughts, interests, ideas and imagination.

Since these two sides of our nature are complementary, most people have a preference to one over the other. Therefore, one of their two faces – extrovert or introvert – takes the lead in the development of their personality and plays a more dominant role in their behaviour.

Lately there has been talk of a third tendency – ambiversion – that is basically a synthesis of the other two. Personally, I have always understood myself as an introvert; but all the tests that I have done on the subject have put me on the borderline between an introvert and an extrovert, that is, an introvert with facets of extroversion.

Discovering the term ambiversion was for me the Eureka moment, like discovering myself. After all, I am not as introverted as I thought nor am I an extrovert, but rather a synthesis or mixture of these two attitudes. I couldn’t be any other way, being who I am and, in my work, dealing directly with people more than with things or paperwork.

Childhood: introversion and extroversion
Jung understands that we acquired these two fundamental attitudes towards life, reality and others which we then maintain for the rest of our lives. These attitudes appear when the baby cuts the umbilical cord that connects him to his environment and starts to differentiate himself from it. We can say that the introvert is born or is emancipated before the extrovert, to the extent that he differentiates himself more strongly from his environment than the extrovert who, in some way, still remains for a longer time in symbiosis with it.

Faced with this fact, a child with an extrovert tendency shows a readiness to act and respond to the stimuli and requests from the surroundings; his attention is directed to the outside world and he interacts with objects without reservations and without fear, even if they are foreign to him.

An introverted child, on the other hand, takes on a reflective and even suspicious attitude towards what he does not know, he feels scared and understands that he must protect and defend himself against the influence that objects may have on him. Therefore, he keeps a distance from them in order to get to know them better and to acquire power and self-confidence in his actions over them.

Little is known about the way we become introverts or extroverts. Initially much importance was attached to educational factors, but it is often the case that children of the same mother who were theoretically educated in the same way are found to act and react in different ways under the same situation.

In the case of psychological attitudes, the educational factor is apparently not the most important determinant in acquiring introversion or extroversion attitude. It is likely that there is a genetic or biological predisposition in assuming one or the other attitude.

The introvert attitude
The introvert’s way of knowing – The world of the introvert is within himself; it is similar to the world of ideas of Plato’s Cave. At the philosophical level, at the act of knowing things, the introvert does not deal with their existence or accidents, that is, their characteristics, but with their essence, with what these things mean in themselves or for him.

Of course, this basic attitude can lead to misunderstandings from the fact that the introvert does not relate to the object itself, but to the subjective idea or image he has of the object, thing or person under his consideration. The introvert's perception of the reality is never objective because he does not see things as they are, but how he understands that they are, that is, as they are to him.

For the introvert, the psychic reality is a relatively concrete experience, sometimes even more concrete than the external reality. What counts is not what the thing or person is in itself but how the subject knows it. The mistake is of course in confusing what the thing or person really is with what it is to me. The subject who is knowing is more important than the person or thing to be known. People and things are not what they are in themselves, but what they are to me.

They say or used to say that the Japanese do not enjoy in the here and now the places they visit because they are too busy taking pictures and videos, which they eventually enjoy in the comfort of their homes as they revisit them through the videos and photos that they replay on the TV screen, drinking sake. This can be a caricature image of an introvert who disregards the external reality in favour of the internal one.

The mind of the extrovert is guided by and reports faithfully to the objective facts; it remains always in contact with the reality to be known, and its conception may vary as this varies. The mind of the introvert, on the other hand, is like a camera: the shutter opens for a short span of time, reality enters, and then it closes and does not open again. While the introvert may look at the extrovert as superficial and too dependent on reality, the extrovert looks at the introvert as prejudiced, selfish and distant from reality.

Introversion and shyness – Introverts may or may not be shy; the timid ones are insecure, apprehensive and nervous when they are with people; the introverts may even have good social skills, but they get tired of being with others and need to be alone to recharge their energy.

In summary

• He is inward-looking and has a preference to finding energy and drive in the world of ideas, emotions, impressions and personal experiences. He prefers to reflect before acting and then reflect again. He needs time to think and recover his energy. In general, he is not very sociable by choice and it is not because of shyness. Very hectic surroundings, with lots of people, tire the introvert.
• From an energy point of view, the introvert produces his own energy, he is self-motivated, autonomous and independent.
• The introvert’s way of learning is by observation, he is a more thoughtful and introspective person. The introvert needs to be alone. He doesn’t express much, but thinks and analyzes much.
• He thinks and reflects and only then acts, he hardly changes his mind, so he may be fundamentalist and intolerant when he is negative.
• He needs a lot of time for himself to recharge his batteries; the extrovert needs to connect to the outside world to motivate himself, to connect to others to have his batteries charged.
• Motivated from within, his mind is sometimes so active that he tends to shut out the outside world in order to protect himself. His mind is his castle.
• He has a preference for communicating and relating one-on-one. The conversation topics are profound and revolve around ideas and concepts; he does not waste time on trivial topics or gossips.
• He prefers to direct his energy studying and analyzing ideas, information, explanations and beliefs.
• Paraphrasing Descartes, the introvert thinks and therefore he is, and then may or may not act; the extrovert is and therefore he thinks.
• The introvert is Plato, the extrovert is Aristotle.
• The extrovert is easy to get to know, the introvert is difficult to get to know.
• The extrovert expresses emotions, the introvert controls or suppresses them. The former needs relationships, the latter needs solitude and privacy. One brings breadth to life, the other brings depth. The extrovert may be accused of being superficial, the introvert of being an island.
• Introverts make up a small part of the population. 

