Freud – Becoming Human

Affect displacement

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April 5th 2018, 15:18

In classical Freudian analysis, affect displacement (Affektverschiebung) occurs when the energy with which a particular drive or desire is endowed with a view to its realization, is displaced to an alternative object (an alternative purposive schema) under the action of the censoring activity of the superego.

Freud mainly considers sexual or aggressive drives and their unconscious repression, which results in observed behavior which draws on the energy associated with the taboo object for purposes which sedate or partially realize the drive while avoiding the taboo content. For example, the unconscious desire to kill the father may be expressed in sadistic behavior towards others in the environment where such behavior is more tolerated by social norms. Nevertheless, the Freudian schema would seem to operate wherever, and for whatever reason, drive gratification is unavailable, including in cases where the rationale for repression is conscious or, at least, represented to the consciousness in some form. This need not cover only supposed social taboos, but also complex ethical nexuses of the subject which draw energy from a variety of sources, some being drive repression but others including compassion, collaborative behavior or perceived self-interest. In other words, I may decline to do things based on grounds which I can rationalize to myself as being ethical, and that rationalization may indeed not be entirely without merit: on occasion it may even be fully merited; it is still the case that drives will seek gratification and that the affect will be displaced onto a cognitive schema which is available to the mind and in some way superficially resembles the censored course of action. When a given situation arises repeatedly, habitual pathways are formed in the mind which automatically direct the energy towards the displacement object. In clinically observed contexts this may lead to what is qualified as obsessive-compulsive behavior but in reality such behavior is a matter of degree and characterizes all of us.

The Freudian schema is simple to understand and, together with its extensions as I have suggested, seems to shed light on much observed behavior. Nevertheless, from my perspective there is also something deeply unsatisfying about it, for it offers no account of the origin of drives or of their legitimate role in our lives, encouraging us to treat psychic material as suspect and failing to recognize that the good life is unlivable on the basis of reason alone. Freud seems to view most instinctive activity as at best catastrophically naïve and at worst as decidedly sinister. This is why repression is not only justified from the standpoint of the reality principle, but often, he would seem to suggest, wise and desirable. Although he is often credited with killing the philosophical concept of the self, it seems to me that he does no more than displace the Cartesian body/mind dichotomy into the mind itself; descriptively, primary processes overdetermine behavior, yet normatively he would rather they did not. All he seeks to do is moderate the worst excesses of a repression which remains imperative and inevitable.

This Hobbesian account of drive formation needs, it seems to me, to be unmasked and to be challenged, since it matches in no particular the knowledge of the human psyche we have from anthropology or experimental psychology, never mind any spiritual insights we may have into the question. In short, if drives are to be mistrusted then their repression is likely to be advantageous in many instances. What we see, however, is that we frequently repress drives which should be trusted (or which at least should be interpreted and prompt some kind of action) simply because of an irrational or at least cowardly fear of their consequences. That we do so is an obvious consequence of (and at the same time the generative precondition for) what Foucault called the social construction of subjectivity.

In repressing drives, often we lose touch with our inner voice. When what we do is habitually conditioned to the prompting we receive, we dissipate the energy which sought to guide our steps and render ourselves insensitive to basic callings of our heart. In this way, we frustrate not only desires which we are perhaps well advised to reconsider; we frustrate our whole life’s purpose. We may, in fact, be well aware that what we are doing is only a poor substitute for what we really want; we do it regardless and we are continually dissatisfied with ourselves, sometimes truly burdened with shame or self-hatred. When the prospect of drive fulfilment becomes more manifest and we continue to deny it to ourselves, this tension may become unbearable. These are moments of existential crisis and of decisions which will have ramifications for many lifetimes. It seems to me that, however scary it may be to move your life into alignment with your soul’s purpose, the alternative is, or should be, more scary still.

Dealing with Life’s Decisions – (2) Innate Resources

In the previous article in this two-part series, I explained why, in a broad class of cases, the information we receive is likely to be a very poor guide to the actions we should take. This is the much-delayed part two; delayed mainly because I realized I didn’t have a satisfactory answer to my own question of what a better guide might be. In this post, I’ll put together the elements I now have even if I am sure there is much more to be said.

So what basis may we then have for decision, if science does not afford one and positivism is to be mistrusted? And a linked question: on what basis, descriptively, do we actually make decisions?

To the best of my knowledge, though both have grappled with it, neither science nor philosophy has an answer to this age-old riddle.

Derrida was fond of the claim – somewhat abusively attributed by him to Kierkegaard – that “the moment of decision is madness“. Decisions, claimed Derrida, are characterized by circumstances in which “it is not possible to know what should be done, when knowledge is not conclusive and does not have the vocation to be so” [1]. In this case “the only possible decision passes by way of the folly of the undecidable and of the impossible” [2].

Kierkegaard in reality was talking about the act of faith, characterized by the Christian apostle Paul as “foolishness to the Greeks“, i.e. outside the frame of logical deduction to which Hellenistic philosophy by virtue of its very precepts could lead. [3] Paul’s account of the conversion experience rings phenomenologically true: it is a moment in which a feeling of knowledge renders reason superfluous, one which subjectively appears to take place on another level of consciousness. This describes not only religious experiences, but many key moments in the life of anyone. It therefore seems to be at least descriptively accurate. The decisions one takes in such moments are experienced as beyond doubt, as led by a higher force, as apodictic: and therefore as right even if, paradoxically, they ultimately turned out ‘wrong’. And yet conversion presumably is, in fact, in our normal sense always wrong as it is interpreted to include the act of adhesion to a number of precepts which cannot be completely correct – as Kierkegaard rightly noted.

With the benefit of hindsight I can see many ways in which I might have improved, in my own life, upon decisions which I took under the influence of internal circumstances which might be compared to a conversion experience. They include matters related to relationships and academic choices. And yet although I am capable of imagining or even holding some of those decisions to have been wrong, I am incapable of regretting those same decisions, however unwise a seemingly “neutral” observer might find them to have been. There is therefore, it seems, a state in which certain decisions can be taken which, even if they are arguably unwise or suboptimal, are at least insulated from regret.

If such a sense of certainty can pervade weighty decisions, therefore, it nevertheless seems to be well worth examining them critically. Psychologist Arthur Janov has argued that conversion experiences display a universal psychodynamic pattern of ego collapse, but this is of course entirely separate from the specific meaning attached to these experiences by those who undergo them[4]. It follows that, even if in that moment the subject may indeed have been in contact with “truth” – a possibility which cannot be assumed away – nevertheless it is essentially impossible to interpret this “truth” in a way which is verifiably and intersubjectively correct[5].

De facto, even under less dramatic circumstances a number of people would doubtless cite not only science and values as a guide to decision making, but also hunches/their inner voice and self-observation. This “inner voice” represents a type of knowledge the nature of which bears further consideration, comparable in some regards to Spinoza’s “third type of knowledge” which he called intuitive knowledge [6], as well as to Husserl’s phenomenological epistemology.

Innate somatic intelligence

At one level, it seems to me that we can found the notion of an inner voice biologically. I will take the example of food. It seems (at least to me subjectively) that our body has some sense of the nutrients which it requires at any given moment – an innate, pre-conscious nutritional intelligence – and that when we make decisions related to procuring nutrition, for example when shopping, preparing food or choosing from a menu at a restaurant, this innate intelligence plays a role, together, of course, with many other factors which may be less nutritionally relevant (emotional associations with particular foodstuffs, physiological addictions, what we have been told about food, what our choices communicate …). The reality of such a sense is well illustrated by the phenomenon of cravings during pregnancy – these appear to be informative of physical needs (although this has not been proven) even if there is unarguably merit to interposing a reflective act between the drive and its gratification, as the linked article suggests. Such an innate intelligence presumably also informs the hunting or foraging impulses of other animals. We, as other primates at least, also have an innate ability to learn from our experience of certain foods which, perhaps largely subconsciously, feeds back into future decision making.

At the same time, it is hard to believe that if he were left to make all the decisions himself, my son would naturally gravitate towards a healthy diet (unless, perhaps, I were to release him into the wild). Food behavior is learnt socially in our species, presumably a significant evolutionary advantage; although on a simpler level, this is also true of other primates [7].

