And, the children
struggled together within her. Gen.
25:22 (ASV)
Incessant discussions across all media forms are centered on
the perception, the theory really, that Americans have become an entitlement
society. The prevailing concept of the
ultraconservative is that barely more than half the nation’s adult population
is gainfully employed and forty seven percent of United States households are recipients
of government assistance at one level, or multiple levels. Is this proof of an entitlement society and,
if it is, does it indicate an emotionally regressive state as defined by Murray
Bowen? Is it possible that the
population as a whole has reached the point one might think of it as symbiotic?
Has our country devolved into something
that resembles the governmental womb of peoples so interconnected, adversarial,
and dependent that it would be appropriate to apply the analogy of Jacob and
Esau in Rebekah’s womb? As I process the
current events, I work within the parameters of biblical teaching and family
systems theory.
According to news reports a young adult, twenty years of age,
shoots the mother he cohabits with in the face then proceeds to the nearby elementary
school and shoots the principle and psychologist after an altercation. Next, he enters the kindergarten classroom his
mother teaches and kills twenty of her students. The shooter is misidentified initially based
upon the fact that he is in possession of his elder brother’s
identification. The tragedy ends with
the perpetrators suicide. Investigators find
it remarkable that his home indicates the young man is meticulously keeping his
personal space in order. The parents are
divorced. The father and elder brother
reside in a neighboring state. The
shooter is allegedly developmentally impaired.
Are the cohabitation, impairment, assumption of a brother’s
identity, and choice of targets an indication of symbiosis within the family or
something else? Is it possible he feels
entitled to kill his mother’s students in retribution for some perceived error
committed by his mother? Alternatively, given
the intrafamily dynamic, has he regressed to a nearly nonexistent level of
differentiation of self and taken on a misguided persona of an angry brother
and killed out of an anxious undifferentiated family ego mass?
The cyclical nature
of the symbiotic relationship between the mother and son is so intertwined that
they are emotional Siamese twins, or so distant and hostile that they repel
each other. The symbiotic mother-son
relationship is intense, not circumscribed or confined to the two but rather a
fragment of the larger emotional field, fluid, and shifting, the family
emotional system extending beyond the central family unit to nonrelatives and
institutions. In the undifferentiated
emotional unit, one family member accurately knows the thoughts, feelings,
fantasies, and dreams of another family member.
This “fusion of selfs” could involve every area of ego functioning. One ego could function for that of another. Is it
understandable only from the family systems perspective — confusion with or the
assumption of the brother’s identity? Is
this another level of entitlement mentality?
A biblical perspective might assume humans in the fallen
state inherently possess an entitlement, adversarial worldview. Therefore, any perceived regression and
symbiotic functioning is not confined to the United States of America; it is a
function of the common human experience from the beginning of time and must be
understood as such. The answers to the
above perplexing questions ultimately exist only within the Creator. A redeemed
people cannot hope to comprehend the extent of our interrelatedness and the
repercussions of an all-encompassing unseen warfare between spiritual good and
evil.
Twins Fight in Womb (video)
No comments:
Post a Comment