Refund and Reparation

For example, if you take a girl who has been jilted or something like that, you will find she has a tendency to leave herself. She has been left and this says that she is not worth much. The interposition says she has been left, and there is charge on it; her own self-determinism is filtered by this action that she has observed, so she treats herself as somebody that she would leave.

This doesn’t mean that she goes into the valence of her former lover. In the past you have treated all of these manifestations—mostly all of them—as manifestations of valence, and I am showing you that just plain, ordinary, run-of-the-mill circuits and locks act in this fashion too. Because this is not valence; she doesn’t go into the lover’s valence. "I want to stay home tonight and sew," she says to herself. All of a sudden she will have a feeling like maybe she shouldn’t stay home tonight, maybe she ought to go out someplace and walk—she just ought to sort of leave; but when she leaves she may walk faster and faster. What she is trying to do is leave herself—all this is perfectly rational conduct—and she will go on trying to leave herself to a large and remarkable degree.

But that is not so observable in people as, for instance, their treatment of their physical person.

When loverboy shoved off he invalidated her, and in addition to invalidating her he went through this dramatization of leaving which laid in a lock—a charge—and sometimes a secondary. This invalidated her. Her worth and value is not as great as it was before because he showed her that it wasn’t, so she has a tendency to regard herself and her person with the same disregard that she was shown by the person who left her. After this person leaves her she has a tendency to neglect herself. She thinks, "I will dress up," and instead of dressing up she just lets herself go. She is treating herself as other people treated her, as another person treated her.

More important than this, her self-determinism when she was a child was interrupted, let us say, on the subject of clothes. She was made to keep her clothes clean. So now when she comes along in life and gets her clothes dirty she gets mad at herself. She forces herself to keep her clothes clean. Let us say that her natural response to a beautiful day would be to get out and walk, sit on the grass and enjoy herself. But she can’t sit on the grass and enjoy herself because she might get her clothes dirty. It doesn’t even matter if she is wearing old clothes; she still has this slight reaction in this regard. She cannot extrovert because she is being forced, although the person who did this forcing may have been dead this long while. She forces herself into certain activities, but "I" doesn’t do the forcing. "I" just starts to-do the action and she gets a filter reaction of forcing herself to do what she has been forced to do.

"Let’s take a bath. All right, take a bath. I’m going to take a bath, but I have to force myself to take a bath. I don’t want to take a bath, but I’ve got to take a  bath." You see how schizophrenic this begins to sound? Nevertheless, schizophrenia—multiple personality—only starts to take place when these interruptions get built up and charged to a point where the person has enormous valence walls. Everybody has tons of these little tiny shadow valences.