Unfortunately, explaining how this innate nutritional intelligence works, distinguishing it from other neurophysiological mechanisms, and determining the confidence we can have in it in making nutritional decisions is a serious philosophical and neurobiological problem which we are not even close to understanding. Some philosophers such as Thomas Nagel and Colin McGinn even argue that the mind-body problem, of which this is an instance, is inherently insoluble. Ramping this up to the next level to explain the role of intuition in complex decision making and the faith we should or should not put in it is therefore beyond the reach of any current theory, and quite possibly beyond even the reach of scientific enquiry per se. The most we can do is list instances where it goes wrong or is misleading and develop heuristics designed to avoid giving it excessive weight. This is perfectly valid and useful, and yet here is a core dimension of human existence about which we are struggling to say anything sensible.

Attitude

Faced with this situation, and with no way to resolve it, the philosophical tradition has focused on the question of the right attitude to adopt vis-à-vis our drives and urges. This tradition has tended, until recent times, to place in my view an unwarranted degree of trust in reason, the logos of Hellenistic philosophy, which presents itself as a metaphysical concept the boundaries of which (as with any socially constitutive concept) are inherently contested. The abandonment to reason urged on us by philosophers seems to lack practical value and to be value-laden, as I have previously argued. It inevitably leads to the tendentious classification of desires on a scale of value, with ‘base’ desires conspiring to lead us astray contrasted to lofty desires which lead to transcendence. This imposition of judgment can be labelled as at best arbitrary and necessarily leads to a bifurcated sense of self which is always in a state of internal conflict.

I therefore prefer a system of heuristics on top of intuition to a metaphysical belief that there is something called ‘reason’ which, if only I would listen to it, would direct my steps better than I might do myself; it sounds awfully like the superego. In my view, there is no need to sublimate desire or benefit from doing so; the contrary impression is merely the consequence of a parody of what constitutes human desire which incorporates unnecessary and ill-founded value judgments. However, I would still reason that the attitude to adopt towards desire is a question of both ethics and esthetics (in other words a question of consciousness), largely because these concepts capture a necessarily intersubjective dimension of desire which is missing in the atomistic Freudian account. This merits a discursus.

An important concept in this context is that of epoché or bracketing, popularized by phenomenologists in the tradition of Husserl who argued that the question of the real existence of objects perceived by the mind, which Kant argued was inaccessible to inquiry, could be set aside without losing the possibility of truth and meaning.

Epoché played an important role in the Greco-Roman Skeptical philosophy of Pyrrhonism. Without actually claiming that we do not know anything, Pyrrhonism argues that the preferred attitude to be adopted is the suspension of judgment or the withholding of assent, since only in this way can the seeker achieve the state of ataraxia or tranquillity. This does not imply that we have no rationale to choose one kind of action over another; however, one kind of life or one kind of action cannot be definitively said to be ‘correct’. Instead of a life of inaction, the Skeptic insists (presumably for no compelling reason other than social convenience) that one normally ought to live according to customs, laws, and traditions.

The nature of desire as movement-towards, and therefore presupposing representation of an object, is one which Franz Brentano argued it shares with other psychosomatic phenomena and which distinguishes such phenomena from phenomena in the natural world, a notion referred to as intentionality. Although it is questionable whether consciousness can be fully reduced to intentionality, for present purposes this problem can be set aside since the category of impulses we are concerned with for the purpose of assessing their reliability is certainly intentional. This intentionality may be social in nature, either because it is directed towards another person as such or because it involves the representation of an act or project which would confer more than purely private benefits or inflict more than purely private costs. Because of this fact, it is obvious that ethics and esthetics enter into the question; these are in fact social means – constitutive of intersubjective modes of action – which allow for group intention. To my mind, the possibility of intersubjective intention is fundamental to the nature and experience of desire.

It might appear that individual and group intention would be prone, even frequently, to conflict, and that there is a trade-off between them which poses itself in win-lose terms. Do we not, indeed, speak of antisocial desires and of social tyranny? While certainly a part of the felt experience of desire, however, there is more to it than this: the participation in shared desires also expands the individual’s range of possibilities and constitutes a source of gratification which is unavailable to her as a purely atomistic actor.

The question of the right attitude to adopt to desire depends at least in part on the confidence we can have in its subjective manifestation. Given the phenomenon of neurosis, that is, of displaced desire, it would seem that this may sometimes require considerable powers of introspection. This statement would appear also to hold good in respect of intersubjective intention. If food cravings are problematic enough to interpret, sexual desires, consumerist impulses and other displaced manifestations of the will to power are surely even more at risk of being tainted and subverted. Is this distinction phenomenologically available to the mind? That is, is there some qualitative characteristic of mental representations of desire which allows the subject to determine their authenticity, their freedom from involuntary subversion?

Probably all I can say at this point is that it seems to me that there is. Not that I am entirely comfortable with a binary disposition of desires between authentic and inauthentic, nor indeed that even authenticity is sufficient to ground action, but nevertheless, all this being said, certain desires just ‘feel’ different from others, just carry within them more of a sense of growth and expansion which gives them greater appeal and authority.

So I think that this distinction can be made phenomenologically, but also that abandon and detachment can coexist. Readers will recall my earlier criticism of Buddhism on the grounds that it seems to preach an unwillingness to actually live life with full commitment. Nevertheless, the attitude of detachment is objectively a part of Dasein and required for its metaphysical consistency. Any identification with a project of ones life, or with ones sensory experiences, is necessarily a confusion since all of these things are perceived or shaped by ‘something’ which cannot be reduced to them, of a form of thought which precedes mind and possesses a potentiality which vastly exceeds its lived experience. It is the adoption of the perspective of this ‘something’ (for which of course a variety of names have been proposed, but I prefer not to employ them for fear of being misunderstood) which constitutes detachment in the sense of apprehending the finitude of ones temporal existence as an artefact of historicity and its subdimensionality relative to the perspective sub specie aeternas. In other words, there is a dimension to which even philosophy can painlessly accede, because it is required strictly by logic, but which cannot be reduced to individual experience and nevertheless is immanently present to being. This seems to me to be what Heidegger is saying in Being and Time: that the dichotomy between contemplation and celebration can actually be overcome, must, in fact, in the logic of things be overcome.

The attitude to be brought to desire is therefore both the serenity of ataraxia and the ecstasy of abandon, the Apollonian and the Dionysian, stillness and dance, the esthetic and the ethical, the perspective of being and the perspective of time; both, simultaneously.

To view this as an inadequate basis for decision is the result of a rationalist bent which I believe it is easy to show reduces to the absurd. The argument is on the following lines, but I will just sketch it out. Taking decisions is just a part of living life. In order to assess the quality of these decisions, it is necessary to determine their effect on the individual’s life. This is their sole yardstick, but it is inaccessible to anything other than the subjective experience itself of being. There is, in essence, no counterfactual and no possibility of error which we could speak about in intersubjectively meaningful terms. Given this, the only pain which is real and actually borne as a result of decisions is the pain of regret, a pain conditioned on having in fact taken a decision other than the one which one ‘knew’ at the time, or should have known, was the ‘right’ one to take. It follows that a strategy which insulates against regret is the best strategy available; there is nothing better, and certainly nothing better about which we can meaningfully talk.

Now, I may seem to contradict myself since the whole premise of my blog is that there are behaviors we are likely to engage in because of our biological nature which we would be better off avoiding. But this formulation, although clear and easy to understand, contains a subtle error : it is not our biological nature which prompts suboptimal decisions, but the way in which the available options are framed by social institutions. The error comes from the institutions, and not from our nature. When I insist that we need a better understanding of our biological nature, what I mean is merely that we need to adopt a standpoint which allows us better to detach ourselves from social institutions, to see their contingency, to reform them so that the act of making right decisions will require less of a superhuman effort than it does now, perhaps to see or consider options we otherwise would not, and to understand why our spirit suffers in the world as it is, that is, to attain to wisdom. This is an agenda of growth and it is part of life; it is not a precondition of being able to live or to live meaningfully.

