Archive for the ‘ Psychology ’ Category

The Victorian Attitude Towards Woman

The NY Review: who was Charles Dickens
The NY Times: Description is Prescription
Wikipedia: William Wordworth and his Relationship with Annette Vallon
Poem Hunter: Three Years She Grew

Since I have been listening to Dickens for quite a while, this has never failed to impress me. The article in the NY Review by Robert Gottlieb clarified this:

Dickens’s treatment of Catherine, we now have to acknowledge, is an inexcusable blot on his personal history and his character, as well as an indication of the powerful psychic derangement he was undergoing in mid-life. They had married young, after his anguished and fruitless courtship of the pretty, flirtatious Maria Beadnell, who led him on, then shooed him away, obviously not deeply smitten by this handsome, entertaining—and callow—boy who was making his way as a court reporter, but had no real prospects. It’s easy to see in retrospect that his feelings for her were calf love, but they were passionate, long-lasting, and led to intense humiliation. No doubt to salve his wounded feelings he quickly turned to Catherine Hogarth, from a family of some distinction—her father was the editor of The Evening Chronicle, a newspaper for which young Charles was now writing. Catherine was placid, admiring, and easily led, and his wooing of her was hardly fervent. What he was looking for, after the emotional upheavals of Maria, was a wife rather than a lover, a family of his own, and a settled establishment. His need to locate himself in middle-class domesticity was so strong that he simply allied himself with the first appropriate girl who came along.

In many ways, and for some years, it seems to have been a happy (and was certainly a comfortable) relationship. His letters to her are affectionate; she’s a stalwart helpmate on the fraught American tour of 1842, despite her severe distress at leaving her four little ones behind in England; and she’s liked by everyone, even if she doesn’t make a highly vivid impression. But by the time she was well along in her child-bearing years—seven boys and three girls, to say nothing of several miscarriages—she had grown overweight, nervous, and sickly. (Can we be surprised?)

As the family grew, Dickens—although he was charmed by and cherished his children when they were little—grew more and more beleaguered and vexed. (In his letters, it’s always Catherine who’s responsible for producing all these babies; apparently he had nothing to do with it.) Yet he’s in total charge of all decisions about them: their mother is not even involved in choosing their names. What can Catherine have thought when he gave the name Dora to a newborn daughter just five days after having written to her, “I have still Dora to kill—I mean the Copperfield Dora….” What can we think?

The article about Tolstoy (Description Is Prescription) by David Brooks is not much better.

One hundred years ago, Leo Tolstoy lay dying at a train station in southern Russia. Journalists, acolytes and newsreel photographers gathered for the passing of the great prophet. Between 3:30 and 5:30 on that freezing November morning, Tolstoy’s wife stood on the porch outside his death chamber because his acolytes would not let her in. At one point she begged them to at least admit her into an anteroom so that the photographers would get the impression she was being allowed to see her husband on his final day.

Wordsworth was not much better, but at least Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy tried to do the right thing by his illegitimate daughter and her French mother:

In 1802, he visited Calais with his sister Dorothy and met Annette and his daughter Caroline. The purpose of the visit was to pave the way for his forthcoming marriage to Mary Hutchinson. Afterwards he wrote the poem “It is a beauteous evening, calm and free,” recalling his seaside walk with his daughter, whom he had not seen for ten years.

His poem Three Years She Grew was about a sentimental as you can get - themes of death, endurance, separation and grief – for a woman who never really existed.

Sentimentality – John Neihadrt, told told his poetry classes (and I have never forgotten this) amounted to murder.

2010
11/28
CATEGORY
Poetry
Psychology
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The Urge to Destroy the World

This urge is nothing new, it must be one of the fundamental urges of the human race – along with its opposite: the urge to create a new one. History is nothing but the history of the rise and fall of empires – of optimism and pessimism. As Shakespeare said “Full of sound and fury, but signifying nothing.”

But death, whether the death of an individual or of any group of people, is awful to contemplate – and part of its fascination. Things get so bad sometimes that destroying everything seems the best way out.

