Hysteria

[Zubenelgenubi]

Today I feel like posting about hysteria, because it is an interesting topic with an interesting history.

Hysteria is the mental disorder which inspired Freud's theory of the unconscious, and thus was a major springboard for the development of psychology. It occurs far more in women than in men, and has become less common in the past 100 years, to the point that people rarely discuss it anymore. Today it is known as "conversion disorder".

Questions (in view of the information below and otherwise): Why has hysteria remained so mysterious? Why has the prevalence of and thus interest in conversion disorder been supplanted by things like OCD, bipolar disorder, ADHD and Aspergers?

Facts about conversion disorder, from eMedicine (http://www.emedicine.com/EMERG/topic112.htm):

Diagnostic criteria for conversion disorder as defined in the DSM-IV are as follows:

* One or more symptoms or deficits are present that affect voluntary motor or sensory function that suggest a neurologic or other general medical condition.

* Psychologic factors are judged to be associated with the symptom or deficit because conflicts or other stressors precede the initiation or exacerbation of the symptom or deficit.

* The symptom or deficit is not intentionally produced or feigned (as in factitious disorder or malingering).

* The symptom or deficit, after appropriate investigation, cannot be explained fully by a general medical condition, the direct effects of a substance, or as a culturally sanctioned behavior or experience.

* The symptom or deficit causes clinically significant distress or impairment in social, occupational, or other important areas of functioning or warrants medical evaluation.

* The symptom or deficit is not limited to pain or sexual dysfunction, does not occur exclusively during the course of somatization disorder, and is not better accounted for by another mental disorder.

Frequency:

* In the US: True conversion reaction is rare. Predisposing factors include extreme psychosocial stress, and perhaps, rural upbringing. Some psychiatrists suspect that western society has incorporated Freudian notions of unconscious motivations and conflicts: conversion reactions have become too obvious to serve their purpose.

o Incidence has been reported to be 11-300 cases per 100,000 people.

o Cultural factors may play a significant role. Symptoms that might be considered a conversion disorder in the US may be a normal expression of anxiety in other cultures.

o One study reports that conversion disorder accounts for 1.2-11.5% of psychiatric consultations for hospitalized medical and surgical patients.

* Internationally: At the National Hospital in London, the diagnosis was made in 1% of inpatients. Iceland's incidence of conversion disorder is reported to be 15 cases per 100,000 persons.

Sex: Sex ratio is not known although it has been estimated that women patients outnumber men by 6:1. This is of little help when evaluating an individual patient.

Is Hysteria Real? Brain Images Say Yes (http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/26/science/26hysteria.html?ei=5070&en=b47cc944fe58548c&ex=1175659200&adxnnl=1&adxnnlx=1175557610-Ce1nKVvL51z5Wz/0FLwXlw)
By ERIKA KINETZ
Published: September 26, 2006
New York Times

Hysteria is a 4,000-year-old diagnosis that has been applied to no mean parade of witches, saints and, of course, Anna O.

But over the last 50 years, the word has been spoken less and less. The disappearance of hysteria has been heralded at least since the 1960’s. What had been a Victorian catch-all splintered into many different diagnoses. Hysteria seemed to be a vanished 19th-century extravagance useful for literary analysis but surely out of place in the serious reaches of contemporary science.

The word itself seems murky, more than a little misogynistic and all too indebted to the theorizing of the now-unfashionable Freud. More than one doctor has called it “the diagnosis that dare not speak its name.”

Nor has brain science paid the diagnosis much attention. For much of the 20th century, the search for a neurological basis for hysteria was ignored. The growth of the ability to capture images of the brain in action has begun to change that situation.

Functional neuroimaging technologies like single photon emission computerized tomography, or SPECT, and positron emission tomography, or PET, now enable scientists to monitor changes in brain activity. And although the brain mechanisms behind hysterical illness are still not fully understood, new studies have started to bring the mind back into the body, by identifying the physical evidence of one of the most elusive, controversial and enduring illnesses.

Despite its period of invisibility, hysteria never vanished — or at least that is what many doctors say.

“People who say it is vanished need to come and work in some tertiary hospitals where they will see plenty of patients,” Kasia Kozlowska, a psychiatrist at the Children’s Hospital at Westmead in Sydney, Australia, and the author of a 2005 review of the subject in The Harvard Review of Psychiatry, wrote in an e-mail message.

But it did change its name. In 1980, with the publication of the third edition of its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the American Psychiatric Association officially changed the diagnosis of “hysterical neurosis, conversion type” to “conversion disorder.”

“Hysteria, to me, has always been a pejorative term, because of its association with women,” said Dr. William E. Narrow, the associate director of the research division of the American Psychiatric Association. “I think the fact we got rid of that word is a good thing.”

Unofficially, a host of inoffensive synonyms for “hysterical” have appeared: functional, nonorganic, psychogenic, medically unexplained.

“Medically unexplained” and “functional” encompass a broader swath of distress than just conversion disorder — by some accounts, patients with medically unexplained symptoms account for up to 40 percent of all primary care consultations. But clinicians seeking to avoid the wrath of patients who do not appreciate being told that their debilitating seizures are hysterical in origin also use these blander terms.

Throughout that cloud of shifting nomenclature, people have kept getting sick. “The symptoms themselves have never changed,” said Patrik Vuilleumier, a neurologist at the University of Geneva. “They are still common in practice.”

Common, perhaps. Well studied, no. There is still no consensus on how conversion disorder should be classified, and not all physicians agree on diagnostic criteria. The epidemiology is hazy; one commonly cited statistic is that conversion disorder accounts for 1 percent to 4 percent of all diagnoses in Western hospitals. In addition, patients have heterogeneous symptoms that affect any number of voluntary sensory or motor functions, like blindness, paralysis or seizures.

The two things all patients have in common are, first, that they are not faking the illness and, second, that despite extensive testing, doctors can find nothing medically wrong with them. The scientific studies that have been conducted on conversion disorder generally have small sample sizes and methodological differences, complicating the comparison of results from different scientific teams and making general conclusions difficult.

“It’s one of those woolly areas, and it has this pejorative association,” said Peter W. Halligan, a professor of neuropsychology at Cardiff University in Wales and the director of Cardiff’s new brain imaging center. “Some people say, ‘That’s a Freudian throwback, let’s go into real science.’ ”

Hysteria actually predates Freud. The word itself derives from “hystera,” Greek for uterus, and ancient doctors attributed a number of female maladies to a starved or misplaced womb. Hippocrates built on the uterine theory; marriage was among his recommended treatments.

Then came the saints, the shamans and the demon-possessed. In the 17th century, hysteria was said to be the second most common disease, after fever. In the 19th century, the French neurologists Jean-Martin Charcot and Pierre Janet laid the groundwork for contemporary approaches to the disease. Then Charcot’s student, a young neurologist named Sigmund Freud, radically changed the landscape and, some argue, popularized hysteria.

Freud’s innovation was to explain why hysterics swooned and seized. He coined the term “conversion” to describe the mechanism by which unresolved, unconscious conflict might be transformed into symbolic physical symptoms. His fundamental insight — that the body might be playing out the dramas of the mind — has yet to be supplanted.

