CONCEPT, BRAIN, GAME-BOARD . . . BANALITY

The psychoanalytical and psychotherapeutic sites I informally monitor are struggling to reconcile the ideas developed by major figures of the past -- all based on observations of patients and introspection in their own lives -- with the molecular, anatomical, observable phenomena recorded on our very specialized flesh ware.  We can now “see” a single neuron take in information, translate it and pass it on to the next neuron. It’s very complex stuff -- we know that it’s intermeshed with what we can “see” subjectively but not quite how.  In the meantime, life goes on and people in distress need help.

At the simplest level I think of it this way:  a concept is like a token inscribed with sensory information embedded as a kind of GPS.  The person may or may not have a word for that concept.  By definition the unconscious concepts cannot be named but they are still there and still interact.  In addition, there also appears to be a lot of undefined “stuff” just floating around, not even well-enough developed to be an unconscious concept.  Sometimes it’s just a hole where a concept needs to be.

The surface of the cerebral cortex has the body mapped onto it.  Also, at a different level, there is a kind of grid that seems to guide concepts (tokens) as they move around.  This evidently creates metaphors, formulae, graphs, and other ways of recording relationships, if-then code, and theories about life, like what matters.  Even the ineffables.  Let’s say one’s inner life is the tokens moving around on this game-board map which has little stacks of consequence cards, dice to roll, and rules of the game.  One plays with other people through empathy.  

A psychoanalyst uses empathy to “feel with” a distressed person and respond in a kind of model.  Howard B. Levine describes working with a little boy who had been badly abused and who had a “volcanic eruption of emotion” when he came to a mental “place” where he had no concept.  One day the boy was afraid to leave the safe therapy space, couldn't convey his distress, and blew up.  Instinctively, without thought, Levine pretended to be a wolf and howled, demonstrating something to be afraid of.  The boy froze, processed, then acted out being a wolf himself and went into the hallway snarling, fangs bared, empowered.  In ensuing days he used that until he didn’t need to anymore.  It was a sensory capture of an inexpressible concept.

As I understand it, which is only in a beginner’s way, dissociation is when a person comes to a situation so overwhelming and unaccountable that it cannot be conceptualized or named or managed.  It’s like the game Eric Berne called “Uproar” in which a person -- for instance playing chess or cards -- knows they cannot possibly control or even play the game, so they dump over the table, tokens and board onto the floor.  We have become used to seeing these uproars played out politically and militarily.  But dissociation needn't be the warrior's berserk.  It could be quiet.  Blank.  Gone.  Deleted.

After "Uproar" there are two tasks: rounding up the tokens again, and perhaps redesigning the game board.  Maybe a third is changing the rules of the game.  If in this time space the larger society has criminalized your game, both the orderly previous version and the Uproar strategy, there is a time and space of ruin and chaos.  When all this happens within the mind,  maybe to a child who is sexually assaulted or a young man in combat, the result can be dissociation -- a gray desert plain with no landmarks and no tokens -- or it can be a re-eruption of “Uproar.”  I think a lot of us are beginning to understand this.  We live it.  It can “present” in conjunction with drugs, because it is about the management of consciousness.

But now I’m asking, “What is the relationship between the extreme and desperate dissociations, sometimes violent, and the redemptive liminal time/space described by Victor Turner?”  Is it the ritual of the community's coming together as a “fourth brain” that supplies a new board map?  Is it the making of new tokens from strong sense memories?  Is it “permission” to throw out some assumptions and expectations that just don’t work anymore?  Probably all of the above.

One of the most valuable things Pam Munter taught me was to ask for time and space to think.  She said something, looked at my face, stopped and said,  “What just happened?  You look as though I’d just suddenly begun to speak Chinese!”  I was flooded.  Too much to think about, no pattern for organizing it all.  I could do it, but it took a little time.  When I was preaching and I saw that stunned, processing look on the faces of the congregation, I'd stop talking for a minute to let them catch up.

Levine says that he had to constantly guard against impatience, trying to “explain” it all to the person trying to solve something on the inside of his head alone.  Who else is in there, after all?  But it helps to have a trusted person sitting there with you, which is what Gendlin is so helpful about with his idea of “Focusing.”  He says it even works to have a trusted person on the telephone but saying nothing -- just being there, supplying patience.  Video on Skype would be even better.  Witnessing.  A whole congregation can do it.