Jesus himself – and I am speaking of the historical Jesus here, and not the Christian myth – was an apocalyptic preacher. And as a practical matter, the end of the Jewish nation was at hand – and in their bones they knew it.

In the same way, Americans know their end is at hand. And they are determined to help it along.

This is part of the end of the modern world, which began with WWI – the greatest carnage the world had ever seen. After contemplating it, Freud decided there must be a Death Instinct. The British Empire vanished in WWII. The USSR vanished overnight – to the amazement of everyone – except those inside it who where well aware of its rot. Now it is the turn of the American Empire – with the vigorous assistance of the American people, who are sick of its rot.

Now that I have said this, it seems so simple I wonder I never thought of it before – or why I never put it so simply before. It is simply a matter of life or death – and some situations call for each. We know what our destiny is – why put it off?

2010
11/21
CATEGORY
History
Psychology
Sociology
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Humans Can Become Inhuman

This ability is one of our strangest characteristics – and one we least like to acknowledge. But of all our shortcomings it is our most serious. Without realizing it, we can easily become evil.

Who we are depends on our social circumstances, and as these change, we change. This change in us changes our social circumstances (it hardly needs to be said) and this feedback produces rapid, unpredictable results – which may be good or bad. Almost all of this goes on unconsciously. We are usually unaware of what is going on at any deep levels – and for some reason avoid such awareness – even though this awareness is vital for the survival of our species.

In summary, we are not the benevolent rational beings we like to think we are – but an unstable mixture of good and bad, driven by forces beyond our comprehension. And this instability is getting worse, not better.

2010
11/19
CATEGORY
History
Philosophy
Psychology
Sociology
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Mass Hysteria about Pedophilia

CNN: Amazon.com book defending pedophilia sparks boycott

A friend of mine sent me this link, and she fully intends to boycott Amazon because of it. This is what I replied to her in an email:

I think my childhood sexual abuse was worse than yours – not that I want to brag, but I think you have adopted the wrong attitude towards it. Refusing to think about something does not make it go away – it only makes it worse.

The world is full of abuse of all kinds, and we all have to deal with it in one way or another. There are no simple solutions – such as punishing someone or something for being seen as evil. Mass hysteria is especially inappropriate.

Looking this over, I only worry that I may lose a  friend because I was too blunt.

I went back and read The Neurotic Personality of Our Time with renewed interest. In The Basic Structure of Neuroses, she develops her theory of the Basic Anxiety – which she claims underlies all character neuroses – as opposed to situational neuroses, which are caused by particular situations. She says:

This attitude as such does not constitute a definite neurosis, but is the nutritive soil out of which a definite neurosis may develop at any time.

This seems like a modest, but important claim to me – since I am a firm believer in the importance of subtle, but important influences. I can certainly identify this anxiety in myself. She continues:

Thus while situational neuroses we have the impression of an adequate relation between conflict situations and neurotic reaction, this relation seems to be missing in character neuroses. Because of the existing basic anxiety, the slightest provocation may elicit intense reaction.

It seem to me that this also applies to whole cultures – they can also have  neuroses, and will act on them automatically. I am not saying anything new here, this is part of the definition of what a culture is.

For this reason, we should not be surprised by this latest mass hysteria – but consider it normal for our time and place. A displaced reaction to a basic anxiety.

2010
11/15
CATEGORY
Psychology
Sociology
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To Be or Not to Be

When I took a course on English Lit in college, our professor belittled this famous passage from Shakespeare as being trivial and meaningless. I now marvel at his ignorance – in this case, Shakespeare was right.

This is the human race’s biggest problem – one we continually have to deal with – and one we will never solve. But we think we have come up with a Final Solution for it: to destroy ourselves (or actually, our selves) – which we see as nothing but a problem. We have abandoned reality for Super Reality. We have become insane, but on such a large scale it has become invisible.

We have decided Not to Be.

