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utbursts on the part of their children. They had also rigidly
prohibited the acknowledgement of any form of sexuality.21
But hostility and sexuality are both unavoidable aspects of
human life. How had the authoritarian personalities coped with their
unwelcome aggressive and sexual impulses? Through a technique that
Freudians call projection. Like the female researcher who forgot most
of the distressing things that happened to her in everyday life, the
authoritarian personalities excluded their own aggression and
sexuality from their consciousness. Like the people misremembering
their own past pay and work habits, the authoritarian types pictured
themselves as people in whom sexual and aggressive tendencies did
not exist. Aggression and sexuality, they were convinced, boiled up
only in the minds of some enemy.
And here's the real trick. The authoritarians thought frequently
of that enemy and his loathsome preoccupation with lechery and hate.
They could actually feel the smarmy sexual sensations and livid
hostility that coursed through their enemies' veins. Why could they
sense this so vividly? Because they had projected their own set of
forbidden emotions onto a faceless opponent like a ventriloquist
projecting his voice into the mouth of a dummy. By seeing their
unacceptable impulses in some unsuspecting outsider, they managed
to dwell on those impulses and deny them at the same time!
Here's how the principle works in real life. During the early '80s,
a group of women in Orange County, California, were convinced that
the dark forces of "secular humanism" were using elementary school
textbooks to destroy their children's minds. The women's group was
certain that the godless foes of true religion were trying to swamp their
youngsters with brain-crippling pornography.
To find out if their suspicions were true, the women's' group
members examined the illustrations in the local school's textbooks
through a microscope. Sure enough, they discovered minuscule
pictures hidden subliminally on the pages. These microscopic images
portrayed women with naked, nippled breasts and men with
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