Connectedness

'It is not as if an 'I' exists independently over here and then simply loses a 'you' over there, especially if the attachment to 'you' is a part of what composes who 'I' am as well. I think I have lost 'you' only to discover 'I' have gone missing as well. There is a relationality that is composed neither exclusively of myself nor you, but it is to be conceived as the tie by which those terms are differentiated and related.'

Butler, J. (2003). Violence, Mourning, Politics. Studies in Gender and Sexuality, 4, 9-37.

Love is as strong as death

Love is strong as death,
jealousy as relentless as Sheol.
The flash of it is a flash of fire,
a flame of the Lord himself.
Love no floods can quench,
no torrents drown.

Song of Songs 8:6-7




I'm a little early for None, today. Studying has this incredible effect, of making my eye rove, ahead. Today's readings for the Hours work incredibly well through the three levels of spirit, for my mind:



At the level of the body:

Terce (Morning Prayer)

Your body, you know, is the temple of the Holy Spirit, who is in you since you received him from God. You are not your own property; you have been bought and paid for. That is why you should use your body for the glory of God. 1 Corinthians 6:19-20



At the level of mind/soul:

Sext (Midday Prayer)

And now, Israel, what does the Lord your God ask of you? Only this: to fear the Lord your God, to follow all his ways, to love him, to serve the Lord your God with all your heart and all your soul. Deuteronomy 10:12



And the Song of Songs above, for None (afternoon prayer) at the level of spirit. Love is as strong as death.


Ref: http://www.universalis.com/20100620/today.htm

Vulnerability and performative contradictions

'But perhaps there is some other way to live such that one becomes neither affectively dead nor mimetically violent, a way out of the circle of violence altogether. This possibility has to do with demanding a world in which the bodily vulnerability is protected without therefore being eradicated and with insisting on the line that must be walked between the two.

By insisting on a "common" corporeal vulnerability, I may seem to be positing a new basis for humanism. That might be true, but I am prone to consider this differently. A vulnerability must be perceived and recognised in order to come into play in an ethical encounter, and there is no guarantee that this will happen. Not only is there always a possibility that a vulnerability will not be recognised and that it will be constituted as the "unrecognisable", but when that vulnerability is recognised it has the power to change the meaning and structure of the vulnerability itself. In this sense, if vulnerability is one precondition of humanisation, and humanisation takes place differently through variable norms of recognition, then it follows that vulnerability is fundamentally dependent on existing norms of recognition if it is to be attributed to any human subject.

So when we say that every infant is surely vulnerable, that is clearly true; but it is true, in part, precisely because our utterance enacts the very recognition of vulnerability and shows the importance of recognition itself for sustaining vulnerability [Italics mine]. We perform the recognition by making the claim, and that is surely a very good ethical reason to make the claim. We make the claim, however, precisely because it is not meant to be taken for granted, precisely because it is not, in every instance, honoured. Vulnerability takes on another meaning at the moment it is recognised, and recognition wields the power to reconstitute vulnerability. We cannot posit this vulnerability prior to recognition without performing the very thesis that we oppose (our positing is itself a form of recognition and so manifests the constitutive power of the discourse). This framework, by which norms of recognition are essential to the constitution of vulnerability as a precondition of the human is important precisely for this reason, namely, that we need and want those norms in place, that we struggle for their establishment, and that we value their continuing and expanded operation.'

I'm praying that Doris asks a phenomenology question in the Psychoanalysis exam, next week. Some means by which I can connect the corporeal vulnerability of the human body, that which connects us, to my three-pages-in-less-than-half-an-hour essay. She is a teacher in the school of 'go deeply into that which fascinates you', and I, merely a girl-serpent, hypnotised. :)

Epistemological distance, methodological variety, ontological pluralism (from Integral Theory, link to come) - would these but constitute the building blocks for the framework for recognition Butler so passionately describes, here?

Ref:

Butler, J. (2003). Violence, Mourning, Politics. Studies in Gender and Sexuality, 4, 9-37.

Violence, Mourning, Politics - excerpt from Judith Butler

'I find that my very formation implicates the other in me, that my own foreignness to myself, is paradoxically, the source of my ethical connection with others. I am not fully known to myself, because part of what I am is the enigmatic traces of others...I am wounded, and I find that the wound itself testifies to the fact that I am impressionable, given over to the Other in ways that I cannot fully predict or control'.