Attaining a conscious perspective on the part of the individual will often not make additional social options available; the same menu of choices will be there. This is why taking a decision which is at variance with that which one would take if fully reconciled to ones biological nature is not wrong. It is because one cannot be fully reconciled to ones biological nature in isolation from ones peers. The range of decisions available even to a Buddha is a small subset of what would be the decision space of an enlightened humanity. Because I cannot take decisions for all of us, my decisions will never have the quality of plenitude which, if I criticize the decision framework I have outlined for being insufficient, I would be implicitly berating them for not having. It is simply the wrong yardstick.

If we manage to live without regrets from this point forward, we will have attained to the highest trajectory available to us within what remains of our lifetime given where we stand now. It seems to me that this should be our highest aspiration.
*****

Notes

[1] “Quand il n’est pas possible de savoir ce qu’il faut faire, quand le savoir n’est pas déterminant et n’a pas à l’être”

[2] “La seule décision possible passe par la folie de l’indécidable et de l’impossible“.

[3] First letter of Paul to the Corinthians. On this paragraph see Bennington (2011), “A Moment of Madness: Derrida’s Kierkegaard”, in Oxford Literary Review, Volume 33, Number 1, July 2011, Pages 103-127.

[4] http://cigognenews.blogspot.be/2010/11/conversion-experience.html

[5] Janov speaks of the conversion experience as if it is necessary a solitary one. It seems to me likely that in so doing he significantly underestimates the importance of community – that is, of the tribal impulse – in religious conversion.

[6] Ethics, Part II, proposition 40

[7] Whiten, A. (2000), Primate Culture and Social Learning. Cognitive Science, 24: 477–508

Sex-positive feminism

“Orgasm is the body’s natural call to feminist politics” – Naomi Wolf (*).

Many feminists take a dim view of the use made of images of women in advertising and in pornography. They argue that such images almost invariably involve an objectification of women, a reduction of them to little more than a collection of sexual attributes, devoid of personhood and without agency, confined in a role dictated to them by patriarchal society and arrayed for consumption by the male sexual appetite.

This argument is partly tautological (in the sense that images are necessarily objects), and often modified in practice by free speech considerations as well as the argument by some that consensual fantasy, even if it depicts scenarios which draw on patriarchy for their erotic value, does not necessarily reinforce patriarchal values themselves (even if it leaves them unchallenged) and should be embraced as a safer outlet for fantasies which it would be more prejudicial to pursue in the real world. Nevertheless, feminist objections to female iconography betray an underlying preference on the part of many women, unsure as to what a “depatriarchalized” female sexuality actually would look like, to choose to behave in such a way as to avoid being branded a slut, which is perceived as, and indeed is, effectively a form of social ostracization. This choice is understandable, but it is not neutral or necessarily pro-feminist.

The desire to be taken seriously has historically often required women in different walks of life to forego visual strategies of seduction and those women who pursue a different track – including so-called “sex-positive feminists” – are often suspect outsiders in the feminist community. At best, they may be viewed as serving up a form of feminism designed to appeal to men’s nature or patriarchally conditioned preferences, and thereby denatured ipso facto.

There is no denying that employing those visual elements most often associated with the objectification of women, whether as part of a feminist counteroffensive, or simply because that is what one wants to do, is a tactic fraught with danger and not the best choice for everyone. But in choosing their strategies of resistance, women need to be lucidly conscious of the fact that they are caught in the type of double-bind which typically characterizes symbolic oppression. Either they claim positions in society entirely analogous to those occupied by men, thereby ratifying the patriarchal order, or they align themselves with a socially despised underclass, attracting opprobrium from men and women alike: that is, from all members of that multitude, regardless of their gender, who continue to think, whether or not despite themselves, in patriarchal categories.

For patriarchy, sex is a male drive, and some women are assigned the role of gratifying that drive. This assignment is not willy-nilly of course; it follows a very structured course which allows the drive to be adequately gratified while at the same time ensuring the reproduction of a social system in which all males have a sufficient stake in the status quo to defend it by political and military means. Patriarchy thus has always used the lever of access to women’s bodies in order to achieve its prime historical purpose, which is to control men (although the control of women per se has also become important over the last century and a half as women have gained in societal power). The conditions of expression of sexuality by men are a major theme of patriarchy, but male sexuality itself is not problematized; women’s sexuality on the other hand is assumed either not to exist or, in complete contrast, to be insatiable and dangerous.

Patriarchy, in other words, is neutral towards male sexual expression; but it is not neutral towards love. For the (male) guests at Plato’s Symposium, the idea that one could love a woman with comparable passion to how one might love a man was simply unthinkable. Loving a woman was socially subversive in classical Greece, the stuff perhaps of Gods and heroes in times past but not of free, land owning men today. For them, free women were objects of symbolic trade (and slave women of monetized trade); sentiment could not be allowed to disrupt that economy.

For us moderns, many of whom probably believe we have experienced something which we feel to be biologically innate and which we call “falling in love” (but which may be merely limerence), Plato’s conception of eros seems a surprising drive diversion. And evolutionary considerations would suggest it is. Nevertheless, the strangeness of the Greek romantic imagination should not allow us naively to imagine that our own conception is purely a biological restoration. On the contrary, the conditions under which we are allowed to fall in love are tightly controlled by society. Absent these conditions, it is not simply that we are condemned to fail in our amorous endeavors; in fact we are little more likely than the ancients to notice or acknowledge our feelings at all. For this reason, we have little idea what the experience we call “falling in love” would have looked or felt like in the ancestral environment, even if I would not exclude that a phenomenological or anthropological enquiry might tell us something (of which I might be ignorant).

So, the kind of feminism I would like to see might better be termed “love-positive” than “sex-positive”; that women adopt a positive attitude towards the biological capacity for physical pleasure with which they are born seems like something that should be able to be taken for granted. It would be good if feminism were to insist on our capacity as a species to love and nurture, including, but not limited to, heart-based, non-exclusive sexuality. Nevertheless, I fear that a “love-positive feminism” would quickly be assimilated to a desexualized one because of the sublimination of sexuality we are all conditioned to operate.

The conversion of the female body into an object of consumption is indeed an artefact of patriarchy. Nevertheless, the role of female iconography in contemporary society also differs vastly from that in Antiquity. Although clothing has a longer history, techniques of mass visual reproduction are very recent. Even the depiction of the female nude in painting only really took off with the Renaissance, and it was a radical break with earlier Byzantine norms (even if, it seems, rapidly embraced by the Papacy…).

Of course, this Renaissance artistic movement was no resurrection of Hellenistic esthetics, but a creation which drew on Greek and Roman archetypes for its own purposes. Representation of men was far more common than that of women in Hellenistic art, and female representations are essentially unknown in the classical period; in Renaissance art this proportion was completely reversed, with the female body, and erotic scenes featuring it, clear themes of predilection. The purpose of this can scarcely have been anything other than male titillation, but the bringing of the female form out of the whorehouse and into courtly palaces represents a concession to its erotic power which must have been profoundly disturbing to indentured wives, daughters and maidservants, and probably to many men within courtly families also. This development, I believe, can hardly be seen as a further reinforcement of patriarchy, hypothetically confident enough to bring into the light those practices which previously had been reserved for the shadows; rather, these inanimate forms, fantasy women created by men for men, represent to my mind the first stages of the crumbling of patriarchy under the weight of its biological, and increasingly social, contradictions: a process which continues to this day and is, of course, still far from complete.

Over the course of history, patriarchy has effected a constitutive bifurcation of women into two antagonistic groups, imposing monoandry on, and denying sexual agency to, the one (essentially those women engendered within patriarchal clans), whilst making the second (slaves and outcasts) available for the use of the males of the society as a whole. Almost all of the portrayal of women in art from the Renaissance onwards has been of courtesans and concubines, or of figures adopting their attributes. The allegedly higher status, but desexualised, class of women qualifying as wives is absent from the collective imagination. This bifurcation, which doubtless stretches back into remote antiquity, gave rise to what Freud called the Madonna-Whore complex. This is certainly a hypocritical double standard. But it is also inherent to the intersection of male sexual drives and patriarchy.

