“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Now, I am glad to see that our friend Ruburt is again spry, good-natured, and himself again.

Usually his aggressive feelings are automatically sublimated into his work. He grapples with ideas and with words. The destructive energy however found no outlet. It therefore took the point of least resistance, and he quite subconsciously of course projected it upon his pet. It was not that he actually focused the energy purposely upon the cat, merely that the cat’s spongelike psychic nature received it full force.

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.

I am trying to explain this rather thoroughly, for once he realizes these connections he will not need to fear this quite human and natural aggressiveness. It only turns into violence, and into a fear of violence, when it is so meticulously denied.

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.

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.

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.