Journal Article

Binaries: Psychodynamic Insights in a World View Split Apart

Allcorn, Seth

2022

Overview

The natural world around us including our interpersonal and organizational worlds is universally subjected to a form of perception and thinking, that by its nature distorts our ability to make sense of our experience. The question of the underlying origin of splitting asa psychological defense against anxiety generated by threatening \"not us or me\" binary lived experience and thought suggests one way to understand the boundary between the good andbad implicit in defensive splittingresides in a more fundamental cognitive dynamic that is polarizing and lacking a middle \"position\" anchored at either end of a range by the product of the good/bad splitting. PROVISO Resident in the notion of binary self-experience that contributes to if not forms the basis of fear and threat (not me or us) that leads to \"signal\" anxiety and psychological defensiveness is the ever-present temptation to reduce these dynamics to a single factor of analysis. A theory of everything or a single explanation of the cosmos is the gold standard for physicists who study the very large and the very small.

• Publisher: Association for Psychohistory, Inc
• Subject: Anxiety / Decision making / Genocide / Mercantilism / Nature / Threats