Usually, I communicate by way of science. Today, I will do that, but I will begin by way of historical fiction. Then, you will understand my science. Today I will speak plainly, and hope you will read further. There is a paper I will recommend on the subject of “Re-Polarization Theory” and that, has the technical details, citations, and specifics. Perhaps I might temp you toward the main dish, with an appetizer. Today, I will speak plainly.
The ice age: Frigid and unhappy is man, huddled together and suffering, the gene pool restricted in a bottleneck of ice and cold, the human race is held fast to life by a thin thread. He is terrible and fearsome, the primal father is an ape most severe and potent, and he looks upon you. Toma is your name, and you are afraid. “Toma!” He grunts and shouts all at once, and you approach him. You have looked, looked upon her, and she is his. His fist slams into you, now spinning headlong to the ground, shattered in a pool of blood. Your eye, split and swollen. . . The kicks are delivered, and you feel sick, and then… nothing. Upon waking you know but one thing: you will never look at her again, you will never even think of it…never. This is the imprint, the imprint of the primal father. This is the kernel, the core, the threat, around which our modern personality and morality are formed. Threat…the threat of the father. It is this which we fear, and it is this which we obey.
You may wish to read the Freud, the twenty-four volumes and the recently published A Phylogenetic Fantasy, or the Dodds, The Greeks and the Irrational, to understand the theory and history to which I refer, and the laws which have been left in its wake. For this thing I say is true. If you do read those books, or take a moment to read the five part series entitled “Who Fired Prometheus” available on this site, and also at The Journal of Unconscious Psychology web archive, you will see our dear friend Toma was quite lucky to have gotten off so easily! Here, we see the phylogenetic core at the heart of modern man, his fear and his morality…his obedience. The father has formed us, and he is an engineer of sorts, a nuclear physicist of the psyche. His experiment is cruel and effective, he has divided the essence, divided the nucleus of the psyche, he has divided consciousness itself: separated consciousness away from the affects. The psychical nucleus has been split. We are the result, the result of his experiment: a psychical fission. Our affects are repressed, and so, we are moral. The lower brain structures, the limbic structures, the primitive periaqueductal grey and basal ganglia so deep within the mental system, all that delegates affect to define and create experience, the undifferentiated energy arising from the ascending activating system itself and all the affective circuitry which powers experience, does its job in the main from under repression, defining the world from hidden depths. In this systemic organization, conscious experience is defined, sublimated, from under repression. This is the paradigm of modern personality: sublimation by repression. Like fission, this system is unstable, dirty, toxic and inefficient, the affects and the mnemic impressions into which they are bound are split away from their rightful nuclear psychical substrate, consciousness. Once repressed the conditions which create neurosis and psychosis are formed, as symptom formation is a product of the return of the repressed to consciousness. The very structure itself makes nuclear waste, toxic affective valence, pain, of our most central aspect: the affects. Our affects, once repressed, are analogous to toxic nuclear waste, always threatening to pollute our consciousness with their unwanted intrusion, so as to create neurotic or psychotic symptoms. One can create energy to split things apart, but it is inefficient and toxic. The main of our mental economy spent and wasted, wasted as an isometric exercise, always spending energy to keep thoughts away from consciousness. Once split apart, our affects seem as poison to us, a pathologic psychical auto-immune response ensues, where the psyche mistakes itself for an invading contaminant, and attempts to “right” the situation by refusing itself. To keep one’s own thoughts away from one’s self––repression––it is this which is most modern. Psychical fission. The nucleus of the psyche is divided to create energetic definition of reality, and we find our affects are as toxic waste, our energies become a sort of “affective contamination” to be removed in repression.