I need to come back to this paper - Butler posits that the disorientation of grief posits the 'I' in the mode of unknowingness, where mourning and grief furnish a politic, a sense of community of complex order. Loss makes a tenuous we of us all. Loss is a change that de-constitutes choice, it forces us to undergo a transformation the outcomes of which we cannot know in advance, something larger than our own cognitive plans, our own projects, our own knowings.

After exams.

Ref:

Butler, J. (2003). Violence, Mourning, Politics. Studies in Gender and Sexuality, 4, 9-37.

Exquisite Reception

'Attunement reveals the receptive elaboration of the intensity, shape and timing of affective expressiveness, and occurs largely out of awareness and almost automatically, while empathy requires conscious cognitive mediation. Attunement involves emotional resonance which is recast into another form of expression - a distinct form of affective transaction in it's own right, which relates to the intensity, timing and shape of behaviour. Stern's lovely example is illustrative:

'A 9-month-old girl becomes very excited about a toy and reaches for it. As she grabs for it she lets out an exuberant 'aaah!' and looks at her mother. Her mother looks back and scrunches up her shoulders and performs a terrific shimmy with her upper body, like a go-go dancer. The shimmy lasts about as long as her daughter's 'aaah!' but is equally excited, joyful and intense'.

Many things are happening in this moment. The expressive tendrils of a child's bodily experiences are recognised, held in a sharing moment by another's body, in another register, and that transformed expression is returned to the child. This is contingency for beginners. Something of the child's experience, which is outside of words, has a material effect on the interpersonal world-her mother-and that reception is conveyed to the child in a different key. The child learns not merely 'What I do makes a difference' (behavioural contingency) but 'What I experience, express, am-for-a-moment makes a difference' (experiential, receptive contingency). And the proof of that is that not only its visible, expressive reception, but it's translation into another register, which permits the child to see it again, to see it in a new way, from another's perspective. [Italics mine]. This provides for the child a non-specular reflective experience of her own bodily experience. She has the opportunity to know the reality of her own bodily and mental experience intersubjectively as much by the senses of proprioception and kinaesthesia. The child in this moment has the possibility of realizing that her experience can be detected and received, of realizing there is a mutual mentality. Not to put too fine a point on it, perhaps this experience is an affective prototype of moving towards a theory of mind; the pleasure of other minds'.

Ref:

McIlwain, D. (2007). Rezoning Pleasure: Drives and Affects in Personality Theory, Theory & Personality, 17(4), 529-561.

Finding your Pleasure Zone

In her paper "Rezoning Pleasure" Doris McIllwain explores the psychoanalytic construct of drives, and searches for reasons as to their deletion from, and the necessity for re-inclusion for drives in the psychoanalytic discourse. Through this work Doris builds a model of personality development incorporating motivation and affective idiosyncrasies.

Citing the evidence that drives and affects are 'subpersonal knowers' and 'intentional engines', Doris reminds us that for Freud, drives particularly are 'knowers in that they are somatically anchored sources of policy with regard to aspects of reality relevant to their satisfaction or frustration'. She expresses concern about the attachment literature accounts of evolutionary behaviours that promote attachment that seem to leave the pleasure of the body, the feelings that guide the attachment, at the borders of the journal articles. This is odd when considering the fact that Tomkin's pioneering work in the 1960's established with certainty that beliefs and belief structures lack the motivational clout, in humans, of one good affect or drive.

Doris charts a loss of the body in psychoanalytic theory that begins from Freud, to object relations theory, to self psychology and intersubjectivism [only now, with enactment theory, do we see the body meet the intersubjective in the relationship between the therapist and the analysand, TN]. Noting that drives are deeply malleable within ongoing relational systems, she argues that it is pleasure that contains within the germ of subject/object distinction-making, defining 'what is me' (the pleasureable) against 'what is not me' (the unpleasurable). 'Only when the distinction between self and world is stably known (if intermittently felt) can there be pleasure in giving up that distinction, blurring self/other, self/world. as in mystical experiences, charisma and love.'

Co-assembly of affects and drives per Tomkins is invoked in an explanation of the 'cascading constraints' of a given developmental path, where our earliest exchanges with others are powerful determinants in the personality outcomes for an adult 'impulse, affect and emotion shape the structuring of thought, behaviour and patterns of relatedness. Their interlinking in the context of language and culture shapes the nuclear scenes, schemas and scripts, autobiographical memories and life memories that we come to live by.'

