My themes in recent years
have been the complexity of the ‘I’ and ideas about psychological integration. I have tried to understand something about
the mind’s construction of the world, and about what the individual can do to
take power and determine the meaning of things on one’s own-- to see what there
is, and what to do.
The big outlines of my
studies have to do with “mind” and also with “society”-- the mind as society,
and society as a kind of mind -- looking through different categories across
boundaries of self/other and home/alien and unconscious/voluntary -- in all
cases trying to make some maps of
these territories, which I call mind-maps.
There is a great deal of
work being done in this arena in current thinking -- the Canadian thinker Paul
Churchland for example studies the impact of “social-level institutions that
steer second-level learning” -- this gets him to the idea of “situated
cognition,” an idea that connects the origins of language in human prehistory,
and ideas about neurological evolution, to large systems of “nested regulatory
mechanisms” such as language, oral tradition, written records, legal systems,
schools, libraries, universities and research institutions -- this “epicerebral
process” represents a constraint on action and thus a new formula by which to
propose new initiatives. Churchland sees
that the underlying picture this view develops is Platonic: the physical brain
captures a landscape of abstract universals -- form precedes experience -- reality
as something humans ‘experience’ is constructed in social space, which itself
develops over time from prehistory to today, fashioning new tools and groups and
growing into something new by a social dynamic.
In my most recent work
“Criticism and Healing,” I look at what we can learn from studying historic
ideas of mental illness and different conceptions of what it means to “put
oneself back together” after having fallen apart. Here are a few excerpts:
“For the last several
months my research has focused on the relation between criticism and healing.
More specifically, I've been looking at critical partitioning in relationship
to therapeutic strategies. Put
differently: I have been looking at various kinds of mind maps and various
opportunities for self-regulation that they suggest. The key problem of psychological integration
varies with, must adapt to, and is empowered by the elements we identify as out
of sync and needing integration. Thus we
can learn something from looking into this distinction and its development
through history.”
“The “mind” is what the brain has developed in contact with the world,
and in social life, in a complex and nuanced interaction with itself, as a
strategy for survival or as a way of equipping itself to survive. It does not seem possible that the region of
the brain that is most involved with speech would not be deeply integrated with
structures involved with social behavior as well as memory and imagination, in
wildly different degrees and circumstances.
The idea of response or of the
whole being reacting to its environment and exploiting resources at hand to
try to survive and flourish -- which we can see in much simpler cases -- is
what we are trying to say with the word “mind.”
The mind is what the brain does, and the brain is doing so much, and is
interacting so powerfully with other brains, in so complex a form, that we have
so much to look at when we start thinking about consciousness. My idea here is simply that the basic
functions -- such as seeking, fear, rage, surprise and play -- in interactions
with each other and in society, constitute what we call mind.”
Greek maps
“Aristotle is an important source for the idea that creativity is
bound up with passionate, violent emotions that break through social
conventions; that forces deep in the soul shove themselves forward and upend
morals; that we can measure thought by emotion and get some practice doing it,
sometimes checking and sometimes encouraging desire, which builds up in us as
habits -- what Aristotle calls ‘strengths of character’ or ‘virtues.’
“Nietzsche takes a critical step beyond Aristotle in further reasoning
on the question, arguing that we harness the creative process by laying hold of
the impersonations one has already undergone and enacted in countless episodes
of social life; he argues that taking on roles in social life offers a
precedent for explicitly creating a persona
for oneself and acting it out; so that by conscious intention one may transform
oneself into one’s own explicit creation. He emphasizes that creative work
emerges out of a place where good and evil are still indistinct, but not
because self-creation is amoral; instead, because art tries to wrestle raw,
rude drive energies into an explicitly ‘created’ form.
Medieval maps
“In the medieval Morality play, we see Youth traveling on the Road of
Life, set upon by Temptation and encouraged by Wise Counsel. Our protagonist strays from proper guides
such as Simple Virtue or Godly Life, and begins to spend his time with Misrule,
Ignorance or All-for-the-money. Things
go downhill as Ignorance introduces Youth to Pride and Pride introduces him to
Lechery and Lechery at last brings him to Iniquity, typically through the door
of a tavern. Then Charity, reminding
the audience of the mystery of divine Grace, frees Youth from the influence of
Ignorance and restores him to the company of Humility. Thus we glimpse the profound change in the
underlying psychology in society in making the jump from the heroic ideal of
classical times -- a world of self-power -- to a new world of faith in which
the agent cannot extricate himself from the troubles of life on his own
initiative, but only by the grace of God …”
Biological maps
“The fundamental concept of mental health that seems to emerge in
these researches is complex; it is about exposure
to reality; it is social in nature -- it is a kind of growth via relation;
it involves replacing automatic responses with mindful responses (via social
resources we have a chance to isolate what is going on unconsciously within us
-- by means of social learning we get some handholds to bring more of the
automatism under conscious control -- ultimately to a new kind of unforced but
still thoughtful response). In this
sense Freud’s maxim that where Id was,
there Ego shall be is exactly right.
A
frequent metaphor from the new biological synthesis is imagining oneself as a
very small rider on top of an enormous elephant. This goes to the sense that we are much more
elephant than we are rider. At the same
time absolutely everything depends on the rider learning something about the
elephant, and gradually getting some control over the elephant. This is very difficult and should make us
patient with people who have some trouble handling their elephant. We get a chance to learn something from
experienced riders, and from people who spend their lives studying elephants,
and from poets, artists and philosophers who show us the elephant-struggle in
all its complexities -- but mainly we learn, and have to unlearn, from our
families, and from our struggle to get out from the closed world of the family
into the enormous reality that includes it -- which means that much is expected
of us -- healing is something we have to work for.”
