    11

    their

    eyes staring emptily into space, and chewed at their own skin,

    gouging themselves until they bled.  That is intropunitive behavior.26

    When you feel like kicking yourself around the block, you are in

    the grip of the intropunitive force.  At times, whole herds of humans

    have unleashed this impulse in an orgy of self-punishment.  Once a

    year, during the festival of Muharram, the Shiite men of the Middle

    East parade through the streets pulling out their hair, lacerating their

    scalps with swords, covering themselves in their own blood, and even

    injuring themselves with wounds that kill.27

    Occasionally, the imagination can cooperate with the intropuni-

    tive emotions to make the mind a living hell.  Some extreme Christian

    fundamentalists see demons and Satan lurking in every shadow.  Their

    imaginations have created creatures that constantly threaten to torment

    them.  The slightest slip from the true path, they feel, can send Satan's

    minions writhing through every vein of their body.  These visions of

    dancing demons do little to enhance an individual's survival or that of

    his genes.  In fact, during the first thousand years of Christianity, many

    of the devout swore there was one sure way to avoid Satan's seductive

    embrace: chastity.  A few castrated themselves.  Others withdrew to

    the cloister and swore off sex forever.  Most of these died childless.28

    In a sense, there are demons lurking in the human flesh ready to

    explode with activity.  They are biologically built-in self-destruct

    mechanisms.   A talented advertising executive in New York was

    suffering from an unusual problem: phobia of cancer.  No, he didn't

    have cancer.  But his fear of it had practically incapacitated him.  One

    night he called all his friends at three A.M. in a panic, convinced that

    numerous vessels in his brain had hemorrhaged, that the blood was

    filling his sinus passages to the point of a fatal explosion.  Finally, one

    friend took him to the emergency room of a local hospital, where he

    was diagnosed as having a minor virus that gave him a stuffed nose.

    The next day the executive fell into a panic again, certain that his nose

    was about to burst and kill him.

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