28 Jan 2008
Whilst we may be uncomfortable with his endemic paranoia, pseudoscience and demagoguery – and I am with all three – today no reflective person interested in psychotherapeutic insights into sociology and philosophy would fundamentally disagree with Reich’s view that the state of society is significantly explained by the prevalence of repression of basic drives, nor fail to seek to dig deeper into how it is that, through feelings and emotions, power relationships come into being, trauma is induced and embedded in the body, and spontaneous self-expression is undermined.
Having come at this myself from a variety of angles, it seems to me that there starts to be the basis of an academic consensus in relation to these issues, which have been so unpalatable and remain so in popular and political discourse because scientific abstraction is so difficult to achieve in this contested arena. Reich himself, indeed, extended – understandably and with some justification but very unfortunately from the standpoint of getting his psychotherapeutic insights taken seriously – the notion of “emotional plague” from a concept to explain the diachronic and synchronic propagation of neurosis, to what he perceived as the unwillingness of his peers and of society to apply scientific standards to his own work of the same order of rigor as those they espoused elsewhere, and indeed to use every “dirty trick” in the book to discredit him. An extreme form, doubtless, with paranoiac overtones, of what Kuhn has described in relation to scientific paradigms more generally.
Whilst I share the view that the processes Reich termed “emotional plague” are indeed relevant to the state of society, I am not very concerned, myself, to thrust these notions into public debate, even if I am persuaded and concerned that my children will suffer immensely from being raised in an environment still largely scarred and polluted (possibly, indeed, increasingly so – I pronounce myself agnostic on this point) by the effects of the emotional plague. Indeed, my approach to the issue is absolutely solipsistic. You are free to call this an abdication. To my mind, however, social activism is the easy route, and many a half-truth has been thrust on society as a way of avoiding confronting, deeply, all that the full truth implies for the self; with frequently tragic results. Public debate on the issue will not help at all, or at least it will never be sufficient.
There’s a lot of fuzziness and opportunistic self-promotion in the spiritual marketplace which bears witness to, but at the same time obscures, the simple truths Reich referred to. Although they turn me off, such grandiose constructions do not, by their mere possibility or evocative hyperbole, render the truth other or inoperant, or dispense the seeker from further exploration. Thus we see in the spiritual tradition a fundamental identity between therapy and enlightenment, and between the destiny of the self and the destiny of society; and whilst a few drops of rain may not transform a desert, they may well sustain what life there is in it; and one day there may be more.
In Advaita Vedanta – the non-dual doctrines of Hinduism deriving from pre-Aryan traditions – it is recognized that “for the enlightened, all that exists is nothing but the Self”. Indeed, the moral basis of pure forms of Buddhism lies in this profound identity which links individual and collective salvation through mechanisms which are various and variously described, but in the end endogenous to the awakened state, and therefore of no special interest.
The extent to which the traumas of early childhood can be fully reversed in adulthood is, I think, a disputed matter. I am not necessarily optimistic about it; it seems to me today like a labor that could last forever, with no end in sight and only a constant stream of suffering as more and more hidden traumas bubble their way to the surface. And yet emotional healing is a necessary, imperative and moral path; the only moral path; the only path in fact, to which we are all more or less consciously called.
Let me be clear that I do not believe that our problems in the here and now come from past lives and will be repercuted in future ones. Reincarnation and karma are barbarisms; but they prefigure another truth which is much closer at hand. What I am in life, the type of moral entity I am, is determined diachronically by family precedent and synchronically by the type of society I have been brought up in; and of course these dimensions interplay and have done so since time immemorial. In my life, I play at the margin of these social processes and social revolution is impossible; but even a little light can dispel a multitude of darkness. And so I see that healing myself is what I can give to my children, the most important thing I can give them, maybe the only important thing. This is its meaning, this is its motivation, these are the “future lives” which I can influence. I am not having more fun than when I embarked on this journey, and I don’t know if I ever will; it doesn’t matter. Only they matter. What matters to me is that the emotional plague stops here; if I cannot rid myself of it, I will at least take it to the grave with me.
But there are moments of elation also, in the process of untangling the emotional determinism which wrecks our lives. It is a tremendous feeling of freedom to break through this layer, however episodically. In the lives of most of us, it is a discourse that rumbles on, unquestioned, scarcely perceived, from cradle to grave. But it is in fact not so difficult to break; even intellectual curiosity about what it is that links cause to effect in our emotional functioning is enough to start. When one is free of this, even just a little free, there is only laughter, and not cynical or nervous laughter, but true amusement. I find it genuinely funny in a way I cannot describe.
