Therapy for Mankind?

Is it possible, perhaps, that the therapy and transformation of one human being - a human being who needed that therapy - could be an experience that is fundamental to realizing the meaning in the human condition?

Our society propagates a very ambivalent message about therapy and mental illness. On one end, we have the nasty and intuitively calamitous habit of taking all the people with mental problems and stuffing them in the same place - around one anothers disturbed mental experience, as expressed in their behaviors. Is this not - I don't know - somewhat autistic in its emotional blindness?

Yes - we live in an age better called the "capitalocene", than the "anthropocene", as has become habit among some social and political philosophers. This aggressive ignorance - explosive in it's incessant self-blindness - functions in a rather simple-enough way, as we all know, intuitively, that what we think is largely a function of making coherent what we are presently feeling. I've come to think of human awareness as intrinsically oriented by second personal constructions - with the "Other" - the interacted with Others of your life experiences - functioning as paradigmatic exemplars of "forms of being" that have Self-regulatory value. This impressive self-consciousness - happening in a conscious mind intensely unaware of its occurrence - is a function of the brains "closed structure". Whereas experiences possess a fundamental "orienting value" with reference to what our biological being has come to experience as "coherent", eventually becoming a "self-orienting" process whereby the ego enacts a form of its own intuitively known dynamic experience of self as a way to defend against interruptions to its coherent experience.

Dissociation is what results from this "perception-action" cycle. This idea, so prominent in modern day cognitive science (and rightly so), fails to recognize that in humans, its more correct to speak of an affect-motivation cycle, that happens during perception and action. That is, what we are affected by becomes the fodder for motivational processes. If, for instance, I'm affected by someone not smiling back after I smile at them, an opposing, coping response may emerge in me that "reifies" a certain prideful or exaggerated feeling of self. The negative shame affect - how I feel immediately after attuning to their response - is then "processed", quite reflexively, in a manner that could only be regarded by the attending mind as "defensive".

This more complex adult habit - with slight differences and magnitudes in every mind - is better captured by the early-life situation of a baby making an effort to connect with a caregiver and the caregiver consistently failing to attune - and contextualize - the baby's response with an enlivening presence.

We still see development as a "genetically programmed process", and not the psychophysical-inner/outer dynamic that it actually is. When the mother or fathers responsivity to the state in the infant isn't "attuned" - the anxiety an infant feels is an expression of more than the registration of an "error". The error occurs because in actual fact, human beings have historically used one another to regulate one another's affective-experience. The subtly of this dance requires a constant awareness of the complexity of the ecology. It's not simply physical matter that dances as it achieves the "path of least resistance" in it's dynamical structuring; it is also the phenomenology - the mental forms of experience - being processed through the physical matter.

Modern day sciences are coming to realize that organisms are structured by temporal dynamics conditioned by the conditions of physics and chemistry. A human, for example, moves in the most efficient way - not requiring any "guidance" by the nervous system, just simply an "attunement" between the cells of the organism and the physical constraints that shape its particular structure. Roboticists studying the dynamics of human motion are at the forefront in discovering how seamlessly integrated the bodily-dynamism of the multicellular organism (animals) is with the physical background.

Yet all this swirling flow is built around not some physical fact like gravity, but about a Self. I capitalize Self, as well as Other, because everything we hold dear is impossible without having or being constituted by the tension of these seemingly polar opposites. My recreations of the evolutionary dynamic stresses the dialectic between good and bad, and how good and bad is processed by different creatures in different environments. Good, of course,is what promotes continued material existence; whereas bad is anything that harms the Self.