The strange land of dissociation

http://www.rossinst.com/dissociative_experiences_scale.html  This site has a lot of information that seems pretty well grounded, including a self-test.  “Skipping” or “blanking” is susceptible to interpretation as pathological or even signaling organic problems.  But in the context of liminality, it might be called meditation or transcending the self or even entering a vision.  

Sometimes it’s just preoccupation, like me carefully spreading cat food on my morning toast instead of the cream cheese on the counter right next to the cat food can.  The absent-minded professor syndrome.  12% of the population of Winnipeg that was tested (over a thousand people) reported some kind of dissociation.

Barbara Sukowa as Arendt

Last night I watched the movie called "Hannah Arendt” about her reporting on the Eichmann trial for the New Yorker.  Her conclusion was that Eichmann was not “evil” in some satanic deliberate way, but rather simply was “incapable of thought.”  The movie included actual footage of the real Eichmann in his glass cage being “grilled like a steak” as he put it.  Flat affect.  Facts only.  He did what he was told to do.  Twitches but no real emotion, in contrast to people in the audience including one man who seemed to have fallen on the floor in a paralyzing agony of grief.  

Eichmann looked like a case of dissociation to me.  If he was dissociating -- sleepwalking -- when he signed the death warrants of thousands, that was criminal, pathological, but also, if he had only a game board and no tokens, self-preserving.  Arendt recognized that.  But she was the one who caused uproar by saying so.  The community would not accept it.

The real Hannah Arendt

Banality is only an extreme version of the moral error called “from is to ought,” which posits that if things are a certain way and have always been that way to the knowledge of the person, then that’s the way they ought to be.  Status quo.  Gays have always been persecuted, Jews have always been blamed, women have always been assaulted -- that’s the way it is.  There is no other standard or strategy.  Except Uproar.

It’s a long way from teaching a little boy to handle fear by pretending to be a wolf to teaching a numb and banal man like Eichmann how to find a new life view.  If his community was insisting on the Nazi game board, it would be hard to think of a new move, inviting death.  Jesus’ Gospel in the New Testament has NOT changed the game board of the Old Testament patriarchs, persecutors, war-mongers, and revenge-takers.  Some of us STILL want to use a game board meant for walled cities defended by men in chariots who were okay with harems and slavery but not gays.  Nice try, J.C.  No cigar.

The “fourth brain,” the consensus-bearing, confirming community of people who enter liminality in a spirit of possibility and enlightenment, can be a nation, the United Nations, or a book.  A book can be a liminal space/time.  Too bad the Bible -- both testaments -- was organized by politicians trying to preserve their own status quo.  We could try again.  Or we can space out.

(Another movie tonight:  “Upstream Color.”  Which is scarier?  Relationships or guinea worms?  Or maybe it's about psychoanalysis, trying to re-associate what has been separated.)

WHEN THE YOUNG PLAY UPROAR

When I started teaching in Browning, Mt, in 1961, Sylvia Ashton-Warner with her intense and scary ideas was very popular.  She was teaching illiterate Maori kids with wild home lives, not unlike those on the rez.  At the start of the day, she asked each kid what word they wanted to learn and printed it on a card for them to carry around.  It was THEIR word and through the day they said it, copied it, reflected on what it meant.  At the end of the day they took their word home and explained it to their folks.  So what words were they?  Murder.  Knife. Skeleton.  They read fast and hot, they wrote the same way, and Ashton-Warner was right there with them, urging them on.  They cared.

So when my discussion class could hardly be persuaded to talk at all, much less reflect on how they interacted with each other, I asked them for their “word” topic.  It was that the town police were beating them up. I knew this was true.  One of the students had a bedroom window upstairs where she could see across the way to the jail.  She witnessed the beatings.  Her parents told her not to tell.  I was keeping company with Bob Scriver, who was the city magistrate and he did indeed bawl out some city officers for beating drunks and kids, but the tribal cops had no restraint.  At home they beat their wives.  Everyone said, “Don’t get involved.”  

So we began to talk about it and pretty soon there was a polite knock on the classroom door.  It was the chief of police, who was also the head of the school board, and he was writing me a ticket for slander.   So we went together to the superintendent’s office, who explained that the defense for slander was simply proving that it was true.  If it was true, you could say it.  Even if no one liked to hear it, if it was true, it was legal.  I could prove it was true, so the case was not slander.  After the cop left, the superintendent and I had a little talk about surviving in hostile territory.

