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    utbursts on the part of their children.  They had also rigidly

    prohibited the acknowledgement of any form of sexuality.21

    But hostility and sexuality are both unavoidable aspects of

    human life.  How had the authoritarian personalities coped with their

    unwelcome aggressive and sexual impulses?  Through a technique that

    Freudians call projection.  Like the female researcher who forgot most

    of the distressing things that happened to her in everyday life, the

    authoritarian personalities excluded their own aggression and

    sexuality from their consciousness.  Like the people misremembering

    their own past pay and work habits, the authoritarian types pictured

    themselves as people in whom sexual and aggressive tendencies did

    not exist.  Aggression and sexuality, they were convinced, boiled up

    only in the minds of some enemy.

    And here's the real trick.  The authoritarians thought frequently

    of that enemy and his loathsome preoccupation with lechery and hate.

    They could actually feel the smarmy sexual sensations and livid

    hostility that coursed through their enemies' veins.  Why could they

    sense this so vividly?  Because they had projected their own set of

    forbidden emotions onto a faceless opponent like a ventriloquist

    projecting his voice into the mouth of a dummy.  By seeing their

    unacceptable impulses in some unsuspecting outsider, they managed

    to dwell on those impulses and deny them at the same time!

    Here's how the principle works in real life.  During the early '80s,

    a group of women in Orange County, California, were convinced that

    the dark forces of "secular humanism" were using elementary school

    textbooks to destroy their children's minds.  The women's group was

    certain that the godless foes of true religion were trying to swamp their

    youngsters with brain-crippling pornography.

    To find out if their suspicions were true, the women's' group

    members examined the illustrations in the local school's textbooks

    through a microscope.  Sure enough, they discovered minuscule

    pictures hidden subliminally on the pages.  These microscopic images

    portrayed women with naked, nippled breasts and men with

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