Psychic Integration and Human Potential

Ten years ago today we were ruminating about neurobiology, another subject I pretend to have mastered. My degree is in clinical psychology, to which neurobiology is adjacent. However, nearly all of my education and training had to do with the software of the mind, i.e., the programming. I remember looking down upon neurological hardwareans as mere technicians. Mechanics. 

Contact with the real world beyond academia soon enough changed my mind. In a way, I had been subject to the cartesian delusion that separates mind from body. This being the case, one could treat the former as if the latter didn't exist. Meanwhile, since the late late '80s, things have veered in the opposite direction, as if a pill can cure all psychological and spiritual ills.

Coincidentally, Prozac was introduced to the market the very same year I finished school, which led to some existential cognitive dissonance: why spend years on the couch blabbering about your troubles if you can just pop a pill? 

But this approach soon led to problems of its own, with vast numbers of adults, children, and even pets on antidepressants, stimulants, and anxiolytics. Nevertheless, the incidence of both depression and anxiety is at an all-time high, so progress in the field of mental health is moving backward.

It seems there no cure for the human condition, especially if we fail to recognize the troubles and conflicts that inevitably arise merely as a result of being human. For example, my father wasn't an educated man, but he knew that Life isn't fair. This being the case, no amount of medication or psychotherapy will make it fair. Likewise, The world doesn't owe you a living, even -- or especially -- if you have an advanced degree in gender studies or queer theory.

One of the dirty little secrets that DOGE is in the process of exposing is that one of the primary purposes of the federal bureaucracy is to serve as an employment agency for all these useless people with phony baloney college degrees. It would no doubt be cheaper to treat them with psychiatric medication, but then again, there is no medical cure for a hypertrophied sense of entitlement. 

Back to our ruminations from ten years ago: 

One of the purposes of this blog is to try to make traditional religion relevant to intelligent people in the modern world, beginning with myself. After all, it made sense to the most intelligent people of the premodern world, meaning that it must have "fit the facts" -- or better, must have addressed man's ticklish existential situation.

One of the first principles of Christianity is that there is something wrong with man. In fact, each religion expresses this principle in a different way: for Christians it has to do with sin -- thus being located in the will -- while for Buddhism and Vedanta it has more to do with ignorance and illusion -- more in the mind.

There is also the notion that this existential pathology is somehow handed down through the generations. Note that this was not a "theoretical" observation, nor any kind of deduction from abstract principles, but rather, an empirical observation that anyone could confirm for himself. In the words of Michael Novak, "A system built on sin is built on very solid foundations indeed."

Denying this foundation leads directly to the utopian ideologies of the left. Even so, leftists do not deny that there is something wrong with man, but simply project it into structural oppression or domestic enemies. For them, MAGA is the cause of their problems. 

Now, in my opinion, when we talk about man's proneness to sin, we're talking about something analogous to a parasite -- a mind parasite. To even talk about this subject implies that there is a proper and healthy way for man to exist -- a mature state -- and that there are things that interfere with the attainment of our proper telos. 

Remember, the facts are one thing, the explanation another. We can still believe man is fallen without accepting the ancient explanation, just as we can believe the world is created without suggesting that it occurred in six days.

This question of generational pathology is touched upon in the Pocket Guide to Interpersonal Neurobiology. For example, Siegel writes that "In relationships within families, one can see the intergenerational transfer of patterns of communication that are reinforced by the repeated experiences of energy and information flow exchange patterns."

Thus, it seems that these pathological patterns and tendencies are handed down from generation to generation, which is what our forbears would have noticed (again, empirically). 

Siegel highlights the critically important point that this intergenerational transmission is not only behavioral but genetic -- or epigenetic, to be precise. That is, "Recent discoveries in the field of epigenetics" reveal "that alterations in the control molecules regulating gene expression may also be important in this intergenerational passage of patterns of communication."

Now, think back to our furbears. Unlike us, they had no way of knowing that the cosmos was 14 billion years old, or that life had emerged 4 billion years ago, or that man had been here for 100,000 years. In such a context, "original sin" is not a bad theory, in that it certainly accounts for the observable facts. It's just that we now have some additional cognitive tools to illuminate those same facts. 

But one thing we should bear in mind is how much more empirically realistic is the idea of original sin, in comparison to the modern leftist assumption that man is born good and therefore infinitely malleable. 