The word hysteria derives from Greek for uterus, and ancient doctors attributed a number of female maladies to a starved or misplaced womb.

The trial of George Jacobs for witchcraft at the Essex Institute in Salem, Mass.
Rachel P. Maines

Doctors sometimes prescribed use of a “jolting chair” to treat so-called hysteroneurasthenic disorders.

“Scores of European doctors for generations had thought hysteria was something wrong with the physical body: an unhappy uterus, nerves that were too thin, black bile from the liver,” said Mark S. Micale, an associate professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the author of “Approaching Hysteria” (Princeton University Press, 1994). “Something somatic rooted in the body is giving rise to fits, spells of crying, strange aches and pains. Freud reverses that direction of causality. He says what the cases on his couch in Vienna are about is something in the psyche or the mind being expressed physically in the body.”

For neuroscientists now, there is no such division between the physical brain and the mind. The techniques allow scientists to see disruptions in brain function, which lets them sketch a physical map of what might be going on in the minds of modern-day hysterics. Many questions remain unanswered, but the results have begun to suggest ways in which emotional structures in the brain might modulate the function of normal sensory and motor neural circuits.

In the last decade, a number of brain imaging studies have been done on patients suffering from hysterical paralysis. Patients with hysterical paralysis have healthy nerves and muscles. Their problem is not structural but functional: something has apparently gone wrong in the higher reaches of the human mind that govern the conception of movement and the will to move. The dumb actors in this dance are fine; it’s the brilliant but complex director that has a problem.

Movement is the product of a multistage process. There is initiation (“I want to move my arm”); then planning, in which the muscles prepare for coordinated action; and finally execution, in which you actually move your arm. In theory, paralysis could result from a malfunction at any stage of this process. (Charcot had a similar idea back in the 1890’s.)

In a 1997 paper published in the journal Cognition, Dr. Halligan, of Cardiff, and John C. Marshall and their colleagues analyzed the brain function of a woman who was paralyzed on the left side of her body. First they spent large amounts of money on tests to ensure that she had no identifiable organic lesion.

When the woman tried to move her “paralyzed leg,” her primary motor cortex was not activated as it should have been; instead her right orbitofrontal and right anterior cingulate cortex, parts of the brain that have been associated with action and emotion, were activated. They reasoned that these emotional areas of the brain were responsible for suppressing movement in her paralyzed leg.

“The patient willed her leg to move,” Dr. Halligan said. “But that act of willing triggered this primitive orbitofrontal area and activated the anterior cingulate to countermand the instruction to move the leg. She was willing it, but the leg would not move.”

Subsequent studies have bolstered the notion that parts of the brain involved in emotion may be activated inappropriately in patients with conversion disorder and may inhibit the normal functioning of brain circuitry responsible for movement, sensation and sight.

Such imaging studies may one day be useful as diagnostic tools. Conversion disorder has long been a troubling diagnosis because it hinges on negative proof: if nothing else is wrong with you, maybe you’ve got it.

This has led to some obvious problems. For one thing, it means hysteria has been a dumping ground for the unexplained. A number of diseases, including epilepsy and syphilis, once classified as hysterical, have with time and advancing technology acquired biomedical explanations.

Such specious history makes patients skeptical of the diagnosis, even though the rates of misdiagnosis have gone down. (One widely cited 1965 study reported that over half of the patients who received a diagnosis of conversion disorder would later be found to have a neurological disease; more recent studies put the rate of misdiagnosis between 4 percent and 10 percent.)

“It helps to have some information from functional imaging to support the diagnosis,” Dr. Vuilleumier said. “That helps make the treatment and the diagnosis in the same language. The patient is coming to you with bodily language. The patient is not saying, ‘I’m afraid.’ It’s ‘I’m paralyzed.’ If you can go to the patient with bodily language, it helps.”

Such physical evidence might help hack away at prejudice among medical practitioners too. “Hysterical patients take a bad rap in the medical profession,” said Deborah N. Black, an assistant professor of neurology at the University of Vermont.

“We don’t like them,” Dr. Black said. “Somewhere deep down inside, we really think they’re faking it. When we see a patient with improbable neurological signs, the impulse is to say: ‘Come on, get off it. Sure you can move that leg.’ The other reason we don’t like them is they don’t get better, and when we can’t do well by them we don’t like them.”

The embodiment of distress is common across cultures, and the suffering tend to find acceptable manifestations for their pain. The “jinn” (evil spirits) in Oman are thought to cause convulsions. In Nigeria and India, common somatic symptoms include hot, peppery sensations in the head, hands or feet. Among Caribbean women, “ataque de nervios” — headache, trembling, palpitations, upset stomach — is a common complaint. One study of British veterans found that over the course of the 20th century, post-traumatic disorders did not disappear, but rather changed form: the gut replaced the heart as the most common locus of weakness.

Both its persistence and its pervasiveness suggest that hysteria may be derived from an instinctual response to threat. Total shutdown, in the form of paralysis, for example, is not an entirely untoward or unheard of response to an untenable situation. (Think of deer in the headlights.)

But the broadest consensus within the scientific community does not pertain to what is known about hysteria, but instead to how much remains unknown. “We’re only at the beginning,” Dr. Halligan said

[sugartits]

Old medical textbooks have pretty solid entries on hysteria, naturally, I suppose. Only parts of which seem outdated regarding the general description of the disease.

In one text I have from 1902, there are some neat peculiarities of the time period (though maybe not worth noting for anything more than amusement) for example: "It occurs in all races, but is much more prevalent, particularily in its severer forms, in members of the Latin race. In this country the milder grades are common, but the graver forms are rare in comparison with the frequency which they are seen in France."

Here's an excerpt, from the same text, concerning the etiology:

Education at home to often fails to inculcate habits of self-control. A child grows to girlhood with an entirely erroneous idea of her relations to others, and accustomed to have every whim gratified and abundant sympathy lavished on every woe, however trifling, she reaches womanhood with a moral organization unfitted to withstand the cares and worries of every-day life. At school, between the ages of twelve and fifteen, the most important period in her life, when the vital energies are absorbed in the rapid development of the body, she is often cramming for examinations and cooped in close school-rooms for six or eight hours daily. The result too frequently is an active, bright mind in an enfeebled body, ill-adapted to subserve the functions for which it was framed, easily disordered, and prone to react abnormally to the ordinary stimuli of life. Among the more direct influences are emotions of various kinds, fright occasionally, more frequently love affairs, grief, and domestic worries. Physical causes less often bring on hysterical outbreaks, but they may follow directly upon an injury or develop during the convalescence from an acute illness or be associated with disease of the generative organs. The name hysteria indicates how important was believed to be the part played by the uterus in the causation of the disease. Opinions differ a good deal on this question, but undoubtedly in many cases there are ovarian and uterin disorders the rectification of which sometimes cures the disease. Sexual excess, particularily masturbation, is an important factor, both in girls and boys.