Professions and ways of life
Introverts are good researchers, engineers, architects, philosophers, writers, psychologists, teachers, or areas where the ability to reflect before acting is valued. For example, a soldier can and should be extroverted, while a military strategist should certainly be introverted; but this doesn’t always happen. When it comes to human nature, more are the exceptions than the rules.

The extrovert attitude
The world of the extrovert is the real world, outside of himself. For the extrovert, the outside world seems to be the subject while he being the object. The individual is impregnated by the exterior which invades him. According to Jung, the extrovert lives in such a way that the object, as the determinant factor, plays a much greater role in his consciousness than his own subjective opinion. He feels and thinks about the object, person or thing, of his knowledge, losing in this his subjectivity or individuality.

An extrovert may or may not be a friendly and sociable person. What really defines him is his need of others and the outside world in order to be himself; he feels full of energy when he is with others, because he draws his energy, his drives and ideas from them.

The extrovert’s subjective considerations exist but they are not privileged at the level of his consciousness, because he favors the object and its circumstances instead of highlighting himself as the subject. This can lead the extrovert to distance himself in the sphere of thoughts, evaluations, sensations and subjective intuitions. With this picture of the psyche, it is much more likely for an extrovert to alienate himself and lose his freedom in an addictive behaviour than for an introvert who maintains a safe distance in relations to things.

The extrovert tends to live dissociated and divorced from himself, and from his feelings and thoughts. He takes refuge in objects to ward off pain and suffering, and realizes his needs when the unmet needs have already become problematic. The subjective needs, in fact, are his weak point, ignoring the health of his own body through unhealthy behaviours. The conscious non-recognition of his needs may take on catastrophic proportions to the point of losing the reference and magnitude of things in relation to himself: he is so absorbed in the reality that he gets confused with it.

In summary

• He needs to be with others and to be in touch with them to recharge his energy externally. He is driven or draws his energy from the world of things, people, relationships, and activities. The way of learning is also external: he needs conversation, the exchange of ideas. He hates to do things on his own, without interacting with others and the world around him. He feels that he lacks something when deprived of interaction with the outside world, because this is what drives him. He looks for inspiration by thinking out loud and in dialoguing with others. He works better in a team than alone.
• He gets his energy from action; his psychic energy, attention and interest are directed outwards, towards people and the world around him. It is the world around him that is real and it is this and not his thought that determines his behaviour. His interior world is less real and more secondary on his list of priorities and has less influence on his behaviour. He is more interested in what happens around him than what is happening inside of himself.
• He likes to do various activities; he acts first and thinks later. When inactive, his energy diminishes, may even enter into boredom and depression. In general, he is sociable. While the introvert seeks to adapt the world to his mind, the extrovert adapts, accommodates himself to the world. In this sense, he easily changes his mind, like a reed stirred by the wind, or like a chameleon, and when he is negative, he is a person without principles. He makes new friends easily or adapts easily to a new group, and just as easily breaks up undesirable relationships. He is open and says what he thinks, and may even say things without thinking.
• He is not necessarily altruistic since he deals with others because he needs them. The topics of conversation are trivial and superficial, the everyday things and even gossips. He is open and talkative, objective and a person of action. He is tediously long-winded in his interests and has difficulty keeping his attention focused on only one thing.
• Most people in the population are extroverts. 

Professions and ways of life
Extroverts are good managers, salespeople, trainers, presenters, journalists, or in areas where it is important to interact with people and things.

The ambiverts
There is no such thing as a pure introvert or extrovert. Such a person would be in the lunatic asylum. Carl Jung

The experts in ambiversion say that the majority of the population are ambiverts. That is, we all fall somewhere in the attitude spectrum between introversion and extroversion. It is a new concept, unknown to Jung, the founder of the theory of introversion and extroversion, although he himself understood that there could be an intermediate degree between these two opposites.

This intermediate degree is the ambiversion. In my opinion, the ambivert is fundamentally an introvert, that is, he is rooted in introversion, but he also does well outside of his shell, to which he needs to return. He is versatile like a duck that can fly as well as walk or neither if it so wishes.

He does well in solitude and in a crowd. In fact, to be himself he needs to alternate between being alone by himself and being in a crowd with others. He feels both needs, so that he can either spend days away from home, or spend days without going outside the house.

Faced with a specific stimulus, the reactions of an introvert and an extrovert are quite predictable; the reaction of an ambivert, on the other hand, is neither clear nor predictable, not even to himself. It depends on many factors, including the current interests of the individual. The ambiverts can be excellent conversationalists and communicators on the one hand, and good listeners on the other.

