THE DYNAMIC UNCONSCIOUS

Freud’s notion of what went on in the mind was thus:

Based on introspection, he started with the conscious mind which he connected to the “ego” or one's general feeling of identity and then proposed a superego, which was one’s “best self,” something like a conscience.  But, held down by repression, there was below consciousness the “un-”conscious where there was a lot of stuff that couldn’t be known and a “pre-conscious” where stuff went in and out through dreams, jokes, drifting on the edge of sleep and so on.  The deepest unconscious is also called the “id.” “In Freudian theory, the part of the psyche associated with instinctual, repressed, or antisocial desires, usually sexual or aggressive. In its efforts to satisfy these desires, the id comes into conflict with the social and practical constraints enforced by the ego and superego.”  (online definition)  This is close to the prevalent notion of what society/culture was like.

Sigmund Freud defined libido as "the energy, regarded as a quantitative magnitude ... of those instincts which have to do with all that may be comprised under the word 'love'.  " It is the instinct energy or force, contained in what Freud called the id, the strictly unconscious structure of the psyche." (wiki)  Its shadow is thanatos, the wish to die.

This is invented.  There is no single brain-blob that can be identified as the ego or even the libido.  Freud was scribbling doodles to keep metaphorical ideas clear.  They were dynamic and theoretical, but they were not real.  Yet we have all talked and speculated so much about this little diagram that it seems real.  Esp. to the psychoanalyst, to whom these concepts are very useful and come to account for things otherwise inexplicable.

Since they are based on introspection, what one can think of consciously is the main category.  Then under that is the unconscious -- we are aware that sometimes we do what we didn’t intend, that we remember and other times forget -- sometimes conveniently.  This is Freud’s strongest concept.  It pulls back into the human mind things that to more “primitive” people might be projected out onto the world, so that “the devil made me do it” seems like a good explanation.  People might feel they are somehow under a spell or not really even know how they feel, deceiving themselves somehow.   "Jesus loves me."

Research now has undermined the idea that there is a "truth," something resistant to fantasy.  Memories are as unreal and fluid as everything else.  It appears that a memory is re-assembled every time it comes to mind and thus can accidentally include mistaken ideas. 

The superego was the attempt to keep the ego sorted.  The id was identified with the raw body and all its indecencies, childishness, craving appetites.  In 19^th century Vienna, the highest value was given to rationality, control, fitting one’s culture, staying clean,  being close and obedient to one’s family.  The result was a lot of suffering and an unending source of jokes, which are an effective way to frame ridiculous contradictions.

There have been many other systems since this “egg” was hatched.  Basically the division between the conscious and the unconscious has persisted, but always the unconscious was seen as an undeveloped source of energy, merely an emotional substrate for the refined mind, messy enough to require the ego and superego to keep a lid on it.  And yet psychoanalysis asks for access to all the steaming, roiling mess in order to straighten out misconceptions.  The old Greek mythology has been authentic and powerful enough to provide “pot handles” by which to grasp strong hot stuff.  At least in the Euro-American setting.  But that's NOT universal.

When working with ritual, Victor Turner’s anthopological concept of the “liminal” has proven very useful.  The idea is that the inner life is more like a room than a pot with a lid --  and that one enters it through a sort of door.  A limen is the name of the threshold one steps over.  In this idea the liminal space is sequestered like the unconscious, but it’s like hypnosis in that it gives access to what is not usually conscious and throws off the superego nagging. It allows change.  No shame.

With this concept and some others, the consciousness is a much “smaller” state than "id/animal/flesh".  One might think of consciousness as the circle of light from a spotlight that can be moved around to reveal the dark stage.  Instead of being some kind of volatile animal to be contained, the unconscious becomes a potential to explore in the way an artist might develop a view or narrative.  What one doesn’t know about oneself becomes a potential discovery instead of some kind of inner monster.

