You have relied on
yourself to find your mates and partners.
The days of arranged marriages etc are over. We take what we get or so we think. There is a place deep inside each of us that
wants to guide you in your search for the ideal mate, someone who will both
resemble your caretakers and compensate for the repressed parts of
yourself. You like every one else has
relied on self and the thought of freedom of choice to handle this aspect or
better said relied on an unconscious image of the ... opposite sex or the ideal
work mate or ... that you had been forming since birth. This is called the Imago ... Latin term for
'image.'
The Concept of the Imago: It is for all practical
purposes, a composite picture of the people who influenced you most strongly at
an early age. This may have been your
mother and father, siblings, or maybe a babysitter or close relative. But
whoever they were, they were, a part of your experience and your brain recorded
everything about them … the sound of their voices, the amount of time they took
to answer your cries, the color of their skin when they got angry, the way they
smiled when they were happy, the set of their shoulders, the way they moved
their bodies, their characteristic moods, their talents and interests. Along with these impressions your brain
recorded all your significant interactions with them. Here is the important part … your brain
didn't interpret this data; it simply etched them onto a template.
It may seem improbable that you have such a detailed record of your
caretakers somewhere inside your head when you have only a dim recollection of
those early years. In fact, many people
have a hard time remembering anything that happened to them before the age of
five or six-even dramatic events that should have made a deep impression.
But scientists report that we have incredible amounts of hidden information
in our brains. Neurosurgeons discovered
this fact while performing brain surgery on patients who were under local
anesthesia. They stimulated portions of the patients' brains with weak
electrical currents, and the patients were suddenly able to recall hundreds of
forgotten episodes from childhood in astonishing detail.
Our minds are vast storehouses of forgotten information. There are those who suggest that everything
that we have ever experienced resides somewhere in the dark, convoluted
recesses of our brains.
Not all of these experiences are recorded with equal intensity,
however. The most vivid impressions seem
to be the ones that we formed of our caretakers early in life. And of all the interactions that we had with
these key people, the ones that were most deeply engraved were the ones that
were the most wounding, because these were the encounters that seemed to
threaten our existence.
Gradually, over time, these hundreds of thousands of bits of information
about our caretakers merged together to form a single image. The old brain, in its inability to make fine
distinctions, simply filed all this information under one heading: the
people responsible for our survival.
You might think of the imago as a silhouette with few distinguishing
physical characteristics but with the combined character traits of all of your
primary caregivers.
To a large degree, whether or not you have been attracted to someone
depended on the degree to which that person matched your imago. A hidden part of your brain ticked and
hummed, coolly analyzing that person's traits, and then compared them with your
rich data bank of information. If there was little correlation, you felt no
interest. This person was destined to be
one of the thousands of people who come and go in your life with little
impact. If there was a high degree of
correlation, you found the person highly attractive.
This imago-matching process bears some resemblance to the way soldiers
were trained to identify flying aircraft during World War 11. The soldiers were given books filled with
silhouettes of friendly and enemy aircraft.
When an unidentified plane came into view, they hurriedly compared the
plane with these illustrations. If it
turned out to be a friendly plane, they relaxed and went back to their
posts. If it was an enemy aircraft, they
leaped into action. Unconsciously you
have compared every man or woman that you have met to your imago. When you identified a close match, you felt a
sudden surge of interest.
This is all hidden ... behind the scenes so to speak ... It happens as a
natural process without out our thinking but and here is the important part it
has far more influence in the day to day doings of our life then most would
care to admit. All aspects of the
unconscious mind have this unknowness of process in common, after all you had
no awareness of this elaborate sorting mechanism was there or that it was
operating in your life. There is a place
where you can catch a peek at it in action ... in your dreams.
- If you reflect on your dreams, one thing you
will notice is that your old brain capriciously merges people
together.
- A dream that starts out with one person
playing a part suddenly has another person filling that role; the
unconscious has little regard for corporeal boundaries.
You may be able to recall a dream where your spouse suddenly
metamorphosed into your mother or father, or a dream in which your spouse and a
parent played such similar roles or treated you in such a similar manner that
they were virtually indistinguishable.
This is the closest you will ever come to directly verifying the
existence of your imago. But when you do
the stemming exercises especially in the off hand you will have a chance to
compare the dominant character traits of your mate with the dominant character
traits of your primary caretakers, the parallel that your unconscious mind
draws between spouses and caretakers will become unmistakably clear.
Let's take this information about the imago and see how it adds to our
earlier theories of attraction.
The question that I'm
frequently asked when I talk about the unconscious factors in mate partner
selection is this: how can people tell so much about each other so
quickly? Are We Soul Mates?
The reason that we are such instant judges of character is that we rely
on what Freud called "unconscious perception.'
- We intuitively pick up much more about
people than we are aware of.
- When we meet strangers, we instantly
register the way they move, the way they seek or avoid eve contact, the
clothes they wear, their characteristic expressions, the way they fix
their hair, the ease with which they laugh or 'le, their ability to
listen, the speed at which they talk, the amount of time it takes them to
respond to a question-we record all of these characteristics and a hundred
more in a matter of minutes.
- Just by looking at people, we can absorb
vast amounts of information. When
I walk to work each morning, I automatically appraise the people on the
crowded sidewalks.
- My judgment is instantaneous:
- this person is someone I wish I knew;
- that person is someone I have no interest
in.
I find myself attracted or repulsed with only a superficial glance. When I walk into a party, one glance around
the room will often single out the people that I want to meet. Other people report similar experiences. As a police officer on Hwy Patrol I could
pick out which cars had booze in them while cruising at sixty-five miles an
hour and be right. A Free Lunch ... bet
with my partner... depended on the “call” being right
Our powers of observation are especially acute when we are looking for a
mate/partner, because we are searching for someone to satisfy our fundamental
unconscious drives.
We subject everyone to the same intense scrutiny: is this someone who
will nurture me and help me recover my lost self?
When we meet someone who appears to meet these needs, the old brain
registers instant interest.
In all subsequent encounters, the unconscious mind is fully alert,
searching for clues that this might indeed be the perfect mate ... OR SOUL MATE
... red herring for an attempt to
understand what was unnoticed but felt.
If later experiences confirm the imago match, our interest climbs even
further. On the other hand, if later
experiences show the match to be superficial, our interest plummets, and we
look for a way to end or reduce the importance of the relationship.
Not everyone finds a mate or partner who conforms so closely to the
imago.
Sometimes only one or two key character traits match up, and the initial
attraction is likely to be mild. Such a
relationship is often less passionate and less troubled than those
characterized by a closer match. The
reason it is less passionate is that the old brain is still looking for the
ideal "gratifying object,' and the reason it tends to be less troubled is
that there isn't the repetition of so many childhood struggles. When people with weak imago matches terminate
their relationships, it's often because they feel little interest in each
other, not because they are in great pain.
"There wasn't all that much going on,' they say. Or 'I just felt restless. I knew that there was something better out
there.'
At this point in our discussion of partnering, we have a more complete
understanding of the mystery of attraction.
To the biological theory and the exchange theory and the persona theory
and family systems dynamics I have added the idea of the unconscious search for
a person who matches our imago.
Our motivation for seeking an Imago Match is our urgent desire to heal
childhood wounds.
We also have new insight into
conflict: if the primary reason we select our mates is that they resemble our
caretakers, it is inevitable that they are going to re injure some very
sensitive wounds. When we sink into this
quagmire of pain and confusion called “the power struggle.”