Mike Bundrant
March 15, 2013


Richard Ryan, co-author of a new University of Rochester study says, “This study shows that when people bend to pressure to exclude others, they also pay a steep personal cost. Their distress is different from the person excluded, but no less intense.”

“Although there are no visible scars, ostracism has been shown to activate the same neural pathways as physical pain,” says Ryan. But complying with instructions to exclude others was equally disheartening, the data shows, albeit for different reasons.


Spiritual sages over time have been clear about this. Modern science validates it. Case closed. Maximize your happiness by treating others how you’d like to be treated.

Why doesn’t this simple truth translate into world peace? For that matter, I often wonder why it doesn’t translate into greater peace within the walls of my own home. Somehow, the Golden Rule is not making its way, nearly enough, into practical life.




Why were people willing to inflict such torture? Because they were instructed to do so by the researcher. They were told, “It is absolutely essential that you continue. You must go on.”






The answer lies in the work of the Edmund Bergler, psychiatry’s lost hero. Dr. Bergler should be a household name, yet his vast work – 25 books and 273 papers published in major medical journals – has been deleted from modern mental health.

Why? This is a story waiting to be told. If Dr. Bergler’s work had not been suppressed, mental health would be very different today. Psychiatry would not focus on medicating us, but on our multi-level blindness to why we inflict pain upon ourselves.

Dr. Bergler’s basic premise is this: long ago, you learned to take unconscious satisfaction in pain, misery and all manner of emotional angst. He called it psychic masochism – the basic human neurosis. It’s been referred to over the years as the “pleasure in displeasure” pattern.

Overwhelmed with infantile fury over the deprivation that all babies must endure (compared to the womb) even when your parents were conscientious, you developed a tolerance for suffering. Rather than suffer in agony, you made the suffering pleasurable. And, you became attached to it. You are still willing to experience suffering; even seek it out. If this were not the case, you wouldn’t suffer 90% of the emotional angst you suffer – it is self-inflicted, albeit unconsciously.







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