by Ozodi Osuji
Psyche means mind;
Therapy means change of what is in the mind.
The purpose of psychotherapy is to help the individual to understand his ego self, how he employs the various ego defense mechanisms in defending his desired ego, help him give up the wish for a certain type of ego, and stop defending that wished-for ego and subsequently live from his real self, which in religious categories is the Christ self, that is, the loving self.
Ozodi Osuji
Let us talk about a person that psychoanalysts call neurotic. This person presents with a desire to be powerful and perfect. His wish is for him to be a perfect and powerful person. He is not who he wishes to be.
You are not your thoughts and wishes. There is a you who wishes for another you that you want to be. Somewhere along the line you have forgotten that the person you want to become is not you but is merely a wished-for alternative self.
Something in your childhood persuaded you to believe that who you are is weak, powerless, and imperfect, and you resolved to become a perfect and powerful alternative self. It could have been medical issues that made you feel inferior or social experiences where other people, especially your significant others (parents, siblings, teachers, peers), told you that you are not good.
Whatever its origin, by age five you were already feeling that who you are is not good, and you used your mind to construct a self that you would like to become, a powerful, perfect self, the opposite of who you think that you are, in fact.
Once the desired important and perfect self is established in childhood, it now influences everything that you do. You are no longer spontaneous in your behavior because you are thinking that if you make mistakes, other people will laugh at you and/or reject you. So, you act properly at all times. You are serious, always on guard to make sure that you do the right thing, not make mistakes, and not seem like a fool.
Your life is now an act, not authentic and spontaneous. You are obviously not powerful or perfect; no human being is, but you are acting as if you were.
Acting at all times as somebody that you are not takes a toll on you. It takes a lot of mental energy to keep pretending to be who you are not.
The neurotic child who is acting as who he is not, is a poor learner at school; most of his energy is put into acting as if he is perfect, making sure that he does not make mistakes, thus leaving him little or no energy to do the learning at school.
He does not make friends easily because he thinks, if I approach other kids for friendship, they will see that I am not good enough and reject me, and he fears rejection, so he keeps to himself so as not to be rejected.
This person is tense and anxious from the fear he experiences watching himself lest he make mistakes and become no good and socially rejected. He has developed anxiety neurosis (he has avoidant personality disorder).
Some elementary and secondary school pupils have anxiety neurosis. They are living with tremendous anxiety. Anxiety is a noxious sensation and not the best way to live.
In psychoanalytic terms, this person is using the various ego defense mechanisms to defend their ego. They defend their wish for an ideal, powerful self whenever they pretend to be perfect and powerful; they feel inferior and compensate with desired superiority.
The ego defense mechanisms are repression, denial, dissociation, projection, displacement, rationalization, fantasy, reaction-formation, sublimation, avoidance, minimization, pride, shame, blaming, acting out, aggression, and others.
Let us see how adults employ ego defense mechanisms. Most contemporary Africans know that they and their countries are considered unproductive. They cannot even feed themselves. They look around for someone to blame for their pathetic situation. They blame Europeans for making them poor by stealing all their raw materials.
Their encounter with Europeans is less than five hundred years, and their close encounter with them is less than two hundred years, and for some reason they believe that within those two hundred years of Europeans colonialism, Europe made Africa what it is today.
Mankind actually evolved in Africa about 300, 000 years ago. What were Africans doing during those 300, 000 years before they encountered Europeans in 1460 AD and were enslaved in the Americas in 1500 AD?
By the way, what made Africans easily enslaved? Today, if you wish to enslave Africans, many Africans will sell themselves into slavery. They are voluntarily going to Europe and North America to do menial jobs for white folks.
Why is Africa unable to govern itself well? Why is it always doing the wrong things that every person with eyes can see?
I do not see Africans’ contributions to physics, chemistry, biology, astronomy, geology, and technology. I see a continent that has given mankind nothing of value in science but gives other people their physical labor. Why?