2010
11/15
CATEGORY
Philosophy
Psychology
Sociology
Technology
The Self
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Karen Horney, Part 1

As I said in a previous posting, Paranoia and Irrational Anger, I am re-reading Karen Horney’s book The Neurotic Personality of our Time, published in 1937. I want to quote from the Introduction to show how relevant it still is:

Emphasis is put on the actually existing conflicts and the neurotic’s attempts to solve them, in his actually existing anxieties and the defenses he has built up against them. This emphasis on the actual situation does not mean that I discard the idea the essentially neuroses develop out of early childhood experiences. But I differ from many psychoanalytic writers inasmuch as I do no consider it justified to focus our attention on childhood in a sort of one-way fascination and to consider later reactions essentially as repetitions of earlier ones. I want to show that the relation between childhood experiences and later conflicts is much more intricate than is assumed by those psychoanalysts who proclaim a simple cause and effect relationship. Though experiences in childhood provide determining conditions for neuroses they are nevertheless not the only cause of later difficulties.

When we focus our attention on the actual neurotic difficulties we recognize that neuroses are generated not only be incidental individual experiences, but also by the specific cultural conditions under which we live. In fact the cultural conditions not only lend weight and color to the individual experiences but in the last analysis determine their particular form. It is an individual fate to have a domineering or a “self-sacrificing” mother, but it is only under definite cultural conditions that we find domineering or self-sacrificing mothers, and it is also only because of these existing conditions that such an experience will have an influence on later life.

In later chapters she goes into more detail about the effects of different cultures – which, needless to say are considerable. I will just go into one of them here from my experience

Men have a strong sex drive anywhere, I believe that is a given. But in Latin American this is amplified greatly. I watched in amazement as my bicycle mechanic, who has two young wives and children by each, put the make an another young woman. I would have thought nothing about this, if it had not been for a guilty look he gave me first. In a Latino setting, everyone would have considered this normal, and thought nothing of it.

2010
11/10
CATEGORY
Psychology
Sociology
2 comments

Neuroplasticity

This is a a review of the book The Brain that Changes Itself, by Norman Doidge. A friend loaned it to me to look over – and I have. Mr. Doidge identifies himself as a research psychiatrist and psychoanalyst. From the Introduction (page xvii):

When patients did not progress as much as could be hoped, often the conventional medical wisdom was that their problems were “hardwired into the unchangeable brain. “Hardwiring” was another machine metaphor coming from the idea of the brain as computer hardware, with permanently connected circuits, each designed to perform a specific, unchangeable function…

At first, scientists didn’t dare use the word “neuroplasticity” in their publications, and their peers belittled them for promoting a fanciful notion. (I just looked it up on the Merriam-Webster Unabridged online dictionary, and it doesn’t list it yet.) Yet they persisted, slowly overturning the doctrine of the unchanging brain..

In the course of my travels, I met a scientist who enabled people who had been blind from birth to begin to see, another who enabled the deaf to hear, I spoke with people who had strokes decades before, and who had been declare incurable, who were helped with neuroplastic treatments….

After reading the first chapter A Woman Perpetually Falling, subtitled Rescued by the Man who Discovered the Plasticity of the Senses, with a quote from Exodus 20:18 And they Saw the Voices – I saw what he was talking about. I recommend you follow up on it, if you are interested.

My main guru, Lewis Mumford, is saying much the same thing in his books about The Myth of the Machine – namely that that reducing everything to a machine analogy, while useful for awhile, has been a huge mistake.

The author, as is common for our times, has hyped this as the next big thing. Myself – someone who has had many psychotherapists, and been enraptured with a few of them – and has since become disillusioned – with a considerable amount of scar tissue, in other words – am reluctant to go this route again.

2010
11/09
CATEGORY
Philosophy
Psychology
Technology
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Paranoia and Irrational Anger

This is a continuation of yesterday’s posting In Some Situations, Social Values Become Reversed. The first paragraph of this was written automatically, it surprised me when it was done. But it is one of the best things I have written.

I have been struggling to find words adequate to express the social environment in America – especially the work environment, in other words the corporate environment – which not only dominates our working lives, but everything else. In such a situation, it is natural to become paranoid.