The first person to use the term “ambivert” was the American psychologist Edmund S. Conklin in 1923, according to Ian Davidson, a professor of Psychology at York University, Canada, in an article dated 2017. Davidson explains that a psychologist at the time said that Conklin “invented the word” to describe those individuals who find themselves between the introverts (who live in their heads) and the extroverts (who live outside of their heads).

The ambiverts find themselves in the middle of the spectrum between extroversion and introversion; they are not very talkative nor do they live too focused on themselves; they do not have a strong and almost compulsive need to interact with others, like the pure extrovert, nor do they seek solitude to escape from reality, like the introverts. They are reflective, tolerant, ambivalent, bilingual or polyglot, and eclectic, and they live with one foot in each of the two worlds.

In summary

• The ambivert is not afraid of being the center of attention, depending on the context and situation. In many cases, he prefers to simply observe quietly without actively participating.
• He enjoys and has fun at parties and social events for hours on end, but his energy can suddenly run out and he needs to withdraw to his comfort zone.
• Like the extroverts, he likes to talk, but not about trivial topics or football.
• He likes to socialize, but sometimes he is reserved, especially if he does not know anyone. And he will not take the initiative to introduce himself like an extrovert would.
• Some of his friends think he is an extrovert, and others think he is an introvert, this is because he presents himself in different ways in different situations.
• In general, he thinks before speaking; if someone speaks a lot, he listens; if others are quiet, he speaks.
• The ambiverts are the best at dealing with the extremes that tend to cause the collapse of the introverts or extroverts, since they have a greater degree of tolerance at the extreme of introversion and at the extreme of extroversion. 

Conclusion
The introverts stay at home on a sunny day, the extroverts stay out on a rainy day, and the ambiverts take advantage of the sun and steer clear of the rain.

Fr. Jorge Amaro, IMC

3 Attitudes Towards Anger: Aggressive - Passive - Assertive

Anybody can become angry – that is easy, but to be angry with the right person and to the right degree and at the right time and for the right purpose, and in the right way – that is not within everybody’s power and is not easy. Aristotle

Love and anger are the most basic emotions of the human being. They are the Eros and Thanatos of Freud, the positive and negative poles of human energy, the Yin and Yang of the Orient, and the affection and aggression that permeate all human actions.

Aggression is as necessary as affection and the optimum dosage of both in everyday life is a matter of learning. Both energies must be sublimated so that we can make good use of them, at the individual as well as at the social level. Problem arises when the education on anger management during early childhood is inadequate. Parents inadvertently pass on to their children their good or bad ways of managing anger.

The nature and the origin of anger
Anger is like fire, you can only put it out at the first spark. After that, it’s too late. Giovanni Papini

Anger is born of fear and a feeling of weakness or inferiority. If you have courage or determination, you’ll feel less and less fear and, as a result, you’ll feel less frustrated and angry. Dalai Lama

Anger, rage, wrath and fury are several words to designate the same feeling or reactive emotion which we feel in the face of adversity that can manifest itself in events, persons or things that antagonize us. It is a natural feeling: without anger, life would not be possible, therefore, in itself, and from a natural point of view, it is morally neutral, neither positive nor negative, because it is necessary for life.

Having said that anger is a basic emotion, this does not mean that it is a primary emotion. In fact, it is a secondary one; it is just the tip of the iceberg of many other emotions that exist below the “waterline” of our conscience. Anger is an individual’s response to these emotions which are, in fact, primary.

What do I feel before I feel anger, that is, before I get mad? I may feel fear, anxiety, shame, frustration, humiliation, discouragement or sadness. All these feelings may precede and motivate anger. The problem is that anger replaces these primary emotions so quickly that we are not even aware of them; but they are the ones that motivate anger as a reaction, that is, anger is indeed a reaction to these primary emotions.

However, we are only aware that we are angry or, very often, not even that. It may happen that others on seeing us angry may confront us and draw attention to the fact that we are angry. Our first reaction is to deny that we are angry, even if the anger has already drawn from us a bad word, an insult or a violent reaction.

Anger is a powerful emotion: either we control it or it controls us. The function of anger is to protect us against the environment and other people. When negative thoughts result from negative primary emotions, like the ones we have mentioned, and fill us, all we need next is a trigger from any situation to make us blow up. Everything happens in a flash of time.

Anger management is only possible if I give myself time to figure out the primary emotions that motivate it. Where there is smoke there is fire, every primary emotion is already a reaction to an unmet need. The primary emotions that we listed above as origin of anger are themselves a reaction to a human need that is not being met.

Once these needs are discovered, all we need to do is to satisfy them properly and the feeling of anger implodes, like the explosives placed to demolish a building, which cause the structure to implode on itself rather than explode and project debris in all directions.

There are two types of anger: just or justifiable anger and unjust or unjustifiable anger which is a personal and referential wrath. The two are similar or may even have the same outcome in as far as action, intensity and violence, but the objective is very different. Furthermore, one is controlled by those who use it, the other or the referential one usually controls those who use it; the righteous anger is proactive, the referential one is reactive and has to do with the shortcomings of our upbringing.