What is new with the Renaissance is that the courtesan is celebrated in art rather than despised. It is important, indeed, to note that these two archetypes are not equal alternatives. The Madonna archetype enjoys superior (if still limited) social status and is unmarked; the whore archetype is stigmatized, including by the madonna herself, and is marked. The subordination by patriarchy of the whore to the madonna has fundamental consequences for thinking through strategies of symbolic resistance.

The patriarchally assigned bifurcation of the female, in fact, has been subject to constant erosion over the last ten centuries of Western history as properties of the courtesan have been transferred to the sought object of legitimate romantic passion, bringing love into the matchmaking paradigm and subverting more strictly patriarchal norms of arranged marriage. Courtly love was the first manifestation of this slow cultural earthquake, in which for the first time romantic passion was admitted into the public arena, provided that it did not interfere with matrimonial arrangements and was sublimated. The right of women – or men – to marry for love, however, took a long time to be established, at least in courtly and developing bourgeois circles, and is not, indeed, even fully acquired in Europe today (never mind, of course, the rest of the world). Its acceptance has been at the price of the assimilation of marriage-for-love to marriage-by-arrangement, with which, however, it shares little in common (and compared to which it is notoriously less stable).

The whorehouse was an accepted and inevitable institution within the social economy of arranged marriage. The position of the whore-as-archetype, became, however, problematic for proponents of marriage for love. By this I mean (though here I may be speculating) that well-born women, having experienced sexual passion in the context of romantic love, came to view it as their birthright, but were nevertheless still constrained by the patriarchal order of marriage – as Flaubert’s Emma Bovary found to her cost. To this we should add, as Michel Foucault has pointed out in La Volonté de Savoir, the increasing importance placed upon sexual exclusivity within marriage within the developing bourgeois ambitions of the 18^th and 19^th centuries, essentially in order to safeguard the blood line and the accumulation of family wealth.

These social developments, which here I can only evoke briefly, resulted in what has become, today, almost a fusion, and frequently an unbearable one, of the expectations associated with the Madonna and Whore archetypes. Women are asked, in the first instance by women’s media themselves, to be both – even though the combination is well-nigh impossible and in any case unlikely to procure any durable advantage. This continuing demand for both archetypes is certainly an indication of the malleability of patriarchy to changed social circumstances to which Bourdieu refers in Masculine Domination. Nevertheless, it is not necessarily indicative of its perennity; it seems to me that patriarchy is really underpinned by militarism and plutocracy and it is shifts in these social variables which will undermine (or are needed to undermine) its ongoing vitality. What feminism needs to do is to unleash the inherent contradictions in patriarchy which have been visible throughout history and harness other forces in our psyche.

By rejecting sexual empowerment, women reject only one side of the bifurcated patriarchal feminine in favor of the only other of the binary choice of options socially prepared for them. It is very difficult to bring into existence alternative archetypal paradigms, and almost impossible as long as the existing paradigms retain their force and serve their purpose. Choice ratifies and strengthens the bifurcation itself, whilst having no effect on the net exploitation of women, as the patriarchal economic order is left untouched by it, and this order can always create the supply of “whores” which it desires. The only subversive choice – the one made, in his way, by Michel Foucault – is not to choose. But this choice is only subjectively available: not choosing will result in social assignation to women of the “whore” label anyway – because sexual shame structures the entire patriarchal system. In the same way as Foucault was socially assigned to the marked category of gay, though he never made that identification.

It is clearly unfair – in fact it is an oppressive manoeuver – simply to dismiss women as their own worst enemies. Society cannot indoctrinate women with patriarchal views and then complain that they exhibit patriarchal attitudes. By far the most likely reason women engage in slut-shaming is to convince patriarchal males of their own chastity and to reinforce the Madonna-norm to which they have chosen to submit since, having made that choice, they are invested in it. We all know, and feminists better than anyone, that women are in part the vehicles of their own oppression, but that is because the odds are stacked against them by the system within which they are constrained to operate.

There is no Archimedean point outside of the structures of symbolic domination which can be used to bring the whole thing crashing down – we are condemned to work within it and this is what makes the whole enterprise so painstaking slow. Nevertheless, so-called sex-positive feminism, while there is plenty to debate and criticize within it, is not a watered down version of the real thing, designed to avoid the latter’s full social consequences: it is in fact the most subversive form of feminism yet devised precisely because it appeals to men on an instinctual level which bypasses, however temporarily, some part of their patriarchal conditioning. It is a power which merely needs to be self-aware.

“Sex-positive feminists” and “slutwalkers” may be vilified for allowing themselves to be objectified but in fact they do not “allow” this at all, they are merely subject to it because of attitudes embedded in patriarchy – attitudes which need to be challenged and changed. As long as patriarchy prevails, women are likely to be oppressed by one or other of the symbolic categories of oppression, madonna or whore, which constitute the two poles, both socially constructed, of the patriarchal bifurcation of the female. There is no choice which renders neither calumny applicable. The core patriarchal oppression, however, is embodied in the figure of the madonna, not in that of the whore. The whore archetype is a secondary manifestation, structurally dependent for its existence and its power on the primary strategy of denying female agency – of denying, in fact, female humanity. Given this, slut-shaming is a counterproductive response by women, and one which is moreover inoperant since the supply of whores and that of madonnas will always attain a patriarchal equilibrium as long as madonnas themselves continue to exist. If an individual is not sexually empowered, the whole system remains in place; but if all women chose the whore over the madonna, neither would be any more.

Notes

(*) “Feminist Fatale: a reply to Camille Paglia”, The New Republic, March 16, 1992

Ancestral sexuality: more clues from our erotic imagination?

In my last post, I alluded to some of the evidence from psychoanalysis which supports the position of primary sexual non-exclusivity taken in Sex at Dawn. In this post, I would like to throw out another idea. (*)

I have mentioned before Robert Stoller’s work on the erotic imagination (here and here) and have just now finished reading the chapter on erotic fantasy in Esther Perel’s superb Mating in Captivity, to which I shall return in a future post Reading this, it occurs to me that we have no good answer to the following question: why is the experience of repressed aggression or of humiliation sexualized even when it is not obviously sexual in origin? That is, why do we make specifically sexual fantasies out of these experiences and wish to reenact them in a sexual context? One could perfectly well reenact them in other contexts, and as a practical matter this may often be far easier to do; yet the erotic persona often seems diametrically opposed to the public persona. There is of course a Freudian, “developmental” answer to this question, but it is in this regard circular: it begs the underlying question of why exactly sex is so important to the ego.

So what is the link between sex, aggression and status and why is it so powerful? After all, in plenty of primate species sex has no particular importance: it is casual, episodic and short-lived. Given the insignificant role of sex in such species, it is hard to imagine that they spend anything like the proportion of their time thinking about it which humans do. In fact there is only one primate species for which it is easy to conceive of its possessing an active erotic imagination and one in which sex and aggression are closely linked: the bonobo.

For bonobos, sex plays a rich and unique social role. Let’s listen to Frans de Waal: “Bonobo sex often occurs in aggressive contexts … A jealous male might chase another away from a female, after which the two males reunite and engage in scrotal rubbing. Or after a female hits a juvenile, the latter’s mother may lunge at the aggressor, an action that is immediately followed by genital rubbing between the two adults.”

Just like “make-up” sex which anecdotally is a frequent occurrence in human dyadic relationships, sex for bonobos plays a role of reestablishing social connections after emotions have gotten a little out of hand.

Now let’s imagine a bonobo which for some reason (forced induction into human “civilization” for example) is not allowed to use sex to bring reconciliation in a certain range of contexts and is also sex-deprived generally. The experience of aggression in these contexts is still, presumably, going to provoke in him or her an erotic reaction. Absent the opportunity to act on this impulse, one can well imagine its becoming, by the standard mechanism, a neurotic script whereby the circumstances which originally sollicited the reaction non-exclusively, now become integral to it and required for it to take place.

That is, we may hypothesize that the ability to make aggression into a core element within the erotic imagination requires a significant primary link between sexuality and aggression in the social life of the species. Aggression and sexuality are in a subtle and continuous balance in bonobo society, the purpose of which is to sustain cooperation within the tribe.

