“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Now, the other smaller episodes involving Ruburt and the cat alone have always occurred during the same process, only when lesser emotional crises were involved. You were quite right in saying that Ruburt fears violence. This is one of the keynotes of his personality, and rather obviously this has to do with his early life and his mother.

The child even then realized that violence and aggression was somehow connected with his mother’s illness. He also, that is Ruburt also, felt the violence that is a part of his father’s personality. Suddenly the tantrums ceased. He held them back in pure terror of the consequences, for suddenly the violent-tempered mother was immobile. He feared the same fate. The father had completely disappeared. To the child the father simply vanished from the face of the earth, an equally fearful fate.

The child took all this as the punishment for violence. The mother now could no longer be violent in act. Not only that, but she was helpless to resist violence. This made the child hold back the most natural of aggressive feelings. In most cases the child can slap the parent. It may be slapped back, but it knows the slap will not really kill the parent. It is pretend.

In this case the child did not dare slap the parent, for even the slightest move upon the mother’s bed, the slightest most unintentional motion, made the mother cry out in pain. Not only unintentional violence then of the simplest kind, had to be avoided, but the unintentional motion and the thoughtless childish move. This was aggravated because when the mother became frightened she pleaded with the child to sleep with her.

Now. It has always been extremely difficult for him to defend himself physically. As a child he simply would not do so, and to make matters worse the mother taunted him for being a coward.

He projects it so that it seems to originate in the mother. At the same time the mother experiences unrecognized feelings of violence against the daughter, that she has never been able to express in physical terms.

With the particular cat episode, we have something else. The mother had an absolute terror of cats, and considered them the personification of evil. She used the cat symbol as the symbol for her own mother-in-law. She was extremely unbalanced, the mother, emotionally, and considered her husband’s mother, who was a foolishly naive, good-natured and innocent thing, as a personification of evil.

He does not see his mother because he imagines subconsciously that he is protecting her from his own violence against her, lest after all these years it might erupt. Now this is ridiculous. This restrained violence has been excellently used for creative purposes.

When he was not docile as a child there was vicious instant retaliation of a most complicated nature. There was ordinary retaliation, in that he was punished through word attacks, and through such corporal punishment as the invalid could give. But, and here Joseph we come to the real heart of the matter, the mother retaliated in the main not by a direct attack upon the child, but by causing the child to believe that its misbehavior could be, and very nearly was, going to result in the death of the mother. As any child does, the child at times wished for the parent’s death, and here we see the mother acting out her own death in order to punish the child.

This could happen as a result of the smallest transgression, if the mother was in a particularly unstable condition. When the death was not acted out in drama form—this you are familiar with, we shall not go into it here—then instead the mother pretended to have an attack of one kind or another, and she told the child that the child was directly responsible.

(Break at 10:10. Jane was again very well dissociated. She said she could feel herself begin to protest when Seth got to the part concerning her mother’s pretending of death, but Seth led her over the rough spots well.

You grew up in an environment, my dear friend, in which violence and aggressiveness became one, were expressed in some degree by both parents. But this expression was denied to the children, and you longed to retaliate. Your father’s aggressiveness, normal male aggressiveness, was blocked up, and directed against your mother. You longed to express your natural violence, you normal aggressiveness, and you also feared to do so, and dwelled mainly in your own world.

Subconsciously he feels that you are saying shut up, and this angers, humiliates and bewilders him. He struggles against such disclosures to begin with. Instead you see methods can be used to direct the emotions in other channels. You can get him to talk about other matters by asking for example about what he has written for the day. The subject chosen by you must be one in which he is immensely interested however. He will understand that you are merely trying to redirect him, and will not feel that you are restraining his freedom to say what he wants to say. He will understand what you are doing, but that is all right. He knows the emotional situation with your mother, and will not object.