The Principles and the Practice of Medicine, William Osler, MD

[Zubenelgenubi]

Some interesting reading material on hysteria in contemporary society from Slavoj Zizek.


Hysteria has to be comprehended in the complexity of its strategy as a radically ambiguous protest against Master's interpolation which simultaneously bears witness to the fact that the hysterical subject needs a Master, that she cannot do without a Master, so that there is no simple and direct way out. For that reason, one should also avoid the historicist pitfall of rejecting the notion of hysteria as belonging to a bygone era, i.e., the notion that today borderline disturbances, not hysteria, are the predominant form of "discontent" in our civilization: borderline is the contemporary form of hysteria, i.e., of the subject's refusal to accept the predominant mode of interpolation whose agent is no longer the traditional Master but the expert-knowledge of the discourse of Science. In short, the shift from the classic form of hysteria to borderline disturbances is strictly correlative with the shift from the traditional Master to the form of Power legitimized by Knowledge.
from Woman is one of the Names-of-the-Father (http://www.lacan.com/zizwoman.htm) (which I also quoted from in the sexism thread)

You interpret the situation one encounters in front of the computer screen - for example when communicating via e-mail - as a situation of Hysteria. There is actually a great deal of uncertainty in these forms of communication: You can never be sure who is reading your input or in what way. Vou are aware of this situation all the time and try to anticipate the other's reactions. Also, important additional features of face-to-face communication like gestures or tone of voice are missing...

Slavoj Zizek: The Freudian unconscious is very much like what one does in front of the computer screen. The Freudian unconscious is not all this body language or tonality, no. The Freudian unconscious is precisely this helplessness, where you are talking to someone, but at the same time you do not even know at whom it is addressed exactly. You are radically not sure, because basically this is a symptom. When you have some hysterical symptom it has precisely such a structure. So my point here would be along the lines you drew, that cyberspace often functions in the hysterical way, which is exactly this radical uncertainty: I don't know whom my letter will reach. = I don't know what the other wants from me and thus I try in advance to reflect this uncertainty. Cyberspace is open in the sense that we cannot decide from its technological properties whether it functions in a perverse or in a hysterical way.

There is not a certain psychic economy inscribed in the functioning of cyberspace as such. But much more often then we think cyberspace is still caught in a hysterical economy. That's why I distrust not only the paranoiac versions of cyberspace, I also deeply distrust the liberating version, "we play with multiple identities" and so forth.

I think, if I may simplify, that there are three or four predominant versions of cyberspace. There is the common sense version, where we are still real people who talk to each other, cyberspace is just another medium. This is too simple, because cyberspace of course does affect what it means to be a subject. Then we have the paranoiac version: cyberspace, the maternal thing, we lose autonomy. Then we have this perverse liberating notion, we get rid of patriarchal authority. And the other one is the New Age version of the Noosphere. People are so fascinated by phenomena which are really very exceptional. I don't know anyone who, when sitting in front of the computer really regresses to some kind of psychotic immersion, who becomes a member of the Noosphere, it's not like that. The hysterical experience is the fundamental experience.

One can read your emphasis on hysteria in this discussion as an answer to a certain kind of current left-wing politics which has been inspired by gender theory, which proposes the transgressive and therefore subversive potential of 'perversion' ...

Slavoj Zizek: Something which makes hysteria interesting is how these modern leftist ideas share the disqualification of hysteria with radical Leninist and Stalinist politics. It would be very interesting to find out when the signifier of the hysterical subject emerges as a swearword in Stalinist politics. Even earlier, already with Lenin, the internal enemies, the revisionists were disqualified as hysterics: They don't know what they want, they doubt.

When I speak of perversion I do not mean perversion as a certain practice, for example anal intercourse. For Lacan, perversion designates a very precise subjective attitude that is an attitude of self-objectivization or self-instrumentalization. Whereas the typical hysterical fear is to become a tool of the other. So the basic constituent of subjectivity is hysterical: I don't know what I am for the other. Hysteria, or neurosis in general is always a position of questioning.

That's the crucial message of Freud: The hysterical subject doesn't materialize his dreams in a perverse scenario, not because he or she is afraid of repression or the law, but because he always has this doubt: I can do this, but what if even that won't satisfy me. What if even this perverse scenario is a fake, a false mask.

Of course there is also a political axis to this: My answer to some popularised version of Foucault or Deleuze which praises this multiple perverse post-modern subject with its no longer fixed paternal authority, which shifts between different self-images and reshapes itself all the time, is: Why is this supposed to be subversive? I claim, and this got me into a lot of trouble with some feminists, I claim that, to put it into old fashioned Marxist terms, the predominant structure of today's subjectivity in "Spaetkapitalismus" (Advanced Capitalism) or whatever we want to call it, is perverse: The typical form of psychic economy of subjectivity which is more and more predominant today, the so called narcissist personality, is a perverse structure. The paternal authority is no longer the enemy today. So this idea of an explosion of multiple perversions just describes what fits perfectly today's late-capitalist order...


from Hysteria and Cyberspace (http://www.heise.de/tp/r4/artikel/2/2492/1.html)

I will add more historical context (Freud and Lacan, as those are what I know) later on, depending on how the thread goes.

[Ahknaton]

I'm sure I came across a mention of hysteria in Jung's book on Archetypes, but I can't find it now and it's not in the index :mad:

Anyway, I found this on the net. Jung believed that hysteria was characterized by "centrifugal movement of the libido", and in that sense was the opposite of schizophrenia:

Psychological Types

http://www.answers.com/topic/psychological-types-analytical-psychology

Carl Gustav Jung Zürich

Training according to C. G. Jung Int School of Analytical Psychology

Psychological Types (Analytical Psychology)

Carl Jung's discrimination of human consciousness according to its functions (thinking, feeling, sensation, and intuition) and habitual attitudes (extraversion and introversion) was his attempt to provide a psychology of experience with a critical orientation in sorting out the empirical material of psychic dispositions, tendencies, and convictions. Jung's first presentation of the idea of psychological types was in a lecture delivered at the Psychoanalytical Congress in Munich during September 1913. He noted the striking difference in attitude toward the external world between patients diagnosed with hysteria and those diagnosed with schizophrenia in terms of intensity of feeling, the former displaying an exaggerated emotivity with regard to the environment and the latter an extreme apathy. He also noted characteristic differences in thought content: the fantasy life of the patient with hysteria may be accounted for in a natural and human way by the antecedents and individual history of the patient, whereas the patient with schizophrenia consciously experiences fantasy closer to dreams than to the psychology of the waking state in having a distinctly archaic character, with mythological creations more in evidence than the personal memories of the patient.

From these facts, Jung concluded that hysteria is characterized by a centrifugal movement of libido, which he called extraversion, and schizophrenia by a contrary movement, which he called introversion, toward the core of the personality (which he later called the self ). Although Jung recognized that in these two clinical syndromes he was witnessing regressive extraversion and regressive introversion, he nevertheless concluded that there was in the development of consciousness a normal distinction between the two movements of libido. Extraversion, he postulated, tends naturally to bond and even merge with objects in the outer world, while introversion naturally turns away from such objects in order to link up with the internal objects that Jung eventually called archetypes. Kenneth Shapiro and Irving Alexander have subsequently noted that these two movements of libido are constitutive of experience itself for the different types, experience only being experience for the extravert when it is shared with another person or object in the outer world and, for the introvert, when it matches up to some a priori archetypal category or capacity to experience just that type of thing. The theory of psychological types itself is an introverted way of thinking about experience and making it real, which may account for its difficulty for psychologists using an extraverted attitude.

