"Police
humor relieves police stress",
Sigmund Freud might have said to
me once as we sat enjoying our Havana stogies and sipping cognac in front of a roaring
fire in his apartment at Berggasse 19 in prewar Vienna not too long before his death.
Freud, the father of modern psychology, might indeed
have said that to me, except I wasn't born until just after that bit of nastiness in Europe,
North Africa and the South Pacific. Freud was interested in the reasons people turned on
each other, witness his 1930 Civilization and its Discontents. Had he
lived, he might have become a police stress counselor. Or if he was a young
man today, he might have become a cop, because he was also interested in the
role of conscience (he called that part of the human psyche the superego),
and how the aggressive urges were held in check both by one's personal
conscience and by a cultures ethics.
He
was a child of World War One. Even before World War Two, he had some doubts
as to whether the human race would survive its own tendency to
self-destruct. Anti-Semitism was rampant in the Austria of the 1930's. Being
a student of human nature, and understanding the individuals' baser
instincts, he might not have been surprised to see where these prejudices
would lead. Certainly this was no joking matter. It is a sobering thought to
realize that the Gestapo was the top law enforcement agency in Germany
They enforced the laws of a dictator. and had total power to arrest without
a warrant, question without Miranda, torture, and then to summarily execute
or sentence citizens to eventual death.
This has nothing to do with police humor, but
is merely my musing on why Freud just might have become a cop in a
society where citizens have rights. Might have. Don't get
picky with me, I didn't write "would have", now did I?
There was no doubt in Freud's mind that humor
had a vital role in human personality. In fact, he discussed humor in his work, Jokes
and Their Relation to the Unconscious, where he analyzes among other things, double
meaning jokes, excrement jokes, nonsense humor, smutty jokes and various categories of
humor too technical to bore you with here. Freud saw humor as residing in the same part of
the psyche as the conscience. He viewed the job of this inner comic as being to care for,
protect, and console the troubled personality, or ego, during times of stress.
 That's enough about
Freud.
I've merely included this reference to demonstrate to my learned colleagues
in the mental health profession, who believe it or not occasionally
stumble into our little police stress web site, that I'm not a complete
Neanderthal. Some of my professors, and even my mentor in graduate school,
were psychoanalysts.
There
are some shrinks who look down on cops. They think cops are all obsessed
with guns because their penis' are too small. Or, with female officers, that
they have pursued their careers because of a phenomenon called "penis envy,"
which some male psychoanalysts secretly still believe in.
My hunch is that many shrinks
consider police stress therapists to be cop wannabes who disgrace the "real
shrinks" who wear tweed jackets (the one's with leather elbow patches) which
smell of pipe smoke. They aren't the only ones critical of therapists who
specialize in treating police officers. Consider this message from the
Police Stressline Forum
(9/6/2002):
First of all any real cop knows
that specials are not cops. Second, the editor of this is a self-serving
"police therapist." In the Commonwealth of Massachusetts there are
psychologists, social workers, psychiatrists, LMHC's, and LMFT's. There is
no such animal as a police therapist. Ask yourself, who would talk about all
the street experience they have when they are a special. Find a real
therapist who is or was a real cop. For all you academic students out there,
ask yourself about the credibility of this website that is written by a
cranberry person. Leave the police stress stuff to the real experts.
For my initial answer to this
post and to find out about the cranberry comment,
click here. As I think about how I felt when
I read, and responded to it, I must admit now, a few weeks later, that I
could have used a bit of a sense of humor. It took Mark's defense of me
(click above link) to make me feel better.
http://stressline.com
Non-profit,
losing money, and damn proud of
it.
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ya?
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the FBI
There's a cop who wants Viagra
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t.v.
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