Post-rationalization: when a representation fills a gap in understanding

What is post-rationalization? What is post-rationalizing and why is it useful? Is post-rationalization something we use to create an illusion, or may there be a useful reason for its existence?

Post-rationalization of an action is the act of giving meaning and purpose to actions after they have been carried out, and can serve as a tool to generate explanatory inner motives that were actually present, but could not be seen by the conscious mind during the act that is exceeded quickly. (s) or when a person was so caught up in the moment that he is able to perceive what had happened from a more emotionally neutral perspective. This ability to post rationalization is also a vital tool for learning from personal history, as strategies that were used in the past can be modified and lead to the creation of better strategies and responses. It can be used to romanticize one’s personal story, to dramatize it, and also to outline comic episodes from one’s past in contrast to another way of thinking.

By creating a representation, the mind that seeks to understand existence can find meaningful and explanatory answers. The realizations created through post-rationalization in an action make it possible for an individual to project new meanings to his past after recreating the event (s) in his mind, and even to perceive in an inventive sense more intelligence, stupidity. , other reasons, or for example as a relic of the history of Freudian psychoanalysis, hidden psychopathological factors, different from those present in the real connections produced by the subconscious in causal history.

Post-rationalization can alter the individual’s sense of personal history at the representational level. In the good, it can create a conscious neutrality to representations of the past, but it can also be used to generate content that increases existing anxiety or maintains the status quo of negativity in the person’s life by generating more negativity to be part of History. personal. Therefore, we can look at the two sides of the ability to post-rationalize, which must be taken into account while using this ability. In a broader perspective, we can perceive this when we interpret the history of humanity, or in the sense of personal relationships, how we project motives and meanings to the actions of other individuals, while trying to predict a posteriori what their motive is. it could have been during the actions we interpret.

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