This dialectic is subject to the enabling and constraining effects of neurons. More complex nervous systems, perforce, evolved complex nervous systems along a dialectical path of "error correcting" towards and along paths that "relaxed" the organism into a stable attractor. More neurons necessarily translates into "more knowledge of" - thus, a stabilizing tendency being borne from a pre-existing and inherent "exuberance" in the centrifugal "overflow" of being. Being is always implicit in life, even at the Origin phase. Coherence, and Reproduction, are moved into agitation by a "surplus energetic state", pushed on by the environment. Nervous systems grow, initially, as hind brain, mid brain, and forebrain, represent at a higher organizational level the implicit cellular logic of "action" (which is carried out in the hindbrain) feeling (ditto) and perception. Interestingly, the first perceptual signals to develop in the forebrain of an animal - as modeled by the contemporary amphioxus - were "olfactory" - meaning smell detectors.

I find it interesting that the head oriented towards an "odor" - a sense strongly organized in our human minds and worlds as a "spiritual" sensation, because of the general and powerful effects it can have upon us. Is it not interesting the way evolution funnels into our structure the metaphors that organize us? Is it truly as problematic as some atheists and "skeptics" have made it out? Must doubt - and the epistemology it unfolds - be our referent?

The Jewish theologian intuited that awe and doubt had some functional significance. He studied these emotions for their theological significance, whereas I seek to show how these emotions have fundamentally different effects in carving out how-we-relate-to-the-world. Keeping in mind, always that people are built by unconsciously assimilating the positive knowledge Others have of them, the mind self-orients with reference to the "positive objects" of its internal life world. These "objects" - better thought of today as brain networks that organize brain-body functioning - guide us in our self-location, and so, precede us as REFERENTS in how we come to make meaning of the world.

I will be writing a book specifically interested in exploring awe, compassion, and fun, as 3 dynamical affects that led to the augmentation of the human brain to 1,500 ccs, 20,000 years ago, only to shrink to 1,350 cc's at a time that roughly corresponds to the advent of the agricultural era - or what may be better called "the capitalocene".

You see, we are always, and will always be, dynamical systems at "far from equilibrium" - made by an incredible 500 million year (since the evolution of multicellular organisms) process of "attuning"

- a very unconscious, we may say, dynamical process of contrgrade (opposed) dynamics finding thermodynamical (among other constraints) stability via a "smoothing out" process. If we accept the centrifugal dynamic as akin to what ethology calls "action', and accept the centripetal quality as what ethology calls "need", then action and perception (perception arises as an adaption to some external perturbation to its stability i.e. continuity and "living") are more complex and "emergent" properties already implicit in the more dynamical terms of 'centripetal and centrifugal'.

We all, always, maintain this presence - this indication of lifes main qualities - the yin and yang - of it's intrinsic and paradoxical tension. Consciousness could be described as the flow of feeling that expresses the ecology of the unity of its biophysical wholeness. The human, in fact, may be a systems property of the earth - a form that gives expression to the underlying dynamics that subserve the expression of it's existence.

Awe - in this scheme - is in fact a generated percept, an emergent property of an organism "sensing" something wonder-inducing in the observed object - whether it be an external or an internal one. Thus, awe is how the organism - the Self - is AFFECTED - by the presence of a world outside itself. That this affect even occurs , feels as coherent and self-orienting as it does, should indicate that it is intrinsically expressive of a state of biophysiological robustness. With creatures being understood more and more in terms as dynamical biological systems, it becomes apparent that a 'dynamic' regulates its structure and function, and that this dynamic is constinuous, built in at the lowest level metabolism, and being "adjusted" by the way the Organism resolves conflicts in its moment-to-moment contact with a world.

I am fairly well convinced that we are living in an emergent world with an emerging ontology. I think our stories of an "eden" reflects a pretty strong unconscious background energy already intricated in our physiological construction: we exist in this form and feel as we do because these feelings and these forms are able to stabilize and sustain our continued biophysical existence. What really, however, deserves deeper exploration, is the way whether or not 'being positively known' by the Other structures the flow of our feelings - and so structures the energy of our brains and bodies.

