Further Examples
Suppose John has been brought up by a strict father, and he feels hurt and angry as a result. Although John may have deep feelings of hatred towards his father, when he talks about his childhood, John may say: "Yes, my father was a rather firm person, I suppose I do feel some antipathy towards him even now". John intellectualizes; he chooses rational and emotionally cool words to describe experiences which are usually emotional and very painful.
A woman in therapy continues to theorise her experience to her therapist - 'It seems to me that being psycho-analysed is essentially a process where one is forced back into infantilism...intellectual primitivism' - despite knowing that she 'would get no answer to it, or at least, not on the level I wanted, since I knew that what I was saying was the "intellectualising" to which she attributed my emotional troubles'.
A person who is heavily in debt builds a complex spreadsheet of how long it would take to repay using different payment options and interest rates, rather than attempting to understand and then stop his urge to overspend his money.
A man with 'an ambiguous conflicted relationship with a female colleague...generated a list of 12 different thoughts and descriptions of their previous interactions. One of these items, titled "Info on her", had its own list of 12 facts'. Thus he 'controlled his feelings by compiling facts and "data". His problem list and the lists within the list were a way of gaining an illusion of control over difficult feelings': intellectualization.
Read more about this topic: Intellectualization
Famous quotes containing the word examples:
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