Expanding  the picture of drives as the frontier between the somatic and the mental, as the demand on the mind for work defined somatically but modified by cognition. Drives meet with their own vicissitudes, and are readily shaped by affective consequences once action is set underway. 'Affects and drives motivate not only what we do, but also what we attend to.' When we are shamed for example in something like experiencing excitement in the bodily presence of another, in the face of our own need, we are likely to end up preferentially attending away from that very need, and will fail to recognise the sign of inner longing.

(I love this next line):

'The affect programmes..are independent of higher cognitive processes, and can be seen as a mechanism for saving us from our own intelligence by rapidly and involuntarily initiating essential behaviours'. Without affects, nothing matters, with them, everything could. The differential definition of affects and drives allows that we're able to explain behaviour that is at cross purposes such as procrastination, being one's own worst enemy and self-deception.

Early Freud defines drives as ensuring the survival of the individual organism, pitted against drives that enhance the survival of the species. The component drives of sexuality can be taken well off the path of pleasure via stimulation of the mucous membranes - sex is biological, but the erotic is distinctly cultural.  The ego drives, as Freud defined them as including hunger, thirst, pain-avoidance and temperature regulation, can undergo an anaclitic propping on of one drive to another (sensuality in eating overdetermines satisfaction in hunger, to a certain extent, for example). The Nirvana principle, that we seek to remove all tensions, becomes coherent when we propose that there can be such a thing as 'pleasurable tensions' - demonstrable in foreplay, and in affects that underpin intrinsic motivation, which are best served in an overall environment of pleasurable affect, such as curiosity and interest in learning.

Much more to go. Er, or come. :)

Ref:

McIlwain, D. (2007). Rezoning Pleasure: Drives and Affects in Personality Theory, Theory & Personality, 17(4), 529-561.

Prayer of Quiet

I've been spending a little time with a Late Latin translation of the Rule of St Benedict - presently in the triurnal cycle we work through the degrees of humility, all twelve of them.

Yesterdays reading is thus:

Secundus humilitatis gradus est, si propriam quis non amans voluntatem desideria sua non delectur implere, sed vocam ilam Domini factis imitetur dicentis: Non veni facere voluntatem meam, sed ejus qui me misit. *


The second degree of humility is that a man love not his own will, nor delight in fulfilling his own desires, but carry out in deed the saying of the Lord: I came not to do my own will, but the will of him who sent me. *


*John vi. 38


The role of the will seems to me to be a key differentiating factor between religious and occult practice (yes, yes, for as much as I really know about either).

The Rule of St Benedict is heavily masculine in tone - it's addressed to monks, with instructions about, and to, Abbotts and brothers. For a post-modern barely feminist psychology student, it's a leap of faith all of it's own to think that this text is talking to me (all of me - my 'inner boy' is well addressed, here).

But I'm flicking through St Teresa's 'The Way of Perfection' at the same time, and she discusses something called 'The Prayer of Quiet', and she talks, in a feminine voice, too, about the role of the will in prayer:

'When this quiet is felt in a high degree and lasts for a long time, I do not think that, if the will were not made fast to something, the peace would be of such long duration. Sometimes it goes on for a day, or for two days, and we find ourselves - I mean those who experience this state - full of joy without understanding the reason [Vajrayana Buddhism I think, talks to this TN]. They see clearly that their whole self is not in what they are doing, but that the most important faculty is absent, namely, the will, which I think is united with it's God - and that the other faculties are left free to busy themselves with service...it unites the active life with the contemplative...Thus Mary and Martha work together'.

It intrigues me, this secondary displacement of an internal capacity to an external facility - the vulnerable opening to the influence of the All, by the All. I don't think that she, or he (above) is implying that there is a need to hold firm to your own sense of cognition, even while giving up your will, but if I think about my life history, the vulnerability, so created by abnegation of the will, is only supported  by maintaining a firm sense of knowing who yer are.

To vocalise, recollect, mentally pray, contemplate,
Attending to the flow of knowing.

These things.

Ref: 


Peers, E. A. (1964). The Way of Perfection - St Teresa Of Avila. New York: Image Books.
McCann, J. (1952). The Rule of St Benedict. London: Burns and Oates Limited.

