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February 2007 - Posts
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February 24, 2007
The brain can storage words that reflect most of our personal experiences, and the words we latter select to express or explain those experiences to others come precisely from the brain regions where they were kept in memory. Aside from the fact that we can talk about our experiences with words we can also select, express and reflect our knowledge in the same way.
Words have a strong effect on ourselves and on those others with whom we share our lives. Is very important then that when we speak we choose the appropriate words to communicate clearly our thoughts and personal experiences to them. The right words accompanied by an appropriate degree of emotional intelligence could help us have a closer bonding with those we love, avoiding unwarranted destructive feelings and helping us weave and shape our past experiences in the present in order to create and develop our future life.
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February 23 2007
Temperament
One of the most significant consequences of an individual’s temperament is the sensory feedback from the body and how it is interpreted. Frequent interpretations of the feedback as guilt and anxiety, for instance, would increase an inhibited child’s inclination to avoid situations that trigger those feeling. However conscious attempts to change one’s behavior can be effective. It works when parents and children collaborate on the effort, and it work when adults and therapists do the same. There are plenty of examples of inhibited children who manage their fears and grow up to be valuable, contributing members of society. There are also uninhibited children who overcome the risks of growing up in a dysfunctional family or living in a violent and dangerous neighborhood. If we ask ourselves what proportion of personality is genetic rather than environmental is a bit like asking what proportion of a blizzard is due to cold temperature and what proportion to humidity.
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February 22 2007
Brain and Mind
Most neuroscientists now argue that the biological organ inside our skulls is both source and repository of our elusive identity and of all aspects of cognition and emotion. The balance of chemicals in our individual brains may predispose us to react to life’s ups and downs with a characteristics tranquility or agitation. Disturbances of that chemical balance can trigger mood disorders and mental illness. And burgeoning research into the connection between the brain and the body is reinforcing the idea that the influence flows in both directions that is, our attitudes and emotions, once regarded as purely a function of “mind”, can affect the health of the body, and vice versa. Any approach to understanding the human mind must take into account both partners in the dance. It is impossible to separate the function of mind from that of the brain.
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February 7 2007
Erik Erikson’s Theory Third Part
At this point let me rescue Erikson’s ideas from a common misinterpretation. He does not see trust, autonomy and initiative ‘conquering’ their opposites in some triumph of positive thinking. One the contrary every aware person needs to internalize experiences and occasions wherein mistrust, shame and guilt are entirely appropriated and inevitable. The positive learns from the negative without being overwhelmed. Erikson reserves special admiration for those like George Bernard Shaw (see margin) who can take the ‘skeleton’ of a drunken father and make it dance.
The ego-identity’s greatest trial usually occurs in adolescence with the struggle of identity versus identity diffusion. Rapid bodily changes at puberty confront ‘the autocracy of conscience’ with the ‘anarchy of drives’. The world suddenly opens to many times its former size, with scores of otential carriers and the mass merchandizing of idols and ideals which deliberately bolster per-group pressures towards mass conformity and transitory identifications. This is a time when wholehearted and consistent recognition by parents and teachers of real accomplishment and meaningful achievements is quite essential, if a stable identity is to be preserved. Otherwise the young person faced with the diffusion of his identity into sparkling shreds may prefer a negative identity to none at all, one that will shock, violate and grab. Delinquency is fostered by labeling games. It is death by pat definition and pet diagnosis. Much current pathology, racism, sexism, classism, and juvenile gangs stem from a desperate attempt to purify identity within communities ‘cleansed’ of outsiders.
It is only when a firm identity has been fashioned that the self may be offered to another, risked in the closeness of intimacy where vulnerability is strength. Erikson describes this crisis as intimacy and distantion versus self-absorption. Implicit is Martin Buber’s idea that distance is essential to true intimacy. The other has a separate space and allows you to enter. Only the self-absorbed cannot leave the safety of their fortress. This is Freud’s genital phase, the mutually of the fully adult. Out of personal intimacies children are conceived and there arises the challenge of generativity versus stagnation. Generativity is Erikson’s most elegant and important conception, one that typifies his own intellectual life, which has been nourished by ad nourishes the work of Freud with cross-generational devotion. Generativity is the care shown in establishing and guiding the next generation. It is loving creativity, for modern careless creativity is our grandest temptation and greatest fault. Generativity is a pattern and process that stretches from man’s most archaic and unconscious biological tendencies to the highest cultural products of imagination. It is the generational complex which transcends the Oedipal complex to make us lovers and parents in the continuity of procreation. ‘Evolution has made man a teaching as well as a learning animal, for dependency and maturity are reciprocal: mature man needs to be needed and maturity is guided by the nature of that which must be cared for.’
And so we come to the last crisis, that of integrity versus disgust and despair. Throughout the life-cycle the pieces have been assembled, structure built on structure around the ego’s continuity. Now with death not too far away, can it all hold up or will it crumble? Are the links of love and meaning strong enough, so that we are ourselves content to fall away--- ‘Only he who in some way has taken care of things and people and has adapted himself to the triumphs and disappointments of being, by necessity, the originator of others and the generator of things and ideas – only he may gradually grow the fruit of the seven stages. I know no better word for it than integrity… It is a sense of comradeship with men and women of distance times and of different pursuits, who have created orders and objects and sayings conveying human dignity and love.’ So in Erikson psychoanalysis becomes a positive ethical science, with the ego holding in synthesis the virtues of the eight stages, hope, will, purpose, competence, fidelity, love, care and wisdom, each caring and cared for by the other.
