DO Look Down

[coberst]

DO Look Down

 

Mental Health is a Matter of Degree!

 

My reading tells me that we are all neurotic and some of us are so neurotic that we cannot function satisfactorily in normal society and are then considered to be mentally ill.

 

All humans repress aspects of their life that might cause anxiety. This repression is called neurosis. It is the constant conflict wherein the ego constantly struggles to hold down thoughts that will cause anxiety. Freud discovered the unconscious in life and there exists a constant conflict between the unconscious and the ego. The ego keeps that in the unconscious that can cause anxiety from becoming conscious.

 

Humans are the only species to be self conscious. We dread death and repress that dread because we cannot live with a constant consciousness of our mortality.

 

Conflict is the essential characteristic of humanness.

 

Regression to animal existence is one answer to the quest to transcend separateness. Wo/man can try to eliminate that which makes her human but also tortures her; s/he can discard reason and self-consciousness. What is noteworthy here is that if everybody does it, it ain’t fiction; anything everyone does is reality, even if it is a virtual reality. For most people, reason and reality is nothing more than public consensus. “One never ‘loses one’s mind’ when nobody else’s mind differs from one’s own.”

 

Regression to our animal form of instinctual behavior happens when we replace our lost animal instincts with our own fully developed symbolic instincts; we can then program our self to uncritically follow these culturally formed instincts without further consideration. We can then do like the elephant parade; we hold the tail of the one in front of us with our trunk and march in file without any other thoughts to disturb our tranquility.

 

“The great characteristic of our time is that we know everything important about human nature that there is to know. Yet never has there been an age in which so little knowledge is securely possessed, so little a part of common understanding. The reason is precisely the advance of specialization, the impossibility of making safe general statements, which has led to a general imbecility.”

 

The steel worker on the girder

learned not to look down, and does his work

And there are words we have learned

Not to look at,

Not to look for substance

Below them. But we are on the verge

Of vertigo.

George Oppen

 

Norman Brown informs us that to comprehend Freud one must understand “repression”. “In the new Freudian perspective, the essence of society is repression of the individual, the essence of the individual is repression of the self.”

 

Freud discovered the importance of repression when he discovered the meaning of the “mad” symptoms of the mentally deranged, plus the meaning of dreams, and thirdly the everyday happenings regarded as slips of the tongue, errors, and random thoughts. He concludes that dreams, mental derangements, and common every day errors (Freudian slips) have meaningful causes that can be explained. Meaningful is the key word here.

 

Since these psychic phenomena are unconscious we must accept that we have motivation to action with a purpose for which we are unconscious (involuntary purposes). This inner nature of which we are completely unaware leads to Freud’s definition of psychoanalysis as “nothing more than the discovery of the unconscious in mental life.”

 

Freud discovered that sapiens have unconscious causes which are hidden from her because they are disowned and hidden by the conscious self. The dynamic relationship between the unconscious and conscious life is a constant battle and psychoanalysis is a science of this mental conflict.

 

The rejection of an idea which is one’s very own and remains so is repression. The essence of repression is in the fact that the individual refuses to recognize this reality of her very own nature. This nature becomes evident when it erupts into consciousness only in dreams or neurotic symptoms or by slips of the tongue.

 

The unconscious is illuminated only when it is being repressed by the conscious mind. It is a process of psychic conflict. “We obtain our theory of the unconscious from the theory of repression.” Freud’s hypothesis of the repressed unconscious results from the conclusion that it is common to all humans. This is a phenomenon of everyday life; neurosis is common to all humans.

 

Quotes from Ernest Becker Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction “Denial of Death”

[Michaelangelica]

DO Look Down

 

Mental Health is a Matter of Degree!

 

My reading tells me that we are all neurotic and some of us are so neurotic that we cannot function satisfactorily in normal society and are then considered to be mentally ill.

it is really very simple.

mental illness is defined by the society you live in.

If i am a SA shaman having visions I am respected holy/healer man

In Western Society I would be locked up and given Zyprexa

 

In my younger days i worked as a psychiatric nurse

.

We had one dear old lady continually admitted to the Hospital by her family because she was talking to the Virgin Mary in the Loo. (Don't ask me it was her vision)

 

After many, many years a smart, young psychiatrist convinced her that she should keep this all a 'special secret' from her family and only tell him once a month.

 

 

The family were delighted and praised the new Young doctor for "curing' their mother

Every month he got his consultation fee.

A win win solution

 

For more on this read the work of RD Laing.

Fascinating and easy to read

 

Laing's view on mental illness

 

Laing argued that the strange behavior and seemingly confused speech of people undergoing a psychotic episode were ultimately understandable as an attempt to communicate worries and concerns, often in situations where this was not possible or not permitted.

