Understanding My Father - Part III

Sigmund Freud’s Behavioral Theory Needs Amendment

In the previous part, you would have read Dr. Freud’s behavioral theory where the needs denied during childhood could have an adverse effect in adult behavior. In this part you are going to look at how the consciously denied needs of an adult affects behavior in the later stages….Proof? – My own living father Mr. Kelly Samuel

As you know, my father is fast approaching his 60s, is currently quite obese, unable to see his own toes, very ugly and not to forget that he is retired with a lot of time on hand and an absolutely idle mind!!!

He always reiterates a statement that when he was just approaching 30 he had to live his life according to timetable, that involved only work, mom & me and his so called “ ministry”! His claim is that such a timetable never let him have a social life and his constant transfers with the Indian banking system, had left too little of a personal life and way too much time to have idle thoughts viz a viz. is my wife cheating on me, is my son sucking the man next door, is my wife meeting my family members and updating them on my infidelities, etc.,

In all known manners my father has been a womanizer since time immemorial however; such an action of his does not give him the right to see everyone else in the same light. Though we know that it sure ain’t right to see others in the same light as one’s self, my father doesn’t and would not acknowledge it. He is under the impression that he is infidel and that makes everyone else infidel as well.

Coming back to the point of understanding what happens when an adult consciously suppresses a need… well, such a need is only repressed until that time he or she have more free time.

Well in this case, my father states that he had to fore go a lot of things in life since he had to stick to the timetable of providing for the family. Hence “needs” of his were not unconsciously forgotten. Rather, since it was a conscious effort to forget such needs, it has manifested itself in ways unimaginable.

One of the ways that I would like to coin at this point of time is that he has tried to have sexual relations with almost every woman in the family, especially if they belonged to my mother’s side. He has also tried sleeping with his own brothers’ wives, both of whom retaliated and that made him start looking for variety outside the family.

I could possibly conclude that this particular infidel character is much influenced by the Sagittarius trait that he possesses but it is more convincing if I had to pin it down to behavioral psychology (since Ms Radha from the University’s Psychology department stated that Psychology is a science that can be proved).

So remember, when an adult consciously makes an effort to suppress a need or a want, it only lays low in the conscious mind. When there is a lot of idle time for such a mind, it mills over what it had missed for so long and finds ways to re-live it.

In the case of my father, he had to suppress the need to fulfill the desires of his loin owing to reasons like the family, society and not to forget religion. Such a suppression has now led him to go against the family (the one for which he had lived life in accordance to a timetable) by sleeping with an underage girl with whom he has now successfully maintained a relationship for the past 10 years, go against the society by not giving a damn what it has to think or say and most importantly go against his own religion by violating one of the ten commandments…thou shall not covet thy neighbor’s wife.