“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(Jane now felt much better. She had received a proof of the dust jacket for her ESP book today, and both of us liked it very much. Her eyes began to open almost as soon as the session began, and she was smoking. Her pace was good.)

The book jacket is indeed one to be proud of, and the book will be a book to be proud of. There is a small matter I would like to clear up. There was no subconscious distortion on Ruburt’s part, when I told you that the nonphysical self book would sell. I am speaking of this instance only.

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.

At the same time the animal was denied the usual constructive psychic atmosphere in which it usually is allowed to operate. The situation in the bedroom was not important in itself. The cat was nervous, bewildered and somewhat frightened however to begin with. The situation was simply the point at which the cat, in self-defense, threw back the destructive energy which it had received, and I must say in fury and full measure, and in the only way it knew.

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.

(Break at 9:32. Jane was as well dissociated, she said, as she has ever been: “He had me so that I was more him than me… Now, how did he do that?” She could have been talking about a stranger, she continued, yet knew what she was saying and that she talked about herself.

She did express this violence, and again with fury, through verbal attacks to which Ruburt was extremely sensitive. But Ruburt did not even dare to express his violence verbally, because of the parent-child relationship. Added to this was the fact that the child loved the parent much more strongly, you see, than the parent ever loved the child.

Now symbolically any attack upon Ruburt becomes an attack by the parent, against which the child in Ruburt dares not retaliate. Flight becomes the only answer, the only sure solution, as flight from the parent was the only solution, for the parent could not run after.

The cat therefore was allowed to chase our friend through the apartment. Beside the rather ordinary humiliation, there was the deep bewilderment, you see, for this was the first time, symbolically, that the parent could pursue physically. If it were not for these early connections Ruburt would not have been so panic-stricken.

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.

Ruburt knew this well. He has since grown to like all animals but at the moment of the attack, you see, the cat instantly became this personification of evil to him, and again his primary concern was to flee. There was never an instant in the whole affair when he thought of striking back.

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.

The child therefore until its teens dared not be anything but docile. The personality was a strong one however, and the rebellion found no outlet except for creativity. Now the present personality suffers pangs of remorse over the slightest imagined wrong it may do to another.

(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.

(Break at 10:36. Jane was again way-out—she had been all evening, she said. Presumably to let the emotionally charged material come through easily. Not all of it was new to us.

If you read this material carefully it can benefit you more than either of you now realize. You are indeed both improving. However since the conditions were right this evening, this was the time to give you this material.

(End at 11:12. Jane said she was very well dissociated—if possible, even more so after the Instream material. Her eyes had been open almost all the session, her manner very active, her pace quite good at times.)