Laing stressed the role of society, and particularly the family, in the development of "madness" (his term).

He argued that individuals can often be put in impossible situations, where they are unable to conform to the conflicting expectations of their peers, leading to a 'lose-lose situation' and immense mental distress for the individuals concerned.

(In 1956, in Palo Alto, Gregory Bateson and his colleagues Paul Watzlawick, Donald Jackson, and Jay Haley[8] articulated a related theory of schizophrenia as stemming from double bind situations where a person receives different or contradictory messages.)

The perceived symptoms of schizophrenia were therefore an expression of this distress, and should be valued as a cathartic and trans-formative experience..

Ronald David Laing - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

[CraigD]

The steel worker on the girder

learned not to look down, and does his work

And there are words we have learned

Not to look at,

Not to look for substance

Below them. But we are on the verge

Of vertigo.

George Oppen

Cool poem. :hyper:

 

However, having spent a lot of time in vertiginous places like building frames and cliff faces and spoken with lots of people who also spend time there, I can attest that the metaphor is only a metaphor. It’s fine to look down (or up, which in most conditions is as or more vertiginous), but not when or immediately before balance is critical (eg: when walking, or changing points). Non-pathological vertigo’s a normal neurological reaction to atypical sensory inputs, similar to seasickness. Like the latter affliction, one can learn to controlled it very well, but it’s folly to deny its effect.

 

My point, which bears importantly on the rest of this post, is that metaphor, while instructive, can be misleading when confused with a true physical duality, or “exact metaphor”. The metaphor of the psyche avoiding threatening ideas as the steel worker avoiding looking down is not exact.

Mental Health is a Matter of Degree!

I agree, and furthermore, that all health is a matter of degree. The healthiest psyche is capable of misperception and maladaptive thinking. The healthiest body is subject to illness, trauma, and senility

My reading tells me that we are all neurotic and some of us are so neurotic that we cannot function satisfactorily in normal society and are then considered to be mentally ill.

Prior to the terms being effectively stricken from the clinical nomenclature in the 1970s, neurosis was a clinical catch-all term for any mental disorder that was not psychosis. Etymologically, the terms are for all intents arbitrary. Neurosis, literally “dysfunction of the nerves” vs. psychosis, “dysfunction of the mind”, reflect to some degree 18th century assumptions about the severity and treatability of a disorder, the nerves being physically tangible and thus more treatable by mundane means, the mind being intangible and mysterious, and thus treatable by anything from educational to supernatural means, but uncertainly so. By the 1960s, these meanings were nearly inverted, with the assumptions being that neuroses were less severe disorders amenable to “talking cures”, while the more severe class of psychoses reflected underlying neurological damage, malformation, or chemical imbalance treatable with drugs and/or surgery.

All humans repress aspects of their life that might cause anxiety. This repression is called neurosis.

As used by Freud, Jung, and other theorists of the psychodynamic schools, repression is not synonymous with neurosis. In most of these theories, most repression is normal, healthy, and necessary to form a fully human psyche. Only an excess of this normal process results in neurosis.

 

In many of the psychoanalytic models, schizophrenia, “split from reality mind disorder”, is due to deficit or repression. Freud described this as the failure of the reality principle, which rules the ego and is dominant in adults, to supercede the pleasure principle, which rules the id, and is dominant in infants. Thus, in Freud’s model, repression is not inherently bad.

It is the constant conflict wherein the ego constantly struggles to hold down thoughts that will cause anxiety. Freud discovered the unconscious in life and there exists a constant conflict between the unconscious and the ego. The ego keeps that in the unconscious that can cause anxiety from becoming conscious.

An accurate summary, I think.

Humans are the only species to be self conscious.

This claim disagrees with the consensus of cognitive science. Coberst, is this personal opinion, or can you link to or site any recent literature supporting it.

 

It’s generally accepted at present that “self consciousness” or “self awareness” is related to possessing a cognitive component know as a self model – that is, being able to think in a manner utilizing an internal term for oneself. The mirror test is a well-known measure of self awareness. All of the great apes, some marine mammals, elephants, and surprisingly, some birds, have passed this test. The primary controversy around it involve the possibility that it incorrectly excludes some animals, not that it incorrectly includes some.

“The great characteristic of our time is that we know everything important about human nature that there is to know. Yet never has there been an age in which so little knowledge is securely possessed, so little a part of common understanding. The reason is precisely the advance of specialization, the impossibility of making safe general statements, which has led to a general imbecility.”

Coberst, is this text your original writing?

Since these psychic phenomena are unconscious we must accept that we have motivation to action with a purpose for which we are unconscious (involuntary purposes). This inner nature of which we are completely unaware leads to Freud’s definition of psychoanalysis as “nothing more than the discovery of the unconscious in mental life.”

