Dr. Sanity diagnosis the Juan Williams firing

I am so glad the good psychiatrist is blogging again. She writes:

Remember the definition of psychological denial : the refusal to accept external reality because it is too threatening. Williams committed a psychological no-no that threatened the pervasive and all consuming psychological denial that the political progressive left is committed to--i.e., he showed some psychological insight.

At the center of all psychological denial is a hidden agenda. That agenda is usually not completely conscious--meaning that the denier has not thought through the issues surrounding his denial; and may not even be aware of what his motivation is in asserting something is true when it isn't; or false when it isn't.

Denial need not be absolute and completely cut off from reality. Even among alcoholics and drug users there is a varying level of awareness of their problem. Some accept that they are in jail or sick because of their substance use, but yet are still not willing to do anything about it. Some may recognize some facts about their drinking (like that they get put in jail), but completely deny the impact of those facts on themselves or their families; or the future implications of continued drinking or drug use (e.g., that they are killing themselves and will die).

The hidden agenda or underlying motivation behind the denial is very frequently related to the potential adverse consequences that could ensue if the denial were eliminated and reality acknowledged. That is where the unnacceptable feelings, needs, and thoughts come in. The denier (or part of him) has made an unconscious decision that awareness of certain feelings, needs, or thoughts is more threatening to his sense of self than the act of denial.

Hence the left's incredible refusal to face the failure of their ideology, despite the enormous amount of evidence before their very eyes. They will denounce anyone who attempts to pierce the veil of delusion (e.g., Juan Williams); they will always blame anyone else (see here, how the White House completely understands the voter's anger...at Bush!!)--by the way, this is another psychological defense that exists in order to shore up the denial of reality and it is called displacement, or the separation of affect from the threatening object or reality onto a less threatening object; they will never blame themselves.

What we are witnessing is a psycholgoical defensive maneuver that has become perhaps, the most common response to the worldwide threat of Islamofascism. It is a very specific kind of psychological denial, known as displacement.