Dr. X's Free Associations

Language and Free Will

Novalis takes on the difficult subject of free will in a recent post:

So free will is located not in the brain, but "in" the group or human culture. What does this imply for the soul? I would argue that just as free will is not some kind of metaphysically magical legerdemain, the soul is not some kind of ethereal "stuff" existing separate from the brain. But the soul is not merely another name for the brain. Rather, the soul is massively distributed, consisting of vast networks of social and experiential contacts (another name for it would be "identity" or "the self").

My soul, like anyone's soul, does contain my irreducibly subjective experiences, but beyond that it entails every kind of relationship I have ever had, the work I have done, the influences I have taken in or given out. And crucially the soul has a history and a rationally supported system of values, both of which depend upon language. This is why animals, who presumably have moment-to-moment conscious subjectivity, do not have souls (that doesn't mean we should eat them though). Infants do not begin to develop a soul until language acquisition begins, and arguably the severely demented have largely lost their souls.

Language acquisition is at the heart of the alternative.  Language and its related cognitive functions transport us from here and now perception, to the world of not me, not here and not now.  If free will is more than an illusion, I can't imagine how it could exist without awareness of alternatives to the immediately perceived.  And if free will is an illusion, it is the awareness of alternatives that makes the illusion possible.

Does Modern Psychology Neglect Guilt?

While searching for papers on the subject of guilt among children who have experienced the death of a sibling, I ran across a provocative article by Donald Carveth.  Carveth offers a psychological post mortem of Harry Guntrip, a theorist who was part of the trend away from conflict-based explanations for symptoms. 

Carveth speculates that Guntrip's unconscious evasion of guilt over the death of a sibling during childhood significantly influenced his theoretical position as an adult.  In other words, Guntrip's views were defensive in nature.

I'm agnostic on the question of Guntrip's motivation, but the speculation is quite interesting.  The entire Carveth article is posted online.  Here's the abstract and first paragraph:

A major contributor to the de-moralizing trend in post-Freudian and post-Kleinian psychoanalysis is Harry Guntrip. The guilt evasion that characterizes certain trends within contemporary psychoanalytic thought and the contemporary culture to which they have adapted mirrors that of Guntrip himself. Despite his background as a Christian minister and his years of analysis with two of the most creative analysts in the field, Guntrip managed by the end (in my hypothesis) only a paranoid understanding of himself as a victim of a murderous mother, rather than a man crippled by a need to punish himself for his disowned murderous wishes toward a brother who died and toward the mother he hated and blamed. In focusing upon the roots of the “schizoid problem” or the “disordered self” in defective early objectrelations, Guntrip obscured entirely the role of guilt and the need for punishment in these conditions and promoted a cure based on reparative reparenting rather than analysis and resolution of inner conflict.

It is now over three decades since Menninger (1973) asked Whatever Became of Sin? In so doing he drew attention to a de-moralizing trend in psychiatry and psychoanalysis mirroring that of the wider culture. Increasingly, it seems, we have come to reject Cassius’s conviction that “the fault … lies not in our stars, but in ourselves” (Julius Caesar, I, ii) in favor of that proto-narcissist Lear’s protestation that we are “more sinned against than sinning” (King Lear, III, ii). Such de-moralization, such guilt evasion, is only to be expected in what Lasch (1979) called our “culture of narcissism.” A preoccupation with our grandiosity or inferiority, or both, is characteristic of the paranoid-schizoid position (Klein, 1946) where splitting (idealization/devaluation) reigns. But self-obsession, of either form, precludes genuine concern for the other. While viewing the self as all-good obviously prevents any admission of wrongdoing, a sweeping judgment of the self as all-bad entails an obvious distortion that removes any realistic focus upon the particular sins of which we may be guilty.

Though not central to the discussion, Carveth's comment on Guntrip's religious background is also interesting.  A former supervisor of mine once offered the observation that religious and ethnic background has a great deal to do with preferred theoretical orientation.  My former supervisor is a Jewish psychoanalyst.  His comment was that "Jews do guilt better than Christians."  At the time, I saw some truth in his statement, but I wonder if American cultural homogenization has been rendering his observation obsolete.  And, if Carveth is correct, increased cultural narcissism is giving guilt a bad name both in popular culture and in psychology.

Vintage Photos: 1908

Gastonia, North Carolina (photo by Lewis Wickes Hine).

