limpyloo

[limpyloo]

1) Trauma, the Future, Real World/Ideal World

A) What is trauma?

In A Psychoanalytic Understanding of Trauma, Joseph Fernando describes trauma as an "overwhelming", coming from either inside or outside of the self. Likewise -- in consonance with his "energic" theory -- Freud saw trauma as a noxious surplus of excitation. And though not exactly treated systematically, implicit throughout Freud's ouvre are accounts of more abstract, "higher level" traumas, such as the violation of an ideal.

What, exactly, is "overwhelmed" in trauma? Let us tentatively posit an intrapsychic function we shall call tarrying. Let us also posit an "ideal world", which is an "object" similar to Freud's "ideal ego". This "ideal world" is an abstract intrapsychic template, essentially an ideal for how the world ought to be. We shall contrast the "ideal world" with the "real world", or how the world proves to be. Tarrying then stands below the"real world" and the "ideal world" and reckons with the two.

Tarrying has an existential dimension: it pertains to our fate in the world. One reckons with fate. Tarrying is perhaps an ego function, and also perhaps subject to the pleasure principle.

We have also -- in this makeshift ontology -- events, which are generated in and from the "real world". Tarrying measures events of the "real world" against the "ideal world", and experiences the difference as displeasure. This process of tarrying is subject to the defense mechanisms (e.g. denial, disavowal): one might not "believe one's eyes". Trauma, in this language, would be an "overwhelming" event of the "real world" that sufficiently deviates from the "ideal world". This "deviation" is the province of tarrying.

B) Trauma of the past, and the future

As time rolls forward, the once-present event drifts into the past, and is caught in the fishing net of memory. It is from the place of memory that events usually emanate their trauma. Let us turn now to this "usually"...

Trauma, as a general rule, emanates from the past. When such is the case, tarrying points backward. However, trauma may instead emanate from future events that have not yet come to pass. These future events exist "virtually" within the present: they loom. In such cases, tarrying leans forward, in anticipation. We shall call trauma emanating from the future futural trauma.

In futural trauma, that which "overwhelms" is a future event, rather than a past one. Examples of such future events might be a) the prospect of one's own death, or the death of a loved one, b) the coming effects of climate change, c) the seemingly inevitable heat death of the universe. These future events may then become the source of futural trauma.

C) How does it stand betwen tarrying and trauma?

In trauma, tarrying has not properly digested the event (as in Bion's "alpha function"). It's a bone caught in the throat. The measure of the distance between the "real world" and the "ideal world" may be accepted or rejected by tarrying. Normally, tarrying (properly) digests events from the "real world" and integrate them into what might be called the "reckoned world". The "reckoned world" would be an admixture of fantasy and reality, a sort of cloud that we inhabit, which is loosely reality-oriented, and is periodically intruded upon by traumatic events. An event may not be properly digested -- as in trauma -- and therefore not be integrated into the "reckoned world".

In recent decades, trauma been speciated into "shock trauma" and "stress trauma": "shock trauma" is sudden, acute; "stress trauma" is gradual, diffuse. Futural trauma may be either "shock trauma" or "stress trauma". Some examples of futural trauma- as-"stress trauma" might be a) looming debts and bills, b) upcoming obligations, c) concerns about future political or economic stability.

Nietzsche's "will to power" and Freud's infantile "omnipotent control" could be seen as the co-authors of the "ideal world". In the "ideal world" one is (perhaps) all-powerful, immortal. Reality, then, would constitute a series of insults to this "ideal world".

C) The salving of wounds

The healing of trauma would then consist in a rehabilitation of tarrying, which would entail (as in Bion's "alpha function") the proper digestion of (past and future) events. Freud maintained that neurosis is a loss of contact with reality: in other words, a distance between the "reckoned world" and the "real world".

