A surge of protoplasm

In the end they traded their tired wings, for the resignation that living brings, and they traded love's bright and fragile glow for the glitter and the rouge: in a moment they were swept before the deluge.

Jackson Browne - After the Deluge  

Life is the swelling and ebbing of our primordial fluid: a sudden surge of protoplasm. 

The bony endo-shell of vertebrates tends to hide this truth: it's clearer for amoebae.

A happy protozoan swims to and fro: in electrolytic bio-soup: by an osmotic wriggling of his waters:  toward a nutrifying chemical reward: fro-ward toxins.

O joyous microbe! Would we were so unconfused.

An acquaintance of mine, a medical doctor and psychiatrist to trade ( and therefore, one would think, somewhat knowledgable of matters human ), wants collagen implants in her tubercles. Her lips it seems are overly wee to her taste.

Now, one mustn't, as a well-known virgin once said, make windows into men's souls - nor indeed should we put padlocks on a soul's cravings for body modification: tattoos, piercings, scarification, gauging, and so on, are near universal modes of human cultural expression, and should be just as acceptable as clothes or makeup - but in this case I disagree with the basic premise.

The conversation went like this:

She: I'm going to get collagen lip enhancements.

I: But lips in their natural form are wonderful. Working on the same basic principles as the penis, they become engorged with  blood to signify positive, outgoing emotional states, and shrivel to display introversion, and the emotions of withdrawal.

She: No, it's not true. I don't believe you!

I:  It is so! Cheer yourself up by getting some good sex or even some regular exercise that you enjoy, and your lips will plump themselves up in no time.

She:  Nah! I'm gonna beat the system. Big lips will help me pull a hunk.

…

Now, what annoys me about this interaction is not so much that a professional head-med had never been introduced to such a basic tenet of anatomical hydraulics as labial motility, and such a clear sign of emotional condition, but that it's another example of how our culture ignores obvious aspects of our animal physicality.  I'm sorry that I even have to state this, in fact, to shout it:  WE SWELL WITH FORWARD, OUTWARD FEELINGS - WE SHRINK WITH BACKWARD INWARD ONES.

Consider a man in fear. He 'shrinks back'. The 'blood drains from his face', 'the hairs on the back of his neck stand up' (as the strong back muscles literally pull him away from the frightening stimulus). Even the most extreme symptoms of fear - 'he shits himself' - can be seen as a feature of the overall inward and backward movement.

The usual explanations given for this phenomenon are tenuous: either that defecating makes an animal lighter, the better to run away; or that the mess will make a predator believe it is diseased and not worth eating. The first is silly because losing the first seconds of a panicked escape in this way would be bad strategy, the second is unlikely because predators can invariably digest the gut contents of their prey. No, at least a significant factor in this behaviour is the mechanical pressure of a flow of blood away from the periphery and into the viscera. [...and, yes, Stephen Porges' polyvagal theory gives a more elaborate account of the neural signalling involved...]

Consider too the outward-going emotions of joy or anger: blood rushes to the face and hands: after a separation lovers meet and are pneumatically flung into an embrace: in rage, we surge forward faster than we possibly could (in a planned and considered action).

And in love, the lips swell. The same phenomenon occurs in bioenergetic therapy, with many patients reporting that their lips have grown after they begin to release the blocks formed by abuse, neglect and trauma.


But why do they swell: the mechanism is blood flow, but what is the purpose? The wonderful answer is that lips are for kissing. They're also for testing the temperature of food etcetera … but most of all, they're for kissing.

We are one of few species to give off such a symbol of affection, and interesting theories have been proposed to explain it. Desmond Morris saw much of human sexual characteristics as being the outcome of our upright stance. Other primates get swollen rumps when in oestrus, but we perform our mating dance face-to-face: lips have become visible analogues of genitals, and the large mammaries of women are proxies for the ancestral marker of fecundity - the buttocks.

So lips are the body's means of expressing emotion:  to stop them doing so by filling them with plastic  is an utter denial of the true self, in a sense it is the ultimate act of narcissism - irrevocably placing  image before integrity.

If Porges is right, and he is, and engagement of the myelinated mammalian vagus which controls facial expression is key to reducing stress and releasing the hormones of relaxation and trust - then by surgically modifying our faces we are cutting ourselves off from society, and from fulfillment... and possibly even increasing our risk of mental and bodily illness: definitely keeping our heartrates higher than they should be.


I'm nearly   done on lips, except to mention the remarkable fact that studies show that the bigger a woman's lips - particularly the middle tubercle of the top lip - the more likely she is to experience vaginal orgasms.

We are our bodies, and only by making peace with them do we make peace with ourselves and the rest of the world 

Repetition Compulsion: to be, or not to be.

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.

dog

For non-human animals, there are instinctual behaviours which bring the body and brain back to rest after the high activation of struggle. A dog shakes it's body vigorously from head to tail after being startled... but only once it knows that it is safe once again.   For humans in modern society the place of safety cannot always be found: our physical shaking response to trauma  is culturally disapproved, we have never-ceasing social and economic obligations that can thwart our healing - in a sense, we all live in a cage. Wild animals are never traumatised or 'neurotic' - they can return to the healthy state of being biologically at rest, poised and alert. Domesticated mammals, people mostly, can suffer ongoing trauma states very easily.



