Rehabilitating the electronic butterfly

Electronic socializing has become the craze recently. Boundaries are defined by the medium of communication being used. There is no obligation to answer and participation in every discussion is entirely the choice of the individual. In essence, control is what is given to the electronic butterfly. In any human interaction there are a number of ways that a person can interact in a negative way. We can look at it in terms of on-off phenomenon, for example, lack off or presence of endorphins. In reality to think about the whole range of possibilities in the neurotransmitter/receptor analogy, we would have to consider degrees of "off" and "on" (antagonist, agonist, partial antagonist, partial agonist, inverse agonist, inverse antagonist).
But in a black and white world, a world of ideals, a world of extremes, a positive feeling will lead the electronic butterfly to drone around the electronic interactions more so than the actual interactions. In the same world, the human or the actual interactions are giving a certain negative feeling to such an individual. The morale is not protected. Morale can take a hit in an interaction when invasion, judgment or deception take place.
A person who by Horney's construct "goes with the people", is an anxious person who lives in a dangerous world where control is a luxury. Anxiety and the need for control go hand in hand. This butterfly when laying its eggs, wants to control any invasion, judgment or deception. The barrier, alter persona and freedom to move is granted by the electronic socialization.
The same answer would be invaluable to the same person outside of the world of electronics. Utility of these principles is one of the arm of social skills training.

The archetype and the meta archetype

As a dear friend recently pointed out a debate that I thought was long gone dead. It was concerning how the sexual roles are basically archetypes. The archetype of a woman is a role defined by the culture. The yearnings, inhibitions and gross cognitive processes would generally be the same cross culturally. Ofcourse not in little details but little details prove the system rather than working against it.
Developmental of psychological apparatus and all such hypotheses are based on an archetype individual. An individual which is present in the world of "idea". Such an individual would do what is the "nature of man".
This main archetype is then divided into atleast two more archetypes, if not more. That of the man and the woman, Adam and Eve, Yin and Yang. These two are then further sub divided depending on conflicts that any of these two archetypes go through for example the archetype of the little girl, the archetype of the teenage girl, the archetype of the fertile woman, the archetype of the mother etc etc.
Talking about archetypes should be facilitated if the word meta and sub is introduced in to the archetype referring to the archetypal classification above or below it.

The spectrum of neuroses

Neuroses as defined by conflicts can be normal in a person during a period in which decisions are required. When the choice is needed between two different paths. They become a problem sometimes though. Horney describes the following characteristics of neuroses which tend to become a problem.
-They are incompatible with each other. Both alternatives to a decision are avoided.
-If looking at them spatially a normal conflict will be 90 degrees to each other where as a neurotic conflict will be 360 degrees to each other.
-A conflict will have both alternatives that can be valued but in a neurotic conflict both alternatives will be abhorred.
-If any conflict plays itself on two poles, the two poles will be more polarized in a neurotic conflict.
-The stakes will be higher when a neurotic conflict is concerned.

Balint describes the malignant and the benign fault. It almost sounds like that is what Horney observed. Balint however put the causes of the fault as development of an individual. A fault in the preverbal stage caused a malignant fault which caused the organism not being able to conceptualize the conflict in words.

It would seem that Horney and Balint talk about swinging on a pendulum which seems to address two different dimensions in two different planes.

Dreams

Shani says:
"I say dreams are a mechanism of the mind to test any changes it makes to the model of the world (in our head), while we sleep.Say i watch a documentary on snakes. I already have a section on snakes in my head (part of the model of the world around me) that has all the 'relevant' information i have collected on snakes so far. Owing to what happend during the day, while i lay in bed and sleep, my mind goes to work to extract the new data (or extent of emphasis on old data/rules), and then wants to suppliment the old notion of snakes with the new data ... as it does that it needs to verify whether that change is good, i.e. wouldn't lead to me say getting bit by a snake cuz i stepped on it. So to verify, the mind creates a drama and lets my updated model react to it, i might see myself in a jungle and then a snake and the mind carefully monitors my reaction to it ... if everythign goes smooth, good, if not then maybe the changes weren't quite right ... "

I say:
"I think there is the biological and then there is the psychological function of dreams. It is not clear whether the dreams play a homeostatic role in our lives, meaning that they create the balance, re orient us and bring us to the center of our biological or our psychological lives.