Claiming that Egypt was African changes nothing in the here and now world. Egypt is in the Mediterranean world, and those who live in such places tend to be brown in color, so ancient Egyptians were brown in color (some of them still live in today’s Egypt, and they are a brown people, not negroid people like Nigerians, Ghanaians, and other Africans under the Sahara Desert).
A contemporary African is aware that he and his people are nowhere in the world of achievements. What does his mind do? He tells himself that it is Europeans who made him unachieving and poor, not the Arabs who enslaved him for almost two thousand years and castrated him, cut off his penis, and had him guard his harem of women (is that insulting or what?).
Our African feels inferior and inadequate and tries to mitigate his sense of inferiority by blaming white people, and that is generalized to blaming anybody around him, members of other ethnic groups, even other members of his family; nothing is ever his fault. In blaming other people, he manages to see himself as good.
Africans overuse the ego defense mechanisms of denial and projection; they deny what they see in themselves and project it to other people. They cause themselves poverty, deny it, and blame Europeans for causing it.
They see themselves as victims and see other people as their victimizers and blame them for their unenviable status in the contemporary world.
When an African blames Europeans for his problems, other Africans join him in blaming Europeans for their problems. Misery loves company.
When you blame other people for causing your problems, you have denied responsibility for causing them and hence do not solve them.
Africans blame other people for their issues and do not take responsibility for them and have not solved one problem since they technically gained independence from Europe 70 years ago.
They cannot even manage agriculture and feed themselves, even though the Congo alone has enough land to feed all one billion Africans (California feeds the entire USA, more or less).
THE GOAL OF PSYCHOTHERAPY
In neurosis, the individual has issues that prevent him from living fully. Something in his unconscious and conscious mind prevents him from living fully and actualizing his potential. If he is lucky and goes to a psychotherapist, the therapist points out his ego defenses and tells him to gradually stop using them, give them up, and retain the inevitable ones.
If a human being completely gives up his entire ego defenses, he will live as we imagine the gods live, freely.
Those on earth must have some neurosis, hence not living fully. All human beings are neurotics, some more so than others.
The so-called normal person is just a neurotic who is not aware that he is one. Consider Donald Trump. Developmentally, he is about five years old, asking for his mommy and daddy’s attention. His narcissism will make a five-year-old boy blush, but he is not aware of it. He wants the entire world to be called Planet Trump to gratify his narcissistic desire to seem important and hide his total sense of inferiority that he is trying very desperately to hide.
Those we call psychotics are folks who have checked out from the game. The schizophrenic is living in his world where he is the creator of the world, God, hence very important; the manic is there with the schizophrenic; the depressed person feels bad because she is not godlike; the deluded person wishes importance and merely claims it, but those around him see that he is not.
If you dropped out of high school and now call yourself Dr this or that, you are obviously deluded.
Virtually illiterate Nigerians buy doctorate degrees and masquerade around as doctors even though they cannot talk at the level of secondary school graduates.
A psychotherapist, after observing you for a while, understands your mental status: normal, neurotic, or psychotic. He then shows you the ego defenses you habitually employ and tells you to give up using them and try to live from your real self regardless of what you think of it.
So, you think that your real self is imperfect because your significant others told you so, and you pretend to be perfect; well, you are not perfect, and no human being is perfect; therefore, stop trying to be perfect; stop wishful thinking and the defenses you employ to defend them; you should simply live from whatever your real self is.
You may not even know what your real self is, because all your life, you have been pretending to be an especially important person.
WHO ARE NEUROIICS?
Yesterday, I sat at a sidewalk café and watched people walk by. They carried themselves as if they were special, saw their bodies as important, saw their egos as particularly important. They were properly dressed. If you were to take away their clothes, they would immediately feel shame, feel like their bodies are not good enough. They use clothes to hide the body of which they are ashamed.
People are ashamed of what their bodies do, such as defecation, sex, etc.; above all, they know that their bodies will die and rot.
The human body is nothing, but people deny that fact and pretend that their bodies are important. Touch them without their invitation, and they would have you arrested and sent to jail to teach you not to devalue their bodies. They take proper care of their bodies only to see them die and become food for worms.