After all, you are a person, and you are living in a world that is devoted to your destruction. Conscious rage is not permitted, so it becomes unconscious, directed at inappropriate targets. To simplify it to the basics, it is destroying you, so you are determined to destroy it. But there are no selves left to fight back – only impotent, hollow shells yearning for a movement of their own. So far, no leader has satisfied them – although plenty, such as Bush have tried, and plenty more are on the stump.

This lack of leadership for the Conservative Movement means that no American Fascism will happen – and we should be thankful for that. But something equally alarming may be happening – the movement may not need a leader, and can make do with the assortment of those it has – improvising as it goes along. The end result will be the same: the destruction of America.

I have talked about destructiveness a great deal – and contrasted it with constructiveness. By a natural progression, this developed into self-destructiveness, and I spoke of the self-destructive society. This analysis still seems valid to me, but I think it needs to be elaborated on – and paranoia feels like the right kind of elaboration.

This is easy for me because I am a paranoid person myself, a laboratory of exactly what I am talking about. All I have to do is observe myself carefully and compare my behavior to that of America’s in general. I can turn my handicap into an advantage. The handicap (or advantage) a paranoid person has is his ability too feel what is going on in his society – and if he is able to make this conscious, to see what is going on. Unfortunately, this may not be much help to him, because few will be able to see the same thing – but there will be a few.

If I am going to write about paranoia I need to know more about it, so I took down The Neurotic Personality of our Time by Karen Horney from my bookshelf and dusted it off. This was written in 1937. I believe paranoia has increased and become the dominant personality type of our time, and she has helped define just what it is. You will be hearing more about this.

2010
11/09
CATEGORY
Philosophy
Psychology
Sociology
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The Mind That Doesn’t Mind Very Well

I once knew a woman therapist who used to repeat “Mind your mind!” And that is the core of Buddhist practice – and all contemplative practices. Struggling to make the mind behave itself. Which is very difficult – nearly impossible.

The Mind is a mysterious something we have invented, that is supposed to be aware of what is going on, sometimes – and in control of our actions, sometimes. The key word here is sometimes. In reality, and as science is showing more and more all the time, our mind, or our consciousness, is only partially aware, and very little in control.

This explains much of our behavior – which cannot be explained because there is nothing behind it. Freud and every other mental theorist notwithstanding.

We are controlled by our instincts, mostly unconscious. Madison Avenue does it all the time. This means our minds are not important – and can be mostly ignored – as any politician knows.

This is not what the Enlightenment thinkers believed. They believed in the power of Reason (with a capital R). And they extended the powers of reason about as far as they could go. Which, it turned out, was not very far. Outside of Science, which is very limited when it comes to increasing human happiness, it will not take us very far.

This is not to say Reason is not useful – it is often the only thing we have. And we should be able to say “Let us reason together.” But sad to say, this often does not work.

2010
11/06
CATEGORY
Psychology
Science
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How Science Has Destroyed Our Ability to Think

This posting is a continuation of my postings How Things Destroy People and Science Has Failed Us. After looking at the comments for the later, it is obvious that my readers are not connecting the dots. They are still enraptured with Science, and cannot see anything wrong with it. This is a very common failing, I have tried to explain it to a number of very bright people – and so far have failed completely. Let me try again.

First of all, everyone agrees that people cannot think, but cannot associate this failing in any way with Science. In their minds Science exists independently of human existence – it does not effect them, and they do not effect it. I find this an extremely odd idea. Science is a human artifact, made by humans and effecting them in very fundamental ways.

I believe this is a new affliction that developed in the period between the late 19th Century and the middle of the 20th Century – due (1) to the impact of powerful new technologies with graphic interfaces, such as the cinema, TV, and the computer. These affect our brains directly, and bypass our conscious minds entirely. And (2) the social sciences, mainly Psychology and Sociology, which made it easy for the Media to control us, and turn us into consumers – with no brains at all. These two form a complex - which is something else we cannot comprehend – and frankly, which most scientists cannot understand either.

In short, a technical/social complex has turned us into hollow beings – as many poets, novelists, and artists have informed us. We have no ability to understand what is going on – and insist on being entertained instead.

2010
11/03
CATEGORY
History
Psychology
Science
Sociology
2 comments
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