My purpose, of course, is not to suggest that human sexuality is not much more sophisticated than that of bonobos: it clearly is. Yet it is appealing to imagine, even if it is only the embryo of an idea requiring further research, that we share this archetypal association, as it would illuminate what remains otherwise, to my mind, somewhat of a mystery.

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(*) Note: as readers of the book will be aware, the theme of a link between the erotic imagination and primary sexuality is already present in Sex at Dawn, where the authors discuss the appeal of multi-male pornography to men. This contribution is in a similar spirit.

John Sarno’s work on the etiology and treatment of psychosomatic disorders

I have been troubled all my adult life by disorders termed, which generally meant dismissed as, psychosomatic. These are disorders for which no physical etiology can be found, although they may have observable physical manifestations. From a psychological point of view, they have also recently been classified as somatoform disorders. As such, I was very interested to discover recently John Sarno‘s work on the subject.

Sarno’s basic premise is that just as emotional conflict can give rise to neuroses, so it also can give rise to pain and other physical conditions. This linkage may be direct, with Sarno positing that localized pain is a result of ischemia ordered by the central nervous system. Such emotional conflicts may also, via mechanisms which are presumably diverse, but which Sarno does not elucidate, result in afflictions to which non-psychological factors also contribute, whether in terms of their etiology or their clinical development. A key feature of Sarno’s posited diagnosis of tension myositis syndrome (TMS) is the variability in its lifetime expression. As such, it is an umbrella diagnosis or metadiagnosis for a variety of syndromes which have in common a non-progressive character. For a fuller discussion, read his 2006 book The Divided Mind.

I suffered in my early teens from clinical depression and situational urinary incontinence. By my mid-teens, this was replaced by muscular fasciculations, which I was convinced for a long time had to be a manifestation of a degenerative condition. Muscular function remained mechanically and electrically normal however, and much later this was officially classified as “benign fasciculation syndrome” (although it has receded, I am not fully free of it to this day). I went on at college to develop chronic fatigue syndrome, which at one point resulted in my being almost unable to walk. I also suffered at that time from migraines and back pain, and peri-orbital migraine was a regular occurrence for many years afterwards. During all this time, there have been no notable biochemical abnormalities observed.

Now I have not been monitoring bodily symptoms against my emotional state for many years and so I cannot provide a full account; it has changed immensely for the better, but I have still had my share of annoying things, in particular abdominal pains, and six or seven years ago Achilles tendinitis. Around May last year I developed plantar fasciitis on the left foot; it took a year to heel but then almost immediately the right foot developed the same symptoms. It has been quite debilitating as strenuous effort has tended to worsen it. All this led me to seek effective relief from the pain in various ways, a subject to which I will return.

Sarno’s notion, therefore, is very appealing. Indeed, given the importance of physical complaints, so called “hysterical conversion“, in the early development of psychoanalysis, it is not quite clear why attention has mostly been subsequently restricted to behavioral neuroses, especially outside of the Reichian tradition. Even if the mechanisms remain obscure, it is attractive to view psychosomatic disorders as somatic forms or expressions of neurosis.

However, I suspect the brain is less involved in mediating this relationship than we think. Sarno claims that the pain is directly generated by the brain as a diversion from unwanted emotions which threaten to break through into consciousness. I fancy this is otherwise: the brain is involved, certainly, in the repression of emotions, and by preventing their expression it prevents their discharge. The bodily symptoms, however, do not necessarily require neurological involvement and may arise on the basis of pure biochemistry. This is illustrated by research on the role of myofibroblasts in the mechanic regulation of connective tissue (see here). To me, the idea that the brain is busy, like some cranky old Wizard of Oz, devising ways to present consciousness with ever-new diversions seems crude, and it is not required to explain Sarno’s clinical outcomes. Variation in the site of pain may have simple biomechanical explanations.

So Sarno’s work is pathbreaking and liberating, definitively contributing to a shift in understanding of psychosomatic disorders, but it nonetheless needs to be taken with the necessary pinch of salt. Sarno offers, in The Divided Mind, no epidemiological data to back up his claim that the syndrome chosen by the brain is a matter of fashion (in a Kuhnian perspective, it is of course much more plausible that it is the diagnosis and corresponding collection of statistics which is driven by fashion, rather than the patient’s symptoms, especially since many of these diagnoses are evidently imprecise). He also offers no evidence to back up the conjecture that local ischemia explains the pain or that this is cerebrally induced (and if so, how). Indeed, the locus of pain is not discussed either, and some statements suggest Sarno does not have a deep understanding of myofascial biochemistry.

Sarno follows the usual path of airbrushing Reich out of the history of psychoanalysis, although it should be obvious that Reich was the first to look at the body and mind as a whole. However, his major error is to follow Freud’s mistrust of the id and misplaced trust in the superego. Freud, as we know, viewed repression as in many ways akin to a virtue upon which civilization depended. Sarno also paints a picture of the “childish, primitive” unconscious as the enemy within, even referring to it, with patent ideological bias, as the “dregs of evolution”, contrasting it to the “ethical and moral” conscious mind, a view hardly conducive to integration and well-being, and one which even Freud would have struggled to maintain (Nietzsche of course having demolished it comprehensively). His negative views of the moral quality of children are particularly depressing in their Calvinist overtones.

Several of Sarno’s statements in relation to brain neurology seem completely wrong: for example he attributes “rational, civilized” behavior to the neocortex, labeling it “that part of the human brain that has been added in the process of evolution”, even though the neocortex developed in the first mammals. The attempted equation between brain structures and Freud’s threefold division of the mind is presented as fact, whereas it is not a notion entertained by any mainstream psychoanalyst or neurologist. Indeed, Sarno oscillates gaily between the unconscious/preconscious/conscious model and the id/ego/superego model as if they were the same thing.

All this aside, this is a book which opened my mind to what now seems like an obvious fact but has long gone unnoticed, namely that the mind does not simply affect the body in vague, unspecified ways but perhaps in very specific ways where a direct link can be drawn between emotional circumstances and pain. It is pretty clear now to me what the circumstances were which led to both episodes of plantar fasciitis, and I am inclined to agree with Sarno that this knowledge is immensely emancipatory.

The Will to Power

I have recently been thinking about what Nietzsche referred to as the Will to Power.

Nietzsche’s concept expresses, glossed in modern terms, the intuition that there is, in our biological constitution, a source of self-becoming which is identifiably and subjectively moral and yet individual and innate.

Nietzsche was dissatisfied with Schopenhauer’s concept of the will to live and with the Darwinian concept of the survival of the fittest. For all that he challenged in German moral philosophy, he remained convinced that man had an innate, if often latent, moral drive and that this was biological in nature. Had Nietzsche lived later, he would surely have found Freud’s “pleasure principle” just as reductionist. The Will to Power itself is amoral in nature and its biological foundations are not really explored: morality is a second order effect that Nietzsche expects to emerge from affirming this basic drive rather than repressing it. What a world would look like in which people lived in accordance with the will to power is not Nietzsche’s concern, and at first sight the notion seems as compatible with altruism and benevolence as it does with despotism and misanthropy. On closer reflection though, the charge of misanthropy must be a misunderstanding, because the superman derives no benefit or pleasure from subjugation of others; he speaks “badly of man but not ill of him”. As for subjugation of nature, Nietzsche views it as an intrinsic folly.

So the question is, what is the biological basis of the will to power? It seems to me that Nietzsche misunderstood Darwin in imputing to him a necessary dependence on utilitarian notions. From at least a modern perspective, this seems not really to underlie Darwin’s discoveries. All that really would seem to matter is that I pass my genes on, and not that I am happy with my life.

Nietzsche posits that vitality is the root of man’s creativity and the best of which he is capable. As such, the will to power seems to rest, biologically speaking, upon the drive to procreate. It is this, seemingly so basic, drive, and which can undeniably also be experienced as entirely trivial, that at the same time is so inextricably linked to our most compelling experiences of dissolution and ecstasy. Whereas Freud thought that moral effort was needed to channel sexual energy into the achievements of civilization, Nietzsche is much more trusting in the natural propensity of this creative energy to overflow into the entirety of man’s social and inner experience: it does not need to be directed, it only needs to be unleashed.