Justified or righteous anger
But woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you lock people out of the kingdom of heaven. For you do not go in yourselves, and when others are going in, you stop them. Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites, because you devour widows’ houses, and for a pretense you make long prayers; therefore you will receive greater condemnation. Matthew 3:13-14

Then they came to Jerusalem. And he (Jesus) entered the temple and began to drive out those who were selling and those who were buying in the temple, and he overturned the tables of the money-changers and the seats of those who sold doves; and he would not allow anyone to carry anything through the temple. He was teaching and saying, ‘Is it not written, “My house shall be called a house of prayer for all the nations”? But you have made it a den of robbers.’ Mark 11:15-17

Jesus of Nazareth, as a person who is 100% human, experienced anger many times in his life precisely because he encountered much adversity and antagonism, especially among the scribes, Pharisees and doctors of the law. He certainly felt anger because his contemporaries were obtusely closed to his message, and faced with the powerlessness to change them, he wept over Jerusalem (Luke 19:41-44). Crying is, in fact, one of the best ways to get rid of negative emotions like anger.

We have just exemplified the times when Jesus’ actions were motivated by anger, that is, he expressed it in the accusations he repeatedly made against the leaders of the people and in the cleansing of the Temple of sellers and their wares. On these two occasions, we can see the marks that distinguish righteous anger from referential anger:

Adequate and proportional – Righteous anger is controlled by the person who uses it, that is, the person who uses it never loses his temper because he has no intention of infringing damage on others. It is controlled and appropriate like the anger parents use with their children: they do not want to harm them, on the contrary, they fear that their children’s behaviour will be self-destructive.

It has no relation to the past – Contrary to the referential anger that comes from the individual past of the angry person, what motivates and arouses justified anger belongs to the present and is, in itself, evident to everyone’s eyes.

Altruistic anger – The objective of the anger is to restore harmony, justice and peace. This was the case with Jesus. He was never angry for personal reasons, as it is the case with referential anger, but was angry to defend the poor from their oppressors. It is in this sense that I call it a selfless anger, in opposition to the referential anger which is selfish.

Referential anger
Anger is never without a reason, but seldom with a good one. Benjamin Franklin

In defining referential anger, we realize that it serves the opposite of everything we have said about just anger. It is neither adequate nor proportionate or controlled: on the contrary, it is often disproportional and inadequate, and it does not have the good of others as its goal, but rather some selfish or even petty reason. Often it is the anger that controls the angry person and not the other way around.

The origin of this anger lies in the past, that is, it is contained in the person who lives in anger and only needs a situation or event to trigger it; that is why it is called referential since it was generated from a past event as the person at that time did not express it because he was in a position of inferiority, for example, because he was still a child, he ended up suppressing or repressing it.

A classic example of repressed anger is seen in the case of the boss who harshly rebukes the employee; the latter not being able to unload his anger back on the boss, gets home and takes it on his wife for the smallest of reason, the wife then takes it on her son and the son then kicks the dog or cat, hoping that the latter will know how to deal better with the anger because there is no one below it to take it out on.

In this case, the anger came out of the individual and was not repressed or suppressed, it fell on another person who served as a punching bag. Referential anger comes from a more distant past: an episode, or episodes, that gave rise to it were serious abuses of authority over a defenceless person who had no way of expressing the anger which evidently was internalized. Time can make the person forget the facts that gave rise to this anger, but it does not erase the anger and many times even strengthens it.

This internalized anger does not disappear and whenever an event in the present bears similarities to the one in the past, unconsciously our psyche looks for that anger, connects to it and expresses presently what he was not able to express at that time, in the past. Rage is triggered when present events or persons are interpreted in a similar way to past events or persons.

At every infraction in the present, we unconsciously see the monsters of the past and react as we should have done at that time. It is clear that the righteous ends up paying for the sinner. The person in the present upon whom we unload our anger is only a scapegoat to the anger that we have accumulated and which was not discharged at the time when and where the anger first originated.

Cervantes, the author of the book Don Quixote of the Mancha, describes this case very well in the famous and emblematic scene of the windmills. Don Quixote and his squire Sancho Pança were riding through La Mancha when they spotted about thirty to forty windmills. Don Quixote addressed his squire Sancho Pança, “Do you see those giants over there?”, “What giants?” Sancho Pança asked. “Those that you see over there with long arms.”

Despite Sancho Pança’s warning and realism that he only sees windmills, Don Quixote charged towards the windmills, thinking they were giants. Don Quixote saw in them his enemies from the past who were giants to him and who had defeated him; but at this moment, he found enough courage in himself to defeat them.

How the Non-Violent Communication sees anger
Anger is a suicidal expression of an unmet need. Michael Rosenberg

We deceive ourselves when we think that our feelings are the result of what others say or do. Instead of looking inward for the cause of our anger, or any other feelings or emotions, we look outward, blaming others, and searching for a scapegoat and often discharging our anger at it in the form of vengeance or punishment.

Anger is to its cause like smoke is to fire; where there is smoke there is fire; where there is anger there is a need of ours that is not getting met, it is this need that is the true cause of the anger and not what the other person said or did.