But these are all fantasies, metaphors, poetries about a molecular structure interacting electrochemically, that somehow manages to throw up to "view" a small stage, a fraction of the busy city of transactions that supports it. A puppet show. Only recently have we been able to actually SEE things flowing busily around and to identify the organized, though sometimes very small, cellular structures of the body and brain that connect messages from outside the body, messages from the actual tissues and their orientation in the world (Where's "up", where's "North?") and messages about well-being or dysfunction in the gut, the eye, the lung, the heart.

A metaphorical illustration of a human connectome.

At the same time professors and their students have been resourcefully devising ways to reveal how the mind works, sort of parallel to the way cloud chambers can leave traces that imply what particles of the atom are like and what they do.  At first it was a bit of a shock to realize how much of our "rational" decision-making -- thought to be fact-based analysis -- was in fact being managed before it ever got to consciousness and sometimes that level did a much better job of evaluating choices.  “Zen” archery turns out to be a real thing, another way of tapping the knowing unknown, while “overthinking” complex problems can prevent good decisions.

It now appears that what we “feel” as the limen or threshold may be the instant of the connectome rearranging itself to address a new sort of task.  Say, going from writing a poem or even a shopping list, to playing a game of ping pong.  The information/decision flow will connect different points in the brain -- maybe more or maybe less.  Maybe not even in the brain.  But if the space/time is liminal, it will be protected without being secret.

It’s clear that the brain has evolved “consciousness” as we think of it when we use language, which must have been recently evolved.  But on the whole, brain evolution is not simply cumulative -- rising steadily up from fish to animal to human.  It may be that some new twist appears, but it’s possible and likely that sometimes it may be a dropped-out bit that has opened up possibilities by eliminating some blockage or sidetrack.  Clearly there are long nerve connections that go down into the legs, but also it seems that some of the newest and more powerful abilities are in individual cells, like mirror cells that enable empathy.  It’s likely that human beings will not evolve by growing wheels on their feet or by being patched in to iPods, but by finding new uses and connections for cells that are already there.  What is the autonomic nervous system up to these days?

Heather Berlin

Heather Berlin is a researcher who addresses these matters.  She’s VERY smart and quite beautiful, which means she is (and must be) meticulous in her thinking and carefully watched by others.  I’m going to spend some time today on an article she wrote for “Neuropsychoanalsis" 2011,13(1) called “The Neural Basis of the Dynamic Unconscious".  It’s so “sourced”, linked to previous research, that it’s hard to read, but I’ll see what I can do.  Freud’s unconscious, you notice, is still being used as though it were a unified entity, but “dynamic” is a good word: the unconscious is not just a junk pile -- it’s doing something, flashing along the connectome in electrochemical transmissions, jumping synapses, and -- only an hour or so ago making me dream.  

by Adolfo 1111

Dream.  “I had taken a train to Chanticleer, a medieval town with a stone wall along a river and some buildings that seemed to be small castles once but are now converted to business, so the nearest one had a huge sign advertising beer.  I was attending partly for a conference but was proud of myself for putting on a backpack and wandering the town.  One of the fellow attendees was trying to get my attention and called my name.  He was very fat and crouched behind the railing of an old stone bridge.  Then he threw a rock.  It was a black gritty one with tiny blue sparkling crystals embedded in it.”

Interpretation.  I free-associate to a long ago meeting in Halifax that looks rather like Bruges in my mind.  I had posted a photo of Bruges recently.  Also I ran across a photo from that Halifax meeting, which was chilly.  (My electric mattress pad had turned itself off.)  I suspect that Corky came over to look at my sink drain while I was still asleep -- I wrote between 3AM and 5AM, then went back to sleep) and called my name.  I have another friend who does this sort of work -- he's had surgery in Spokane that reduced his weight by a fourth or a third, but I haven't seen him since then.   (I'm trying to lose weight.)   I had read something about the imposingly big female knight, Briana, in "Game of Thrones" who was saved by the idea that she was from the Island of Sapphires.  The rooster was a little figure I'd torn out of a magazine for my painting morgue that keeps floating around on my desk without getting filed.

