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HUMAN BEINGS ARE capable of developing some very distorted ideas about living. We spoil many opportunities because we approach them with emotionally charged stereotypes and biases. As therapists we try to help patients rethink and reevaluate self defeating fixations and transferences so they can "bring their thinking up to date, " as Fromm-Reichman (1950) put it so long ago. I hope that the following discussion of concept boundary formation and ego boundary formation will be of some use to therapists in their work with patients so that they can dispell those limiting beliefs which imprison them.
One important distinction has become obscured in our language. Heidegger (1968) has pointed out that the word "being" can be used as either noun or verb, as can a large number of words. Nouns should not be used in reference to people or their being. Verbs are acceptable because they speak of action, behavior, and functioning, but nouns sound as if being could be frozen into a make-believe abstract substance. Yet the noun is so ingrained in our language habits and thought that we blindly accept this error. Take the noun "mind." A mind is not a substance. It is actually a "verb" composed purely of functions, such as perception, memory, ego defenses, fantasy, etc. This error of treating people as objects, or nouns, comes from the mind's function of forming abstract concepts and retaining these in memory. Because the mind is capable of this function of retaining abstract concepts, a person is able to be in the world as though he were some sort of substance. Through abstract conceptualization, and retention of these abstractions in memory, we can actually imitate a substance or object. As we mature, various judgments are made of us by parents, teachers, and peers, and we infer still other conceptions of ourselves from experience. Because we are open when we