In the years between 1913 and 1921, when the book Psychological Types finally appeared, Jung developed the theory to include what he called the functions of consciousness, which he named sensation, thinking, feeling, and intuition. Whether deployed toward objects in the outer world or toward the inner world of archetypes, sensation gives consciousness the practical sense that an object is really being presented to it; in other words, that it is, thinking gives it a name, feeling assigns it a value (for which reason Jung's feeling is sometimes replaced by analytical psychologists with the word valuing or with feeling valuation) and intuition grants consciousness a direct, uncanny perception (from the perspective of the "absolute knowledge" of the unconscious) of the origin and fate of the object, as Jung puts it "whence it arises and where it is going."

For Jung sensation and intuition are irrational functions in being functions of perception which are irrationally "given." Thinking and feeling, by contrast, are rational functions, being choices, in the sense of judgments by consciousness, as to how to discriminate among objects that are perceived.

That individuals develop consciousness in different ways, according to their preference for using certain functions over others has led the theory of psychological types to be used to type people and to predict their likelihood to succeed in certain professions. A test based on Jung's model, known as the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), has had widespread use in the United States. The MBTI uses categories of judging and perceiving to distinguish Jung's rational and irrational extraverted functions. In typing the preferred mode of consciousness of an individual, an attempt is made to define the person's typical "superior function" according to whether it is extraverted or introverted, whether it is most characterized by sensation, thinking, feeling, and intuition, and whether it is rational or irrational.

There will normally be an auxiliary function that is "different in every respect" providing the individual with an alternative mode of consciousness with which to meet inner and outer situations. In depth psychological work, it is also important to define the "inferior function" which, though much less easily differentiated into a conscious competence, is the place one most often experiences unconscious complexes and conflicts.

Bibliography

Franz, Marie-Louise von, and Hillman, James (1971). Lectures on Jung's Typology. New York: Spring.

Jung, Carl Gustav (1913). A contribution to the study of psychological types. Coll. Works, Vol. 6. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

—— (1921). Psychological Types. Coll. Works, Vol. 6. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

Myers, Isabel, and Myers, Peter (1980). Gifts Differing. Palo Alto, CA: Consulting Psychologists Press.

Shapiro, Kenneth, and Alexander, Irving (1975). The Experience of Introversion. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

[Shapeshifter2]

One may possess an irrational feeling that such babbling non-sense holds some great insight into the mind and psyche.
This irrational feeling is no different than the people screaming and yelling at some professional sports game, it's all hype, posturing. Putting on the cloak of Jungism, and you're funny, pointy hat, making a pretense to the priesthood of Psycobabble and it's holy, mysterious, authoratative secrets, nobody really understands.

In nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus Sancti. Amen.

Introibo ad altare Dei. Ad Deum qui laetificat juventutem meam

Judica me, Deus, et discerne causam meam de gente non sancta: ab homine iniquo et doloso erue me

Carl Jung's discrimination of human consciousness according to its functions (thinking, feeling, sensation, and intuition) and habitual attitudes (extraversion and introversion) was his attempt to provide a psychology of experience with a critical orientation in sorting out the empirical material of psychic dispositions, tendencies, and convictions. Jung's first presentation of the idea of psychological types was in a lecture delivered at the Psychoanalytical Congress in Munich during September 1913. He noted the striking difference in attitude toward the external world between patients diagnosed with hysteria and those diagnosed with schizophrenia in terms of intensity of feeling, the former displaying an exaggerated emotivity with regard to the environment and the latter an extreme apathy. He also noted characteristic differences in thought content: the fantasy life of the patient with hysteria may be accounted for in a natural and human way by the antecedents and individual history of the patient, whereas the patient with schizophrenia consciously experiences fantasy closer to dreams than to the psychology of the waking state in having a distinctly archaic character, with mythological creations more in evidence than the personal memories of the patient.

From these facts, Jung concluded that hysteria is characterized by a centrifugal movement of libido, which he called extraversion, and schizophrenia by a contrary movement, which he called introversion, toward the core of the personality (which he later called the self ). Although Jung recognized that in these two clinical syndromes he was witnessing regressive extraversion and regressive introversion, he nevertheless concluded that there was in the development of consciousness a normal distinction between the two movements of libido. Extraversion, he postulated, tends naturally to bond and even merge with objects in the outer world, while introversion naturally turns away from such objects in order to link up with the internal objects that Jung eventually called archetypes. Kenneth Shapiro and Irving Alexander have subsequently noted that these two movements of libido are constitutive of experience itself for the different types, experience only being experience for the extravert when it is shared with another person or object in the outer world and, for the introvert, when it matches up to some a priori archetypal category or capacity to experience just that type of thing. The theory of psychological types itself is an introverted way of thinking about experience and making it real, which may account for its difficulty for psychologists using an extraverted attitude.

In the years between 1913 and 1921, when the book Psychological Types finally appeared, Jung developed the theory to include what he called the functions of consciousness, which he named sensation, thinking, feeling, and intuition. Whether deployed toward objects in the outer world or toward the inner world of archetypes, sensation gives consciousness the practical sense that an object is really being presented to it; in other words, that it is, thinking gives it a name, feeling assigns it a value (for which reason Jung's feeling is sometimes replaced by analytical psychologists with the word valuing or with feeling valuation) and intuition grants consciousness a direct, uncanny perception (from the perspective of the "absolute knowledge" of the unconscious) of the origin and fate of the object, as Jung puts it "whence it arises and where it is going."

For Jung sensation and intuition are irrational functions in being functions of perception which are irrationally "given." Thinking and feeling, by contrast, are rational functions, being choices, in the sense of judgments by consciousness, as to how to discriminate among objects that are perceived.

That individuals develop consciousness in different ways, according to their preference for using certain functions over others has led the theory of psychological types to be used to type people and to predict their likelihood to succeed in certain professions. A test based on Jung's model, known as the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), has had widespread use in the United States. The MBTI uses categories of judging and perceiving to distinguish Jung's rational and irrational extraverted functions. In typing the preferred mode of consciousness of an individual, an attempt is made to define the person's typical "superior function" according to whether it is extraverted or introverted, whether it is most characterized by sensation, thinking, feeling, and intuition, and whether it is rational or irrational.

There will normally be an auxiliary function that is "different in every respect" providing the individual with an alternative mode of consciousness with which to meet inner and outer situations. In depth psychological work, it is also important to define the "inferior function" which, though much less easily differentiated into a conscious competence, is the place one most often experiences unconscious complexes and conflicts.

[Thoth]

A quick blast ...

