Defiance is often the opposite of what's expected or required. It's a car commercial that's meant to impress you with how fast the product can go backwards. It's the Mother's Day that shows mom how much you care less about the true and founding purpose of the day. And, it's substituting animal milk for mother's milk ever since the 1950's as the formula for economic status in society.
What I would call 'perverse psychology' is simply the result of deifying defiance.
It's a method of obscuring the fact that most cars, like the brands of gasoline put in them, meet the same basic standards of performance. It's the well-meaning dose to obscure minimal efforts for women's rights by maximum over-compensation and over-commercialization one day a year. And, it's obscurely focusing, instagram-style, on a family history of providing everything for infants, except human contact and mother's milk.
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Defiance need not be a conflicted condition when it can be a complicit condition of pop's psychology.
Alice Miller's Thou Shalt Not Be Aware reminds us that psychology is a "profession in particular (that) offers the opportunity of delegating one's own feelings to others - namely, (from analysts) to patients." As such, many psychologists perversely attempt to deal with the emotions of their patients vicariously, or clinically, rather than factually, or personally.
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Something, I'd imagine, like trying to sell more expensive cars by the way they can, but really can't, be driven backwards. Something, I'd wager, like having a day for mom rather than a union and legal representation for her rights. And something, no doubt, like creating a commercial industry for what infants, as mammals, have a propensity while mothers have a need for in the interplay of sustained existence.
Recently, I was told of a case of reverse psychology that proved effective for two pre-schoolers who disliked each other. The astute assistant teacher asked the children to pretend that they were best friends for the day. It wasn't long before they were whispering secrets, playing together and even holding hands. And, when they worked on an art project together, the dye was cast in more ways than one.
Indeed, defiance leads to deviance, which keeps perverse psychologists, car salespeople and baby formula companies in business. But rather than our cars, shouldn't we be trying to put our history of psychological obscurantism in reverse?