Spinners. Smallest girl - Pearlie Turner, 408 East Long Ave. Been at it 3 years and runs six and seven sides. Her Sister (largest girl) runs only four sides. I found other cases where youngest sister did much more work than oldest and family stimulated her by praising her speed and the other's slowness. -- Lewis Wickes Hine

Narcissism and Difficulty Apologizing

Recently we've seen a couple of false blogger-promoted stories that were quite damaging to innocent parties.  The falsehoods promoted weren't trivial reporting errors.  They were errors that turned innocent people into despicable villains.  After the stories were exposed as false, a number of bloggers admirably apologized for their errors while others maintained that they felt no need to apologize because their mistakes were "honest."  I was reminded once again of McWilliams and Lependorf's article on the narcissistic denial of gratitude and remorse:  

Narcissistically driven people do not seem to understand that saying one is sorry represents an expression of empathy with the injured party irrespective of whether the hurt was intentional or avoidable. The woman who is kept waiting and worrying when her husband is late coming home will feel immediately forgiving if he expresses genuine sorrow that she has suffered on his account. In narcissistically defensive states, however, people seem to go by the general rule that such expressions of sympathy and regret are called for only if they were "at fault" in some way. Thus, the tardy husband meets his wife's anxious greeting with, "It wasn't my fault; there was a traffic jam," communicating not remorse but resentment of her distress and rejection of its validity.

The organizing, overriding issue for people with narcissistic preoccupations is the preservation of their internal sense of self-cohesiveness or self-approval, not the quality of their relations with other people. As a result, when they feel their imperfections have been exposed, the pressing question for them is the repair of their inner self-concept, not the mending of the feelings of those in their external world (cf. Stolorow's [1979b] definitions of narcissism). They are consequently likely, in a state of defensiveness about exposed faults, to protest that they meant to do the right thing, as if the purity of their inner state is the pertinent issue - to others as well as to themselves.

I would add one clarification: knowing that a harmful act was unintentional usually does matter to the injured party.  Deliberately stomping on someone's toe is going to be taken by the victim as a far worse offense than accidentally stepping on their toe.  But in either case, an apology is in order.  Narcissistically defensive people step on toes without apologizing for the pain they cause.  They aren't concerned about the suffering of the injured person; their only concern is that they remain blameless.

What Does Fat Mean?

Cheryl Fuller is continuing a thought-provoking discussion of the social and psychological dimensions of obesity.  In her most recent post, she shares her thoughts on the difficult question of how we think about fat as a  symptom.

In a previous post on this subject, Dr. Fuller touches on the scapegoating of fat, and offers a wonderful quote from George McGrath Callan:

To cast or project blame is to protect ourselves from our own shadow. We stand in the place of righteousness, and fail to acknowledge those aspects of ourselves hidden in our own shadow. The scapegoating of another person or group allows us to feel guiltless, atoned. It inoculates us against blame. Now unburdened, we can turn to our ego ideal and reestablish our place among the chosen. We are then free to place goodness in one corner (ours) and malevolence in another. Only when we catch ourselves stepping into a righteous, one-sided stance are we in a position to begin to observe our own shadow. This is a very painful thing to do. Why would we do this? Because what we keep in the shadows, in a place of forgetfulness, turns to symptom. A symptom is an untended memory. It is the voice of a forgotten or banished part of ourselves… Memory is the medicine of the psyche - even, and especially when the memories are dark.

Early Motion Picture Color Film Test: 1922

Thanks to commenter logerp.

Vintage Photos: 1941

Greene County, Georgia. Photo by Jack Delano.

A prisoner dancing while another plays the guitar at a prison camp.

What do you get when you delete the FucM gene?

Isn't the answer obvious?  Neurophilosophy writes:

Researchers create 'lesbian' mice by deleting a single gene

DELETION of a single gene switches the sexual orientation of female mice, causing them to engage in sexual behaviour that is typical of males. Korean researchers found that deleting the appropriately named FucM gene, which encodes an enzyme called fucose mutarotase, causes masculinization of the mouse brain, so that female mice lacking the gene avoid the advances of males and try to mate with other females instead. The findings probably have little relevance to human sexual orientation, however.

Imagining Thought Without Language

In a fascinating post, Greg Downey writes about author Susan Schaller's work with a profoundly deaf man who had no language:

The man she would call, ‘Ildefonso,’ had figured out how to survive, in part by simply copying those around him, but he had no idea what language was. Schaller found that he observed people’s lips and mouth moving, unaware that they were making sound, unaware that there was sound, trying to figure out what was happening from the movements of the mouths. She felt that he was frustrated because he thought everyone else could figure things out from looking at each others’ moving mouths.

Chicago Suburb Mulls Criminalization of Eye-rolling

This isn't an Onion story.  It's a story in the Chicago Tribune and Elmhurst is a real Chicago suburb.

Elmhurst considers violation for eye-rolling.