You open a drawer and find the picture of a loved one passed away that you haven't seen in a long time. You are overcome with emotion. Are you crying over a picture? What is the object of your emotion?
Are you denying that some of that is not actual devotion to the symbol? Not in all cases, of course. However if my loved one were killed by a gun or a knife, I don't think I would want to intensify my grief by having those pictures laying about. It seems natural to me to feel a healthy grief over things that are momentos of passed loved-ones. A moment of reflection. It seems unnatural to me to reach to magnify the grief and pick the scab by displaying the cause of death. I don't have pictures of cancerous tumors in my home to remind me of my mother. That would be unbalanced at best.
But I don't think that individuals are unbalanced that cling to the cross, but the culture that molded them to give significance to a symbol that really was a torture device. Has such had an impact on people? I think so. History kind of proves that torture within Christian cultures was seen as righteous in some way. Sometimes even as a cleansing of sins. My friend's mother had to kneel on rice and say the rosary when she was bad. That's torture. Is it ancient history? It was only a generation ago, and I have learned since then, it was not an aberration, but I've heard quite a few stories of the last generation kneeling on rice as children. One of my highschool teachers went to a Catholic school. He said every morning, every single morning, the students would have to hold their hands out, palm up. The nun would whack them all on the palms with a ruler and proclaim, "That is for the bad thing you did, and if you haven't done anything bad, that is for the bad thing you will do."
Times are changing. As things become more secular, there is push back. It's not okay to force every child to greet the day with stings to their hands. Yet I still find it noteworthy that being good and experiencing pain went hand-in-hand for so long. It still goes on today. Mother Teresa and her cult of suffering as though it was holy. I think the cross is simply a symbol of this. Implement of torture=holiness and forgiveness of sins. It goes much deeper than the cross, but that is the visual we are given. Humans are inherently defective, in need of repair, and the only way to achieve that was torture and a drawn out death.