PERSECUTORY ERROR MESSAGES

As a clinician, my hours are filled with patients who quite often disavow emotion, especially their own aggression. As Freud says, "the inclination to aggression is an original, self-subsisting instinctual disposition in man." One of the purposes of analysis, maybe the sole purpose, is to know oneself and become more aware and comfortable with the full constellation of our affects -- the good, the bad, and the ugly.

Nonetheless, we live in a society that often denies its emotions. Case in point, the exceedingly polite and emotionally bland error messages and instructional text you encounter every time you open your browser or use your mobile device. What if we could reclaim our aggression, envy and hostility and express it more directly? Perhaps you would be reading something like the following, the next time you're online:

Hold your horses while the page downloads.

How the heck do we know it's you until you login?

What's the matter with you, forgetting your password?

We'll send your data just as soon as we finish our 3rd pint of Ben and Jerry's Cherry Garcia.

Don't worry. Your rambling, amorous email to your beloved has beensent.

Click here to buy something you don't have from someone who doesn't want it.

You have 23 new messages. Aren't you the popular one.

Refresh the page? Sure, if you enjoy re-entering 37 fields of form data.

Go on. Get out of here. We're redirecting you to another web site, like it or not.

How nice you can afford to submit your order for a pair of $1,450 cashmere PJs.

Go ahead. Click more than once, buddy, and we'll be happy to charge you twice for those PJs.

Windows has had enough of your insufferable Word documents and your pointless, boring surfing and is shutting down.

Cleopatra Victoria, MFT
IMPULSE Editor