For maximum relevance today:
1. Mass epidemic hysteria -- a social sickness
fairly well-studied. Caspar Schmidt's classic 1984 in J. of Psychohistory linked:

A. Reagan's coming; Carter's burial
to
B. 1975 cross-over point from '60's' expansion to beginning shame-guilt "the party's over" crackdown reaction-era, w/ 'right-wing'-ers delegated by The Group (mainly, themselves, but left-wing 'self-hatred' comes in, expecting it) to punish 'left-wing'-ers for their own (r-w's) child sacrifice in Vietnam -- displaced onto the "abortion" issue ("the left" is by definition (token-tautology) -- the corrupt, abusing, baby-killing jew sinners--"Like Nazi gas chambers, those abortion clinics" opined NY's Cardinal John O'connor --

C. Gays (and feminazis) get to be odd-man out scapegoats, as jews morph quickly into neocon mode (Elliot Abrams does Military/Church right-wing dirty work in El Salvador; Wm. Casey RC cola time in Nicaragua, Afghanistan, Pakistan; Sharon butchers the Lebonese, JPII politicizes Polish Christianity, heists Walesa's honest union cause and honors Opus Dei's Escriva, Banco Ambrosiano etc.)

D. This social situation 'spiraled in' on male sexuality, as homos were called upon to come out or cop out. This is where affect-Conversion went over into AIDS hysteria, which became a permanent psychotic Signifer of living with a death condition.

Schmidt, a South African child psychologist (one of the most brilliant men I'VE ever met, up there with Abbie Hoffman) took the eitiology of hysterical conversion to an unconscious sense of SHAME VS GUILT ! -- pointing out that it is a (what I call) being-indictment, not a willed act-condemnation, which can be recalled and/or externalized. (projected and punished-in-the-other in the latter case). Shame goes deep. Some can't leave home w/o a gut-smack. Get a bunch of them together ... if you accept Freud's economic model, the libido has to go somewhere, or be re-absorbed as poison (love turned into hate, reprojected as passive aggressive sadism). Freud speaks somewhere of bodily fluids becoming toxic; Gulf War Syndrome included women claiming returning vets semen stung, raised welts on ther skin.

It was maleness, itself (especially on the part of "little dick white boys" as Ed Bradly coaxed that black whore to call the Duke Lacross guys on 60 minutes CBS TV), and whoever wasn't already sure and comfortable with their masculinity stood a chance of getting real sickness at the time. What if their 'lifestyle' had, in fact, inflicted earth with a deadly plague? -- retro-virus 'smouldering in darkest Africa' one right-wing Christian science writer had it, waiting to pop out of green monkey dung into the food chain. Something had. Then we see Rush Limbaugh ... Glen Beck -- Bill Kristol -- Ben Shapiro -- Savage Weiner --Fox news and the Guckert/Mehlman gaynxiety prodders f'r jeezus (holy seculards) -- for the truly pussified boobus Americanus. All ya gotta do is talk tough and put up a front against A-rabs, you'll be OK. These guys feel shame? Do vacuums exist? (Pouring from the empty into the void.)

***
http://www.garynull.com/documents/Continuum/ReviewTheAIDSCult.htm

The AIDS Cult offers essays that examine the psycho-social origins of the ‘HIV/AIDS’ belief system. The opening essay, ‘The fantasy group origins of AIDS’ by the late Caspar Schmidt, a psychoanalyst with a practice in New York, written in 1984, was astonishingly prophetic of our current rethinking of the ‘AIDS’ construct.
....
Ian Young, in the preface, states that ‘HIV believers’ and ‘AIDS critics’ have ignored the psycho-social factors that have arguably contributed to the unnecessary deaths of thousands. Schmidt nominates ‘AIDS’ as a "bio-psycho-social disorder" and contends that ‘AIDS’ is psychologically contagious, being ‘spread’ through mass-hypnosis rather than microbes. He proposes that chronic and inescapable fear can elicit a biochemical reaction in the body, which in time causes "psychogenically-reduced cell-mediated immunity."

[Thoth]

One may possess an irrational feeling that such babbling non-sense holds some great insight into the mind and psyche.
This irrational feeling is no different than the people screaming and yelling at some professional sports game, it's all hype, posturing. Putting on the cloak of Jungism, and you're funny, pointy hat, making a pretense to the priesthood of Psycobabble and it's holy, mysterious, authoratative secrets, nobody really understands.

In nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus Sancti. Amen.

Introibo ad altare Dei. Ad Deum qui laetificat juventutem meam

Judica me, Deus, et discerne causam meam de gente non sancta: ab homine iniquo et doloso erue me

Gotta disagree with this. Wrestlling is barely a conscious function at all; psychological understanding (not born with it, not available while standing on one foot,not so easy to come by) is a totlity function of highest order. (Fishing, closer -- needalittle zen in there)

Therefore, even if psychobabling were essentially the same psychological phenomon as wrestlemania -- fetishism rewound around different Things -- which it's not, though accomplishment in anything, as opposed to nothing, prompts exuberance -- they wouldn't belong on the same scale of activities for 'what we are left with' comparison. The fact that they might be thought so is symptomatic.

[Kim Jong Tha Illest]

Evans, Dylan "An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis"

Hysteria:

"The nosographical category of hysteria dates back to the ancient Greek medicine, which conceived of a female disease caused by the womb wandering througout the body (in Greek hysteron means womb)"

"The classic symptomatology of hysteria involves physical symptoms such as local paralyses, pains and anaesthesias, for which no organic cause can be found, and which are articulated around an 'imaginary anatomy' which bears no relation to the real structure of the nervous system (see Lacan, 1951b:13)"

"Lacan regards hysteria as one of the two main forms of neurosis, the other being obsessional neurosis. In the seminar of 1955-6 Lacan develops the idea that the structure of a neurosis is that of a question, and what differentiates hysteria from obsessional neurosis is the nature of the question. Whereas obsessional neurosis concerns the question of the subject's existence, hysteria concerns the question of the subject's sexual position. This question may be phrased "am I a man or a woman" or, more precisely "What is a woman?" (S3 170-5). This is true for both male and female hysterics. Lacan thus reaffirms the ancient view that there is an intimate connection between hysteria and femininity. Indeed, most hysterics are women, just as most obsessional neurotics are men."

In addition to the hysteric as subject-position, there is also the (related) social position of the discourse of the hysteric. Interestingly enough, it is the discourse of the hysteric, according to Lacan, that is privileged in its ability to produce knowledge if it is structurally introduced through the process of analysis and subsequently overcome.

http://www.partnership.mmu.ac.uk/cme/Chreods/Issue_13/4Discourses/Hysteric2.gif

In the hysteric's discourse, the dominant position is occupied by the symptom (the hysteric's womanhood - woman is her own symptom, incapable of asserting herself as woman for woman does not exist, she poses it in the form of "what is a woman?") which represents the truth of surplus enjoyment (the hidden pleasure derived by the hysteric by pointing out the impotence of the master through questioning) the arrow of impossibility points from the symptom to the master-signifier (the hysteric questioning reveals the impossibility of taming the irrational under the symbolic law), and the arrow of powerlessness runs from knowledge to surplus enjoyment (in the discourse of the hysteric knowledge is produced, but is revealed to be powerless in comparison to the law of enjoyment).