They bedeck their bodies in expensive clothing and fine jewelry, feed them, house them, work to have the money to support them, yet those bodies will die and rot.
What do you think that people are doing? They know that their bodies are nothing. They deny the sense of nothingness and worthlessness of their bodies by all the efforts they make to seem important.
Civilization is a futile effort to seem like people are important. A deluded power-drunk comes along and reminds people that they are nothing.
In today’s academia, criticize Trump and your university is defunded, and you are out of a job, so all the little cowards that call themselves professors keep quiet as the Mar-a-Lago madman destroys the USA.
THE PURPOSE OF PSYCHOTHERAPY
A psychotherapist asks you: do you want to be happy and live peacefully and authentically? If so, then understand how you defend your self-concept and eventually stop defending it. Give up your ego defenses and live from your authentic self, whatever that may be. Stop wishing to be powerful and perfect and just be.
WHO ARE PSYCHOTHERAPISTS?
Officially, Psychiatrists, psychologists, and counselors are psychotherapists. However, these days psychiatrists merely give people medications that eventually destroy their livers and kidneys and seldom have ten minutes to talk to their patients. Psychologists do psychological testing and tell you what your IQ and personality are and are seldom able to do psychotherapy. Counselors and social workers generally have a master’s degree-level of education; they seldom bother with what is going on in the human unconscious mind.
A psychotherapist is anyone who helps you to understand your personality, your habitual behavior pattern, how you defend your ego self, and helps you to stop defending your ego as much as possible and live from your real self, whatever that may turn out to be.
In successful psychotherapy, you stop wishing for an alternative ideal perfect self, stop the desire for a powerful self, you give up your ego defenses, and in the end, you give up the ego self that you made for yourself, and try to find out who is behind the ego mask of importance.
What you will find will surprise you; you might find that you are not your body and ego; you may find that you are a formless part of a formless being that folks call God.
For now, we just note that psychotherapists make an effort to make their clients stop defending their desired self that gives them anxiety; they help them live from their authentic self, hence have less anxiety.
CULTURE AND NEUROTIC DESIRE FOR IMPORTANCE
What are people doing but pretending to be important, and that pretense is reinforced by their society?
Culture is a means of making the animals called human beings see themselves as if they are important, whereas to nature, they are similar to other animals.
Culture and biology are so intertwined that it is difficult to know which is more in causing people to do what they do.
Do we speak because of a biological predisposition to do so or because other people around us speak, hence functioning as a stimulus for our brain to develop speaking? It is not either-or; biology, language, and culture interact to make people do what they do.
I once dealt with an autistic boy. He looked like his age but had nothing inside his brain because he was raised by an absent father (his mother had abandoned him). He did not have social stimulation to become a human being, so his brain stopped using the neurons that are used in culture and language.
STOP USING WHATEVER EGO DEFENSE MECHANISMS YOU EMPLOY TO MAKE YOU SEEM TO BE WHO YOU ARE NOT. LIVE FROM YOUR AUTHENTIC SELF. YOU ARE HEALED OF YOUR NEUROSIS WHEN YOU LIVE FROM YOUR REAL SELF.
WHEN YOU ARE HEALED, YOU LIVE WITH LESS FEAR, ANXIETY, DEPRESSION, DELUSIONS, AND OTHER MENTAL DISORDERS AND LIVE MORE FREELY AND AUTHENTICALLY.
Developing the courage to accept your seeming imperfect self and live authentically is achieved by only a few human beings. Most people pretend to be who they are not, important and perfect selves, and pay a high price in having anxiety, depression, and other mental disorders.
You may not understand how you use the ego defense mechanisms and try to understand how you do so. Thereafter, you must train yourself not to use them.
Understanding is only half the battle; you must put the understanding to work until it becomes your habitual pattern of behavior.
If, for example, you used to pretend to be important and successful, do not wish to be important and successful, and do not pretend to be so either; just live from an inner authentic self that does not play games to seem who you are not in your and other people’s eyes.
Action is what changes people, not just thinking about their problems.
Ozodi Osuji
July 23, 2026
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