Other than as potentially helpful metaphor, hardly any scientist of whom I’m aware give serious consideration to any of the psychodynamic models, or which Freud’s is one of if not the earliest. The primary reason for this is, as various brain imaging techniques have been invented and improved, psychodynamic models have poorly fit the objective data, even as emergent properties. Even more recent theories of mind, such as Minsky’s “Society of Mind” model, while influential in computer science, have failed to provide practical models of what animal nervous systems – including humans’ – are actually doing.

 

This is not to say that self-improvement and therapeutic programs utilizing various psychological theories have not been nor continue to be very beneficial, only that these theories do not describe the underlying reality, but rather constructed metaphor, of minds. We should perhaps therefore be unsurprised if these theories reveal as much about the societies of their authors and ourselves as they do about our psyches. Given the tremendous complexity and microscopic scale of the brain, and the hard problems of objectively measuring them, I expect the state of the psychological art to progress only slowly, at best, for some time to come.

[coberst]

Craig

 

I agree that metaphor must be understood as one important means for understanding but is not a substitute for the complex process of understanding. I think of metaphor as being an atom which makes up a complex molecule; there are often many interconnected atoms which form the complete molecule.

 

I think that psychology is a tool for both clinical healing and for understanding humanness. My focus on the study of psychology is an attempt to comprehend why humans do the things they do and can we do better. I pay little attention to psychology as a means for determining medication.

 

I think that it is very important for all of us to gain some level of knowledge regarding psychology as a very important tool for “knowing the self”. My study in this matter leads me to conclude that psychology as generally practiced today is directed primarily upon its use for creating pills that will bypass human propensities that will stymie the maximization of production and consumption.

 

Repression is normal as you say, and it becomes a “mental illness” when the person begins to act significantly different from the rest of society.

 

I cannot quote anyone that I have read who says as I said that “Humans are the only species to be self conscious.” However, I would say, based upon that reading, that self consciousness forms as a continuum from our animal ancestors to a point where we create a category called the human species and self-consciousness is an essential aspect of that category.

 

The id is our animal self. It is the human without the ego control center. The id is reactive life and the ego changes that reactive life into delayed thoughtful life. The ego is also the timer that provides us with a sense of yesterday, today, and tomorrow. By doing so it makes us into philosophical beings conscious of our self as being separate from the ‘other’ and placed in a river of time with a terminal point—death. This time creation allows us to become creatures responding to symbolic reality that we alone create.

 

As a result of the id there is a “me” to which everything has a focus of being. The most important job the ego has is to control anxiety that paradoxically the ego has created. With a sense of time there comes a sense of termination and with this sense of death comes anxiety that the ego embraces and gives the “me” time to consider how not to have to encounter anxiety.

 

Evidence indicates that there is an “intrinsic symbolic process” is some primates. Such animals may be able to create in memory other events that are not presently going on. “But intrinsic symbolization is not enough. In order to become a social act, the symbol must be joined to some extrinsic mode; there must exist an external graphic mode to convey what the individual has to express…but it also shows how separate are the worlds we live in, unless we join our inner apprehensions to those of others by means of socially agreed symbols.”

 

“What they needed for a true ego was a symbolic rallying point, a personal and social symbol—an “I”, in order to thoroughly unjumble himself from his world the animal must have a precise designation of himself. The “I”, in a word, has to take shape linguistically…the self (or ego) is largely a verbal edifice…The ego thus builds up a world in which it can act with equanimity, largely by naming names.”

 

The primate may have a brain large enough for “me” but it must go a step further that requires linguistic ability that permits an “I” that can develop controlled symbols with “which to put some distance between him and immediate internal and external experience.”

 

I conclude from this that many primates have the brain that is large enough to be human but in the process of evolution the biological apparatus that makes speech possible was the catalyst that led to the modern human species. The ability to emit more sophisticated sounds was the stepping stone to the evolution of wo/man. This ability to control the vocal sounds promoted the development of the human brain.

 

Ideas and quotes from “Birth and Death of Meaning”—Ernest Becker

 

I use quotation marks in the standard manner and when I enclosed in quotation marks: “The great characteristic of our time is that we know everything important about human nature that there is to know. Yet never has there been an age in which so little knowledge is securely possessed, so little a part of common understanding. The reason is precisely the advance of specialization, the impossibility of making safe general statements, which has led to a general imbecility.” I am using the words of the author I reference in the OP.

 

I am very new to this study of psychology and I study it not from a clinical aspect but from an understanding aspect. I get the impression that most everything being taught in our colleges is directed at clinical psychology. It appears to me that like all other domains of knowledge we are interested only in the aspects that will help maximize production and consumption. I think that our colleges and universities are primarily vocational schools with little energy directed toward understanding our humanity.