Let us recall the elements. This isn’t meant to be a complete account of something I’m sure I don’t fully understanding, just what’s needed to set the scene.
Sense-data provoke natural bodily reactions, like fear, lust, anger, and set in process mechanisms to deal appropriately with the situation thus anticipated. This is governed by the reptilian brain and the autonomic nervous system and thus not under conscious control. But the social animal that man is, disallows a part of these reactions; this also takes place not via dispassionate operation of the central cortex, but through the mechanism of emotions. Whilst emotions play a role in bonding and enabling communities to survive, however, they also become frozen in scripts which undermine feelings and natural drives in a way which is maladaptive and frequently acutely so. By this means, the natural response of the body to external stimuli typically comes to take on a habitual character whereby tensions are associated with surrogate and constant stimuli and become a state of being rather than an adaptive transient response. Sentiments like fear and guilt come to dominate our psychic makeup and are used by us in turn to prompt reactions which we find favourable to our interests. It is from this game that we need release – though we may seek the contrary, which is exactly what organized religion gives us…
We believe in and associate ourselves with our emotional scripts, not appreciating that they are not only socially constructed – like aesthetics – but socially conditioned also; whilst they may linger on in solitude, their origin is always in social events. But maladaptive emotional scripts are no more a necessary part of our personality to be held onto and cherished, than any bodily pathology.
To illustrate, a typical process of scripted emotional response may be as follows: stimulus (A innocently switches light on early in the morning, believing B to be awake); B’s reaction (fear; surprise); state of alert; realization that reaction was inappropriate to stimulus; recollection of (or rather subconscious association with) a pattern of similar events in the past, especially in early childhood, which were a source of emotional reactions designed to ward off annoying/malicious intent on the part of a parent, sibling etc.; subliminal transference of such assumed intent onto A; production of the associated emotional reaction; association on the part of A, in turn, of B’s reaction with similar prior events (unfair unpunishment in the absence of intent to harm); emotional counterreaction (anger, outrage, sense of injustice, sense of betrayal); defensive or hostile reaction by B to what is now perceived as or associated with a threat (fight, flight, freezing); situation spirals out of control…
Especially when A is a small child, this type of inappropriate reaction, repeated often, can easily generate trauma and a diminished sense of self. Let us assume now, however, that both B and A are mature and intelligent enough to grasp this sequence of events intellectually, and may also have some understanding of their own conditioning which predisposes them to this type of reaction, which, it must be said, is in one form or another totally commonplace and largely unquestioned; often accepted by adults though invariably upsetting to children.
Then one can start to dissociate the elements and observe them critically. In this way, the spiral is broken. More than this, however, the past events which are brought to life in this way can be processed and dealt with, rather than – as so often happens – repressed anew. In fact, the recollection of these past emotional injuries which happens outside conscious control is an opportunity to be seized. It rarely is, however, because doing so unleashes the full force of the earlier reaction to the traumatizing event, a reaction which is obviously disproportionate to the proximate cause and risks, therefore, further escalating the emotional spiral as reaction and counterreaction become a battlefield for control of the self. The healing process relies on replacing the scripted reaction by one which is appropriately supportive and recognizes the fact that the phenomena being experienced have their origin in something other than the precipitating stimulus, and, thus, do not bear on A’s appreciation of B or the converse.
Even when A and B perfectly understand under normal circumstances that they have a high appreciation of each other and each is happily anchored in their own identity, this dissociation is not easy and can only be progressive. The cumulative effect is, however, liberation from this conditioned reaction and its replacement by one which is more spontaneous, appropriate and joyful. By creating a space which is safe for A to completely enter into reliving and discharging the earlier experiences, B – even through a mechanism which is at its origin maladaptive – succeeds in allowing A to reprogram a part of his emotional armouring. And this is the process which, over time, can defeat the emotional plague; one individual at a time, one moment at a time, because, just as its physical counterpart a virus, the emotional plague infects only individuals; its effect on communities is no more than the arithmetic aggregation of individual infections through whatever contagious process is at work.
In fact, whilst understanding is seemingly helpful (and being of a very academic persuasion I am drawn to it), it is probably not even necessary. In tantra we learn to feel our bodies, to respect their reactions, their capacity to feel, to respond, to respect and honor even what is seemingly maladaptive, knowing that underneath its maladaptive character, which is social in nature and hence contingent, these reactions are in fact individually adaptive, carry a message and meaning, and can bear us to safer and more secure shores.
In the English language, we do not normally place a period at the end of a title. In this case, however, it is deliberate.