NO revelations of the future.  Just scraps.

AROUND THE WORLD AND HOME AGAIN

As I keyboard here on the high prairie, I’m listening to WFMT, the classical radio station in Chicago.  Because I brought my interests and networks with me back from “outside” this small town, both in the form of print subscriptions and as computer network access to faraway radio stations and memberships in environmental, arts, educational, religious, and social action groups around the planet, I get an entirely different set of information and interpretation about everything than what is available locally.  In fact, the steady stream of ideas that are my identity have been different from those of my extended family ever since I went to college in Chicago where I listened to WFMT both as an undergrad (’61) and graduate student (’82). 

On my father’s side my cousins are still pretty much the careful non-smoking, hard-working people that the Strachan patriarch was when he brought his wife and grown children to South Dakota to homestead.  Because they were from Scotland, they valued education and books.  Five generations later, there are college-graduates, teachers, and middle-class liberals among those cousins.  But they are mainstreamers, mostly not church-goers, and watch TV news but complain about violence.  On my mother’s side the cousins are neither Pinkerton nor Cochrane, middle-class mid-Westerners who came on the Oregon Trail.  They WERE church-going (Presbyterian and Baptist of the northern sort) but the generation before me all of them married gentrified hillbilly rednecks whose religion had become prosperity.  One branch runs a string of titty bars down the Willamette Valley.  One branch married lawyers.

If I had to put myself in a category it would be Generation X -- over-educated/low-income.  The first half is invisible in this town and the second half marks me as no-account.  To live below the poverty line in order to read and write full-time is unintelligible to locals, though there are more like me in the rez/resort towns.  I am not enough like the do-gooders and “green” people across the state to get involved with them, though I know and value many of them and have for decades.  Not as long as I’ve known the part of the Industrial Cowboy Art Cartel rooted in the mystique of white male domination of the West, though most of them are dead or dying now.  And as long as I’ve known the Blackfeet, who cannot be shoved into any category.  Some of them are more like me than anyone else in Montana.

People get lumped together in various ways and split out over various issues.  One of the main differences is between those who try to force everyone else to be just like them, and those who are willing to live and let live.  But the first step is realizing that other people DO see the world differently -- there is not just one point of view, one way of interpreting things, one way to live, one way to define what is important.  This was the most amazing discovery of the sailing ships beginning in about 1600: that there were many civilizations, quite self-contained and equally valid so long as they fitted into their ecology.  The land-locked Europeans who had been battling over territory for centuries realized over the next four centuries that the planet is based on pluralities and the best way to reconcile them is trade and law:  democracy.   But, of course, there’s always humor and demonstrations.

Actually, the revolution hasn’t been all that sudden and the realization has not reached a lot of places, but trade and law expand constantly.  Africa and the Middle East extending into Eurasia are now fighting the wars that Europe fought in Medieval times (“Game of Thrones”) and China fought even earlier.  (A host of Chinese “Westerns.”)  In America it was the war between brothers, then against the indigenous, and now it is an economic war cloaked in religious terms -- urban against rural.  We don’t demonstrate much for fear the law will get out the old fire hose, tear gas, and dogs -- tools against the “other” whether blacks or hippies or gays.  We know they’re listening.

Sense of humor?  Forget it.  Unless you count how ridiculous the Taliban can be:  “Under the Taliban regime, Sharia law was interpreted to ban a wide variety of activities hitherto lawful in Afghanistan: employment, education and sports for women, movies, television, videos, music, dancing, hanging pictures in homes, clapping during sports events, kite flying, and beard trimming. One Taliban list of prohibitions included:  pork, pig, pig oil, anything made from human hair, satellite dishes, cinematography, and equipment that produces music, pool tables, chess, masks, alcohol, tapes, computers, VCRs, television, anything that propagates sex, wine, lobster, nail polish, firecrackers, statues, sewing catalogs, pictures, Christmas cards.”  Even stodgy old ag towns in Montana would be in trouble.  At least lawn mowing is not forbidden.  A person has to have SOME pleasure!   Of course, the Hutterites already have the beards.  On the other hand they approve of pigs.