[Thoth]

I'm sure I came across a mention of hysteria in Jung's book on Archetypes, but I can't find it now and it's not in the index :mad:


Jung didn't arrive at (his version of) analytical psychology from the side of hysteria and young female patients as Freud mostly did (many battered and sliced up cadavars at the Rue Morgue in Paris, Kraepilin) but from observations of 'schizophrenia' and odd paranormal phenomena which abounded all over Europe and America after dinner drawing rooms. (I had an elderly aunt who could make a table walk and talk after a 30 minute 'seance' session, but she got religiously scared of it and quit.) "Hysteria" just wasn't taken that seriosly; subsumed under broad categories. He flattened 'libido' to 'interest' for psychic energy, and so did not work as close to the hard-wiring as the Old Cigar man.

Nor was the notion of Psychological types really central to his psychology, growing out of his metaphysics of Archetypes, rather than vice versa. It was a bit of a scandal, like later Babylonian astrology knock-offs of Sumerian science (whatever it was). Also, in re Psych types, the Icazo knock-off of Gurdjieff's Anneagram is reported to be quite good -- in actual workshop training to relate to other's behind-the-mask personality. Personally, I think POSTING ON THE INTERNET provides more data in this regard than the olden dudes ever had.

I would like to return to L-bloomer's observations about what such communication does to one's "audience sense" (back to individual psychology and hysteria). My own big Master Schema on the wall over there shows "HISTORICAL AUDIENCE" as a major Feedback sector in sign-use processing, so I think it may connect with hysteria, as suggested. Posting on eboards definitely DOES do funny things to the libido, and has greatly helped me differentiate my own inferior function (feeling-intuition/anima). ("differentiating the affect" so you don't have to go through so much "I'd like to shoot 'em right between the fuckin' eyes" before getting down to saying anything .. not that one should, but it does do that)

[Zubenelgenubi]

Interesting... Lacan got into psychoanalysis via psychotics (specifically paranoiacs) as well, but he doesn't oppose hysteria and psychosis. In Lacan's analysis, neurotics (hysteria and obsessional neurosis) experience their symptoms due to the "phallic signifier", i.e. that which represents the lack of what will fulfill their desire but which they repress and their symptoms are symbolic attempts to deal with this problem of the lack. Hysterics identify with the desire of the Other and obsessional neurotics attempt to cover up the lack in the Other. Psychotics, on the other hand, "foreclose" the phallic signifier, meaning it is as if it never existed, it is not in their unconscious and they have never entered the symbolic order, so when they are confronted with the lack they must go elsewhere- this is why they form paranoid delusions and other such things which explain away their inability to fulfill their desire. Basically, hysterics appear to point their libido outward and psychotics inwards because of their relationship with desire, not because they are opposite in any fundamental way.

Generally, Jung's analysis of introversion vs. extraversion seems somewhat superficial- hysteria is centrifugal and psychosis is centripetal with regards to the core of personality, but what is the "core of personality" and what is it caused by? Does he explain anywhere the aetiology of these two relationships with the outside world? I don't know a whole lot about Jung.

[Ahknaton]

Jung didn't arrive at (his version of) analytical psychology from the side of hysteria and young female patients as Freud mostly did (many battered and sliced up cadavars at the Rue Morgue in Paris, Kraepilin) but from observations of 'schizophrenia' and odd paranormal phenomena which abounded all over Europe and America after dinner drawing rooms.
True. However Jung does mention Freud's theories of hysteria a few times in order to counterpoint them with his own. I wish I could find the damn reference, then I'd be making a lot more sense here... :o

[Thoth]

thanks for the Lacan, lb... I was simply unable to wade through his French euroism back when challenged to read the escrits. Especially liked "Foreclosure" -- it went exactly with a use to which I had put the term in connection with the concept of "completing totalities": declaring a totality prematurely complete (like usuing the world "intelligent" for the "design" of the universe, as if human brains measure what it is -- which I hold, but do not foreclose). Theological foreclosure is the chief intellectual sin, lul.

btw -- one thing I did cull from Lacan: premature ejaculation is due to identification with the Other, which I think explains my general hysterical psychological condition.

added: most ideas one encounters first as "Jungian" seem superficial, I think, especially after having read Freud (I read J before F; got stuck mostly in the 1910 -1913 period and their strange trip to America, with the board snapping/chandalier cracking while they talked aboard the ship! -- Jung privately grinning, Freud taken to his cabin with the vapors).

It has to cook, what he is doing. The picture of a completed psychological totality, for Jungian psychology, is the mandala. The uroboric beginning/end process (as cosmic/hologrammatic unit) passING through a cross-over mid-point in each one's completing life-cycle, switching relation of Cs to the Ucs (using F's old abbreviations, which of course he abandoned after his '23 ego analysis found the Thing was full of holes) from introversion to extraversion -- or vice versa, whichever had been dominant in the first half of life. FWIW I can testify. I used to be a shrinking violet, leopoldbloom. Now I've got the 'Net.

NO! -- make that the Galaxy, by God! I'VE GOT THE FUCKING GALAXY !

[Zubenelgenubi]

thanks for the Lacan, lb... I was simply unable to wade through his French euroism back when challenged to read the escrits. Especially liked "Foreclosure" -- it went exactly with a use to which I had put the term in connection with the concept of "completing totalities": declaring a totality prematurely complete (like usuing the world "intelligent" for the "design" of the universe, as if human brains measure what it is -- which I hold, but do not foreclose). Theological foreclosure is the chief intellectual sin, lul.

btw -- one thing I did cull from Lacan: premature ejaculation is due to identification with the Other, which I think explains my general hysterical psychological condition.

You should read the new translation of the Ecrits published last year by Bruce Fink- Lacan's never a breeze but this one is much smoother than previous translations.

[Kim Jong Tha Illest]

You should read the new translation of the Ecrits published last year by Bruce Fink- Lacan's never a breeze but this one is much smoother than previous translations.

Fink > Sheridan.