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February 6 2007
Erik Erikson’s Theory Second Part
But let us now go through the various stages of the life-cycle. Erikson sees the first crisis as basic trust versus mistrust. To acquire basic trust is ‘the cornerstone of a healthy personality’. In this oral phase mouth meets *** and the child comes to trust in the sameness and continuity of providers. Unless the child feels that he can get a reliable someone to do something for him, there is a risk of acute infant depression, and, later in life, of regression into avaricious forms of oral sadism and, in some psychotics, a chronic incapacity to respond to any kind of help or support. Basic trust imparts to us that faith in a responsive universe that underlines the realism born of later stages.
The next eliminative or anal stage develops between the ages of one and three as the child learns to keep the body system in rough balance: holding and letting go, rigidity and relaxation, flexion and extension. From this balance, or its lack, grows the crisis of autonomy versus shame and doubt. It is fatally easy at this stage to make a child ashamed and disgusted with bodily functions performed under the most public scrutiny. Adult judgments carry infallible weight. The consequence can be a life-long conviction that dirtiness and evil are associated with the body. We see such �pathology in neurotic compulsion, their stinginess, their rituals of decontamination and obsessive orderliness, all disguising an underlying disgust at the human condition.
The child or four and five next enters upon the crisis of initiative versus guilt. This is the age of vastly improved locomotion (not just of walking per se but of searching, poking and intruding) and of precocious language acquisition with its concurrent explosion of imaginative powers. The child can visualize himself as grown up and such simple action roles as policeman or doctor are popular. The danger lies in the capacity for secret fantasies to rise where initiative is thwarted as in the Oedipal attachment to the mother. The child is now capable of feeling intense guilt about illicit desires, and his embryonic conscience can be cruel towards himself or an inconsistent parent. At stake is the belief in a coherent system of universal goodness versus the terror of arbitrary and incomprehensible powers which can posses the mind. At this stage, Erikson sees the necessity for a clear boundary drawn by the family within which the child’s sense of unbroken initiative has the freest feasible rein.
In the fourth stage of industry versus inferiority the child goes to school to discover the world of systematic instruction. Erikson gives short shrift to the perennial debate between ‘formal’ and ‘progressive’ educators. The child needs and enjoys an ecological mastery of the environment. To play is to gain imagined mastery of the things toys symbolize. Play, therefore, both refreshes the ego from struggles to learn in the schoolroom and visualizes the ends to which that learning can be put. Play is therefore complementary to work, but no substitute, any more than any fantasy can be a substitute for achievement. From school the child must develop a sense of industry stronger than occasional feelings of inadequacy. To fall seriously behind is to battle daily against humiliation, so that great energies are expended purely to defend against inferiority. Another pathology is the life of ‘busyness’ aimed entirely at warding-off feared deficiencies, a frantic running up the down escalator at the bottom of which live those beasts of the bourgeois imagination, the poor, the idle and the ‘scroungers’.
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February 5 2007
Erik Erikson’s Theory First Part
In his classes at Harvard in the 1960s Erik Erikson, the psychiatrist, showed a French film called Sundays and Cybele, directed by Serge Bourguignon and Antonie Tudal. It tells the story of an ex-airforce pilot, now a mental patient with amnesia, who befriends a little girl of twelve, abandoned by her father at a convent home for children. Posing as a relative, the man takes her out every Sunday and a deep friendship develops. She is discovering a fatherly affection she never knew. He is restoring to life a girl very similar to the one he caught in the sights of his machinegun as he dived to strafe an Algerian village. (This trauma is the source of his amnesia). At the film’s climax the two are celebrating Christmas, but meanwhile the authorities have discovered their ‘unhealthy’ relationship. Having no gift to give him, the little girl writes ‘Cybele’ on a piece of paper and puts it in a silver ball upon the Christmas tree. It is her true name, which the nuns refuse to recognize because it is ‘pagan’. Beneath the tree she falls asleep, and the man finding her gift bends tenderly over her. At this moment, the police rush in and mistaking his intentions, shoot and kill him. They command the awakened child to give her name. ‘I have no name’, she cries forlornly, ‘I have no name!’
Erikson’s socialization of Freud’s work has become justly famous, particulary his concept of ego-identity. ‘The accrued confidence that one’s ability to maintain inner sameness and continuity… is matched by the sameness and continuity of one’s meaning for others’. Like Cybele we must all gather up the important pieces of our experience, make a synthesis of them and ask significant others in our lives, ‘Will you accept this configuration of what I am?’ Upon such questions and the answers sanity itself depends.
Erikson’s map of the human life-cycle is extraordinarily rich and subtle. On the left side of the grid, shown opposite, are ‘the eight stages of man’, the first five being elaborations of Freud’s oral, anal, phallic, latency and genital stages with three more stages taking the subject from adulthood to maturity; the challenges met at each stage are plotted diagonally from bottom left to top right; and the achievements or ‘virtues’ listed on the right (although Erikson added these much later and did not write much about them). Erikson based his theory on Heinz Hartmann’s idea of an ‘average expectable environment’ of cradle, nursery, family, school, peer group, marriage, children and maturity. He is not saying however, that this is how culture must or should be, but that these events trigger a sequence of responses; other environments might well alter the order or challenges, but a sequences of some kind will persist. First one newly-grown part of the ego-identity then another, is tested by the environment and surmounts (or fails to surmount) its vulnerability. Each step is an altered perspective with a different capacity using a different opportunity. ‘Each comes to its ascendance, meets its crisis, and finds its lasting solution towards the end of the stage indicated’. Each new stage founds itself upon earlier stages, so that the manner in which initial crises have been met must affect the chances of resolving later ones. Cybele suffered not merely from a blighted childhood, which drover her to find multiple solutions in a single friend, but from the failure of her culture to tolerate so improbable an attachment. Once a child is out phase, its needs are seen as illegitimate and the odds against the deviant multiply.
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