X-Ray Ted: A Fable

Ted has gone blind, not by seeing too little, but by seeing too much. He is a highly sought-after therapist with the uncanny ability to see through people. All their moral pretenses and rationalizations are no match for him. Even hidden traumas that stand in the way of understanding do not cloud his vision. Ted can strip people bare and see straight to the core of anyone’s psychological makeup.

Trained by the best, Ted combined Jung’s understanding of the psyche with Freud’s understanding that sexual desires drive all humans. There is no false narrative he cannot see through. He once helped a woman dealing with the guilt of adultery by showing her that her subconscious had absorbed the social construct of monogamy. It was a false archetype that was causing her problems. She had done nothing wrong. She needed to correct her psyche, not find forgiveness.

He helped another man dealing with neurotic anxiety by showing him how his puritanical upbringing had formed his conscious mind. The longer the patient repressed his sexual urges, the more they pushed against his fictitious moral boundaries. This unconscious inner conflict caused him to feel as if he was in danger. Since he could not identify the threat, he lived with chronic and irrational fears.

Ted was proud that one publication once referred to him as “the therapist who deconstructs souls.” He wanted to eradicate the concept of the soul altogether because of its relation to the imaginary idea of God. This framework worked well for Ted for a while; he had risen to prominence and affluence, but then something began happening to him.

He began to look at his wife and kids differently. One day, he overheard his daughter singing, but all he could think about was how her voice patterns reflected her subconscious needs. For years, he felt he knew his family, but the idea of “them” began to take on new meaning. Who were they really? All he could see was that they were merely patterns of dysfunction and historical determinism—even his wife. Even the concept of family was absorbed into this framework.

These questions caused Ted to become more isolated. Before understanding the human psyche, he could look at those he loved and see beauty and goodness. As Ted looked more closely at these concepts, to see through them to their causes, they began to disappear. They vanished because he could see nothing behind them. There was no soul, God, or universal standards to give them substance.

He clung to the idea that truth or facts held it all together. If sexual desires are real and psychological constructs could either align with them or repress them, then sexual desires themselves must be an objective standard to anchor his worldview.

The problem he ran into was that you cannot get to what ought to be by looking at what is. Just because something is a certain way, does not mean it should be. Ted is always arguing that, although the collective unconscious has developed a certain way over time, it shouldn’t necessarily remain that way—yet he has no objective standard by which to judge it.

He then tried to explain it by saying psychological distress is bad, so what we ought to seek is a sense of well-being. Anything that causes distress should be removed, and anything that causes peace should be encouraged. But this did not work. Sometimes, he counseled people to do things that caused psychological strain, like leaving a spouse. Without a plumbline of what ought to be, even the idea of a person making progress disappeared.

One day, Ted was walking down the street when a sense of overwhelming dread came over him. He realized he could no longer love because love itself had lost all meaning. For him, love was no more than a socially conditioned expression of sexual instinct. In trying to see through people’s personalities, he had erased their personhood.

Sometimes, nihilism catches you by surprise, and Ted never fully recovered. He was able to cope with his anxiety and dread with the aid of medication, and he eventually went back to work. Today, he continues to help others by counseling them to see the world the way he does.

C.S. Lewis once said, “If you see through everything, then everything is transparent. But a wholly transparent world is an invisible world. To ‘see through’ all things is the same as not to see.”

By eliminating first principles like the existence of God, truth, goodness, and beauty, you do not begin to see the world as it really is; you start to see a profane version of it. And if you take it to its logical conclusion, you will lose the ability to see it at all.

-D. Eaton