NEUROLOGY LOOPS, BONDAGE, OPPRESSION, AND MY OLD PICKUP

A METAPHOR FOR LOVE: A THEME ON CRIME SHOWS

The mechanic could not figure out what was wrong with my pickup. Now and then it wouldn’t start, particularly in the parking lot of the Great Falls Target.  Sometimes it stopped in traffic and wouldn’t restart.  We thought it might be the key or something about the battery.  In the end, I got desperate and sat down to read every word of the Ford Ranger S directions.  

It turned out that that old pickup has an early computer which, when it receives unresolvable commands — stop and start at the same time — freezes for thirty seconds.  I always come out of Target with that push/pull attitude -- wanting/ not-wanting and it is “caught” by the pickup as though the vehicle were a horse.

Today’s selection from aeon.com includes an essay called “The Empire Dreamt Back” by Erik Linstrum which proposes that the British Empire, trying to “manage” (force compliance) of many foreign cultures was challenged to figure out what those people were thinking.  So one man decided to use dream analysis, Freud-style, to figure them out.  The trouble was that Freud didn’t work.  The theories didn’t apply.

Sometime later, Frantz Fanon analyzed the dreams of Algerians, who were oppressed by the French.  Their dreams were about “running and jumping: expressions of the longing for physical freedom, for the ability to move without fear, that the reality of colonial rule denied them.”

I’ve been trying to understand approach/avoidance situations in which two forces oppose each other, producing paralysis — a kind of psychological bondage.  Some actually act this out through sexual “kink”, practising actual bondage with rope, sometimes in ways — esp. with women — that leave them exposed and vulnerable.  Sometimes it’s voluntary on the part of the women, a surrender, an offering.

One useful book has been “The Measure of Madness: Philosophy of Mind, Cognitive Neuroscience, and Delusional Thought” by Philip Gerrans.  Though this is identified as philosophy, it accepts the physiological organic neurology of mind — that the brain is wired as surely as my old pickup.  Almost everything biological works in a loop: depletion, renewal, and more depletion.  (I suppose you could say like my pickup’s gas tank, except you can’t just buy the renewal of neurotransmitters.  But drugs?)  

What I didn’t suspect was that there are primal circuits going back probably as far as the original one-celled animals and that they can be in opposition to each other.  This creates a bondage that is apparent in behavior but has been created so early in the development of the person that they are subconscious, part of the original platform that describes the world.  No one can talk them out of it.  A parent who tries to force compliance, ensure loving loyalty, and discover what the child is thinking builds that platform out into a life pattern.

J. Bricklin writes in “The Volitional Brain: Towards a Neuroscience of Free Will” which is a collection of essays.  His or her chapter is called “A Variety of Religious Experience” which sounds a lot like dissociation.  But the piece describes interplay between contradictory ideas or images without an added restraining force.  This is not actual physical bondage, but that of ideas.

I copied phrases:  “the feeling of a reflex reaction to being bound.”  “Two thoughts flash by in alternating succession so quickly as to be a whirl.  They would be experienced as an explosive emotional force — not some kind of tennis volley between sides . . . the energy of one feeds into, rather than siphons off, the energy of the other.” . . ."the thought to break free, which, without any other mediation, produces a second, intensified physical response.”  It sounds orgasmic and is what kink sex can use.  I need to find more thought by J. Bricklin.

Persons who are overwhelmed and stuck by these two brain loops, “well-conserved limbic circuits” — both involuntary and subconscious so that they are not detectable by reflection — develop some remedies.  One is to leave, escape, get out of Dodge, run, take the ecstatic drug of speed.

Another is to go blank.  That’s dissociation.

Denial is always an option.  What anxiety?  I will not tolerate anxiety because it indicates ambiguity, demands action or decision I will not take.

Attack.  Mock, dissect, fight back, smash the whole system by revealing its own basic contradictions, challenging its morality, and — if you are an Algerian philosopher, deconstruct the whole system of assumptions in Euro-thought.  Punk them all.

And then there is the option of the narcissist — attach another person who is clear-headed, morally secure, and able to make decisions.  A Jiminy Cricket, a Tinker Bell, who doesn’t oppress but acts as a guide.  Or maybe a partner of strong character.

Then again it can work to find a cause so personally intense and morally overwhelming that it dictates what to do.

Freud (SOMEtimes he’s useful) suggested that people have “repetition compulsion” in which they cause a repetition of an original experience that couldn’t be resolved, in hopes that this time it will be different.  And since people become smarter as they age, sometimes this works.  The dynamics may finally come clear, though it’s not easy to break them up into new options.

Probably many psych people are addressing their own irresolvable issues by seeking them in others, in hopes that releasing them from bondage will untie the helper’s knots.  

Clearly, when government is oppressive, it creates people full of resentment and determined to take their turn to oppress, often in their own families, which creates distorted men, tortured by the need to be right, to be in charge, but to be loved.  They are like the person who wants his dog to come when it’s called, but then beats it when it comes— believing that the dog will know that the punishment is for earlier not-coming.  The lack of success in this blindness is so frustrating as to create an explosion of violence, esp. if there is no insight as to what’s happening.  Dogs can get killed.

We live this all the time in race relations, the handling of deviation, the treatment of children, on and on and on.  I need to find more research.