Rosenberg gives the example of a prisoner in a Swedish prison, when asked what the prison authorities had done to provoke his anger, the prisoner replied, “I made a request to them three weeks ago, and they haven’t responded yet.” The prisoner made a pure observation without mixing in any evaluation, that is, without qualifying the behaviour of the prison authorities; however, the stimulus seems to coincide with the cause, that is, he blames the authorities for his anger.

When he turns within to find the reason or the cause of his anger, he discovers that what in fact he feels is fear of getting out of prison without receiving the training he requested in order to be able to support himself financially. What causes anger is not what others say or do, but our interpretation and negative evaluation of what they say or do, as well as what we tell ourselves.

In the case of the prisoner, he discovers that he was angry because he thought it was not fair the way he was being treated, that they were not treating him right. We feel angry because we interpret and deem as bad, unjust, inhuman, the behaviour of the one who triggered our anger. The behaviour triggers the anger but the cause is our interpretation of this behaviour and the verdict we pass on the people by judging them as selfish, unjust, cruel etc.

Anger results from focusing our attention on what the other person “should” or “should not” do and judging them as being “wrong” or “bad” or “selfish” etc. Anger keeps us focused on what we don’t like instead of helping us connect with our needs. By shifting the focus of our attention to asking what needs of ours are not getting met when we accuse others, our feeling of anger disappears or is replaced by feelings that serve life such as fear, disappointment, sadness or pain.

The sentences that we pronounce in judging the one whose behaviour spurred our anger are life-alienating tragic expressions of needs that are not getting met. Instead of looking into ourselves to connect with what we need, we come out of ourselves, and accuse and blame others for our needs not being met.

Going back to the Swedish prisoner, Rosenberg asked him what unmet needs of his lie behind the accusations he made against the prison authorities. The answer did not come easily and that is because most of us are more used to reacting and judging others than to doing exercises of introspection and connecting with what we really need.

Finally, the prisoner said, “Well, my need is to be able to take care of myself when I am released from prison. So, the request I made of the prison officials was to learn a trade while I am an inmate.”

Rosenberg asked the prisoner, “How do you feel now?” He answered, “I’m scared.” In connecting with the need that provoked fear as a primary emotion and anger against the authorities as a secondary emotion, the anger eventually dissolved, imploded as we have said before, and stopped making itself felt.

Recapping what we have said so far, when faced with anger, the first thing to do is to contain it by taking a deep breath, count to 10, then check the primary emotion that underlies the anger by answering the question “why am I angry?” Finally, it is our responsibility to find out what need is this primary emotion referring to and to check that the solution or satisfaction of this need does not lie with the person against whom we are angry.

Reactive versus proactive
A man in a passion rides a mad horse.  Ben Franklin

Much of what we say in this section refers to other emotions and not only to the emotion of anger, but since this is the most reactive of all emotions, everything we say here can be applied to anger when we experience it in an aggressive and explosive manner, that is, reactively.

It goes without saying now that reactive behaviour is our animal behaviour, since it comes from our limbic and reptile brains that have been designed to rid reptiles and mammals of the dangers they encounter in their daily lives.

They are not designed for situations that a human being encounters in himself and with his fellow human beings: in these situations, it is the neocortex that helps us and not the other two. What we know a priori at the theoretical level, however, is not what we apply in our daily lives at the end of the day.

Way of acting – The reactive person acts within a framework of cause-effect, stimulus-response, while the proactive person is aware of his emotions and freely decides what is appropriate to do with them, consciously assumes the reins of his behaviour.

When faced with error – The reactive person says that it is not his fault and if he admits it, he would say that everyone is like that and that to err is human. The proactive person believes that in excusing oneself of a wrongdoing, by saying that everyone does it, serves as a justification only for foolish people. The wise rather than excusing themselves take responsibility and learn from their mistakes.

When faced with adversity – The reactive person feels victimized, discouraged, loss of control, depressed, questions his self-esteem, fears failure and does not act. The proactive person knows that adversity is the best teacher; where there is a crisis, there is an opportunity to grow and discover new things, and a much-felt need sharpens our mind’s creativity to find ways to satisfy it.

When faced with future – The reactive person thinks he is persecuted by misfortunes or thinks that those who succeed in life do not get there by hard work, but rather by luck. He is superstitious and believes in fate or predestination. The proactive person understands that his future and success depend on him, they are in his hands, and that whatever happens will happen because of his ingenuity and effort.

When faced with spending time – The reactive person is always very busy and doesn’t even have time for himself, he is anxious and lives stressed from lack of organization, he often misuses time, wastes it on unimportant things and then has no time for the important ones; he boycotts himself. The proactive person is organized and methodical, so he always finds time for the important things in his life, for himself and others, he lives without stress and anxiety.

When faced with challenges – The reactive person flees away from pain, risk, self sacrifice and challenges, does not face them, and hides his head in the sand like an ostrich. The proactive person faces challenges one by one, with a plan, organization and courage, he believes in taking the bull by its horns, and by not running away from it.

