If Thine Tongue Be Single

By Atom Bergstrom

Atom’s Blog

Make sure the wrong you right is not in the eye of the beholder.

That’s why one government replacing another ends up being four times more tyrannical than its forerunner.

Right the wrong without becoming a conspiracy of one.

A conspiracy is often one brain hemisphere laying the blame on its companion hemisphere.

Heed our Indian brothers and sisters who said, “White man speak with forked tongue.”

Marie-Louise von Franz (Projection and Re-Collection in Jungian Psychology: Reflections of the Soul, 1978, 1980) wrote …

“It occurred to Freud […] that the true and false impressions received by a child in his earliest experience of his parents and siblings play a role in later projections. For example, a child who has experienced his father or mother in a specifically negative form tends to project the same father- or mother-image onto older men or women he meets in later life, so that an unprejudiced experience of the relevant persons is no longer possible for him. Such a negative reaction lives on, stored up in the depths of the psyche, and is ‘projected’ onto outer object at a suitable opportunity.

“To be more precise, what is projected is not only a memory-image, as one might at first conclude, but rather a sum of characteristic qualities that constitutes a part of the person observed. If a son, for example, experiences his father as tyrannical, in later life he will, in many cases, not only project the quality of tyranny onto authority figures and father figures, such as his doctor, his superiors, and the state, but he will also behave just as tyrannically himself — though unconsciously.”

According to Colonel Hugh Young (Proceedings of the Second Annual Convention of the Philadelphia Bankers’ Association Held at Pittsburgh, December 16 and 17, 1896) …

“One of the most exasperating and vexatious annoyances of a banker’s life is the habit of certain of his customers of making overdrafts. You see I speak of it as a habit, and not as an accident made through carelessness or inadvertence, which may sometimes occur with the best and most careful depositors. But there are men — you all know them — who actually believe that because they trust the bank with their money until they want to use it, the bank ought to trust them with the money of others by overdrafts, unsecured and without interest, until they choose to make it good by another deposit. The cashier of a private bank in a country town told me of an amusing incident that occurred to him, which will illustrate this point. One morning he saw a customer passing the bank, grip in hand, on his way to a train. He ran out, called to him, and asked him if he was to be gone from home very long.

“‘I am going to Philadelphia, and will be absent a few days. Why?’

“‘I wanted to know, because there is an overdraft to your account amounting now to about $20,000, and I thought perhaps you did not know it was so much!’

“‘Oh, yes I did, but what of it? If you don’t want my account I will take it to First National.’

“The banker turned and walked back to his desk, pondering in his mind how a large overdraft could be transferred from one bank to another. However, in a few days his customer came in and deposited $50,000. And when the amount had been duly entered on his book he said to the cashier: —

“‘Well, who is overdrawn now; you or I?’

“That man’s ideas of the functions of a bank were very vague, and the worst of it is there are too many like him. A bank’s officers have it in their power to educate their customers in right methods in this and in many other ways, and if they fail to do so by good-natured insistence and firmness they should accept the tribulations which follow bad methods in their customers without complaint.”
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