In Control-Mastery Theory, neurosis is seen to be the result of warped (conscious or unconscious) beliefs about what is harmful or dangerous in the environment. In such cases, the "reckoned world" has overshot the mark and become grimmer than the "real world". And psychoanalysts such as Freud and Reich believed that healing involved fully countenancing a traumatic event, and with the summoning of authentic emotion. In short: the event had to be reckoned with. More recent thought (cf. The Neuroscience of Psychotherapy) sees the healing process as entailing the communion of a) the traumatic event, with b) our language-use, emotion and self-concept.

D) The world of tarrying

To tarrying, the world is a space of benefits and hazards to our "for-the-sake-of-whichs" and our "possibilities-of-being" (Heidegger). These latter are implicated in the "ideal world", serving as its structure. Beliefs (both conscious and unconscious) orient tarrying in the world.

E) Some afterthoughts

a) The unconscious side of the "reckoned world" includes unconscious beliefs, attitudes and emotions, b) there may be a distance between the conscious "reckoned world" and the unconscious "reckoned world", c) this system of analysis could perhaps be applied to "lost futures", and their relation to tarrying, the "real world", the "ideal world", and the "reckoned world", d) in the case of denial, how does it stand with tarrying , the "real world", "the ideal world" and the "reckoned world"?

[limpyloo]

Ten Modules on Affect

one) Hidden Affect

Wilhelm Reich recounts, in his Character Analysis, that one of his patients harbored a strong, yet entirely unconscious, hostility towards his older brother (in whose shadow the patient had essentially lived since birth). This unconscious hostility would leak out at opportune moments, through the patient's behavior. (Reich's analysis with the patient would later come to a head when the patient was brought to notice his unconscious hostility and its origins.)

Unconscious affect implies and entails unconscious motivation: micro-agendas operating in the dark of our psyche. (I once [accidentally] shut the door in the face of a person that I disliked talking to; later, I couldn't decide how [accidental] it actually was.)

two) Toward a Theory of Object-Induced Affect

A friend recently shared with me a photograph of an abandoned bicycle, dumped in the grass on the side of the street. The abandoned bike struck me as being a very lonely object...

Affect evoked by an object seems to be triggered by some combination of the object's a) form, b) function or purpose, c) being-in-or-out-of-place, d) capacity-for-identification-with, e) historicality.

A wicker chair is mangled with a sledgehammer: its frame is now deformed (a); the chair is no longer used for sitting (b); it's now sideways on the back lawn (c); perhaps we empathize with such a chair (d); perhaps that chair had once belonged to Jorge Luis Borges (e).

(Coda: The mangled wicker chair was later put out with the trash.)

three) Futural Trauma

Trauma, of the present, by the future.

Typically we envision trauma as emanating from the past (e.g. from events in our childhood). But in certain cases trauma emanates rather from the future.

Examples: knowledge of a) the inevitability of our own death, and that of others, b) the coming effects of climate change, c) the ultimate heat death of the universe.

Certain aspects of the future do violence to our possibilities-of-being. Wounds, lodged not in our past but in our future. (Even mere prospects can be traumatic.)

Some individuals, such as myself, are strongly impacted by the knowledge that the universe is someday going to end. (The ultimate betrayal on the part of the Other.)

four) Self-Other Scripts

As is thought by many schools of psychoanalysis (eg. object relations, relational psychoanalysis), our memory houses what are essentially scripts for self-other interactions. These are generated by past interactions with certain significant others (e.g. caretakers). Such scripts are in turn enacted in new interactions with new others.

Our micro-habits in social interactions are an expression of these scripts.

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[limpyloo]

Eight Bagatelles

Robert Langs' Unconscious

(boundaries; tripwires...)

In the 1970's the psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Robert Langs introduced the concept of 'frames', which are essentially ideal boundaries related to physical and emotional distance in interpersonal encounters. Langs theorized that we had evolved an unconscious system that quietly absorbed normal, day-to-day impingements on these 'frames'. Such impingements--'frame violations'--are processed unconsciously, whereupon they re-emerge in various peculiar ways in our speech, behavior and emotions. Langs further theorized that, in order not to overwhelm conscious processing, only the most overt of 'frame violations' were registered consciously. What is bizarre is that our conscious and unconscious systems seem to have different preferences: one might happily consent to a situation that unconsciously one objects to.

