Psychodynamics, Neuroscience, and Reality
- Coherence
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Psychodynamics, Neuroscience, and Reality
When reading over Freudian theories about the self, I sometimes ask myself "how the hell can people believe this ****!?" The problem is certainly not the concept of psychodynamics - that is clearly real and the most important of human knowledges. Rather, what I refer to is the metaphysical context these theories were fashioned within, as well as the societal forces around Freud that made him, from a 21st century vantage point, appear very concerned about his appearing "manly", which means, avoiding states or orientations that made Freud feel "week". His Jewish and his shortness, were two constant themes that would have "imposed upon him", a feeling of inferiority - which in a chauvinistic and machismo society is synonymous with misogynistic and anti-female attitudes, simply because "opening up", i.e. exposing yourself to emotional truths, sets machismo brains built through a traumatizing background - of a real-life interfacing and adapting to negative, shame affects, and how such affects focus perceptual and cognitive systems on identifying with the environmental affordances that "enliven" a persons sense of being i.e. so-called "positive objects".
Object-relations is as obvious a truth about human and animal perception - basically any organism that becomes a "living object" to an observing organisms nervous system. Object relations is true, yet we live in a world where some cognitive scientists and psychologists fail to take seriously the way nervous systems - as an actual extension of the epithelia of the early embryo, becomes the organisms "skin" to the outside world. Indeed, conceiving of the self as anything other than a social product of interacting phenomenologies is ludicrous, yet that is precisely the culture that formed in the background of neoliberal commercialism, producing more bad science and bad thinkers precisely because the people that matter i.e. people with the power to bankroll something - always "selected" the perspectives that were consistent with their own libertarian values. Hence, then, why popular mainstream scientific writers like Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett are where they are: they express a political culture superimposed on academia, which essentially operates by denying the fundamental importance of psychodynamics - since knowing how it is you know, i.e. how your affects shape your sense of need, and how you identify to help yourself to feel oriented to others - is the only knowledge that will save the Human race from destroying ourselves and sending us back into dark-ages.
Human minds fashion narratives, so it is very important to know which psychodynamic processes "scaffold" or act in the background of the words, themes, and ideas that form our cognition relations to people outside ourselves. These are two different ontological "phases" - and yes, phase, just like in physics, is appropriate when describing the behavior of mentality.
Ecology, or self-other power relations, are always communicated to the self. If one has had a rather pleasant development, certain ideas aren't likely to occur unless one happens for whatever accidental interaction to pursue a technical knowledge of a subject matter i.e. as in psychopathology. It's via developmental trauma that neuroscientists, psychiatrists and psychoanalysts have discovered the two 'tiers' that describe the developmental process of development. Indeed - an observant dog owner can see intimations of the first phase: tone of voice, or the nature of the affect you feel, is instantly transmitted as an affective image to the child, which at the same time plays an "oceanic" type role in calibrating the early brainstem, mid-brain, and right frontal lobe, to experience the environment in certain ways.
Traumatized human beings invariably oscillate between hyper-arousal and hypo-arousal - expressions of two, usually integrated systems, expressing a complete state of chaos vis-à-vis the environment. Remember: the nervous system is the skin of the organisms sensorium, and thus, the production of the self we experience, the affects we feel, and the identity states we assume when we speak our narrative, has everything to do with a self-other permeability that tends to be blocked from awareness unless the system in question (a Human being) has assimilated the relevant knowledge, which, when known and reflected upon, will interact with that persons own phenomenological experience to produce the experience of "true knowledge". True knowledge - or an epistemology that "matters" - is literally related to the way our matter is organized. Humans evolved as self-organizing systems that self-organize on the basic of symmetry dynamics. Physics becomes chemistry which becomes biology which becomes mind. Each "transition" includes the lower dynamics of the system it evolved from. Mind, in other words, is based in a temporal symmetry between Humans who "match" their affects and narratives in a sequenced way of "communicator" and "listener".
Good and evil, furthermore, are not "real" in the sense of being something that exists outside of us. Good is real, but is also synonymous with coherency and symmetry. Because we are all more-or-less neuropsychologically "wired" in ways to take in a world of constant unpredictability and, thus, "stress", we have amygdalas that are too large, and very much depend psychologically on ways of knowing that entail the "self" we feel to be ours. The self, of course, is malleable and transformable, but without a sense of a 'wider perspective', in the sense of the "eye above the pyramid", with the eye as consciousness, and the biodynamic process the 'pyramid', it'll be impossible for most people to see life in new ways.
Coherence is good, which means incoherency, or environmental dynamics which 'stress' the system, is evil. Evil is merely the absence of what is real. Matter - or the sense we use when we say "it matters" - is what makes Human consciousness real. Existence is synonymous with mattering, and when we speak as something "mattering", we are speaking truly from the perspective of our brain-dynamics: it is indeed "needed" by our neural dynamics to "couple" with the world in certain ways - in order for the brain to maintain the coherency of its ordering.
Of course, in todays very scary world, where nuclear war appears like a likely possibility, it seems to me that the biggest error made by the "intellectual" community is to under-emphasize the necessity of self-awareness, and therefore, discussion of psychological self-experience and ones own phenomenology - what would have been far more common and normal in the forests where Humans evolved in. Our interactions, in short, have too "little bits" flowin through it, which is rendering human minds almost autistic like in their affective relations with one another; indeed, it is an amygdala going haywire - so scared/uncomfortable/unpredictable - is the mind, relationship and environment, that people are changing, but not for unknowable reasons: people change when their environments change. The valuations of the environment, in turn, are the "ice burgs" that hide the societal dynamics that create people and brains that are struggling to "feel good" in a world where standard for goodness are narrow, and really only benefit (financially - probably not emotionally) the super-rich.
2023/2024 Philosophy Books of the Month
Mark Victor Hansen, Relentless: Wisdom Behind the Incomparable Chicken Soup for the Soul
by Mitzi Perdue
February 2023
Rediscovering the Wisdom of Human Nature: How Civilization Destroys Happiness
by Chet Shupe
March 2023