The will to power and the drive to procreate or to experience dissolution are not, however, precisely the same thing. If this were so, the will to power would be everywhere; it is hard to imagine how societal forces would keep it in check. Descriptively however, few people seem to embark on the journey to which their vitality invites. For those people, and I count myself among them, allowing societal forces to prevail over ones inner sense is simply an impossibility; it is inherently immoral, however noble might be that to which one is exhorted. The only moral being one possibly can be is the one that one is. Of course one exercises judgment, discernment, in practical action but this is really not very difficult because one is not at war with the outer order of things, one is simply awake to the opportunities to change it that may arise. All else is tension, and counter-reactions to it are assured. If morality arises from the natural state of man, moral crusades can never lead anywhere. All I need to do and all I can do is to take you, if you are ready, by the hand and lead you to places which can trigger your own awakening. Force is available to me, but it is useless. As I have written before, meditation is my only moral imperative.

But, you may protest, if I see injustices of which I am not the author, do I not have to act?

No. But at least I may. If I embrace the will to power, I am no longer powerless, no longer trapped in knee-jerk reactions to external events, reactions which are almost entirely determined by my own inner struggles. I am serene. I can act. My power is available to me and I have clarity as to the potential rewards of my action. And as such, I am finally a moral subject. Certainly, good deeds may contribute to mankind’s well-being, but they do so proportionately to the inner serenity of their authors.

Ultimately, it remains a mystery why most of mankind, like the animals from which we are descended, is in a state of more or less deep sleep. The will to power, in conscious form, seems to characterize only the few and at this stage of our social and perhaps biological evolution it is a pure leap of faith to imagine it as potentially characterizing the many. We are left with the mystery of consciousness, this quality which suffuses nature and yet is distinct from it, seemingly, in an evasive sense, superordinate to it; which erupts into human minds and human history more as a messenger from another realm than as an expected basis for our being. It is alien to us, yet our deepest nature; we long for it, but have mostly no idea where to look. Humanity as animal plus consciousness is an aspirational equation, even a self-delusion at times. Grounded in our biological nature, the will to power necessarily impels us not simply to recreate the conditions of a more natural life, although this is a precondition, but to be something which, so far and with rare exceptions, humanity has not been.

Better food, worse sex?

I have just completed Jared Diamond’s at times fascinating account of how the economic geography of today’s world came into play. Predictably, the major culprit (or hero if you will) is the same agricultural revolution which Ryan and Jethá in Sex at Dawn blame for the human race’s unnatural fate of sexless monogamy, in turn both blamed by Reich for giving rise to endemic neurosis and feted by Freud as a precondition of civilization. This inevitably raises the question of whether it is actually possible for the human race to buck this secular trend and live a natural existence of any sort under by now fundamentally transformed social conditions.

Mystics often float the idea that our species is engaged in a spiritual evolution. It is quite hard for me to buy into this notion. Evolution in any case is not a one-way street: organisms also get simpler to adapt to their environment, not only more complicated. Indeed, both Diamond and Ryan document instances of this happening in our own species. We tend to assume we in the West are smarter than hunter-gatherers, but it turns out that the opposite applies. Intelligence is much more predictive of the chances of passing on ones genes in primitive societies than it is in post-industrial ones, and in keeping with this, the average native of Papua New Guinea is more intelligent than the average Englishman. He also has a larger penis and significantly higher sperm count.

It seems to me that we basically live in a state of alienation which we have some idea now how we got into, but no idea how to get out of. Not only is the Enlightenment myth of constant progress dead, but we perhaps have to get used to the idea that we have regressed instead. And even if we do believe that human societies are getting fairer, less violent and generally less neurotic, then clearly there has at least been a period, presumably until fairly recently, when the contrary was the case. Moreover, Freud’s Faustian bargain might even have been acceptable if it was only about sex. But if the cost of adapting to modern civilization is in fact a large loss of enjoyment in life and atrophy of both body and spirit, then might we not really be better off abandoning much of what we have built and starting over?

I do not have an answer to this question other than to observe it is not an obvious or even well-defined option. The myth of the Golden Age is omnipresent in our collective memory and wildly opposing views on the quality of prehistoric life pitted philosophers in the iconoclastic, naturalist tradition of Rousseau and later Nietzsche against the likes of Burke, Hobbes and Voltaire. The so called “paleolithic diet” is a controversial attempt to restore an analogous nutritional environment to the one that existed in hunter-gatherer times, and the barefoot movement shares similar aims. But primitivism, it seems, whilst it can be a source of inspiration in trying to uncover some of the ways in which modern life does not serve our health and happiness, can hardly be an agenda.

Electra

Ich glaube, ich war schön: wenn ich die Lampe ausblies vor meinem Spiegel, fühlt ich es mit keuschem Schauer. Ich fühlt’ es, wie der dünne Strahl des Mondes in meines Körpers weisser Nacktheit badete so wie in einem Weiher, und mein Haar war solches Haar, vor dem die Männer zittern, dies Haar, versträhnt, beschmutzt, erniedrigt, verstehst du’s, Bruder? Ich habe alles, was ich war, hingeben müssen. Meine Scham hab’ ich geopfert, die Scham, die süsser als Alles ist, die Scham, die wie der Silberdunst, der milchige des Monds, um jedes Weib herum ist und das Grässliche von ihr und ihrer Seele weghält, Verstehst du’s, Bruder! diese süssen Schauder hab’ ich dem Vater opfern müssen. Meinst du, wenn ich an meinem Leib mich freute, drangen seine Seufzer, drang nicht sein Stöhnen an mein Bette? Eifersüchtig sind die Toten: und er schickte mir den Hass, den hohläugigen Hass als Bräutigam. So bin ich eine Prophetin immerfort gewesen und habe nichts hervorgebracht aus mir und meinem Leib als Flüche und Verzweiflung.

(Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s libretto for Richard Strauss’s Elektra)

Let me share with you a painting.

This was done, unprompted of course, by my six-year-old daughter; the little bird on the left is her, the big one on the right, me; and the heart represents what hearts represent.

In sharing this with you, I want to make two points, which, in fact, are really only one point from two perspectives.

But first a brief discursus.

Carl Gustav Jung’s invention of the Electra complex earned him, as we know, Freud’s opprobrium. Freud was unwilling to contemplate a symmetric process on the part of the girl child to the male Oedipus complex which forms such a basic plank of his theory of male psychosexual development. The reason for this appears to have been that the initial infantile oral attachment is to the mother; in the male child, this attachment needs to be broken so that the object of sexual attraction is sought outside the family unit; for the female child the problem is not posed in these terms because the female/female bond to the mother remains. The female child thus would not form any infantile presexual bond and therefore not need to break this bond. As sexual development progresses, objects of attachment can only be sought in the outside world.

The Freudian account, I guess, is by now thoroughly unconvincing to any clinical psychoanalyst, who knows from repeated experience the importance of fixation on the father figure as a source of female neurosis.

In an earlier post, I reflected that Sex at Dawn, due to its deconstruction of the elemental nature of the nuclear family group, might anyway require a reevaluation of the Oedipus and Electra complexes. On reflection, Sex at Dawn does not really imply anything for Freud’s theory: the biological mother has an archetypal role and status in any society. However, I believe psychoanalysts have not awaited the findings of paleoanthropology to start to criticize both Freud’s and Jung’s accounts as reflecting contingent social circumstances rather than universal truths. As such, at the very least the intensity of the psychic conflict alluded to may be primarily a consequence of the poverty of adult social relations, whether male or female, to which children in industrial societies have access. If the mother or father fails or is absent, the available social tissue is insufficient to take up the slack. This would not have characterized pre-industrial, much less pre-agricultural societies, in which the absence of one or other parent is likely in any event to have been a common scenario and therefore one to which the human psyche presumably developed resilience.