Much, much later when I was off the rez, the tribe felt that children taken into custody were being abused because they were taken to jail with adults, so they set up a special safe house.  The kids were not nice.  Abuse does not make people nice.  They treated the adult staff the same way they treated their abusers: cursing, hitting, taunting, provoking, etc.  Soon the adult staff that was supposed to be protecting them was caught duct-taping them to chairs with bags over their heads to keep them from spitting.  It takes a lot of personal security and confidence to withstand rage and revenge from kids.

In the Seventies when I returned to teaching, the kids were constantly indignant at adult behavior.  They demanded that things change.  One day they gathered in the library/auditorium and started a near-riot, shouting and overturning chairs but not harming the books. We had a brilliant counselor who was not afraid of kids and though they wouldn’t allow any other adults in the room, he was able to go in and talk it through.

When I briefly taught in a nearby white town not so long ago, there was a phalanx of athletic boys who had gotten out of hand.  The idea was that I would somehow dominate them because of the fantasy that the rez was a tough place and since I had taught there, I could crack the whip.  They WERE crazy and obscene and argumentative.  I asked the librarian and the computer teacher what they thought was the secret to controlling these young men -- drunks, sexually active, “red-meat-eaters,” who consistently won games.  The answer they gave me was “kill them.”  They meant it.

Murder was not practical, so I went back to the Sylvia Ashton-Warner kind of approach, the walking in with the lions thing.  These guys -- and some of the gals -- felt that the world was going to smash, that adults were hypocrites and abusers, the town was a pit, and etc. etc.  As soon as they had permission to talk and it seemed as though I were listening, emotion came pouring out.  One boy drew diagrams of it on the whiteboard.

Basically, they were neglected and abused.  Not that they were starved or didn’t have clothes -- not those things.  But that they were being used by an ignorant community that would abandon them as soon as they weren’t useful anymore.  For me it was summed up by “extreme fighting” matches in back alleys that adults set up and attended  for betting, no different from dog-fighting.  These were mostly white kids, some with professional parents.  So far as I know, disease was not a problem but injuries were, drugs were (steroids), alcohol was but no one thought so.   Some of their behavior was criminal but there was no proof, no witnesses.   Denial.  Suppression.  Force.  Don’t even THINK about gay.

Bryon Farmer

So I wasn’t surprised at the reaction when over the weekend of North American Indian Days, Bryon Farmer said on Facebook that he was going to sponsor a float in the parade that would challenge the Tribal Council.  The police walked into his family’s group meal on the camp grounds, and took him to jail.  He was there four days.  No float appeared.  The best discussion I’ve found so far was at http://www.popehat.com/2013/07/22/bryon-farmer-of-the-blackfeet-tribe-jailed-for-talking-about-corruption-in-tribal-government/  quoted below.

How can such an ordinance — or any prosecution premised on it — stand, under the First Amendment? . . .

The United States has made gestures of contrition and correction, including a half-century effort to give surviving tribes sovereignty. That sovereignty includes jurisdiction over criminal charges against tribal members on tribal lands.  [And now charges against whites on tribal lands.]

Does that mean that members of Native American tribes have no right to free speech? No — in theory. The Indian Civil Rights Act of 1968 says that tribes can't "make or enforce any law prohibiting the free exercise of religion, or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press, or the right of the people peaceably to assemble and to petition for a redress of grievances." But here's the rub: sovereignty also means that the tribes get to enforce that right. The Supreme Court has ruled that, in general, only tribal courts have the right to decide whether tribal practices comply with the Indian Civil Rights Act. Bryon Farmer and people like him can't sue in state or federal to invalidate Ordinance 67 – they have to rely on a tribal court, connected politically and culturally to the tribal council. Mr. Farmer could seek a writ of habeas corpus in federal court to get out of tribal custody, but that's a painfully slow process, one that allows the tribe to harass dissenters with short-term incarceration with effective impunity.

In the Sixties Bob would sentence someone to jail, the cops would take them there, and within an hour -- released by a relative on the tribal council -- they’d be back (still drunk) to argue about the case some more.  Hard not to lose patience. The whole law and order concept needs a good airing, not just on the rez.  IMHO the Cut Bank cop who pursued Shannon Augare onto the rez and then tried to reach into his car to take the keys was being overbearing and provocative.  A different sort of drunk might have gotten so angry that he had to be tazed.   By driving off, Augare DE-escalated.  It was easy enough to serve him a ticket the next day.  How the FBI figures into it is beyond me.  More escalation.

The first rule of governing and restoring order -- much neglected these days -- is not to make a fool of yourself.  Maybe we should hand out cards with that written on them.

Tribal Chairman Willie Sharp

Willie Sharp --  Senior Class of 1972