I think you are right about dream being the censor for the change that occurs in our minds. I would though want to extend it by saying that introducing snake as a data in the mind means introducing various things in the mind. I would liken it to the mind going over the translation of the world that it did in the day time. I would think that is what you mean by going over the data.
The translation though would be a tricky thing because that would mean what is the data that the mind sees.
If I were wearing red spectacles I would interpret all data about colors as various shades of red. So it is interesting how the mind interprets the new data. In gross terms new data is interpreted, associated and then stored.
In the example of the snake. You dreamed about the snake. Your interpretation of the snake, i would think is a very biological phenomenon which involves integration of the lines and the colors and then naming it by comparing it to past experiences. The comparing part starts to spill over in to the psychological realm. Now when you compare it, the emotional significance of the snake will be brought forth. Freud felt that unconscious mind or the dreaming mind is involved with primary thinking. Thinking that would use primitive patterns of reaching conclusions. (See level I and level II defences). There are some bizarre explanations for a snake incidentally. Snake has been interpreted as a phallic symbol and the explanation is that the mind while associating it might recall a similar emotion (the one that the person might have felt on seeing a snake) associated with a similar form. Ofcourse there is a lot of "static" also going on in terms of defences and the resulting situation is bizarre dreams which need to be interpreted.

Prigogine: the end of certainty

In his book, the end of certainty, Prigogine talks about irreversibility as a possibility. This is something that people have neglected when putting forward laws that describe how nature operates. He calls many laws deterministic in nature, in that, they can be bidirectional with respect to time. He however says that this bidirectional time is a very narrow minded view. It only takes into consideration the isolated experimental subjects and considers them free of the multiple other factors that are impacting on them.

I was involved with a functional behavioral analysis of a child with disruptive behaviors. In a functional behavioral analysis one tries to determine the antecedents that cause the behaviors and the consequences that either enforce or extinguish the behaviors. A hypothesis of the whole situation is made and that hypothesis is tested out. The parents are then given strategies to manage the behaviors from the hypotheses. The proof that those strategies work has been shown to the parents during the testing phase. Hypothesis like "the child can go to a non preferred activity if he knows that it is time limited and if it is followed by a preferred activity", is an example.

This kind of analysis of behaviors is fine if a behavior is only considered to be present and influenced by a limited number of antecedents and consequences. But the truth of the matter is that the true antecedents to a behavior are multiple and have a propensity to be unknown. Freud believed the majority of the decisions that a person was making were unconscious. When dealing with these many possibilities of environmental and psychological variability, it is essential not to "over simplify" or "over complicate"things to the point that incredulous demands be made of patients in "treatment".

Prigogine talks about phase space which would be very applicable to the scenario of the disruptive child. All the different possible behaviors of the child are represented in that phase space. Prigogine also talks about stable (determinism) and unstable (chaotic) equilibrium and details characteristics of those systems.

A beautiful example he uses is of Poincare who proved that dynamical systems are non integrable. An integrable system would be a static deterministic world without the possibility of freedom. Non integrability results from existence of resonances between degrees of freedom. What we have done with behavioral analysis is to put on deterministic glasses and translated the multi factorial world into a lesser dimension. The city of Oz was not really green.

Prigogine also talks about prevalent energies in a system. How potential energy is maximum in a state of equilibrium and free energy is at minimum in a state of equilibrium. Increasing energy in a system also increased the areas of randomness in it. He describes creativity as an irreversible phenomenon which has been associated with complexity. Any system in non equilibrium can spontaneously evolve in to increased complexity and any system in non equilibrium can lead to irreversible phenomenon, hence creation.