When dealing with commitment – The reactive person makes promises that he does not deliver, he is like the Gospel character who tells his father he will work in the vineyard, but then does not do it, and always finds justification for his sloppy and lazy behaviour. The proactive person is trustworthy and reliable because he does not break his promises. He has a wider perspective and can see the puzzle in its entirety while the reactive one is only fixed on the piece that he is supposed to place in it.

In front of a mirror – The reactive person says “I’m not as bad as they say, there are many worse people than me” while the proactive says “I’m good, but I can be better”, there is room for improvement.

In dialogue – The reactive person does not wait for his turn to speak, interrupts and thinks that what he has to say is more important, is not a good listener and is always thinking of an answer, he wants to win the argument and does not mind losing the opponent; on the other hand, he resists everyone who knows more than him, and only fixates on their faults to throw them back at their face. The proactive person is calm, listens, understands, thinks and responds, and finds positive things in what others say and begins his intervention by mentioning them, respects those who know more than him and tries to learn from them.

When faced with progress – The reactive person resists progress, is in love with the “status quo” and its routines, he thinks it has always been done this way and always will be done this way. The proactive person wants to grow and thinks that there must be a better way to do things. So, in short, the reactive person’s attitude is part of the problem, while the preactive’s person attitude is part of the solution.

Anger management
You have heard that it was said to those of ancient times, “You shall not murder”; and “whoever murders shall be liable to judgment.” But I say to you that if you are angry with a brother or sister, you will be liable to judgment; and if you insult a brother or sister, you will be liable to the council; and if you say, “You fool”, you will be liable to the hell of fire.

So, when you are offering your gift at the altar, if you remember that your brother or sister has something against you, leave your gift there before the altar and go; first be reconciled to your brother or sister, and then come and offer your gift. Matthew 5:21-24

As we saw before, human behaviour is preceded by thoughts and feeling before it reaches action. If we want to stop the action, it is wiser to catch it at the feeling or thought stage than to catch it later. This is true of all thoughts or feelings and even truer in relation to anger. As mentioned above, anger is like fire that is relatively easy to put out if we catch it at the start; but if we let it spread, there will be nothing we can do to stop it.

The longer we spend nursing a resentment, the more we nourish it; in the case of anger, from resentment we move to hatred, from hatred to insult and from insult to action. This is why for Jesus, sin is not only the killing, but all the steps that led to this act; like the good psychologist that he was, Jesus lists these very steps: the feeling of anger, the insult and punishment, these steps are as much a sin as the act of killing.

To safely reduce the high speed of a car, it is preferable to change the gears from 5th to 4th, from 3rd to 2nd, rather than to slam on the brake because the brakes only lock the wheels and not the inertia and the speed of the whole car. On the other hand, there is always one wheel that brakes more than the others dangerously unbalancing the car.

By reducing the gears, I am braking with the engine, that is, I am forcing the whole car to enter into a lower speed and thus reducing the speed of the car safely. I am resolving the problem at its root and not at its manifestation, in the case of the car, reducing the speed at the engine level and not at the wheels. You cannot do this with an automatic car and that makes it less safe than a standard one.

The same is true of our behaviour: if I give free rein to my thoughts and feelings, and try to stop the action, it is like locking the wheels; if on the other hand, I control my thoughts and feelings, I am braking or avoiding the action at my centre where they originate, or from where they are projected.

There are three ways to manage anger: aggressively, passively and assertively. The aggressive is violent, he screams, explodes, takes revenge for everything and nothing, and only realizes the evil he has done after the fact; he is the Incredible Hulk. The passive denies and hides his anger from others, and even from himself; he explodes later without him or others knowing why, or slaps then quickly hides his hand behind his back; he is the terrorist. The assertive distances himself from his anger, he separates the baby from the bath water, denouncing the sin without accusing the sinner; he is the diplomat.

THE AGGRESSIVE
Let no evil talk come out of your mouths, but only what is useful for building up, as there is need, so that your words may give grace to those who hear. (…) Put away from you all bitterness and wrath and anger and wrangling and slander, together with all malice, and be kind to one another, tender-hearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ has forgiven you. Ephesians 4:29, 31-32

• Speak when you are angry and you will make the best speech you will ever regret. Ambrose Bierce 
• Anger is one letter short of danger.  Eleanor Roosevelt. 
• How much more grievous are the consequences of anger than the causes of it. Marco Aurélio 
• Acting with anger is the same as setting the sail in a storm. Euripides 
• If a small thing has the power to make you angry, does that not indicate something about your size? Sydney J. Harris 
• He who angers you, conquers you. Elizabeth Kenny 

Anger, which exists naturally because it has the function of protecting us and launching us into life, when used aggressively goes against our life and those of others, it destroys harmony and only achieves the deadly peace of a cemetery.

Being under the influence of anger is like being under the influence of alcohol: we don’t know what we are saying or what we are doing. Anger envelops our neocortex in a thick fog, can even deactivate it, scoring a KO over it; anger divorces the person from himself, leaving him without any control, completely possessed by the “demon” of anger who makes of the person whatever it wants.