These 'frame violations', Langs theorized, were echoed, unconsciously, in the subject's speech: they showed up in themes related to the impingement. For instance, a violation of privacy might stir up themes of being spied upon, or loss of autonomy. Our emotions are likewise implicated; we often have emotions that we can't account for. Langs would have suggested that many of these are the result of such insults to our autonomy.

Unfortunately, Langs didn't elaborate his theory much outside of the context of the clinical setting, beyond theorizing how our ancestors might have developed such a psychic system.

How Objects Absorb Encounters

(memory and objects...)

In the late 1940's the psychiatrist Ludwig Binswanger had a patient come into his ward: her name was Lola Voss. Prior to being admitted, she had developed an extreme hatred and aversion towards her mother.

This aversion seemed to be contagious: not only did Lola avoid her mother, she avoided anything even remotely connected with her mother: her room, her clothes, anything that her mother had bought or come in contact with. Even anything that she knew had come in contact with anything that her mother had come in contact with. It was all cursed. Or in Lola's words: "bewitched."

Once on the ward, this aversion continued to spread. Lola would avoid nurses who had talked to her mother, places those nurses had been, and people with whom those nurses had come in contact. And all of this caused Lola intense dread.

This drama was playing out, semiotically, in Lola's associative memory, whereby images and speech are linked by contiguity, resemblance and cause-and-effect. Emotionally, all of these mother-proxies had the impact on Lola of encountering her mother herself. The effect is a sort of magical materialism.

This magical materialism is precisely the mechanism of phenomena like memorabilia and souvenirs. Memory enables events to leave a spectral trace upon objects.

Nietzsche's "On Moods"

(scenes are moods...)

In his short, early essay "On Moods", Nietzsche relates moods to worldly states-of-affairs: the music in the air, the birds in the sky, the falling rain. For Nietzsche, these states-of-affairs become satisfactory descriptions of the very moods themselves. This proto-phenomenological perspective brings to mind Heidegger's befindlichkeit ('how-one-finds-oneself-ness'), which likewise denotes how one is situated in a state-of-affairs. For Heidegger, befindlichkeit is the primordial basis of stimmung ('mood'). As Dasein is always and necessarily concernfully embedded in a world--and in a sense is its world, phenomenologically-- we are in part identical to these very states-of-affairs.

We are, of course, familiar with this linking of mood and states-of-affairs: something like haiku, which is traditionally restricted to mere descriptions of the world, is able to conjure a mood without the least recourse to our interiority. When Nietzsche says "fair: people are dancing", we are immediately struck with a respective mood. This simple scene somehow, magically, speaks to our inner life.

Object-Oriented Affect Theory

(a tea kettle heating on a burner; a car crushed under a tree...)

Objects--and their teloi ('aims')--have a strange relationship with the perturbations that they experience in the world. Objects have a sort of mood based on the status of their telos: the dilapidated chair seems sullen, disappointed; the tea kettle heating on a burner seems purposeful; the dust-covered fan seems haggard and old; the felled tree seems defeated. The world is a massive confluence of such objects and perturbations.

Heidegger (by way of Graham Harman) thought that objects have two sides: vor-handenheit (their 'mere physical presence') and zu-handenheit (their 'doing-ness'). Heidegger uses the hammer as an example: the hammer is a mass of materiality, but it's also a tool that hammers. One aspect that is underdeveloped in Heidegger is the exact relation between the two: under what conditions does the hammer stop being able to hammer?

The answer seems related to the worldly perturbations that beset objects. Physical forces must deform the vor-handenheit to affect the zu-handenheit. The hammer must somehow lose its shape or its heft. A car needs to be in a certain configuration in order to hold a person and transport them. Such configurations are doubtless particular to each object, or to each type of object.

