metonymy4u

One could ask: why philosophize? Why write philosophy? I do it because it is helpful for me. I have a very emotionally vulnerable brain. My emotional states often take over my entire body, and emotions then become my only facts. Writing helps center me. The usefulness of this activity has been verified by scientific investigation. When teens are in an overwhelming emotional state of mind, we teach them to take out a piece of paper, write the alphabet down one side and then come up with an animal name for each letter. This activity activates additional neural circuits that can balance the emotional urges and feelings that are threatening to overwhelm the individual and also helps fill short term memory with alternative, emotionally neutral cues. I have no problem with the hypothesis that our urge to think may be driven in part by our hugely emotional brains. Kierkegaard asked, “What is a poet? An unhappy man who hides deep anguish in his heart, but whose lips are so formed that when the sigh and cry pass through them, it sounds like lovely music…. And people flock around the poet and say: ‘Sing again soon’ – that is, ‘May new sufferings torment your soul but your lips be fashioned as before, for the cry would only frighten us, but the music, that is blissful.’”

Read Full Post »

Just last week I had a conversation with a therapist colleague about the nature of suicidal and self-harming behavior in humans (a behavior that also occurs in other primates, btw…). We were actually discussing a specific case that she wanted to refer to me for behavioral therapy. She considered herself a psychodynamic therapist. She referred to the suicidal and self-harming behaviors exhibited by the client as “masochism.” I found it interesting that she would conceptualize the behavior as intentional and perhaps even a bit pleasurable to the individual, since my experience with such clients is quite different. In my experience suicidal and self-harming individuals are experiencing unbelievable levels of pain and are often not at all in control of their own behaviors. If they were, I actually have no doubt that they would seek other solutions to their problems. The difference in our experiences of the same event brings to my mind the difference between a symbolic experience of life and what I will call a phenomenological experience. The symbolic experience of life is well expressed by the following quote by Hegel: „Jede Vorstellung ist eine Verallgemeinerung, und diese gehört dem Denken an. Etwas allgemein machen, heißt, es denken,“ which I would interpret as follows: “Every representation is universalization and this belongs to thinking. To make something universal means, is, to think.” (From: Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts oder Naturrecht und Staatswissenschaft im Grundrisse). For those with the symbolizing habit of thinking therefore, to act is to express something (consciously or unconsciously) and to express something is to symbolize, symbolization being the primary form by which we universalize our experience. Thus for my colleague I hypothesize that self-harming behavior symbolizes an unresolved experience of violence or deprivation in her growing up years that she is compelled, by unconscious forces, to repeat over and over again until it can be resolved through interpretation and proper analysis. For me, on the other hand, the events are what they are and nothing more. For a phenomenological thinker, events are experienced in a manner well described by Sartre: “There is no longer an exterior for the existent if one means by that a superficial covering which hides from sight the true nature of the object….The appearances which manifest the existent are neither interior or exterior; they are all equal, they all refer to other appearances, and none of them is privileged. Force, for example, is not a metaphysical inclination of an unknown kind which hides behind its effects (accelerations, deviations, etc.); it is the totality of these effects” (from: Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology ). One can see, I hope, how vastly different experiences of the same clinical material might inform a very different clinical response on the part of the therapist. Students often question my ongoing emphasis on the genealogy of ideas. I hope that this very common, everyday example of the different schools of modern psychological thought demonstrates the utility of remembering the history of our cultural habits.

Read Full Post »

One common feature of human and chimpanzee culture is that social power is always potentially up for grabs. This pattern is not observed in all animal cultures. Amongst Bonobos, for example, power is distributed in a much more rigid hierarchy governed by blood relations. The result is that everyone can relax a bit more. One result of living in human or chimp culture is that assaults are much more frequent. Any given individual, when presented with the opportunity to grab power over another can often barely resist the urge given the learning history of our species. What I have learned about myself recently through repeated exposure to these sorts of assaults is that I tend to respond to the signals of violence with the same thoughts and urges. Whether it is urges for violence towards myself or towards others, it has become clear to me that the learning history which shaped these responses is the same. Having grown up in a culture of violence during my developmental years, those neural connections are very solidly built. They represent my automatic response patterns, over which I have very little immediate control – like someone pulling their hand away from a hot stove before they are even aware of the pain. To change these automatic, emotional responses therefore requires a great input of energy to the system, because neurons are physical events and obey the laws of physics, one of which is inertia. I have to work very hard to change my own automatic responses which were shaped in a culture of violence. I also have to remind myself that these responses were created by forces beyond my control. I did not ask, during my growing up years, to be repeatedly exposed to violence and aggression. This situation is not of my own making. Therefore I have also learned that turning towards my experiences with compassion rather than shame and self-hatred is the more skillful approach.

Read Full Post »

In times of extreme stress, one is forced to define more clearly one’s values. Who am I as a human being and what do I want to become? What behaviors will I not engage in under any duress, any circumstances? In our current social context, assaults are numerous and brutal. One consequence of being assaulted is that one learns who one is when assaulted.

Read Full Post »

I was at a poetry reading several weeks ago. Most of the readings were in the narrative, “post-confessional” genre. I liked a lot of the readings very much. The host of the reading afterwards said he didn’t care for that genre. That it didn’t take poetry seriously enough. That poetry for him was about expressing a feeling, not about who can tell the most entertaining story. I was glad to hear him say that. I feel the same way. I want to integrate what I learned from them into an emotional story. The way a musician learns from the title of the work. I want it to exhibit the courage of words.

Read Full Post »

The brutality of our species never ceases to amaze me. Especially during this season of so called good will. Good will! It is often just another way of dressing up our ignorance of the suffering of others. A justification for our custom of treating the entire world as reserved uniquely for us – to be transformed according to our immediate habits. The question of suffering is the question of why, in this very moment, in this season of good cheer, some people are suffering more than others. And we roll right over that question like all others. At times I experience it as a season of unfathomable brutality.

Read Full Post »

In a post Kantian world cut off forever from the possibility of purity, Kierkegaard asked the obvious question: what keeps us going?

Read Full Post »

I no longer experience words as connecting us to anything essential. I see them as merely events in a language game.

Read Full Post »

Prevalence is a measure of the number of people meeting criteria for a given condition in a specific time period. Lifetime prevalence is the number of people in a given population that will have the condition at some point in their lives. For example, the lifetime prevalence for asthma in the US is about 13%, which means that 13% of the US population will have asthma at one point or another in their lifetime. Let’s compare that number to the figures for “mental illness.” At some point in their lives, 46% of adults will meet criteria for a psychiatric diagnosis, 30% of adults will meet criteria for alcoholism, and 40-50% of adults will get divorced. Now definitions of what constitutes an “illness” certainly do differ, and most of the definitions that I looked up in Webster’s relating to health, illness, sickness or disease emphasized a functional definition. That is, they defined health as practical, working capacity to do things and illness as loss of this capacity. However, when one looks up “disorder” one finds this: “an abnormal physical or mental condition.” The concept of normality, which is a statistical concept, is turn defined as “conforming to a type, standard or regular pattern.” Now I ask you, what sort of regular pattern are we seeing when 30-50% of the population doesn’t conform to it at some point in their lives? Of course, if you look around you right now you won’t see 50% of the population suffering from “mental illness,” and so it may indeed look like emotional suffering is not so statistically common. But if we take a larger, high altitude view, our species is suffering from a hell of a lot more emotional disorder than is commonly understood. This is the myth of isolation which I believe contributes to much of the emotional suffering that we call mental illness.

Read Full Post »