I am pretty convinced, as others are as well, that autism represents a epigenetically transmitted reduced capacity to tolerate the feeling dynamics implicit in the Others presence. Remember - capitalism stresses - and by stressing, neurologically promotes forms of self-regulation (affect regulation) that relies on the external world and its endless distractions - and not, as has been the historically stabilized norm (hundreds of thousands of years) using one another - that is - actually enlivening one another, with the way and manner we make one another feel in the process of seeing ourselves known positively in the expressions of the Other. Autism therefore simply represents a biophysical system that is being "pulled off" from a species typical attractor - the enlivening presence of the caregiver. The caregiver is "too much", because the world for both parents, indeed, has felt just that way, and been psychologically and neurologically processed in that way.

How amazing it is that we can be so blind to the ecology around us! How amazing, truly, that capitalisms structuring logic and gating of our feeling would take so long to be unearthed as literally a life-regulating process.

A nice post, but you use too many "in" words to make yourself sound informed.
Anthropocene or Capitalocene? Nature, History, and the Crisis of Capitalism
www.jasonwmoore.com...

I believe that environmental influences and human interaction play very large roles in the development of the human condition, or rather conditions. Above all, we are social beings needing emotional, intellectual, sexual and spiritual interaction which also requires reinforcement, acceptance, and nurturing; which is greatly lacking in society now.

If only we could have a non-judgemental other self step away and see ourselves in a true light, the light of understanding and compassion.

I commend you for delving deeper into the human condition to foster a deeper understanding of the human condition and the factors that influence our behaviour instead of settling for questionable psychoanalysis which is now found to have no empirical evidence, including childrearing practices.

www.richardwebster.net...

socrates.berkeley.edu...

a reply to: Astrocyte

Very nice deductions the main crux is the driver of evolution which is basically just adaptation to adversity... our mental being grows or stunts to these adaptations to adversity in coping mechanisms. Past experiences held go beyond the fight or flight in the human experience, because how can children fight or flight against an adversity if their parents or peers are ones they cannot escape from... so since one has no such freedom to escape a home life or peer life in a school setting that may be one of more adversity than growth, various coping mechanisms are formed as an escape to those situations.

The thing about such coping mechanisms is even ones are formed in growth promoting environments of parents and peers... later on when faced with an adversity they are unfamiliar with. This is where self protection ideas and fear of the unknown arise having previously been so coddled or cloistered away from such interactions that do not affirm their grasp of reality and instead are seen as an adversity and then form coping in various ways to deal with such things.

So it should be obvious that much of the way one reacts to things is going to be based on how they were fostered to in affirmation and encouraging groups in coping or had to adapt to in a very maladaptive environment that didn't foster early growth with a coping based on survival needs.

When both of those coping groups combine in early and later adulthood, they are automatically at odds in understanding... yet both can benefit from each other if taken to understanding instead of rejection for various reasoning without really any ration to it.

Each choice not our own requires an adaptation and in these moments of no choice how we chose to think or act based on the lack of choice is how we've constructed various personalities of coping.

A personal example; is I grew up in a very hostile and abusive home, everyday was survival including trying to secure ones own food and personal space was a hard fought freedom. I found coping in reading books and being outside as far removed from the conflicts going on as possible. This coping made me very adverse to any conflict, yet there was a hidden under current of rage built up due to having to repress any and all voice as no matter what was said it was always disregarded because of honor parents even if they are the very reason why they are unhappy, resentful and at each others throats and children were just a burden and in the way. So all of that bottled emotion not allowed any expression gave a coping of being passive aggressive, like calm water that could crash into a force of a devastating wave if need be.

Being in such an unhealthy environment, I coped the best way I could... but as I neared adulthood the clinging of that control the only one either parents had was over their children... the more they grasped and clung to us because they had neither control over themselves much less each other. So in the same way anorexics etc. take control in the only area they seem to have any over, it became apparent that the sudden importance of parental clinging that had always been repulsion was to keep their coping mechanism of control around that was a buffer to spread abuse and pain from that they constantly inflicted on each other.