Whatever its theoretical basis, however, descriptively the Electra complex seems to have been highly relevant in the environment in which psychoanalytic theory was born. Its clinical relevance probably explains why it is the only concept developed by Jung which made it into mainstream clinical practice. Post-structuralist, feminist and Marxist readings of fairy tales and dowry practices tell a similar story: whether or not the role of the father figure is to any degree biologically programmed, it is certainly to an extraordinary degree culturally reinforced. Jung was neither wrong to see in the neurosis with which Sabina Spielrein presented the shadow of her violent yet charming father, nor to identify a cultural pattern attested from the earliest literate societies (sex-negative patriarchy struck back when Stalin closed Spielrein’s experimental kindergarten in Moscow in 1926 on charges of sexual perversion and Hitler’s troops shot her for her Jewish origins in Rostov on Don in 1942)(1).

I would like, therefore, to bear witness in this way to the astonishing delicacy of the love between father and daughter. In our emotionally devastated world, each generation is still borne anew with all its potential for love. The emotional desert in which we all live certainly contributes in a major way to the semiotic charge of the relationship and its frequently unhappy course. And yet, we instinctively sense that we are in the presence of something deeply sacred – in many men’s experience perhaps uniquely and unbearably so.

In sharing the painting with you, I want to say something to women, and to fathers.

To women, I hope it shows you that, whatever has been your personal history, your love for your father has been a precious part of who you are as a human being. In all likelihood he was an inept, if not appalling guardian of the treasure entrusted to him. The treasure, however, is yours, and remains.

And to fathers of daughters (though frankly, it is really very similar with sons): please wake up and cherish this tender miracle which lights your days. In doing so, remember that we are the servants of our children, and not they of us.

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Notes:

(1) Jung’s proximate source seems not to have been Sophocles, however, but Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Strauss’s librettist whose words are cited at the top of this article.

Sex, pain, and the death instinct, revisited

As I mentioned in a previous post, I have been reading a book by Joachim Bauer entitled Warum ich fuehle, was du fuehlst (“Why I feel what you feel”), which is basically a mixture of science and conjecture about the function of the human mirror neuron system. It turns out that the same neurons fire when we perform an act ourselves and when we see it performed by someone else, and this, it is argued, lies at the basis of our ability to experience empathy and to intuitively read the emotional state and intentions of the other.

A leitmotiv of the book is the idea that social interaction performs an essential role in neurobiological development. Famously, though probably apocryphally, Frederick II is said to have conducted an experiment whereby children were raised without hearing human language; deprived of this stimulus, they are said to have died. Perhaps more believably, controversial experiments on macaque monkeys have shown that, deprived of social contact, they develop psychosis. This conclusion is not new, but it appears we are starting to uncover some of its neurobiological foundation.

Controlled scientific experiments cited by Bauer in the book show that social exclusion can generate pain in the same centers that register physical pain. We have for some time known that the perception of physical pain is not a simple function of external stimulus, but also factors in, and fundamentally, psychological aspects – what that pain means, or is thought or feared to mean, to the perceiver. Now further we know, and this is backed up in a 2005 paper by Naomi Eisenberger and Matthew Liebermann, entitled Why It Hurts to Be Left Out, that purely social factors can induce pain which is similar in all respects to “physiological” pain (indeed, it is physiological pain).

Interjecting a couple of points of my own here: firstly, pain is something we are wired to avoid. Indeed, we avoid it instinctively, even if we are consciously prepared to confront it knowing it has certain benefits (or more accurately, is a by-product of processes which have such benefits). The greater the pain we experience, the more we privilege its avoidance over any rational assessment of the benefits to ourselves of enduring it. Secondly, what is already true for physiogenic pain is true, of course, a fortiori for psychogenic pain (or perhaps I should call it “sociogenic pain”), namely the pain we actually experience is a function of our psychological state at the moment of the stimulus. There are common features, perhaps, but there is no standard human response to life events which modify our social constellation such as bereavement, loss of ones job, retirement and so on. Just as touch, which might otherwise procure pleasure, will feel painful when applied at a point where we have open wounds, so also the same life event will be experienced by some even pleasurably whereas it might have the most excruciating effect on others. In medicine this is called hyperalgesia.

Indeed, this is true to such an extent that it leads to a necessary qualitative distinction in any discussion of psychogenic versus physiogenic pain. Certain life events, such as bereavement, are probably universally painful in at least some degree, and therefore comparable to fractures, burns, stings and so on. In other words they signal to us a real and universal need to bring the healing resources of the body to bear on the wound inflicted. The vast majority of situations and events which cause psychogenic pain, however, are not like this at all – our reaction to them is intensely personal and someone else’s reaction to the same events could be totally different.

As I am in the business of giving personal development suggestions in this blog, and not just describing things, allow me then to say that it is extremely important to make this distinction. There are many things in the world in relation to which vast swathes of the population are in a neurotic state. It is thus statistically common to observe a similar reaction to these things in many people. Nonetheless, this does not make these things natural or inevitable sources of pain. They may even be natural sources of pleasure.

This is likely the case in many instances where many people – men and women – experience sexual jealousy. There are many grounds to suspect that observing ones partner and other people one loves being sexually intimate with others, or to learn about it or hear of it, is in fact naturally pleasurable, and was experienced as such in our Urwelt. Just to cite a few: there is the vicarious experience of pleasure which I mentioned before; the social bonds which it creates to the new sexual partner; the prospect of half-siblings improving the life chances of ones own offspring; the prospect of ones own enhanced sexual gratification as a result; and so on. Perhaps most convincingly, there are people who enjoy it. There are not many who enjoy objective sources of physical pain.

Nonetheless, many people experience this as pain. What to do? It is easy enough to say that one should stick out the pain and eventually it will die down and be replaced by pleasure. However, as any sufferer from chronic pain will tell you, this is not even necessarily true, much less is it a sufficient motivation to endure a potentially long and painful journey to a seemingly uncertain destination.

I do not have a simple answer either, but I think some reflection on what causes this hyperalgesia may point the way. Already when it is understood that the person suffering from jealousy experiences physical pain, it becomes clearer than it might otherwise have been that their reaction to this experience is, to a significant degree, outside of their control. Anger or recriminations in relation to it are pointless. Indeed, worse than pointless – such a reaction invites the sufferer to feel guilty, deny their pain, or submit to the other, refreezing and reinforcing the factors which led to the experience of jealousy in the first place.

Jealousy is felt as alienation – a withdrawal behind the defenses of the ego and a loss of the sense of contact with the world, a sense which was clearly tenuous to begin with. Alienation in childhood becomes self-fulfilling prophecy in adulthood. The cycle can only be broken by showing empathy and connection – not by withdrawing it and leaving yet another victim abandoned carelessly on life’s highway.

And this really brings me back to the essentiality of social contact, of touch and of sexual expression also. It appears that there is nothing in humanity’s basic repertoire of interaction which is merely “nice to have”, which we can ignore or neglect without fear of consequences. The idea of freedom without community – cultivated the world over as a spiritual value – is in fact a nonsense, or at best something which is only possible on the basis of a very strong foundation of community in the past.

Bauer tells familiar stories and some less so. That the passage into retirement is an explanatory variable for mortality rates. How couples seem so often to die in close proximity to each other. But also of how persons condemned for their crimes by the community to expulsion, voluntarily take on themselves the duty to die. The biological stress engendered by social exclusion is a self-destruction program, eerily like (though Bauer does not make the connection), Freud’s posited death instinct (Reich’s response to which I discussed here). And I guess this makes some sense, both because there does, after all, appear to be such an instinct in the animal kingdom* (though this certainly does not mean that Freud’s treatment of it was correct) and because it is something that many character types may intuitively understand – not only masochists.

Persons experiencing jealousy have an injured sense of connection to the world, such that they need to hold on to symbols of that connection and turn particular people (often partners, but also kids) into such symbols. They respond to perceived threats to those symbols – perceived through a magnifying lens of paranoia – with self-destructive behavior, just like those on whom the tribal shaman has pronounced a curse.

All too often, fearful of the intensity of this reaction – which is truly akin to a reaction to a life-threatening situation – and burdened anyway with their own sense of shame and guilt, their partners will apologize, try to reassure, try to salvage the fragile trust which existed, or seemed to, before. It is in the nature of things that this is not possible. This type of connection to the world is too tenuous and artificial to be anything more than a band-aid on a gaping wound. What the jealous partner needs in such moments is empathy, grounding, and connection – not desperate attempts to re-become a shattered symbol, but the shattering of the symbolic and its replacement by the real.