The teloi of objects--or at least man-made ones-- are related to their ultimate 'for-the-sake-of-which': the hammer hammers the nail, to fast the board, to erect the wall, to build the house, to safeguard our dwelling. How the lower levels relate to the 'for-the-sake-of-which' is also complex, implicating subjects such as mereology, hylomorphism and emergence.

Futural Trauma

(climate change; death; the end of the universe...)

Of course, we tend to think of trauma as some terrible event of the past, radiating its noxious effects into our present psyche: maybe a car crash, or the death of a loved one. More recently, some have made the distinction between 'shock trauma' and 'stress trauma', the latter resulting from something like a high-pressure job or a toxic home environment. However trauma is parsed, it is assuredly associated with the past.

But we also recognize that death--"the gravest of all misfortunes" according to Freud--is a looming trauma of sorts. It is lodged somewhere over the horizon, invisible, inching ever closer. It seems to upend our notions of traumagenicity.

It seems that futural trauma derives its traumagenicity from the imagination: we imagine the event arriving, as inflicting its effects on us, here and now. Anticipation and awaiting seem to entail this imaginal dimension as a sort of virtual rehearsal: we immanently envision the moment of death, the turmoil of climate change, or the all-encompassing hopelessness of the end of the universe.

Affect and Taboo

(theft; arson; shitposting...)

In "Criminals From a Sense of Guilt" Freud notes that, in analysing certain of his patients that had committed crimes, he had made the "surprising discovery that such deeds were done principally because they were forbidden, and because their execution was accompanied by mental relief of the doer". Freud concluded that this "mental relief" was a dissolution of the doer's guilt, which stemmed ultimately from Oedipal fantasies.

Taboo, in all its various forms, exerts a constant pressure on us. It constitutes a repertoire of possible behaviors that could potentially result in punishment or other such consequences. As such it is a prime source of anxiety. In 'harm OCD', for instance, it is common to see a heightened sense of taboo-related anxiety and guilt. The subject experiences intrusive thoughts, which often entail the violation of harm-related taboos such as swerving into oncoming traffic, or pushing someone in front of a subway car.

It could be that the impulse to trespass taboo is a simple, if misguided, desire to rid oneself of taboo anxiety, to rise above the commands of taboo, if only for a moment. I know someone who, while walking on a crowded New York street, spontaneously decided to remove all of his clothes and run through the crowd. This person had a long-standing fear of public nudity and recurrent anxiety dreams around the topic.

Gravity in Kafka

(Alexander; the Tower of Babel...)

In Kafka's Parables and Paradoxes bodies are constantly being pulled downward. Alexander is prevented from crossing the Hellespont due to "the mere weight of his own body". The Tower of Babel crumbles to the ground under its own weight. People are constantly kneeling or lying down. The man awaiting admittance to the Law has to "[bend] down to peer through the entrance."

Kafka, as is well-known, had a very yin temperament: whereas someone like Nietzsche would presume to overcome the forces within and without, Kafka sought to slip beneath them.

Orality and Anality

(plagiarism; Nietzsche...)

In "Character and Anal Eroticism" Freud conjectured that childhood experiences involving erotogenic zones (e.g. mouth, anus) might be sublimated into general character traits. For instance, the joyful or spiteful retention of faeces in toilet training might result in a person later becoming miserly or obstinate.

In the wake of Freud, orality became associated with abstract tendencies like consumption, integration and appropriation; anality, with retention, hoarding and destruction (and more specifically: crushing). These tendencies were used to diagnose conditions like 'oral eroticism' or 'anal sadism'.

Something like plagiarism might be seen as a type of orality. A fiery polemic might be seen as a type of anality (was Nietzsche an 'anal sadist'?). While Freud's theory of psychosexual development has generally fallen out of favor since Klein's analysis of children, perhaps some of its concepts are worth retaining.