Humor’s one of the big identifiers of groups:  Montana folks tell South Dakota jokes, Garrison Keillor tells Lutheran and Unitarian jokes, Unitarians tell fundamentalist jokes.  Fundamentalists don’t tell jokes -- they’re like radical feminists.  Life is SERIOUS.  Certainly it’s not if people in power could impose penalties as harsh as these: “theft punished by the amputation of a hand, rape and murder by public execution; married adulterers stoned to death,”  there would be a major loss of tax-payers around here.  So we don’t do this officially -- only out in the alley behind the bar after closing.  The most insidious restrictions are imposing ignorance for children and slavery for women, both enforced by abuse.  If you had a confidential talk with law enforcement or child and family services around here, they could name you some people who do that.

Between Americans now is a major split between those who think our government is out of control in its secret militaristic dealings around the planet (we almost certainly subsidized the Taliban through the CIA in Pakistan before they turned on us) and those who want an internal military against the citizenry for the sake of “safety.”  Osama bin Laden’s interests in college included “writing poetry, reading, with the works of Field Marshall Bernard Montgomery  and Charles de Gaulle said to be among his favorites; black stallions; and football.”   The difference is in the use of religion to oppress others.  When we interpret our citizenship in the US as being the same as any particular religious point of view, we become oppressors -- sometimes of ourselves.  Recently there have been laws proposed to ban all religions except Christianity.  Luckily, many people are enough like Jesus to reject that nonsense.

People feeling this tendency in our own country begin to talk of American Fascism and the American Taliban.  Any time an individual or group begins to claim God is on “their” side, splits up God into a diminishment.  It means they think they ARE God.  The juice they get from this will last until their economic advantages collapse.  Virtue is almost always rooted in the idea that being good will mean getting rich.  They don’t consider the other side: that being rich might make them good, because it won’t.  They’ll still be the same rigid rotters they always were.

People who want to be big frogs love little tiny puddles.  Personally, I’d rather be small -- even unnoticed -- and swim throughout the world.  Just for fun, I looked up some frog jokes:  “What did the frog order at Macdonald’s?  French flies and a big croak.”   If you think ordering French flies is unpatriotic, the joke is on you.

NO JOKES FOR CEBULL

Since Federal Judge Cebull has set the standard for what can be joked about on the Internet so low that almost anything can pass, I might as well take advantage.

I’ve had this story about bestiality floating around in my “to blog” file for quite a while:

White House press secretary Jay Carney fielded a question about bestiality during the daily press briefing:

Q: The Family Research Council and CNS News both reported a 93-to-7 U.S. Senate vote to approve a defense authorization bill that, quote, "includes a provision which not only repeals the military law on sodomy, but also repeals the military ban on sex with animals, or beastiality.[sic]" Does the commander-in-chief approve or disapprove of bestiality in our armed forces?

In short, have you soldiers stopped fucking your camels? (And don't put any beans up your nose, either.) Of course, clever PETA never fails to jump on any issue that involves animals.

In watching last night's news briefing, we were upset to note that you flippantly addressed the recently approved repeal of the military ban on bestiality. With respect, this is no laughing matter. Our office has been flooded with calls from Americans who are upset that this ban has been repealed—and for good reason. As we outlined in the attached letter sent yesterday to the secretary of defense, animal abuse does not affect animals only—it is also a matter of public safety, as people who abuse animals very often go on to abuse human beings.