An action not enlightened by reason is an instinctive and animal-like action. The aggressive lives in the past, misinterprets the present because he deals with it from the reptilian brain, which is only adequate for snakes. That’s why we say “he is as bad as a snake” when we want to say that somebody is evil. Or he uses the mammalian brain that was designed for wolves, not for humans; that is why Thomas Hobbes claims that man is wolf of man. The aggressive person is against everything and everyone because he lives with the belief that everything and everyone antagonize him, he trusts no one.

For the aggressive person, the attack is the best defence, he explodes readily, boils in little water; he controls others and seeks power over them, because he has no power or control over himself; he often uses intimidation; is in love with power and never comes to know the power of love. He likes to pull the rug under the feet of others and takes pleasure in unmasking hypocrites.

He uses obscenities, insults with ease, possesses a firm, hard and sharp voice, shouts, rising in tone at the end of his speech. He has a cold and sarcastic tone of voice, he is loquacious, his speech is smooth, without hesitations; he has the tendency to use accusing words, he fixes his eyes on his subjects with the intent to intimidate and dominate. He points with his finger, hits with his fist, and he is impatient.

The farmer’s vengeance
If you are patient in one moment of anger, you will escape a hundred days of sorrow. Chinese proverb

A farmer enraged by a fox that stole his chickens finally manages to catch it. He decides to take his revenge not just by killing it but by first making it suffer all the resentment that it had caused him in the past. He ties the fox’s tail to a thick rope well soaked in oil and sets it on fire. The fox by a strange fatality or irony of fate sets off running in the direction of the farmer’s golden and ripe wheat fields. It is harvest time, but as the consequence of his revenge, that year the farmer is left with no crops to harvest.

Whoever wants to do evil, the evil will return to him. The spell has turned against the wizard. What goes around comes around.
   
Much more positive is the story of Buddha, who as he passed from village to village with his disciples, the villagers would throw insults at him as they believed he was perverting the youth with his ideas. At one point, one of his disciples could stand it no longer asked the master, “But don’t you hear the insults the villagers are throwing at you?” to which the master replied, “yes, I do hear them, they are insulting me but I don’t feel insulted.”

The domino effect of anger
When one responds to anger with anger, inevitably it increases exponentially in intensity and involves more and more people; this phenomenon is called the spiral of violence. But anger or violence also has a domino effect, as the following story shows:

While the family was having breakfast, the little girl accidentally knocked a cup of coffee that ended up staining her father’s white shirt. He scolded her severely and she began to cry. He then blamed his wife for having left the cup too close to the edge of the table, and the wife reacted by starting a verbal battle.

Defeated and grumbling, the father went to change his shirt and when he came back, the girl was till crying and ended up missing her school bus. The wife went to work upset, and the father had to drive his daughter to school. Since he was already late for work, he went over the speed limit and was caught and fined by the police. He finally arrived at the school and the girl quickly got out of the car without saying goodbye to her father.

When he arrived late at the office, his boss gave him a lecture on punctuality and on top of this, he suddenly realized that he had left his briefcase at home. He had to return home to retrieve his briefcase, and had to listen to more impropriety from the boss. At the end of the day, he went home to an atmosphere so stormy and cold that one could cut it with a knife.

Whose fault was all that? It was his and only his. Accidents like a cup falling off the table are quite common and they are nobody’s fault, but the way we react to them is completely our responsibility. All he had to do was to say, “It’s okay, it can happen to anyone,” and the day would have been very different.

PASSIVE
Be angry but do not sin; do not let the sun go down on your anger, and do not make room for the devil. Ephesians 4:26-27

• Anger is an acid that can do more harm to the vessel in which it is stored than to anything on which it is poured. Mark Twain 
• Bitterness is like cancer. It eats upon the host. But anger is like fire. It burns it all clean. Maya Angelou 
• Learn this from me. Holding anger is a poison. It eats you from the inside. We think that hating is a weapon that attacks the person who harmed us. But hatred is a curved blade. And the harm we do, we do to ourselves.  Mitch Albom 
• Holding on to anger is like grasping a hot coal with the intent of throwing it at someone else; you are the one who gets burned. Buddha 
• Resentment is like drinking poison and waiting for the other person to die. Saint Augustine 

“Evil stays with those who practice it”, says the proverb, and anger harms especially those who feel it and not so much those who receive it, unless those who receive it are children. Suppressing or repressing anger is really deceiving oneself, since neither neutralizes the anger, it does not go away but enters into the unconscious because the conscious denies it.

Anger is not lost, what is lost is the control over it. For the emotional and physical health of the person, an explosion would be better than to keep it bottled up. Even if we have told ourselves that what happened is of no value, our unconscious gives it due value and defends us, in some way, from ourselves.

Suppression can erase our feelings towards people, it can place mines that at some point can explode and harm the people who live around us. Unresolved chronic anger can lead to health issues such as ulcers and depression.

The passive person gives in to the exaggerated demands of other people. He suffers from apathy, lets others control his life, and is uncritically submissive. He never offers his opinion before others give theirs. He never criticizes or makes a negative comment, he assumes guilt even when it is not his fault.

