Freedom, meaning, and anxiety

[coberst]

Freedom, meaning, and anxiety

 

‘Mind’ is a style of reaction. One might correctly say that ‘mind’ is the measure of reaction a creature makes to a given range of stimuli. The world of meaning for any creature is bounded by the measure in which that creature is able to react to its perception of the world. Paying attention to the world that is bounded by reaction ability is described by Leslie White as “reactivity meaning”.

 

There are four levels of reactivity of an organism to its environment: 1) Simplest response wherein the organism responds directly to stimuli, 2) Conditioned response is best represented by the “Pavalovian Response” wherein there is a response by association, 3) Indirect association takes place when a tool is used to acquire desired object (an ape knocking a banana from a tree with a stick), and 4) Symbolic response wherein a symbol becomes the object causing response, which entails the creation of a symbol representative of an object.

 

These four different responses are evolutionary but are different in kind. Only humans are capable of all four levels of reactivity. Only humans have the capacity for creating a relationship such as “house” with an object. We might appropriately state that the evolutionary development of mind is a “progressive freedom of reactivity”. “Mind culminates in the organism’s ability to choose what it will react to.”

 

Delayed reactivity is the birth of freedom; this ability, plus the mammalian evolution of long prolonged development of new born growing up into a society that demanded ever increasing norms of behavior, led to the further development of mind.

 

Anxiety is a feeling that I assume is familiar to all of us. It is a sense of helplessness: when the throat constricts, the heart races, and chaos appears. The ability to stand upright against anxiety is considered to be heroic behavior.

 

What is the source and nature of anxiety? Kierkegaard saw it as a basic response to the human condition of impotence, finitude, and death. Thinkers since Darwin saw it as a stimulus to intellectual growth because only with this adaptation could humans survive. We can see in animal responses that it is the key to survival. Anxiety is the universal response of the organism to danger.

 

For the child, anxiety becomes second nature when there is the slightest hint of separation from or abandonment by the mother. William James said that solitude is the greatest terror of childhood. Children are midgets in a world filled with giants. The child is dependent upon these giants and feels itself as a helpless object without control. The child sees helpless objects being run over with the car or being flushed or flattened and, as another object, fears equal forms of treatment by the giants. The principal childhood adaptation is to master anxiety by controlling the situations which threaten to awaken it.

 

Freud’s whole psychoanalytic theory of neurosis is basically a study of how children control anxiety. Human reaction to the environment is delayed and controlled by the ego. Unlike all other animals the human can take some time to analyze and choose a response. It is obvious that the first concern for the developing ego is to learn how to control this ever present and overwhelming stimulus-response that can result from anxiety. The ego does this by ‘housing’ this anxiety within the ego, thus, no longer does the human organism respond directly to anxiety but the ego controls the response by ‘taking over’ this anxiety.

 

Freud considered this ‘taking over’ of the anxiety impulse as being a form of vaccination of the total organism. “The growing identity “I” must feel comfortable in its world, and the only way it can do this is to experimentally make the anxieties of its world its own…The anxieties of the ego’s world are at first the anxieties the child feels with its handlers. A good many of them are the anxieties of its trainers. And so we see in microcosm how a child owns his own control, his own central perceptions, his own humanness, by a fundamental adaptation to his social world.”

 

Becker associates with the work of Alfred Adler who has developed a major revision of Freudian Oedipus Complex theory regarding the postulation by Freud of a hypothetical event that happened way back in the dim recesses of time. This postulated event has been given the name the Primal-Horde theory: “this was the theory about the crises in the humanoid horde, when the young males, tired of being deprived of females by the dominant male, turn on him and kill him, and take possession of the females—their own mothers.”

 

Freud was clear regarding the nature of anxiety in a child. One source of this anxiety was “the trauma of birth, the child’s initiation into utter helplessness and dependence; and the fear of castration that was awakened by the child’s own sexual urges…Thus his major anxiety, over the loss of the protective and loving mother, is a problem stemming from his relentless search for pleasure.”

 

Post-Freudian scientists pinpoint where Freud went astray. There is general agreement that the infant is not driven by instincts of sexuality and destructive aggression. “There is absolutely no evidence that this new type of animal carries over viciously competitive instincts of the subhuman primates. He has phased them out, and replaced them with a new nature: pliable, instinct-free.”

 

A major revision of Freudian theory finds that while the child’s anxiety is based on helplessness; it is not based upon genetic instincts but is based upon the child’s life situation and in his social world. Becker concludes that Alfred Adler’s theories are still current in the mid and late twentieth century because the child does not bring to his relationship with his mother any basic innate desires but he brings a generalized need for physical closeness and support.

 

“It is technically correct to say that the child is object-oriented rather than pleasure-oriented.” The anxieties of life are communicated to him not because of the strictly scheduled toilet-training or bodily cleanliness but because of the lack of joy and spontaneity in the child’s environment. This causes him to shut up within himself and makes him try extra-hard for basic security. The adaptation is a kind of confusion about what the world wants of him.

 

The child’s confusion centers on the comprehension that he is only a body not yet fully a symbolic animal. The more his confusion with the adult world the more he falls back on his body as a way of getting along. This affirmation of body is his question ‘does the mother value his body—him or not?’

 

Do you agree with me that the world of meaning for any creature, i.e. that self-determination or freedom, is bounded by the measure in which that creature is able to react to its perception of the world?

 

Quotes from “The Birth and Death of Meaning” by Ernest Becker

[nutronjon]

That is profound insight. While reading it, I was thinking of children and adults in other cultures. Our culture surely instills fear in us.