It took quite a few years to undo all of the unhealthy coping mechanisms from having to adapt in such an environment, and being so used to using children as their various means and ways of coping mechanisms as an unconscious habit... those habits they exhibit still try to surface and exert to this very day, in the cognitive dissonance of total denial or an attempt to depersonalize or invalidate ones experience of the environment by objecting any view point other than their own, as to what was or did occur... as yet another form of coping to the adversity called truth.

Of course, those that did not have such an extreme of adversity find it difficult to relate to such things, but being over such things there's really no point in bringing it up unless it's to educate on something rarely seen without trying to peel through layers and layers of damage that is not a part of the person at all, unless such is perpetuated in their own behavior and just the coping mechanisms forming a self in that adaptation to such adversity.

Of course some would say such adversity not adopted as personal traits, when all coping is shed away into positive behaviors, even though such coping is difficult to see as it was an oasis that becomes an automatic habit one goes to without thinking about it's occurring.

Such as someone just shutting down and walking away from a disagreement, concerned that it may escalate only to have it bubble away and with each disagreement adding to the burden until it just explodes or enough becomes enough and they just leave the entire situation seeing it as a dysfunction and not seeing the failure to effectively communicate even in a disagreement is also a dysfunction of coping that will continually surface and sabotage the persons life, as disagreements are bound to continually arise throughout the course of ones life.

Either way we evolve physically as an organism, whether the experience continues if positive or negative determines the mental evolution of being through how we cope or have learned to with each and every experience. Such as someone failing to smile back at you, sends you into an emotional extreme, one would say the coping would be self deluding negation instead, that makes excuses for them... such as maybe they didn't your smiling, maybe they were in a bad mood etc.

However, since the reaction takes place within you... then of course the more healthy approach would be looking at your expectation as the giver in what it is you hope to receive, or what you expect as a feeling in it's return knowing what the feeling is when it isn't being one you dread. The cure is of course, learning to give smiles without expectation of any receiving them as a custom... as the self training to smile at others has come with an expectation... instead of simply just smiling, because thats what you feel like doing.

In such a manner smiling has ceased to be simply smiling and instead become an act of intention with attachments to the act of smiling... so digging deeply and honestly into your intentions for smiling and the expectations attached to that intention will uproot that emotional turmoil that has attached itself forcing you to cope with something, instead of well just smiling because the mood to smile manifests in that moment it occurs... instead of preconceived with intentions and outcomes and expectations as an "act" of smiling.

Smiling is a natural occurrence, forcing it to be UN-natural with all of these mental attachments in it's expression is why it has become something to contend with that brings you suffering and in turn having to adapt to that suffering with some form of coping when the expected outcome does not match the intent for doing so.

Sorry to turn some focus directly onto what you shared... but since you said it brings you suffering, In compassionate understanding the root of why it is causing you to suffer... it's one of my duties to aid in the removal of such things to ease others suffering, by pointing directly at the cause for which they are suffering, rarely it is at the hands of another, even then we always have a choice to react or not.

So which is it then, Self, or other?
Bastard question: if other stands apart from all selves, what then is the objective Other?

a reply to: 5leepingWarrior

Object is simply an object until some subject either externally or internally has been attached to it or both. The labels or experiences we have had with such objects regardless of what they are are themselves unaffected by any of the labels, experiences, or expectations we have of them.

The sun will still sun regardless of being called a sun or any experience positive or negative we as a group or individually have had or think about this object we have subjectively called a sun, being a subject of observation our mental field when attached to this essentially empty concept becomes subject or slave to it as something to judge when it simply is what it is regardless of all the labeling and subjectivity we have placed on this object we call the sun.

In the same manner we do this to every single thing there is and call it knowledge... yet we being subject or slave to empty concepts called knowledge what have we actually learned other than the self perpetuation of labels and descriptions that were here before us and likely many will still be here long after us in much the same way as that thing called a sun has done the exact same thing as an object regardless of any of this coming and going and labeling we have done as humanity.

That's how things exist outside of subject and return to simply being an object. Over complication of simple things seems to be the over all issue in humanity that has over complicated instead of brought the ease that was the original intent behind such searching and pondering to begin with.