His voice is sometimes fragile or soft, in a monotone, it is extremely timid or quiet and so silent that it often trails off at the end. The flow of speech is hesitant and full of pauses and doubts, he clears his throat frequently, puts on a fake smile when he is irritated or criticized, raises his brows always expecting a rebuke, etc.  The eye contact is evasive and downcast.

What makes a person passive? Probably everyone in the family was so considerate and helpful that the child never had the opportunity to practice saying no. Obedience may have been so deeply rooted in the child that he cannot rethink things for himself as an adult. 

Passive aggressive
The passive aggressive person is the combination of the aggressive and the passive type. Many passive people are, in fact, passive aggressive. To better understand them, we have to compare them with the aggressive ones. The aggressive person is frontal, declares and fights in an open war; the passive aggressive person, on the other hand, is more like the cowardice attitude of terrorism – a combination of aggression with the fear of expressing it openly.

To a large extent, the person is not aware of this behaviour, of slapping someone’s face then hiding his hand, or of having negative behaviours towards the person he seeks to distance himself. For example, the housewife who is angry with her husband without blatantly showing it, cooks meals that he does not like or puts too much salt in it to spite him.

The passive aggressive person forgets commitments and things that have an impact on people’s lives, confuses everything accidentally. He makes sarcastic statements, is not punctual, is stubborn, often has headaches or backaches or invents them. He fails on purpose or performs his tasks poorly so that they replace him. He is happy when things go wrong.

ASSERTIVE
‘Why do you ask me? Ask those who heard what I said to them; they know what I said.’ When he had said this, one of the police standing nearby struck Jesus on the face, saying, ‘Is that how you answer the high priest?’ Jesus answered, ‘If I have spoken wrongly, testify to the wrong. But if I have spoken rightly, why do you strike me?’ John 18:21-23

Postpone today's anger until tomorrow. Filipino proverb

The High Priest was not following the Roman or the Jewish law; in fact, he was breaking the law by directly interrogating the defendant. What he should have done was to question the witnesses. Jesus in his intervention alluded to the law and the practice of the law, but he did this without accusing the High Priest of doing something illegal.

The assertive person mentions the sin, being careful not to accuse the sinner in the hope that the sinner himself on seeing the sin and its effects or consequences on his victims will end up accusing himself and recognizing his mistake. Accusing the sinner of his sin is usually counterproductive since the sinner’s tendency is to defend himself when feeling attacked and will try to justify his indiscretion.

Jesus behaved assertively when the soldier struck him on the face. He did not react aggressively by words or actions, he forced the soldier to question his own action, to let go of his reptilian and limbic brains and to use his neocortex, seeking within it a justification for his aggression by asking him, “Why do you strike me?”

The aggressive person aims to punish while the assertive seeks to help the person who erred. He tries to be understanding and flexible, and is willing to look for alternatives. He recognizes that we all have flaws, and knows that even the best of us sometimes make mistakes. He knows the value of forgiveness, recognizes that one can always improve, does not say enough is enough, and never gives up on anyone, or cuts anyone out of his life forever.

He is able to defend his own rights without violating the rights of others. He can express his own needs, desires, opinions, feelings and beliefs directly, honestly and appropriately.

The assertive person has in mind that when someone addresses him angrily for no apparent reason, this anger is referential and at that moment he represents to that person someone from his past. Therefore, the anger is not towards him, but towards a monster in the past, which at that moment he represents. This is particularly true in schools when students revolt against the teachers.

The assertive person takes responsibility for his own feelings, reveals the wounds that the action of the other person has caused him, but without accusing him, in the hope that the other person will also become aware of his action. He never tells others that they irritate him, nor calls them names or labels them, but he takes responsibility for his own anger when he feels it. Even when angry he recognizes virtues and not only defects in the one who aroused his anger.

Using the subject ‘I’ instead of ‘You’
Aggressive – (You) are always interrupting my stories.
Assertive – (I) would like to tell stories without being interrupted.
Aggressive – (You) embarrassed me in front of all those people.
Assertive – (I) felt embarrassed when you said that in front of all those people.

Using factual descriptions instead of value judgments or exaggerations
Aggressive – This work is garbage.
Assertive – The punctuation in your report needs more work. In addition, the titles are spaced inconsistently.
Aggressive – If you don’t change your attitudes, you’ll have big problems.
Assertive – If you keep coming in after 8:00 a.m., I’ll have to deduct two days’ pay from your salary.

Expressing thoughts, feelings and opinions assuming responsibility for them
Aggressive – He makes me furious (denies responsibility for feelings).
Assertive – I get angry when he doesn’t do what he has promised (responsible for feelings).
Aggressive – The only acceptable policy is to equalize competition (states opinion as if it was a fact, is being aggressive and controlling).
Assertive – I believe that equalizing competition is the best policy (takes responsibility for the opinion).

Like any other feeling or emotion, the feeling of anger is not under our control in certain situations in life, but it is our responsibility to appropriate it, making ourselves responsible both for feeling it because it comes from inside of us, and for the way we manage it.

Fr. Jorge Amaro, IMC