Primitive Minds and Minds of Primitives

I'm always receiving notices in the mail for continuing education courses and seminars. Yesterday's flier from a psychoanalytic institute has several offerings that remind me of our current attempt to reach down into the mindset of human sacrifice.

One is called Treating Primitive Mental States. You might say that human sacrifice was the treatment for certain primitive mental states. Before there was psychotherapy, there was murder. I'm not sure which is more effective. Certainly murder is more popular.

Another seminar is called Forms of Things Unknown: An Approach to Ineffable Experience. It goes to how we manage to translate unconscious experience into language.

Here again, this goes to the problem of thoughts and what to do with them. Human sacrifice had to be a mode of expression, but expression of what exactly? Clearly, it involved acting out instead of thinking. The acting out is a kind of thinking-in-action, the way children act out their thoughts and emotions instead of reflecting upon them.

Recall what was said about innocence only being seen retrospectively. It is no doubt the same with human sacrifice. It could not be seen for what it was when it was occurring -- which was the whole point. Acting out is defense mechanism, the purpose of which is to avoid thinking, precisely.

Here's another: The Fragmented Self: Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Dissociation. As we've discussed in the past, we begin life with a fragmented self that eventually becomes integrated through what is generically called good-enough-mothering.

But any number of things can happen along the way that keep the self fragmented: trauma, neglect, abuse, etc. This is how the mind parasites take root. A mind parasite is essentially an unintegrated and semi-autonomous fragment of subjectivity that takes on a life and agenda of its own.

Each of these concepts is essential to understanding human experience and behavior: primitive mental states, unverbalized experience, and fragmentation. The more primitive the mental state, the more fragmentation, dissociation, projection, etc.

The question is, can our current knowledge of primitive mental states tell us anything about the mental states of primitives? I don't see any other way. Humans are humans; just as our physical form develops along certain universal lines, so too do our minds. Indeed, if they don't develop the same way, then we're talking about a different species.

That was abrupt. Work suddenly beckons. I gotta get going. To be continued...