The Three Christs of Ypsilanti - Milton Rokeach [13]
As Helen Merrell Lynd writes in On Shame and the Search for Identity: “[The child’s] developing sense of himself and the developing sense of the world about him increase concurrently. Expectation and having expectation met are crucial in developing a sense of coherence in the world and in oneself.
“Sudden experience of a violation of expectation, of incongruity between expectation and outcome, results in a shattering of trust in oneself, even in one’s own body and skill and identity, and in the trusted boundaries or framework of the society and the world one has known. As trust in oneself and in the outer world develop together, so doubt of oneself and of the outer world are also intermeshed …
“Shattering of trust in the dependability of one’s immediate world means loss of trust in other persons, who are the transmitters and interpreters of that world.”[4]
Our trust in the dependability of the physical world is rarely an issue in our daily lives, and we do not hear of people becoming neurotic or psychotic because this trust is violated. But, in our complex social relationships, the need for person constancy (which includes group constancy) is often disrupted through such adverse learning experiences as severe punishment, trauma, or the inculcation of shame and guilt. It is in contexts like these that the individual is likely to develop primitive beliefs that have no social support whatever. Such beliefs—phobias, for example, or obsessions, delusions, hallucinations—seem to be a second-best way of achieving constancy in the face of adverse experience. The person who holds them relies solely on his own subjective experience; he abandons social support altogether.
One need not go into the realm of such severe psychopathology to find examples of this development. The child who unconsciously believes he is unloved and unlovable, the person who believes he lives in a hostile and friendless world, the one who believes himself to have some deep-seated inferiority—all, in the present view, hold primitive beliefs that have no social support. It is primitive beliefs like these that lead to neurotic anxieties and conflicts and bring people into psychotherapy. In psychotherapy, their problems are resolved through the establishment of what psychoanalysts call the transference relationship—a relationship in which the patient unconsciously transfers to the analyst all the positive and negative feelings he had, as a child, toward his parents. In working through the transference with the therapist, the patient brings to awareness his previously unconscious responses to these external authorities of his childhood and, at the same time, establishes new and current external authorities in whom he feels trust. In this fashion, by testing the primitive beliefs of his childhood against the realities of his contemporary life, he is enabled to abandon the earlier neurotic beliefs.
Primitive beliefs are, however, only part of a person’s total system of beliefs. What about the others? Non-primitive beliefs can be divided into three groups: (1) beliefs about the authorities to rely on in relation to controversial matters; (2) peripheral beliefs derived from these authorities; and (3) inconsequential beliefs. Such beliefs, which develop out of primitive beliefs and stand in a functional relationship to them, seem to serve the purpose of helping the individual to round out his picture of the world, rationally and realistically to the extent possible, and irrationally and defensively to the extent necessary. Unlike primitive beliefs, however, they are not completely taken for granted. Even though they may be deeply cherished, we learn to expect and even to tolerate differences of opinion or controversy about them. Belief in God, for example, is of such