"Every prophecy is self-fulfilling. It is in having prophecized that the possibility of fulfillment arises.
- Unknown

The following analysis was written quite some time ago:

[Name] handed me a joint, and I dropped it on the ground on accident, failing to grasp it fully. I felt already that she didn't enjoy my company, and I guess subconsciously I sought to validate it by giving her a reason for me to be apologetic, so that in accepting the apology I would feel as if I as a person were accepted.

I would like to go into further detail about a more general principle, in which the following pattern:

  1. Subject intuits a prejudice towards the object
  2. Subject inverts the prejudice, believing the object feels that way about him/her
  3. Subject seeks to act in a way to either validate the core feeling, or remediate it

In the case I presented here, 3. was a case of indirect remediation; however, in the past, I have noticed that I would "self-sabotage" in a way that angered others. I then, upon analysis, concluded that I already felt a predisposed negative sentiment towards these people, and was seeking to validate it by irritating and provoking them.

As another example, consider that I was mad at my mother for something I cannot remember now. She has a strict rule in which we must open the blinds fully before exiting, so none drop. I had not a conscious anger for her at the time, nor a will to defy her, but subconsciously I may have harbored one. I ignored this rule (by failing to remember it), and one of the blinds dropped onto the floor. Later, when she chided me, I felt justified in the original feeling, whose own cause I had forgotten, but was likely just one successor in a chain of repetitions of some original inclination.

Psychologically, I associate the act of unintended dropping (such as a phone, or either of these two examples) with the manifestation of a frustration in the collective unconscious. The majority of time someone unintentionally drops an object, they are agitated. Contrast this with the dropping of an infant, in which one would be mortified or terrified, rather than irritated. It is an annoying inconvenience, costing one time and possibly damaging the material.

  1. Some objects - such as my laptop - I would be more terrified of dropping than others, where I would be merely frustrated. This suggests a subconscious tendency to humanize certain objects.
  2. Dropping an object, only to be frustrated soon after, seems to be an act of Freudian repetition compulsion, seeking to reify an innate frustration (objet รก), which in his view would stem from the failure to perpetuate an autoerotic state.

Relevant

c.f. Halliday's metafunctions - the ideational leaks into the interpersonal, and the foregoing analysis is the technical component; "metafunctional transduction" (terminology my own) [to be expounded upon in more detail in the future]