Forgetting via Freud

Forgetting is as much maligned today really, as the notion of regression seems to me to be, in our culture. I tend to jolt a little, when people explain a forgotten moment as 'old age' - mostly because I consider in some ways, my ability to remember has gotten better as I've gotten older (says she at the grand age of 35). What's happened perhaps is that I've garnered more strategies for remembering things over time. Also, for me now, the world is less a place that I react to, and more a place that I'm graced to observe, and so from that perspective there may be a few more cues available for recall than there would have been for me, in my gung-ho passionately involved but mostly misdirected twenties.

Either way, as the line that Schlesinger opens this paper with says 'though widely used, forgetting is a poorly understood process'. This post attempts to summarise and present his main arguments (or paradoxes) that he sees as being inherent in the process of forgetting.

He starts with two ideas:

1. Firstly, that the act of repression (as I see it, the act of secondary repression) is a form of memory as much as it is a forgetting, acting like a 'hell room' in a sacred library by keeping forbidden material out of general reach, with no card catalog record.

2. Forgetting can be seen as the normal organisational process occuring withing memory, with new schemata being consistently re-drawn in line with the experience of the self. Content may simply be rearranged into larger patterns of meaning, generalised, subordinated or condensed as a process of efficient memory functioning.

Freud wrote 'A Project for Scientific Psychology' in 1895. The genius of this man becomes apparent when you consider that he was theorising about the possibility that memory is represented at the synaptic level as 'a permanent alteration following an event' well before the neuroscientific data and measurement capability that we have available to us today. Through this paper, according to Schlesinger we find breadcrumbs that help us piece together a theory of forgetting, per Freud.

It's important to note that forgetting is a selective process. Freud in 1904 offered that forgetting takes place through condensation, the blending together of ideas, thus becoming the basis for formation of concepts, In repression, Freud proposed that confusion in condensation was possible because distortion was a likely outcome of memories under the force of repression.

While we may think of forgetting as a function of time for Freud this was not a truth - rather, patterns of 'distorting trends' prevented us from being able to access the original memory, through active repression.

Freud had some clear positions on forgetting, per Schlesinger:

1. He held that nothing registered in memory is every absolutely lost. The evidence for multiple registrations of every impression, existing in subsequent forms in the course of development, combines to render repressed material somewhat immune to forgetting.

2. Freud directly rejected a disuse theory of forgetting (this has been picked up by Kihlstrom).

3. Freud highlighted the uniqueness in individual's patterns of remembering - styles of memory organisation are highly variable.

4. Freud implicated a mechanism, condensation, as responsible for forgetting. This gets difficult because Freud also invokes condensation processes in repression.

With respect to repression, it can be noted per Freud per Schlesinger, that repression's goal is to avoid pain through memory - the pleasure principle is served in opposing the possibility of a better appreciation of reality, mentally.

The reality principle is served through the constant reorganising of verbal memory trace, with consistent renewal in working memory. Forgetting, as a notion, here would simply mean the adaptation of new patterns of memory organisation over-riding the old ones, thus emphasizing certain memories, linking some and obliterating others. Loss of centrality in the memory schema renders less clarity to a memory, and so it becomes fused with other elements to be only available in conceptual form.

Experimentally there have been many experiments performed with nonsense stimuli, to reveal that us humans are very good at recalling absolute truffles of meaning. Information that has been 'forgotten' is pretty easily restored, for us people, with a few prompts (would that some of my old hard drives displayed such similar malleability and influence.

Notably, for ye of occult and ritual practice, who have wandered this far through my comments and summarising, Schlesinger notes 'the by far preferred style of memorising meaningful material is to organise it in a way that relies less on specific connections between isolated elements than upon overall patterns.' These are called schemata - organising principles with personal reference. Remembering is identified as 'an imaginative reconstruction..built out of the relation of our attitude toward the whole active mass of organised past reactions or experience'. In most areas of human concern, literal recall of learned material is of minimal importance.

The work of psychoanalysis is to remember so that one can properly forget. The psychic economy seems to me to be an underlying schemata that characterises much of Freud's work (with the Marxist focus of his cultural time and place, this is perhaps not a surprising find, given the probable dominant social discourse). Secondary repression seems usually instigated for a reason - trauma, superego conflict, a defense mechanism that may actually serve healthy ego functioning. In maturation, repression shifts from a disruption in memory functioning to a subtle interplay of adaptive and defensive purposes, which may obfuscate an inarticulateness under broader fluency and eloquence. In other words, repression may be many things, but this paper goes to great lengths to show, repression does not equal forgetting.

Ref:

Schlesinger, H.J. (1970). The Place of Forgetting in Memory Functioning. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 18, 358 - 371.