Genies do not go back into bottles. In such moments we can meet as demons to each other, or both decide to meet as humans. Almost everything in life that generates emotional pain has great potential for healing, but it is a potential which almost always goes unexploited because the insecurities are not just on one side, but on both. When we decide to meet as vulnerable, hurting beings it may just be that we finally realize we are not, and cannot be, alone.

Notes

* Illustrated at cellular level by the process of apoptosis, and also observed in many cases of post-traumatic stress disorder where the underlying monotrauma results from a direct human agent.

What’s the big deal? Thoughts on resistance

I’ve recently been led to reflect on the question of what it is that makes us so afraid of looking inside to the circumstances which lie historically at the origin of our neuroses – frequently to the point of utter terror and/or total blindness even to the fact or possibility of repression. After all, we frequently face much more objectively threatening circumstances in life, like major illness and operations, with much more stoicism.

It is not a question that I think standard psychoanalytic theory really has an answer for. Sure, we are afraid to dismantle the ego. However, this unremarked importance of the ego simply appears as exogenous or as a mere mediator between the pleasure and reality principles. Its apparent tendency to calcify very early on is not really explained. One might link this to a biological developmental calendar, but then the apparent successes of therapy in sometimes bringing down the edifice would be very surprising. Why then do we freeze emotions in the body and hold them down long after the apparent, original need to do so is past? Why can’t we (or at least why don’t we), like the animals, just pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, and move on – years and decades after the event? When you think about it, it is really, really strange that humankind is the only species that appears to have this strange dysfunction of its innate healing capacity. And even if we have some idea of how to unblock it, we have little idea of what gets it blocked in the first place.

I can only offer some clues as to how it appears to me.

At the basis, we need to remember that our species has evolved in small, interdependent tribal groups, and what mattered for the survival of our puny organism was being smart and acting in concert. This has led, via mechanisms which I shall perhaps discuss on another occasion, to an unparalleled emotional attunement to other members of the group. Most of this, of course, is a deep mystery – we do not know why we have a spiritual instinct and in what ways it differs from other species, and we do not know why it is so important for us to receive and to give love. These things I will have to take as a given, at least for now.

The Rousseauian view, expounded also by Osho, and perhaps bought into by Reich – all for their own reasons which I understand – that “observed” man is the product of social processes which have perverted the pristine and beautiful natural state of man, has, I believe, to be dismissed as naive. Freud was not wrong in believing that civilization required a sort of suppression of natural drives. On the contrary, the mechanism of acculturation is innate in our species and even what most defines it; it is not maladaptive; it is just misfiring under the conditions of modern life.

If we are happy enough to trace cerebral patterns back to reptilian times, I believe we should be a bit more accepting of our less remote ancestors and what they have bequeathed us. A scientific view of our, or of any, species cannot consist in simply choosing (and idealizing) one forebear over others. Thus, we cannot identify with certain bonobo traits merely because we do not like those of chimpanzees. That we do not like the warlike, selfish part of our nature certainly tells us something, but it does not disprove its existence – only the lengths to which the acculturation process goes to redefine and rechannel this truculence through mechanisms which are entirely social – social learning processes which result in the transmission of norms of behavior from generation to generation and group to group, norms which constitute as important, though far more diverse, a part of our patrimony as what is chiseled on our DNA.

If Darwin, evolutionary psychologists and classical economists have all made a mistake, as argued in Sex at Dawn, it is a perfectly understandable mistake, deriving from first-order principles which one may not like (for the reasons I just mentioned) but must defer to. In all higher species we see collective behavior which is imposed by social mechanisms on instincts which are far more egoistic. And ultimately, this process of acculturation is what has led to the second stage of evolution and the emergence of a creature such as man. Indeed, only social learning processes can result in cooperative behaviour – it cannot be innate.

So: guilt and shame are primary emotions and manipulation of them is a primary process.

Seeing this helps enormously, because there is no need any more to feel – well – guilty about feeling guilty. It is hardwired into our species to feel guilty when we fall short of social expectations, as it is hardwired to manipulate this feeling in order to obtain and maintain group cohesion.

I guess we would all like our children to be generous and patient. But that is not their natural state. Even allowing for incipient neurosis at the earliest stage, I do not believe any child anywhere on the planet has ever been born naturally sharing and thinking of others. Indeed, this is implicit in the standard developmental model, and pretty much a logical evidence: the child first has to develop a concept of self before it can develop a concept of others; the concept of the other can never be ahead of the concept of self and there is thus always a self-bias. So, the younger child must learn, and the adult or older child must teach.

What drives the young child to accept the social yoke, and what approach to childrearing optimizes the transmission of needed social norms? On the child’s side, this can only be the need for love and acceptance. I do not see any other candidate. That the sense of self is impacted by social disopprobrium – for when being reprimanded, however patiently and lovingly, the child will feel such disopprobrium – is natural. From its standpoint, love and acceptance are maximized and guilt is minimized when the child is aligned to social norms. In fact, I would even go further than this – it is not just the sense of self which is impacted, but the very fact of self. A human being living in isolation is not human.

Trying to bring about such alignment must, however, take account of the child’s natural rebelliousness and nascent sense of self. If the primary motivation to align is love and acceptance, it is obvious that bringing about long-term alignment through fear and violence is an inferior and unstable recourse, because love and acceptance create bonds which fear does not. However, fear and authority are not maladaptive either – they are highly adaptive to situations of stress and highly effective in such situations. The balance has just been lost because the circumstances in which we have evolved to exist are no longer those in which we do exist – and this estrangement becomes self-reinforcing. The child learns to suppress aspects of its behaviour which are perfectly healthy and unthreatening to the group, just because the former-child-now-adult can’t handle them. This repression and these patterns of behaviour maximize its payoff in terms of acceptance under the circumstances which it is powerless to change. However, they do so at a tremendous cost in terms of vitality, which is passed on to the next generation.

So to return to the question with which I started, it must be that the energy which cathects the fear of confronting our inner traumas when we start to do so, i.e. the energy of resistance, is the same energy which holds the neurosis in place at other times, i.e. when it is unchallenged. In other words, our fear is our neurosis. It follows that it is functionally identical to the fear experienced in response to the primal events – ultimately, in almost all cases, the fear of losing the sense of belonging and thereby of what it is that defines our nature as human.

And yet: we will not. Objectively, no such risk exists as adults, certainly in a therapeutic situation, when all the traumatizing factors belong to the past. Why is this not obvious?

I think I detect the reason, and it is this. In fact, our desire for love and acceptance is never met. It was not met during our formative years, and it is still not met today, because the endemic character of neurosis means that there is almost no-one able to love as we are meant to be loved and as we need to be loved. This is why we cling on to the strategies we learnt as children, although in no absolute sense did they work either then or now – they merely optimized subject to inordinate constraints. In fact, we are not failing to substitute them by a better strategy: there is no better strategy available to us. We have also chosen partners subject to the requirement that our strategies to gain acceptance initially worked with those partners. We have grown up emotionally paralyzed because of a lack of nurturing and we realize that we, all of us, continue to face the same situation, and whilst the needs of an adult are not those of a child, the meeting of those adult needs is the only thing that can start to demine the unexploded ordinance buried in our past.

It’s Catch 22.

The notion that we as adults are sufficient unto ourselves and can get all the sustenance we need from our physical environment, with no need for comfort, touch, contact is just a perpetuation of the lie and the violence at the heart of humanity’s traumatized existence.

Love and compassion are necessary to our physical and mental health as a species, and they are necessary to the therapeutic process and personal growth. Our mind, that place where we feel in control, because it works so well without others, strives after technique, but such technique is meaningless and ineffective without compassion, and secondary when compassion is present.

Facing our traumas is terrifying because we are innately afraid, under prevailing and persistent conditions of emotional starvation, to lose the little acceptance we have won in the world, and with which we reluctantly content ourselves. We lose sight and faith that anything more is possible, even though we know, deep down, that this way of existing is impoverished, is not satisfying and is not human.