Given his sophisticated understanding of the theoretical foundations of mathematics, i have no doubt that Thoth would get an awful lot out of an engagement with Lacan. For a little help in that direction, a topological figure relied on heavily in lacanian psychoanalysis:

http://www.ics.uci.edu/~eppstein/junkyard/knot.html

Borromean Knot: This is the topology of the registers of reality.

http://web.uvic.ca/~saross/lacan.html

The fundamental structure in Lacanian psychoanalysis is a tripartite confluence of what Lacan called the real, the imaginary, and the symbolic orders.1 I will define each of these in turn shortly, but first it is important to conceive of their interrelationship as "the fundamental classification system around which all [Lacan’s] theorising turns" (Evans 132). The intersection of the RSI constitutes the whole of the mental life of humans, whether in a cumulative way or in the various effects it produces – "together they cover the whole field of psychoanalysis" (Evans 132). Each of the orders not only constitutes a particular aspect of the mental life of the mature human, but also corresponds roughly to stages in the development of the infant human as it approaches maturity. Nonetheless, while it is tempting to think of the orders as stages through which the individual moves, we must resist this temptation and retain their purity as orders or registers in which, through which, and by which the individual is determined: "The symbolic, the imaginary and the real are not mental forces, personifiable on the model-builder’s inner stage, but orders each of which serves to position the individual within a force-field that traverses him" (Bowie 91). This insistence on the existence of RSI as orders or forces that traverse the individual allows us to comprehend that though together they comprise a structure, that structure is far from static. Rather, the various orders contained in the RSI configuration constantly act on each other, defining each other and themselves in contradistinction to one another. They are simultaneously mutually interdependent for their definition and utterly incommensurable. "The symbolic, the imaginary and the real pressurize each other continuously and have their short-term truces, but they do not allow any embracing programme for synthesis to emerge inside or outside the analytic encounter. The three orders together comprise a complex topological space in which the characteristic disorderly motions of the human mind can be plotted" (Bowie 98-99).

For a quick and dirty explication, let's take a look at Thoth's signature - "everything is two". What demands attention is that to express this concept (and Thoth's signature does so in the most linguistically efficient way possible), it is required to use a minimum of three symbols. To express the mind/body split in such a way (which in Lacanian terms would be the relation between the imaginary and the symbolic order), one must name both terms and send a floater between them. The split between the imaginary order (that of the body and desire) and the symbolic (aka tokenspace) can be introduced into thought only by allusion to the real, which is not symbolic or imaginary, but is that which radically resists both imagination and symbolic representation.

http://web.uvic.ca/~saross/bringsbig.jpg

BTW: Although Lacan himself is frenchified and hoity-toity in the extreme, the backdoor to Lacanian psychoanalysis is now open through the works of his stepson Jacques Alain-Miller, and through his Slovenian interpreters (Zizek being the most famous, along with Zupancic and Dolar). Zizek is a self-described "enlightenment guy", whose goal is to present Lacan in such a way that his thought will lose none of its power but will be accessible through examples that other academics would sneer at. Zizek is a true pleasure to read, and makes one wonder why one did not spontaneously arrive at Lacanian conclusions simply by reading the paper or flipping through a comic book. viz:

http://lacan.com/zizekrumsfeld.htm

"What Rumsfeld Doesn't Know He Knows about Abu Gharib"

But the main complication is the contrast between the "standard" way prisoners were tortured in Saddam's regime and how they were tortured under U.S. occupation. Under Saddam, the accent was on direct infliction of pain, while the American soldiers focused on psychological humiliation. Further, recording the humiliation with a camera, with the perpetrators included in the picture, their faces stupidly smiling beside the twisted naked bodies of the prisoners, was an integral part of the process, in stark contrast with the secrecy of the Saddam tortures. The very positions and costumes of the prisoners suggest a theatrical staging, a kind of tableau vivant, which brings to mind American performance art, "theatre of cruelty," the photos of Mapplethorpe or the unnerving scenes in David Lynch's films.

This theatricality leads us to the crux of the matter: To anyone acquainted with the reality of the American way of life, the photos brought to mind the obscene underside of U.S. popular culture - say, the initiatory rituals of torture and humiliation one has to undergo to be accepted into a closed community. Similar photos appear at regular intervals in the U.S. press after some scandal explodes at an Army base or high school campus, when such rituals went overboard. Far too often we are treated to images of soldiers and students forced to assume humiliating poses, perform debasing gestures and suffer sadistic punishments.

The torture at Abu Ghraib was thus not simply a case of American arrogance toward a Third World people. In being submitted to the humiliating tortures, the Iraqi prisoners were effectively initiated into American culture: They got a taste of the culture's obscene underside that forms the necessary supplement to the public values of personal dignity, democracy and freedom. No wonder, then, the ritualistic humiliation of Iraqi prisoners was not an isolated case but part of a widespread practice.

In March 2003, Rumsfeld engaged in a little bit of amateur philosophizing about the relationship between the known and the unknown: "There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don't know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don't know we don't know." What he forgot to add was the crucial fourth term: the "unknown knowns," the things we don't know that we know-which is precisely, the Freudian unconscious, the "knowledge which doesn't know itself," as Lacan used to say.

If Rumsfeld thinks that the main dangers in the confrontation with Iraq were the "unknown unknowns," that is, the threats from Saddam whose nature we cannot even suspect, then the Abu Ghraib scandal shows that the main dangers lie in the "unknown knowns" - the disavowed beliefs, suppositions and obscene practices we pretend not to know about, even though they form the background of our public values.

Thus, Bush was wrong. What we get when we see the photos of humiliated Iraqi prisoners is precisely a direct insight into "American values," into the core of an obscene enjoyment that sustains the American way of life.

[Thoth]

True. However Jung does mention Freud's theories of hysteria a few times in order to counterpoint them with his own. (1) I wish I could find the damn reference, then I'd be making a lot more sense here... :o


Yes, but if you go all the way back to Collected Works vol. I (1898?) here he is (I should have perhaps noted above, since it bridges with F.) writing up his observations of a teen-age girl who has 'lapses', goes into spells totally outside herself, 'channels' material from sources his erudition locates ver batim elsewhere, the way you found that crop circle, and I had to go back through today. Amazing that that all went down and is 'out there'. Anyway, you see how this. His version of "hysteria" (independent of Freud, with the latter's libido/childhood sexuality concept still a decade away) would be most notable for the kind of 'abnormal' conscious content he was interested in.

What was happening? He said: "I don't know, but here is the psychology of it," and explaining the shared transpersonal content without metaphysical assumption of its extra-transcendental reality.

I'm pretty sure the passage you cite is in CW vol. III, explicitly devoted to this topic of him v. Freud, but I no longer have the set of volumes around to look it up. It was very hard to compare them at the time, for me. It was clear something different, profound, and inescapable was going on, when it was not clear for either one, much less both. (I didn't turn to reading depth psychology until my '40's, after the Ideal Language philosophy period.)
Raising this philosophical question: "Can psychology be metaphysically neutral? or Is the study of psychology relative to the psychology of the studier?" etc. -- you know the rap. Well .....

This is where I think We* come in, in the Pentachronic.

I want to claim (to Others, broadly, clearing message with you): a System of purely* (*individually specified; as the nine signs used to construct logical syntax) formal synthetic apriori network of relations existing in experience that merges study of letter shapes, number signs, fractal geometry, using the pentagram as basic tesselated grid shape and scaled appliers; ... with the psychological study of what is communicated by symbols. (Jung distinguished signs from symbols as cons. vs uncs. 'references" (quotes because this is a weasel word). (Best just stick with meaning = use -- but not stop there, as Wittgenstein did.) To explain the transcendental possibility of "meaningful concidences" (Jung).

As mentioned elsewhere, I have registered the domain name "psychosemiotics", hoping to get it up soon as a parallel/lateral octave enterprise linked here to the Phora. The work is so good it speaks for and is sufficient unto itself, like the piece below I have been playing all the while .....

http://vids.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=vids.individual&videoid=2019942780
.