With this he comes full circle to creation as an irreversible process which creates a system of equilibrium for itself till of course it is pushed into non equilibrium again. It will get pushed into non equilibrium.

From this we glimpse a view of a world which is constantly oscillating in between equilibrium and non equilibrium. A world which is constantly changing due to chaos, organizing and disorganizing itself. And caught in the center is man who attempts to act like the universe, organizing and then disorganizing whatever it comes across. Creating and then uncreating. Cooking and then digesting. Being born and then dying.

Jungian archetypes in media

In a conversation today, I realized how the theory of Jungian archetypes has an association with the recent trend of going behind the mask of the superhero. In Hollywood movies the trend has turned from the behaviors of the superheroes to the motivations behind them. In all past cultures this has come at a certain point in their respective civilizations. The stories attributed to the gods are present in greek, roman, egyptian, hindu and virtually any civilizations. When religion clamped down on the muslim culture the stories about the life of mystics and pirs was born. It almost points to an innate need of a civilization to have stories about the ideals. As if the masses are trying to express their conflicts in the idealized figures that they try to emulate. This primordial need is manifesting itself in the the movies of the present also.
Batman from the times of George Clooney and Kilmer has suddenly a different mood now. Superman was explored in more detail in Smallville. Spiderman has definitely become more introspective. Star wars had to explore the origins of the dark side.
The point to notice is that the creators of all these characters had invented their past when they were brought to life initially. Spiderman's conflicts about being Parker and avenging the death of his grandfather are not new. Neither is Clark's search for his home land and the isolation that he feels new. But they were limited by the spread of the comic media. Now it is as if the whole world is re discovering these archetypes as the media reaches out to them.
There is ofcourse a finite amount of media or the interpretation of media that can be incorporated in an individual's mind. That amount of finite data, has a comprehensible number if we apply the bell curve to the human population. Neuropsychology shows us that all new information has to be interpreted, associated and then remembered. Hence within that bell curve there is all sorts of different combinations that exist. Some person might comprise his "moral good" as an expression of batman and superman, another might have a different combination. The result is a pallette of different colors that portray the internal unconscious life of an individual. Twinship to different archetypes as well as parental/environmental mirroring might also play an important part in selection of the colors that go to make a pallette.
A point to note is that people who do not watch movies are not necessarily bereft of this archetypal life. They just reach out and grab onto the archetypes that have been passed down from other sources like religion or ancestary.
Retelling stories and understanding them from different perspectives an important part of the human dillemma. Something that will continue in its myriad variations.

Psychic trauma in children: review of an article

AM J Psychiatry 138:1 January 1981 by Lenore C. Terr, M.D.

Background:
This article discusses the response to psychic trauma in children who were exposed to the kidnapping in Chowchilla.
The story of the kidnapping goes something like this: July 1976, 26 children (5-14 year) disappeared for 27 hours and they eventually escaped their captors. The school bus had been stopped by a van blocking the road and masked men had taken over the bus at gun point. The children were transferred to boarded over vans in which they were driven for 11 hours and then transferred into a "hole" (actually a buried truck trailer). The kidnappers covered the truck-trailer with earth. The children were buried for 16 hours until two of the oldest and the strongest boys 14 and 10 dug them out. By then the kidnappers had left the vicinity.

Methods:
The children were interviewed by the author and one or both of the parents had also been interviewed. The school bus driver and the kidnappers were not interviewed. This interview took place between 5-13 months.

Notes:
Initial signs of traumatic disruption (the breach of the ego):
-Omens: Children tend to associate things that happened before the incident and related that as the causal factor of why they were kidnapped.
-Fear of further trauma: Traumatophobia. (am I going to be killed?)
-Disturbances in cognition: During trauma disturbance in cognitive function such as perception, time sense and thought.