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.       

  

Interesting Wilhelm Reich -based bits 'n' bobs

orgonomist.blogspot.com has some interesting articles, covering Reichian analyses of subjects like school discipline, and Reich's relationship with Herbert Marcuse. A bit too heavy on orgone accumulators and flying saucers for my liking: that part of Reich's legacy I see as more of a burden than a blessing: sometimes I wonder if W.R., under enormous pressure from McCarthyism (carried out by the FBI, FDA and other US federal agencies), actually felt safer in allowing himself to be portrayed as a crank in his final years. In any case, it's sad the way he's become known in popular culture - as a goofy New Age psychonaut. The truly radical, truly revolutionary insights of his early work are wholly ignored. In books like The Mass Psychology of Fascism and The Function of the Orgasm, he communicates a programme for moving towards a natural, healthy and radically free social order: without ignoring the physiological and psychic parameters that inhere for human beings with a body and a history.

Reich was purged from Stalin's Comintern for being 'Trotskyist'; purged from Freud's International Psychoanalytic Association for being scientific - for stressing the physical basis of the mind and of neuroses [not to mention for treating the poor... for free!]; persecuted by '50s America for holding Socialist ideals. Given all of that, he must have been doing something right!

What bugs me most, though, is the way he is dismissed by the supposedly Libertarian Left. Reich was the darling of British Anarchist thinking for a while in the sixties and seventies, in part because he contrasted so much with the bourgeois Existentialism of the likes of Sartre, or the authoritarian overtones of Louis Althusser et al. ... but any respect for the philosophical aspect of his work has since been eroded. In part, this was because he was co-opted as a father figure for commodified Californian post-Hippie New Age Spirituality. It was also because a new generation of cultural theorists had gained prominence: Foucault, Derrida, and - importantly for the Radical Left - the 'anti-psychiatry' movement: R.D. Laing, Deleuze and Guattari (In another post, I'll return to the damage done to the political left by the over-application of the social critiques made by the anti-psychiatry people).

When Reich is mentioned at all these days, he's a parodied as the 'sex guy'... supposedly he and Margaret Mead came up the idea that society's problems would all be solved if everyone could have every possible variety of guilt-free sexual activity, with no strings attached, but plenty of bells and whistles. We've now had the sexual revolution (the story goes), things are still shitty, Capitalism is still destroying lives... so let's forget about Wilhelm Reich. This totally overlooks his constant stress on the natural drive to unalienated, co-operative labour... and on the loving relationship as the only sexual situation that can be acceptable to the unarmoured (ie healthy, undamaged, trauma-free) person. Reich presents a thorough and convincing synthesis of the social and personal aspirations of humanity - of socialist idealism and the individual, animal needs of each one of us. His theory gives a solid empirical basis for discussing the 'tricky' question of what Marx called 'species-being'.

Sadly, no-one wants to mention that. Slavoj Žižek, this week's favourite vaguely anti-establishment pop philosopher quite knowingly engages only with the 'comedy' version of Wilhelm Reich. In 'Living in End Times' (Verso 2011, p74), he correctly draws a parallel between the Reichianism-Stalinism split in socialist thinking and the battle between Pelagius and Augustine in early Christianity... but he argues that the authoritarian 'anti-life' side are correct: Stalin, Augustine and everyone in between. He says:

The opposition between the Pelagians and Augustine on (sexual) lust is instructive here. For the Pelagians,lust was itself a good thing, which might be put to bad use, while for Augustine, lust was a good thing which might, in marriage, be put to good use...Did the Communist movement not face the same dilemma in how to deal with "sexual liberation": oscillating between the two extremes. On the one side the Wilhelm-Reichian "Pelagians"; on the other side the ascetic "Augustinians" who castigated "free sexuality" as the exemplary phenomenon of bourgeois decadence, destined to confound people and divert their energy away from revolutionary objectives.

He goes on to argue that the Reichian view leads to a kind of 'Masochistic perversion', that by 'enforcing' sexual freedom, we necessitate extreme sexual behaviours. The analogy he gives is with those who leap from 'clean clothes and body can contain a dirty mind', to 'clean clothes and body imply a dirty mind'... ie he thinks that allowing sexual freedom implies sexual excess and depravity. But Reich's whole point is that perversion and excess become unnecessary only when sexual energy is free to flow in a healthy way - in fact he presents loads of case histories of patients with masochistic and other 'perversions' who went on to enjoy stable orgasmic sex lives after receiving his therapy, and who also found a new passion for their lives in general: with the release of their character armour, the could no longer accept unsatisfying sex, unsatisfying jobs, or unsatisfying, alienating social roles. To me, this kind of embodied sexual liberation (as opposed to intellectually accepting sexual permissivity) must be a necessary cause and condition of authentic revolutionary zeal, rather than a bar to revolution. To take Zizek's position, one has to believe that a) sex is dirty and b) sex and love are not correlates. What Reich found is that good orgastic sex and good, non-controlling relationships go hand in hand. This is true at a societal level as well as a personal one.