Given the complexities and uncertainties involved, we rarely find the person who has escaped the exigencies of human development without his share of intergenerational mind parasites -- so rare that we might as well say it's a miracle. For Christians it is so miraculous that it happened just once. This is one of the implications of Mary's immaculate conception. Since she was free of sin, she had no intergenerational mind parasites to pass along to Jesus.  

The transmission of a mind parasite always results in an absence of integration and failure to achieve one's potential. Again, there is some block in the attainment of our mature state.

As mentioned in last Saturday's post, of the principles of Interpersonal Neurobiology (IPNB) is that mind, brain, and relationships represent an irreducible trinity, in that you can't have one without the others.

However, it occurs to me that each of these components may be further divided (but not separated) into three. For example, vis-a-vis the brain, we have the hindbrain, the midbrain, and the neocortex -- or the reptilian, the mammalian, and the human. Thus, when we talk about integration, it isn't just between mind, brain, and relationships, but within the brain itself.

Likewise the mind, which I visualize as spanning a vertical hierarchy from the divine to the human to the infrahuman. Importantly, the infrahuman is not analogous to the mammalian or reptilian, but is something far worse than mere animals -- like Nazis, or ISIS, or Al Sharpton. Matter itself can only go so low.

With regard to relationships, there is always self, other, and the link between them. In order to meet other persons where they actually are, we have the faculty of "mindsight" or empathy.

With this in mind, I think we are in a better position to understand what Siegel means when he says that the triangle of mind-brain-relationships is a "process by which energy and information flow." This is obvious, say, in education, where information passes from one mind to another via our relationship to the teacher. But such links also occur in far more subtle ways.

For example, in a paper I published back in 1994 -- before the internet permitted me to bypass the middleman -- I talked about "the back-and-forth interplay between mother and infant" through which we come to know ourselves (and without which we could never know ourselves).

Therefore, certain obstructions, blind spots, and inflexible repetitions in the mother will be internalized by the baby. Although the self cannot develop without a brain, it obviously cannot be reduced to mere brain activity. An isolated brain is just a disorganized blob of cells, while an isolated self isn't really a self at all.

However, there are such things as a healthy brain, a healthy mind, and healthy relationships. Things can go sideways in each domain, which will in turn affect the others.

For example, a brain tumor will probably not be good for your mind. Likewise, a painful relationship, or a death or loss, will cause real structural and chemical changes in the brain. And we all know how the internalization of a dysfunctional ideology certainly causes damage to the soul.

The keynote is again integration: "From an IPNB perspective, integration is the definition of good health," and "integration is the linkage of differentiated elements." Failure to integrate always results in one of two outcomes (or else an alternation between the two): either chaos or excessive rigidity.

Here we can see how rigidity may become a habitual defense mechanism against chaos. However, excessive rigidity inevitably results in more chaos. (Of note, this applies to any complex system, which is why the rigid, top-down economics of the left doesn't work.) 

As Siegel describes it, "Brains or relationships that are not integrated move outside this river of integration." That is, the integrated flow of an open system can be analogized to a river. On one bank is rigidity, the other chaos. Siegel is absolutely correct that every single diagnostic category of the DSM is characterized by either rigidity or chaos.

To cite some obvious examples, a compulsive personality is too rigid, while a borderline personality always generates chaos. Narcissists are generally too rigid, while a person with bipolar disorder goes from extreme to extreme -- from a static depression to wild mania, the former functioning like a fixed point attractor, the latter a strange attractor in subjective phase space.

As it so happens, I'm reading a rather comprehensive biography of Beethoven, who was deeply unintegrated in certain areas (e.g., emotions, relationships), even while creating perhaps the most vertically and horizontally (intellectually, emotionally, and spiritually) integrated music that had yet appeared (from what I am told; I don't pretend to be a classical music maven).

Being that he was one of the first representatives of the then new cult of genius, we have ever since had the romantic image of the "crazy genius," but it isn't necessarily so. One doesn't have to be crazy to be a genius, but one can see how, in an excessively rigid cultural or academic environment, it may require someone who has an undeveloped ability to stay within the lines to discover new territory. Thus, there are times that chaos can be in the service to development, but it is not the ideal.

On the one hand, Beethoven strived "for unity within diversity," and "struggled for greater unity and at the same time for greater diversity than any composer had aspired to before." And yet, outside the context of composing, he "had little grasp of the world at all. In childhood he did not truly comprehend the independent existence of other people. He never really did. He reached maturity knowing all about music... but otherwise he did not know how to live in the world."

This post has already gone on way too long. We'll have to resume the discussion next Saturday, and hopefully integrate this mess.