Repetitive phenomena (Repetition compulsion):
-Traumatic dreams: 1)terror dreams 2)exact repetition of kidnapped events 3)modified repetitions of kidnapping events 4)deeply disguised dreams
-Post traumatic play
-Reenactment: Direct reenactments of attitudes, fears or actions that have occurred before or after the kidnapping.
-Absence of flashbacks: Adolescents exhibited "voluntary" visions in contrast to the involuntary intrusive thoughts that adults have. Children younger than 9 did not complain of having visions. The ability to day dream develops after 9 and that might be the reason why children below 9 did not have flash backs.

Fears: (Kidnap related fears)
-All children had kidnapping related fears.

Personal Commentary:
Note that the DSM required criteria of a distressing event, re experience, avoidance and increased arousal are necessary for PTSD. Children in this incident also displayed re experience (exeplified by the repetitive phenomena), avoidance (is an end point of multiple psychological factors including omens and fears) and hyperarousal (exemplified by fears) .

The paranoid dynamic and mindfulness

Paranoia consists of individuals projecting on to other objects their unconscious desires or motives. There is a certain amount of a paranoia existent in every individual and there are a good number of people who have more of this trait than other people. According to the DSM-IV-TR, between 0.5% and 2.5% of the general population of the United States may have PPD, while 2%–10% of outpatients receiving psychiatric care may be affected. A significant percentage of institutionalized psychiatric patients, between 10% and 30%, might have symptoms that qualify for PPD.

Paranoia is sometimes used to cope with intra-psychic conflicts. When used like that it is called a defence in classical pshychoanalytical literature. For example lets consider a person who does not like a certain sweater and wants to destroy it while it is hanging on display in the shop. For the sake of appropriateness he will inhibit that impulse and by inhibition will give rise to an intrapsychic conflict. This conflict will become more and more strong as the impulses to destroy this sweater increase because of the opposite tendency which is in harmony with not doing anything inappropriate while looking at sweaters in the shop. Now let us consider the shop manager who to help out this person looking at sweaters in the shop comes over and starts hovering around. This person who has been thinking of destroying the sweater will project on to the manager. Now he will feel persecuted by the manager and feel that the manager is expecting him to destroy the sweater and that is why he is hovering around him. This will lead to paranoia on the part of the person who is browsing the sweater line up in the sweater shop.
If people use this defence exclusively it results in a certain type of a personality called the paranoid personality disorder. People described as having a Paranoid personality employ other defences also but we are foucsing on the paranoid dynamic.

In clinical situations it is proscribed that dealings with these individuals should be follow certain rules.

-It is important to hide as little as possible from these individuals. This transparency should include note taking; details of administrative tasks concerning the individual; correspondence; and medications.

-Individuals with paranoid tendencies often don't have a well-developed sense of humor; those who must interact with people with PPD probably should not make jokes in their presence. Attempts at humor may seem like ridicule to people who feel so easily threatened.

-Asking about an individual's past can undermine the treatment of PPD people. Concentrating on the specific issues that are troubling the patient with PPD is usually the wisest course.

-The paranoid thought should not be challenged too directly.

The basic proscription is because of the following dynamic. The paranoid dynamic vascillates in between two extremes. The model of the two extremes is useful for a number of dynamics and the etiology of defences (from Level I to Level IV), Gustafson has called these extremes the near-far dilemma. On one hand is the threat to be engulfed in the closeness which is too uncomfortable and on the other hand is the distance which threatens total isolation and loss of touch from reality.

So with a health care provider there is a dance which the paranoid person engages in. If the clinician is not quick on his/her toes they can soon find themselves out of rhythm with the interview. The above general rules serve well but it is to be kept in mind that rules are made for people and not vice versa.

"The unfettered mind" which is taught in everyday mindfulness is needed in many things including dealing with this trait/defense/jinn described above.

A Dream Triptych about Gustafson

I have had the luck and the fortune to learn from Dr Gustafson. The following dream triptych I believe describes a journey which is defined by the first dream and ends with the last dream.

ACT I:


As a part of residency training in our program we were required to have one hour per week of general psychiatry supervision and one hour per week of psychotherapy supervision. In the third year I had requested Dr Gustafson as a supervisor. The following dream marked that time.