[Thoth]

Fink > Sheridan.

Given his sophisticated understanding of the theoretical foundations of mathematics, i have no doubt that Thoth would get an awful lot out of an engagement with Lacan. For a little help in that direction, a topological figure relied on heavily in lacanian psychoanalysis:

http://www.ics.uci.edu/~eppstein/junkyard/knot.html

Borromean Knot: This is the topology of the registers of reality.

http://web.uvic.ca/~saross/lacan.html



For a quick and dirty explication, let's take a look at Thoth's signature - "everything is two". What demands attention is that to express this concept (and Thoth's signature does so in the most linguistically efficient way possible), it is required to use a minimum of three symbols. To express the mind/body split in such a way (which in Lacanian terms would be the relation between the imaginary and the symbolic order), one must name both terms and send a floater between them. The split between the imaginary order (that of the body and desire) and the symbolic (aka tokenspace) can be introduced into thought only by allusion to the real, which is not symbolic or imaginary, but is that which radically resists both imagination and symbolic representation.

http://web.uvic.ca/~saross/bringsbig.jpg

BTW: Although Lacan himself is frenchified and hoity-toity in the extreme, the backdoor to Lacanian psychoanalysis is now open through the works of his stepson Jacques Alain-Miller, and through his Slovenian interpreters (Zizek being the most famous, along with Zupancic and Dolar). Zizek is a self-described "enlightenment guy", whose goal is to present Lacan in such a way that his thought will lose none of its power but will be accessible through examples that other academics would sneer at. Zizek is a true pleasure to read, and makes one wonder why one did not spontaneously arrive at Lacanian conclusions simply by reading the paper or flipping through a comic book. viz:

http://lacan.com/zizekrumsfeld.htm

"What Rumsfeld Doesn't Know He Knows about Abu Gharib"

HERE'S Pleasure-to-Duty Bound ...

Holy Shit!
(wonder how that one got started)
--gotta pray
individuality of dragenbot
intuiting today
i know it's my inferior function, Lord
C'est c'nya unn'rstan ?
these thine hysterical knots doth twist me
garters,
with 'arters (orders: symbolic, imaginary, real)
to play da man ... (wher'd these guys come from?)
***
1. The symbolic, imaginary, real are called "orders" --also, "registers", "forces/not mental forces". Do we know what they mean? - the analyst naively purrs.

2. "Yes," the answer is. "We understand them as signifiers of what is said in context about them. (stretch yourself, asshole)" - (Wittgensteinian trans.) -- OK. They are 'stages of logical development' as well as each being "a particular aspect of mental life."

3. The three-ringed knot grid-dynamics brings a sharp elucidation of the form without content -- thus, a transcendental apriori 'inerpretant' (in C.S. Pierce's clumsy but usable term) of the three "orders." (Kantian 'Schema')

4. An attempt to take it up to another formal level.
-- a 'clearing house' for relating whatever is communicated by sign-use (thanks for tokenspace!); assuming individual consciousness(es) with linked by common content in the paradigm situation. Reconstruction:

A. On the Textual side (objective real conditions)

Let " - /S*->" stand for the top of a triangle whose base is an imaginary line connecting two persons on either side of the Two-Way Nose Bridge:
( - /S*->)
) Y_______X (

paradigm communication situation of persons Y,X linked by S* ; " S*(X,Y) "

The "S*->" stands for the signifier as text; "->" stands for the mystical philosophical relation of "reference", connecting the symbolic and the imaginary to the real. (Trying to work here.) This (the text) is the common content; what 3 + 2 ='s whatever shape is given the number signs. So far, this only reconstructs what accounts for communication between two conscious standpoints Y and X.

5. On The Token side

The left-side is left open in the schema for whatever empirical sign is used as a fungible particular (token) for the text S*. To speak, write, draw, gesture, ('signing'), posture, gross body movement ... these 'I - N - G' -ings (see origin of Yngling, Futhark)" can be brought under partial control of consciousness to express its content if desired.

6. That said, and bundling, now want to address this wonder of elucidity, and I mean it:

"To express the mind/body split in such a way (which in Lacanian terms would be the relation between the imaginary and the symbolic order), one must name both terms and send a floater between them. (meme: I S IS ISIS) The split between the imaginary order (that of the body and desire) and the symbolic (aka tokenspace) can be introduced into thought only by allusion to the real, which is not symbolic or imaginary, but is that which radically resists both imagination and symbolic representation."

THAT'S thothic, or my name isn't Thoth. Teacher gets taught! ... but stay...


-- In the 7-Token type system I am constructing, the split between (what he calls) the symbolic and imaginary "orders" translates into representation by pictures (like mirrors -- lower reptile brain/amagdylan memory -- all token) and word - number (the sign representing something other than itself -- cortical brain/hippocampal memory-- neuronal gating between the two memory feed-back loops expl. irrational fears; why motility doesn't obey conscious desire, etc.). Pictures are learned early; reality clings to them. Pictures of ourselves, as body, flash on the inner screen -- glimpses of ourselves in a mirror; we know its us. The high school picture -- how we appear in audience to ourselves, from/through others becomes an inner, not an object, cathexis: libido turned back on consciousness through the body. "And if S/He loves me/it, I'm OK." (Thus the narcissized ego would be esentially reptilian.)

An entire system of motility-memory linked reactions become organized as the later symbolic data-base. The template of the reaction formations would be the pre-sublimated energy-upsurge through the spinal cord/chakras, collected as in the pool under the arms of the amygdala where neck and brain conjoin, discharged according to either unchecked outflow, or inhibited by rational (ego-reality) memory process "from above" ("don't drink the kool-aid even if you're thirsty").

This early world of infant/child is now (since 1970's) known to date from fetal origins, with built-in Birth-trauma complex material imprinted: Hero-ism, valorization, high anxiety signals, re-birth repetition compulsion, acted out in Wars by Groups whose individuals have not participated in rebirth as individuals. Jung used Levy-Bruhl's phrase "participation mystique" for the primitive, instinctual, less differentiated psychis attachment to the world. This is independent of the "mind/body split" as that gets discussed in the Freud - Lacan traditions; there is no pre-sexual undertone. Wundt, Brentano, Tichener, and the very influential German theologians Karl Barth and Emil Bruner all began from a version of 'participation mystique', as did Wm. James ("buzzing booming confusion" infant's world.). Heavy phenomenology R psychology. esp. German.

Words and numbers come to communicate later. Symbolic Pictures express inner feeling-fantasy content retained from earlier stages, textually projecting undifferentiated, archaic token templates.

The reality of the body is its location in three-dimensional space. It is this to which the constructions of the upper triad ( 7-theology, 6- philosophy, 5-existential (ego) token topes) refer, intra-psychically, through conscious continuity, unless allowed to be split-off.

This is extremely fragmented but there is a system, it doesn't have to all be repeated.
I want to separate the three interlocked rings for separate octave-cycles of S*-types, maybe moebiusizing them, before returning then to the pictured unity, and the "floating connector". Beautiful stuff.