Hauntings: Dispelling the Ghosts Who Run Our Lives

In the face of any compelling message we have three tendencies. First we are inclined to serve the message, repeat it, identify with it, and replicate it—the more so as the model operates unconsciously within. The second most common reaction is to react against the model and its explicit and implicit messages. “I will be anything but like my mother

But even more, and paradoxically, that repetition to feel our chosen pain is still preferable to reexperiencing the primal pain anew.

But I'm inclined to think that we're all ghosts . . . it's not only the things that we've inherited from our fathers and mothers that live on in us, but all sorts of old dead ideas and old dead beliefs, and

We may add to that: what we resist in time becomes pathology, either through platitudinous, superficial lives or embodied as addictions, depressions, or obsessions with those objects upon which the unlived life has been projected. We may confess instead that what we resist will persist, as haunting.

things of that sort. They're not actually alive in us, but they're rooted there all the same, and we can't rid ourselves of them. I've only to pick up a newspaper, and when I read it I seem to see ghosts gliding between the lines. I should think there must be ghosts all over the country—as countless as grains

[Are we] related to something infinite or not? That is the telling question of [one's] life . . . If we understand and feel that here in this life we already have a link with the infinite, desires and attitudes change. In the final analysis, we count for something only because of the essential we embody, and if we do not embody that, life is wasted

The past is not dead; it is not even past. And what we resist will persist—as haunting.

So, told or untold, the archaic stories ineluctably manifest through our unconscious choices, our aversions, our preoccupations, our projections, and our agendas and replay themselves in the recognizable patterns which constitute the human story.

All relationships, all relationships, involve two elemental psychological mechanisms at all times: projection and transference.