Turning People Into Nothing

LUSION: to play, to deceive
Illusion: conscious self-deception
Delusion: total self-deception
Elusion: self-deception by meta-pretence
Collusion: mutual self-deception

“From the moment of birth, when the stone-age baby confronts the twentieth-century mother, the baby is subjected to these forces of violence, called love, as its mother and father have been, and their parents and their parents before them. These forces are mainly concerned with destroying most of its potentialities. This enterprise is on the whole successful”

"Between truth and a lie there is room for the most curious and subtle ambiguities and complexities in the person's disclosure or concealment of himself"

R.D. Laing (1961) 'Self and Others' [Tavistock]

"Heft"

the unconscious experience of physical gravity pulling the body down toward the Earth; and, since the dawn of civilization, the unconscious experience of social gravity - the existential weight of other people's expectations about who you are and how you should think, feel and behave.