Substitution goes back to my earliest childhood. I remember learning how to use mental or thought substitution as a child of three to four years of age. As a young child I was filled with fears. Witches, demons, and ghosts populated my mind and became especially troublesome at bedtime. Some of these demons may have originated inside my young head (and may be attributable to defects in my family life), but some of them were introduced in the stories read to me and by the movies I was taken to.
The Problem of Snow White
Movies were a special problem, and nothing scared me more than “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.” The wicked stepmother-queen in this Walt Disney production, based on a Grimm Brothers fairy tale and completed in 1937, caused me much terror, and night after night I found myself fixating on this example of jealousy and vanity carried to the extreme. I couldn’t sleep. Something had to be done about it, but what? Well, I could force myself to think about something else.
I’d seen a kid in my neighborhood in Philadelphia with a wagon, and I thought I’d like to have one too. Did I want one just like his? No, I wanted a better one. I began to visualize the kind of wagon I wanted. I began to build it in my head. It would be bright red and shine like crystal. The wheels would be large, as large as possible, and the tires would have jet black tread. Rising up from the body for the protection of its precious cargo would be side extensions made of polished wooden slates.
The Boats Fixation
By forcing myself to think about the red wagon I pushed the wicked stepmother queen out of my head, and I was able to get to sleep. I have been practicing wagon substitution ever since except that the object visualized ceased to be a wagon decades ago. Long ago boats became my fixation. I started becoming interested in boats when I first moved to Margate, a suburb of Atlantic City, in 1953.
Like Atlantic City, Margate along with Ventnor and Longport, are parts of Absecon Island. One is never very far away from water anywhere on Absecon Island including, of course, the beach and the ocean. One is also never too far from boats.
Building a Barge in Margate
In 1953 I started building a barge-like structure on the shores of the bay that runs the length of the island about two to three blocks from my house. I was building it with a friend I’d recently made, and we were designing it as we went along. We were both fourteen at the time, I think. Barges are not exactly major challenges in naval architecture, but I suspect we would have had more of a challenge on our hands had we ever gotten to the house that was to sit on top of the barge platform.
Our barge building came to an abrupt halt when the police arrested us. My friend and I had been using house lumber taken from the house construction site of a local builder. No, we hadn’t paid for the lumber, but as part of the resolution of the case the judge decreed that we pay the builder an amount that far exceeded what we would have paid had we gone to lumber yard and purchased our wood directly.
Avoided Reform School
We had to pay through the nose, as the saying goes, and we ended up with nothing to show for our efforts. The builder sent a crew to our construction site, dismantled what we had built, and took the wood back to be used on one of his houses. Hence he profitted many times over from our misfortune. But at least my friend and I didn’t end up being sent to reform school for our misdeeds.
I recount this small episode drawn from the annals of juvenile justice not only as an example of how I learned at a young age that crime didn’t pay, but to place a date on when my efforts in mental substitution switched to the use of boats. For many years hence, designing and building boats within my head (I would frequently commit my designs to paper, but never attempted to build any of them) was a method I used to escape the everyday worries of keeping a job and supporting a family and the stresses from the political realities of the day, namely the cold war and the possibility of missiles raining down multiple nuclear warheads.
Cruising the Chesapeake
Boats were my escape, but they were not all fantasy. For a while, I lived in Maine and was paid to write and edit articles about the sea. Throughout my life, I have been privileged to own and operate boats of significant size. During the 1990s, the Chesapeake Bay became my cruising ground, and my wife and I spent many hours traveling to and getting to know its many very interesting water towns. And now my substitution object has switched to unusual varieties of aircraft and spacecraft, about which I may write in the future.
As I indicated at the beginning of this essay, some members of the psychiatric community might look at my use of substitution and accuse me of living too much in a state of denial. At the age of three, had I analyzed what it was that scared me about the wicked stepmother queen of “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” and then somehow risen above it instead of spending mental time with imaginary red wagons, perhaps I would be better off today.
Developing the Imagination
Possibly, but then something has to be said on behalf of exercising the imagination, especially if one is a creative person. My red wagon was one way I discovered and developed the power of the imagination as a means to overcome fear.
I am now actively involved with the program of the Blue Mountain School of Meditation, as I have previously indicated. Some of the reasons I am pursing this practice are to get control of my mind and keep it focused as much as possible on the positive, to enhance the moral center of my life, and to minimize the role of fear in my outlook. In addition to daily meditation itself, this practice calls for the daily use of a mantram, that is, the use of a saying of a religious nature repeated over and over again to oneself to substitute for the negative thoughts during times of anxiety.
Not So Benign Substitution
Yes, another form of substitution. Let us acknowledge the value of substitution then, despite what some mental health care professionals might say, but let us quickly bring the importance of good judgment into the discussion. There is benign substitution and not so benign. When we use addictive substances and fall prey to risky attitudes and behaviors to substitute for the fears that plague us, we are doing ourselves and those around us no good. We cannot eat our way to a sound mind, for example.
At the same time, we must assert the principle of moderation even with benign substitutes. If we are spending a preponderant amount of our time in our head designing red wagons or boats or whatever and not accomplishing other things that need to be done in our lives, that may be our clue that a rigorous re-examination of what is going on in our lives and the need for intervention are necessary.
Yes, but no one should have to spend his every waking moment thinking about health problems. We all need a break from that kind of fixation, as steeped in reality as it may be.
ABOUT MIND CHECK
Thank you for tuning into Mind Check, a biweekly effort to prove that we are what we think and that clear thinking leads to effective action and to a better world. Mind Check is intended to serve as a bridge between the realm of the human spirit, that center of our energy, mental and physical, and our rationality or reason, of which the scientific method is an excellent example. Mind Check is also intended to prove that the ideas of right and wrong are innate, not exclusively inherent in the situation or the whim of the moment.
To communicate with the author of Mind Check, please write to stephen.saft@gmail.com. For examples of the writer’s other writings, see the website http://www.iwillmeanpoetry.com. The author is also preparing to launch a site of podcasts consisting of spoken poetry, essays and short stories. Be on the look out for it.
Copyright © 2007 by Stephen Alan Saft
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