Colleen O'Brien
Director of Communications

I’m amazed that so many people think that such a law has anything to do with real events. I assume they were raised to believe that a law immediately changes everyone’s behavior. What Mama says, goes. So where are the statistics about military animal rape? I’m sure there are vids on YouTube of species boundary violations, but where are the numbers? Or the theory about why such things happen? But the post-modern thinkers are as alert as HSUS. This call for papers arrived via an academic listserv about animals.

Call for papers for Carnets de Géographes

“Towards a ‘humanimal’ geography”

«Ironically, both the pleasure of bestiality for the practitioner and the horror/humor of the shocked observer rely upon this projection of humanity onto the animal. This calls for thinking of potentially other relationships to animals in which we seek not to exploit human-­‐animal difference but pleasure in exploring the breaking down of this boundary [...] Such a queering of the boundary between human-­‐animal may serve a valuable role in reconsidering our ethical relationship to animals,which has previously hinged upon human-­‐animal difference and hierarchy. This ontological certainty must be undermined to establish a nonhumanist approach to animals in particular and to otherness in general.

(Brown and Rasmussen, 2010)

I’m nearing the end of the first volume of the magisterial overview of the history of the novel by Steven Moore and have finally come to my mother’s favorite childhood novel. “The Tales of Genji,” the Japanese Sheharazade. (It’s very much a novel of adolescence, the struggle to come to terms with sexuality.) On page 551 I come to this story. A man “yearns for an unobtainable woman, so turns instead to her cat: ‘To relieve his powerful feelings the Intendant. . . called the cat and cuddled it and with its delicious small and its dear little mew it felt to him naughtily enough like its mistress herself.’”

“. . . So he had the cat at last and he got to sleep with him at night. By day he caressed it and fussed over it. Soon it was no longer shy, and it curled up in his [kimono] skirts or cuddled with him so nicely he really did become very fond of it. He was lying against a pillar near the veranda, lost in thought, when it came to him going Meow, Meow ever so sweetly. ‘My we are eager, aren’t we!’ He smiled and stroked it, then gazed into its eyes. . . .

“‘How odd of him all at once to take such a liking to a cat!’ the old women muttered. ‘He never cared about such creatures before.’

“The Heir apparent sent for the cat, but the Intendant never returned it. Instead he kept it to whisper sweet nothings to all by himself.”

Hello, kitty! Once a person is alerted to such phenomena, they are clearly everywhere, though often in diluted form and especially in history. Are we to forbid people to love their animals? Or even other people’s animals? We aren’t having much success in getting folks to love each other in any sense except entwined with violence. We are having such a hard time understanding how humans as a species are different.

When I was an animal control officer in Portland, OR, we generally got two or three bestiality complaints a year and no one ever knew quite what to do with them. One was a public event about which PPD asked for advice: a stripper had two Great Danes in her act. Was it cruelty? Resorting to French philosophy, we said it depended on the reaction of the dogs -- mutuality as a principle. Of course, it’s an open question whether any animal can give informed consent, so that would mean the act was statutory rape whether the dogs like it or not. I think the stripper simply moved to another city. Evasion can be a good law enforcement strategy.

I would recommend it to Judge Cebull, but earlier in the sequence of events. Evade friends who want to send you dirty jokes at work, esp. if they demean the very context that makes one’s work dignified. If they fail to get the hint, use your delete button. Everyone in Montana knows a lot of sheep jokes and no doubt they are problematic for sheepherders, but their jobs do not depend on social respect -- only respect from their dogs, which insist on respect from their sheep, even the black ones.

If a judge damages his own dignity and that of his position, who can trust him with their camels? Is this joke of Cebull’s not an abuse of human beings? Ruptures of social conduct are sometimes seen as the private privilege of esteemed persons, the enforcers not having to enforce the same rules on themselves. It is a major mistake, but hardly a rare or unusual one. Making a law against it cannot prevent those who enforce the law. Which implies a certain level of contempt for law. Can a contemptuous man serve the law?