As we examine the neuroanatomical and psychological alterations created in this psychical fission, we see the inculcation of shame, the threat and penalty of the father become introjected into super-ego, and shame becomes the real stuff: guilt. The result is the actuation of parasympathetic lateral circuitry associated with the limbic/orbitofrontal system, which cuts off libido, terminating energetic expression stemming from the sympathetic dopaminergic ventral limbic circuit [these sympathetic and parasympathetic circuits were discovered by Schore]. If you read my Prometheus paper, or better still, the Re-Polarization Theory: From Native Psychoanalysis to Sublimation––The Practical Reconstruction of Modern Personality paper, both available for download from the archive at: www.thejournalofunconsciouspsychology.com you will see the relationship between morality, which fosters obedience via threat, and hence is immoral, as compared to ethics, which are based upon empathy. The source of empathy, which is to be thought of as a sort of world identification stemming from the earliest interactions with the mother, created before the infant has fully distinguished the mother from itself and the world, is founded in the formative activity of the sympathetic circuit. This same functional connectivity and identification is terminated by the threat of introjected morality. Hence the proposition: morality is immoral, as it is unethical, based on threat and obedience, rather than empathy. No wonder we obey and go off to war, believing foolishly that we are moral, and even imagining, that God is on our side to begin killing. What strange sort of God is this which advises violence and immoral behavior? This is no God as we must imagine God: as an ethical being. (As an atheist my view is naturally somewhat different). The psychoanalytic idea of projection of the father onto the idea of God, makes the matter clear enough. This is the image we mistake for an immoral God. If we believe this is God, we have been fooled. We obey, and are moral, and hence, are unethical and cruel––unthinking and immoral is our obedience: our morality. How foolish is the modern man! His energies and intellect wasted keeping his most vital aspects, his affects, the very fuel for all thought and action––repressed, as if our height were our disgrace! To obey in fear, to repress our affects, to be dissociated from identification with the world, to be prone to neurosis and free of ethics: this is the result of modern personality based on sublimation by repression.
There is another paradigm for the construction of personality: sublimation by integration. Akin to the idea of fusion, sublimation by integration does away with the main instrument of repression: super-ego. Once this internal threat has been removed, the conditions for empathy are encouraged, and the sympathetic dopaminergic circuitry is activated in predominance. Authority itself becomes suspect, and obedience a non-issue, as one’s internal ethical compass becomes primary. All the world is created as a function of internal dynamism and symbolism, so, we can say, to remove this thing––super-ego–– is to change the world…entirely. Strength is creativity and lightness, authority, is laughable, ugly and unconvincing. Ethics never obey. Let us create a new world instead!
What if you could use your pain? What if what you thought was pain, was not, but was only energy which has been additively altered, its valence shifted from positive to negative? That is the case with the majority of our sexuality and other affects which have been paired with “reaction formations.” So you see, our pain, is only painful because we wish it so…or to be more accurate, because our super-ego wishes it. In fact, what seem to be toxic affects have been poisoned, and are nothing but energy, held in a fixated pathogenic form by the very guilt which keeps them under repression.
What if you could use everything? Rather than hold most of yourself away from yourself, what if you could release all of your affects, even your pain, and use it to DIRECTLY fuel experience and thought? You can. You can re-polarize your pain, and gut super-ego, to become––new. As fusion, the mind becomes super-efficient, all energy is used, and no waste remains to poison consciousness. Even traumatic events can have their memories altered, reconsolidated, and then, the energy used to create an entirely new world. Nothing is wasted! You can use…everything. Sublimation by integration creates a new sort of person––the emotive rationalist. It is a new paradigm for mankind, for us. I have spelled out the steps to accomplish this thing. Go to: www.thejournalofunconsciouspsychology.com and download Re-Polarization Theory: From Native Psychoanalysis to Sublimation––The Practical Reconstruction of Modern Personality from the papers archive. That is the specific technical picture. Today I will speak plainly. Here. . .I will show you:
One can not have the world, but, one can create it. All energies are pure. What I choose is my life, and the rest, becomes all of the universe. This…is hope.
From my book, Mind Map:
May our emotive rationalist see that the world is beautiful and perfect as he can imagine it, an inviting puzzle laden with every energy he does not become, his life invites him to interest and is graced with the fullness of his inner world as well as its outer reflections–his worlds become him and he becomes his worlds. The world is only a thought, a perception which may be made beautiful, as is our inner world just a thought, a perception which is subject to this same “rational magic,” and now the intellect too is energized and fueled to capacity, no longer starved of its fuel: emotion and every other sexual and primal energy. The mind and heart are full like a windsock in an airborne current of emotion, and the motion of feeling and the thought it powers are our happiness, so over-full, burgeoning and flush with the burden of such happiness that it must create, must spill over and become itself outside of itself, to see and become again and laugh in the moment of creation, a cackle to tease all weary things which have fled in this moment so cherished and double sweet, stolen from beneath the pouting lips of time herself. So does each moment present itself as a perfect prize, ripe and hued beyond description as a prism of our happiness. So should thought, the world of ideas and all ascending things call to every man.
If not every man, then perhaps for us?
This work is the sole property of the author, Rich Norman © 2010, 2013.