 

The strongest influence on our culture is religion, and especially Christianity is prone to paranoia. It, more than Judism or Islam, relies on a God who rules by whim. Being a martyr like Jesus, was long seen as pleasing to this God. Fear of the devil has been very real to Christians. How can we be sure when our sorrows are God punishing us, or Satan tormenting us for his own pleasure? How can we be sure we are pleasing to God, and will not spend eternity in hell? The world is full of evils you know. There is so much to worry about.

 

However, turning against our own bodies and sexuality, begins with Hebrews, who were horrified when their sons participated in Greek athelets in the nude:eek2: This prompted the Hebrews to take the education of their sons seriously. It became an urgent matter to indoctrinate their children, before they were influenced by those hedonistic and pagan Greeks. ;)

 

Really this matter is very paradoxical and confusing, but I think we are making a terrible mistake today. The stress we are putting on our children to learn, learn, learn and excell and compete, is very bad for our nature.

[Thunderbird]

Freedom, meaning, and anxiety

 

 

 

Do you agree with me that the world of meaning for any creature, i.e. that self-determination or freedom, is bounded by the measure in which that creature is able to react to its perception of the world?

 

Quotes from “The Birth and Death of Meaning” by Ernest Becker

 

Yes, But the meaning has changed very recently.

In our evolutionary past, the tribe was a small island of security surrounded by a vastness that was both sublime and threatening. The source of fear was to be out of balance with the forces of the natural world, which at different times could be nurturing,beautiful, chaotic merciless or deadly.

 

Today we find ourselves in larger social landscape that has expanded to the point were the nature is seen by most children as a relic of the past . The security boundaries from the chaos of nature seems more distant and only affect our subconscious as symbols that represent the chaotic landscape of our collective ethos.

 

Our children's identities are no longer shaped by fears of being out of sink with the natural order, and those Gods that emerged from that existence. The wrath is felt from the fears expressed though the parents own fears, as they look out over the social landscape of possibilities that the child will inherit.

 

I would like to see a study that records the number of people that have anxiety dream symbols of the natural kind, Animals, storms, floods, etc. as opposed to the anxiety dreams of the social, Finding yourself in school in your underwear, Surrounded by bullies, threatening social situations..

 

The three gorillas: an archetype orders a dynamic system

 

 

Mythology

What I have argued in this paper changes my view of mythology. Because a god represents a principle of organization, myths about the gods say that such principles create and regulate the world. But science says the same thing. Natural structure, whether it be an atom, a living organism, a brain, or a galaxy, is created and regulated by self-organization. Self-organization is guided by principles of organization. It follows that a polytheistic myth is an accurate, though metaphorical, description of the process by which the world is created and regulated. Mythology seems to have intuited the process of self-organization which science is only now beginning to explain. The congruence here between myth and science is too great to be coincidental. All of this supports Jung?s emphasis on mythology.

 

 

 

 

 

 

What is an archetype-as-such?

The personality is at least an assembly of instinctual impulses, affects, feelings, sensory perceptions, images, thoughts, hopes and the like, together with the memories of all of these. These components are not simply jumbled together: they are organized into a dynamic system which functions adaptively. But from whence comes the organization? Jung's answer was that organization came from the archetypes. From clinical evidence we know something of what an archetype contributes: the mother archetype, for example, contributes containing which leads to security and trust, or devouring which leads to anxiety and mistrust. But what is an archetype-as-such and how does it organize the personality?

The field of cognitive neuroscience is new and rapidly growing. It integrates knowledge from dynamic systems theory, neuroscience, cognitive psychology and the clinical disciplines. I show in this paper how cognitive neuroscience may help us to understand the archetype-as-such. For an earlier discussion of archetypes and self-organization see McDowell (1999).

 

The three gorillas: an archetype orders a dynamic system. Maxson J. McDowell.

[Thunderbird]

The archetype of the personality is a point of organization. This point can be seen though the lens of systems theory as the central organizing vortex existing in the temporal universe or as a flame, that is fed by the social environment until such time the personality is formed and begins to choose for itself the energy that it is feeds itself.

 

The dynamics of this vortex is balanced between two complementary but opposing polarities, one of chaos the other of order. This core of organization----

"/wiki/Psychological_entropy" - the distribution of energy in the psyche, which tends to seek equilibrium or balance among all the structures of the psyche.

This central core relates to the environment----

"/wiki/Social_entropy" – a measure of social system structure, having both theoretical and statistical interpretations, i.e. society (macrosocietal variables) measured in terms of how the individual functions in society (microsocietal variables); also related to social equilibrium.

 

Freedom in this model could be measured by the sustainability generated by central point of organization. This “autopoetic” core or “self-generating” personality.

 

 

 

 

 

"Don Jaun’s argument was that most of our energy goes into upholding our

 

importance. This is most obvious in our endless worry about the presentation

 

of the self, about whether or not we are admired or liked or acknowledged.

 

He reasoned that if we were capable of losing some of that importance, two

 

extraordinary things would happen to us. One, we would free our energy from

 

trying to maintain the illusory idea of our grandeur, and two ,we would

 

provide ourselves with enough energy to enter into the second attention to

 

catch a glimpse of the actual grandeur of the universe".........

 

To seek freedom is the only driving force I know.

 

Freedom to fly off into that infinity out there.

 

Freedom to dissolve; to lift off; to be like the

 

flame of a candle, which, in spite of being up

 

against the light of a billion stars, remains

 

intact, because it never pretended to be more

 

than what it is: a mere candle."

 

Carlos Castaneda