Only the very safe can talk about wrong and right.
-Floyd Red Crow Westerman
My good friend's Gaelic granny had a trite response to any sudden vicissitude: "You live in hope, you die in despair". Such seems to be my lot as a philosophical blogger. With the rash optimism of the dilettante, I address basic points of a topic, state what my conclusions will be, lay out my premises and push through the main stages of an argument - before dropping the post like a ton of Sisyphean brick as soon as I'm faced with the final forceful heave that will bring it to a close. Again. And again. I've got eight half-written posts to this blog, still not published at all. Part III of my essay on Sanitivity is published in an unfinished condition as I write this, and numerous earlier pieces that could be doing with a touch of spit and polish are left in full view of these here public interwebs.
Why don't I just complete one project before moving onto the next? That is the million dollar question of my life, and the lives of so many others. Of course, there's no point to being too self-critical: I'm using the blog to give some order and coherence to my rather unorthodox opinions, and as they say... Rome wasn't built in a day.
I could recite a litany of theories as to why I display this trait of incompletion: some laced with hubris, some with self-contempt. In fact, I shall recite it: just as an example of the many ways we can rationalise any phenomenon of human behaviour. Here we go...
- Perhaps I have a deep-seated unconscious fear of death. The concept of completion is somehow mixed with that of being done, perfected, dead... so I leave everything half accomplished.
- Perhaps, with the humility of a Navajo rugsmith, I acknowledge that only the Great Spirit can create perfection... so I leave gaps in the tapestry of my writing.
- Perhaps I have a dose of ADD
- Perhaps I don't want to do all the work of understanding for you: I leave you a little space to think in.
- Perhaps I do not attach sufficient seriousness to the prospect of truths being communicated in words.
- Perhaps I am too lighthearted: as Samuel Johnson says, "I too have tried to be a philosopher, but cheerfulness kept creeping in."
- Perhaps I've introjected the maxim, "It's not the winning, it's the taking part"
- Perhaps at some point in my life it was an a successfully adaptive behaviour to leave things incomplete, perhaps to avoid hurtful criticism of my best efforts. Perhaps it's only maladaptive now.
- Perhaps I have a repetition compulsion, as Freud might diagnose.
Let's consider that last option...
Sigmund Freud's view of the repetition compulsion - of how people continue to commit acts (or get into situations) that are clearly not in their interest - led him to move psychoanalytic theory away from emphasis on the life affirming, pleasure seeking libido or eros, and towards the 'death urge' that he called thanatos - the energy behind the ego. Examples of repetition compulsion would be the woman who continually chooses abusive partners, or the man who continually gets into unnecessary debt, or the baby who continually flings his toy from the pram, and shrieks with despair each time the toy is gone. The most dramatic repetitions are the 'acting-out' behaviours of survivors of extreme trauma: the war veteran who runs for cover when a car backfires; the survivor of childhood sex abuse who seeks out images of such abuse.
Of course, Freud's conception of how repetition compulsions worked - and his concept of a death instinct - were not universally accepted: thank goodness. Reich, who stressed the biological basis of life's drives and energies, saw these repetitions as an attempt by the organism to return to homoeostasis, by discharging the energies held in the initial traumatic event - because the presence of these energies was unpleasurable.
Later, scientists like Peter A. Levine have given a detailed biological account of trauma, acting out (repetition), and eventual healing - which accords with Reich's insight. Levine notes that animals, when faced with a threat, will fight or run away if possible. When fighting or escape are made impossible, the animal freezes, 'playing possum', and awaits a chance to escape while still maintaining the highly activated energy state in its respiratory and nervous systems: primed to fight or flee when possible. He gives the example of a gazelle chased by a cheetah. If the cheetah catches it, the gazelle 'plays dead' rather than struggling, but it's heartbeat and breathing still race. Should the cheetah lose its grip for an instant, the gazelle will dart off at full speed.
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| dog |
The video below includes footage of a polar bear discharging the energy of 'freezing' (although the freeze is induced by anaesthetic rather than by an overwhelming attack).
When the release of the energy of shock is blocked, the human organism still tries to do so: with the stereotyped behaviours of 'shell-shock', and with more complex dysfunctional patterns of self-destruction and self-harm. It will do so until safe places and safe people are found, and it is safe to return to the condition of pleasurable embodiment which is our birthright.
So, we nowadays have a clear understanding of repetition compulsions and acting out behaviour: which is so watertight that it can't be denied, except by the rankest cartesian or psychic platonist, who simply refuses to stop believing that she's an immaterial spirit, only accidentally associated with a physical body.
An effect of unreleased trauma energy is dissociation - the sense of being separate from the body and from feeling. Dissociation is nature's anaesthetic... it stops the frozen gazelle from suffering the full pain of being eaten alive. Because of dissociation, it is often the most traumatised people, those most in need of feeling their feelings and discharging negative emotions, who cannot do so. Their illusion of safety requires them to believe that they are not their bodies, that anatomy is not destiny, and that the emotions are an unfortunate and embarrassing feature of life - that they would be better off without them. Trauma victims experience themselves as ghosts: ghosts in a malfunctioning, threatening machine.They lose their willpower and sense of self, and they also lose any potent empathy or compassion... in exchange for an illusion of being untouchable.
Sadly, most everyone in the orbit of globalised consumer capitalism is traumatised, to some degree. Worse still - in humans, trauma can be passed down through generations, and even spread within social groups: as in 'mass hysteria', or in families who suffer, generation after generation, for the sad experiences of an ancestor. A traumatised parent can't attune emotionally with her baby, the child grows up with an underlying sense of anxiety and insecurity... primed for traumas of her own.
Are we ready to accept the full importance of trauma, and the repetition of unhealthy behaviours that it creates, as a factor in our societies and politics? Can we accept that many of our opinions, and many of the causes that we espouse most forcefully, suit us only because they help us re-enact our primal wounds? How credible is it that:
- the harsh, dehumanising stance of the Israeli State towards Palestinians in the Occupied Territories, and the treatment of Israel's Arab citizens as second class, is in large part an acting out of the traumas of the Nazi holocaust by the descendents of its victims, with the victim role being taken by an unwilling proxy?
- That the destructive politics of Nazism was based on the compulsive acting out of childhood traumas suffered by the sons of disciplinarian fathers?
- That the disciplinarian fathers and grandfathers of Fascism were themselves brutalised by the trenches of the first mechanised war, and earlier by the upheavals and uncertainties of industrialisation?
- That the examples above are not unusual, and that every country suffers for the violent compulsions of its most injured members to some degree?
- That no matter how noble our aspirations may be, any of us is capable of great harm, if we act unknowingly based on traumatic pain?
If we can accept this sad story of human history, as a dialectic of psychic forces as well as of economic ones, we need not be dismayed. Technology has played a part in generating the horrors of the past centuries, but we are now beginning to find the psychic technologies - or spiritual technologies, if you like - to break the chain of cruelty and despair. Perhaps all it takes is a commitment to providing proper economic and social support to the caregivers of children... as our greatest priority, and to make personal growth, development and maturity the basis of social respect - and value the search for these attributes as much as we value wealth, celebrity or artistic skill. From what I know of the pre-capitalist world and indigenous cultures, wisdom and compassion were always highly prized in the past: they can be again.
.... so much for those lofty visions of a happy world. It may come, but for now we can only lay the groundwork, even if only in minuscule ways like blogging about it: tossing hopeful messages in a bottle into the electronic ocean of smut, scandal and fake Viagra. As for me, I'll no doubt continue to half-finish my posts (until I release some more trauma) : but at least there'll be bottles, and the bottles will at least be half full.