If one is shot with an arrow, do you treat it right away to remove the issue or say first, I want to know what feathers, what wood, what was the bow, what formed the string, who shot it, where they male or female, child or adult, what was their heritage, what where their beliefs? Well one would die before all such asking... this is what humanity has been doing slowly dying from it's own self inflicted arrow making infinite points out of the pointless that doesn't treat any wounds we've inflicted on ourselves.

a reply to: Astrocyte

Are you talking about disassociation as a form of therapy? And can't get a clear message but it sounds like you are talking about DID and trauma based mind control.

That is what I see, a poetic monarch. I only skimmed some parts and I don't know what you are talking about so if you could make a more concise statement maybe I could understand. Maybe it's over my head and if that's the case I'd like to know.

a reply to: imod02

This is a strange response.

Whereas I do use "in-words", its not so much to "make myself sound informed" (which, btw, is a somewhat rude thing to write in so terse a response) as i believe the "in-words" add a level of clarity in understanding.

As for Jason Moore, "capitolocene" is an intensely small-piece of my general project. Whereas I like Moores work and have definitely been positively influenced by his thoughts on the way capitalism functions to structure the ecology of the earth system, my ideas about evolution, human psychology, and the flow of the human mind in terms of whether or not a certain type of self-other attunement is occurring, goes far beyond Moores' analysis.

I had already experienced in my life the problems people immersed in continuous social process have in thinking rationally. My mother, herself abused and traumatized by parents who were themselves abused and traumatized (this is a feedback process, so it should be acknowledged as occurring in a lawful way as a function of genetic constraints on self-organization in ontogenesis) always, just as all people do, turn upon the world in their thinking (representing reality) in terms of a reflexively constituted affective referent. This idea is mine, and derives from the trauma I endured and my own disability throughout my adolescence and early adult life (16-29).

It is hard - or impossible, rather - to know yourself, the way your affected and so, your motivations, in a world dominated by the processes engendered by capitalism. This issue partially derives from a cultural-mythos that fails to recognize in it's interactions causal processes - and then "representing to itself" through its theorizing, what exactly is occurring.

Again - the dynamical patterns of everyday living interactions "constrain" perception so as to make each experiencier in such a world able to "make coherent" its interactions. Its just unfortunate that those interactions change you, and shape you into an agent that is dynamically able to "entrain" with the Other.

We are biological systems that are structured pre-cognitively by brain processes that operate in our phenomenology as feelings. Since our society puts no emphasis on this process, and indeed, has thoroughly deluded itself with false psychologies (Freudian, Stimulus-Response, computational) in our desperate needs to 'self-locate' in the social process, we feel good feelings, and, so, have our minds and thoughts structured in ways that are in many ways structurally dissociative - leading to minds with multiple viewpoints, states of self-experience, that amount to internal contradictions in action - action in different contexts, with, again, their own "constraints" on the flow of emotion.

Feeling is everything in the evolutionary process - it is the internal cognate of the dynamical attractors studied by systems biologists. We have been fooled quite horribly by a market-system that is riveting our minds to material things to regulate our affects, and very far from the evolutionary norm of using the Other - and their presence - for enlivenment and regulation.

a reply to: Astrocyte

English isn't my first lanhuage, I am tired and your writing is always dripping with intelligence.

With that disclaimer, what it made me think of is the experience of spirits in different cultural contexts. In the caribbean it's quite normal for people to be possessed by spirits, something we westerners would see as a pathological issue.
Me personally I think our rationalisation and alienation from all spiritual things will ultimately strike back, because at the very least it seems to be a hardwired desire in all of us to get in touch with the Other. Even if this might be just the subconscious.
Spirituality always came with the feeling of being part of something bigger and a purpose.
The meaning of life got entirely lost in our pursuit of knowledge and rationalisation of what is "in us reaching out".
Hope you catch my drift.

Nice thread.