Dream notes:
The dream is set in Silent Hill universe. It was in the film adaptation of silent hill. It was primarily focused on the siren which signaled the transition into the alternate universe. Dr Gustason had started recently writing his book The Great Instrument of Orientation.

Dream:
Throughout the dream, I was exploring a very strange house. I had the feeling constantly that we had to get out before the universe changed into the dark one. With me was Dr Gustafson and there was the siren which scared me and gave a desperate longing and spurred a frantic struggle to get out of the house. My guide was Dr Gustafson and together through various rooms we made our way. We had pistols and we killed several monsters in the process of trying to fight our way out.

Interpretation:
Dealing with psychiatric patients is a tricky business.

ACT II:






Dream notes:
This dream was set in the painting of the last supper. Instead of JC I had a condensed figure in it. By this time I was roughly half way through the supervision with Dr Gustafson. I had already seen him transform his everyday life encounters into words and pen them down. The rigorous discipline which came to him like breathing (inspiration and expiration). I had by this time asked myself the big question of why life was going in and out of silent hill psychosis.
Also of note all pulmonologic diseases are divided into those dealing with inspiration(restrictive) and those deal with expiration(obstructive)
(Thanks to Darkdiscordia)



Dream:
The main figure was that of Jesus who was not Jesus but a condensed figure that I had created by combining a Pulmonology attending that I once met and Dr Gustafson. The Pulmonology attending I described next day to Dr Gustafson as "a show off who was very capable but liked showing off to his students". I was asking the savior about a Pulmonologic illness that I was suffering from and the condensed figure of the savior looked at me and said to me, "the problem with you is not in the expiration but in the inspiration."

Interpretation:
Inspiration can be difficult when the organism is threatened with expiration at every instance.


ACT III:



Dream notes:
The third and the last of the Triptych, I had the night that I received news that Dr Gustafson had published his book. All through the dream instead of seeing that book, I was thinking about Eckhart Tolle and A New Earth.

Dream:
I was going around a table of people who were studiously writing about something. Each had their own book and I was going around trying to make out the book that each person had with them. Suddenly I stopped because I saw a new book by Eckhart Tolle. I knew he had not written a new book after A New Earth. Not wanting to interrupt the person who was working with this new book, I took great pains to glance at the cover about this new book.

Interpretation:
Dr Gustafson writes about the dream "The dream could be taken several different ways, of course: one is that the new author is yourself, which seems to be exciting in finding your own center; another that you are getting pulled into someone else's center."

All the rivers of psychodynamic therapy combine

I hold to the belief of all therapy having one common theme to it. There is one expectation from therapy and that is too work. And sometimes not to work but do the least bit of damage. To explain all the intricate manifestation of human behavior, all theories come fairly close to each other. Yes they differ also on some key elements but then again if a therapist cannot practice being all inclusive, he or she runs the danger of trying to see everything in the world as all squares or as all circles.
The discussion of Beck about modes of cognition which exist in our minds and how they become activated through cognitive reactivity brings back some memories of archetypes that Jung talks about.
My psychotherapy supervisor, who i just started with believes in thinking in psycho dynamic terms but making plans keeping in mind behavioral or interpersonal principles. I found his approach as somewhat unique. He believes that initially the problem needs to clarified. One should be clear whether one is dealing with problem of libidinal drives, problem of function of the ego (like reality testing, impulse control etc), problem with how the person perceives the world around it or how the person recognizes itself. By this he is combining all the schools of psycho dynamics and giving each of them a place to help formulate each case.
The four schools broadly being drive theory, self psychology, object relations and ego psychology.

I think every good therapist tries to unite all these things in the mind and clinical practice. It is informative trying to see what every one's picture of unity looks like.

My previous psychotherapy supervisor who is a man held in awe by many including myself, was a minimalist. He was the king of brevity. Actually still is. He saw all therapy and condensed it into the very basic rudimentary dynamic. On those basic framework of dynamics he would plan the clinical dance to take some very interesting forms.