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As any empirical science, psychology is constructed from experience, here limited to self-experience. Therefore, it is good to stress the basic experiences from which this science has been elaborated.
As an individual may not be able to integrate an enormous amount of experience, even the most fundamental experiences, one has to rely to some extent on the exchange of information to build a coherent theory of the psychic phenomena. As one cannot share the experience of the other, even if its discourse is really heard, at least, part of the information of the others cannot be integrated into one's psyche. The psycho-scientist having the greater range of integrated experience is thus likely to have the more realistic and the more coherent model, this in accordance with the extension principle.
Beyond the controversies of the definitions of the 'ego', the 'self', the 'I' and the 'personality', there is an obvious fundamental experience that we experiences ourselves. Implying that there is at least an I and an experience of this I.
At any moment, I am experiencing a field of feelings. So there is a field of feelings and a centre to this field where this experience is conveyed. An absence of feeling, which is common in many disorders, is the experience of the absence of something, one may not be aware of, of course. Then the field is void. Following the process principle, we may state that
I am but the experiencing of the field of sensations of the moment.
Therapeutic experience shows that thoughts are either the ultimate ripples of the immense motions taking place in us, or constructs to avoid confronting these motions (i.e. a 'negative' product of these motions). In this respect, thinking is a too partial phenomenon to define the I or the self or the personality. Thoughts may be more or less identified to the conscious personality. There are also a number of experiences of experimental psychology showing that feeling and reacting come before thinking.
This fundamental experience of the quasi-identity of the I with the process of experiencing the field of sensations is called the primacy of sensations. One may be aware that it is in contradiction with the cartesian postulate of the primacy of thinking which does not take into account the prime experience of unconsciousness and of thinking as an avoidance process.
A step further may be to identify the I with the process of experiencing a body, sensations and everything else, for instance the direct transfer of foreign information into one's awareness.
I am but the experiencing of all my body field.
[In some border states, one may also produce real body sensations, showing the power of mental constructs, emotions of the past, and suggestion, in creating unreal information (real for the psyche but not produced by an external source). The converse is also true that one can erase sensations from inner motivation. We put these cases as a particular experience of the I having a definite meaning.]
If one wishes, one can distinguish 'I' from 'self' and from 'myself', and also from 'ego', depending of what we refer to: body, field of conscious experience, field of unconscious experience, what I think of myself, what I produce of myself, etc. There are many theories of the ego (conscious and unconscious) following freudian lines, and some theories of the self following phenomenological lines. There is an interesting theory of the archetypes of the ego (persona) and the self (centre of the psyche) in the jungian approach. Jacques Lacan distinguishes the subject of the unconscious and the subject of the discourse (being here in the cartesian paradigm: the I being identified with thinking).
The second basic process we are confronted to is that of unconsciousness, i.e. not knowing what is the case. For instance, we do not know our birth. Or we do not know that our social lives prepares war. Or we do not know that the normal 'good acts' we do on our children makes them schizophrenics. Even when confronted with the facts, we may persist in telling the contrary, like: "taking black people from Africa to the Caribbean is good for them". A man arrested for having killed a policeman, few hours later, suddenly shouted: "Oh! God! What I have done!" showing that he did not know it before this time. This almost incredible process of delusion is so common that most of us deny it altogether. Denying the unconscious is the root of unconsciousness and the base of all cartesian thinking. For instance, if one suffers from an isolation of his body, which excludes feeling, one has no 'body', and therefore has no experience of what it is like to 'have a body', and therefore the world of those who have a body and experience feelings does not exist for it.
The experience of the unconscious is gained from unfolding it and retrieving processes which have been silented, which usually takes a procedure of revelation of some sort (we may call it 'therapy' for short). The so-called 'unconscious' is thus had only after it is revealed and made conscious: unconsciousness is therefore a fact of the past. It is but a concept to designate the process of revelation. The tendency to become more conscious leads to the fact that in the past we were in some way unaware of some events.
However, there is a more absolute kind of unconsciousness as we show in another page. In the autistic and psychotic types of disorders, there is no 'author' for certain facts which are therefore not recognised by the psyche. There is no subject to own some sets of events, which then are foreign to the psyche itself while having been produced by it. Furthermore, some major events, archaic traumas, are 'encysted' (encapsulated) so as to be completely amnesied and out of access.
Therapy largely shows that the bulk of our unconscious material, facts or events, are but events of our past, and especially of our pre-verbal infancy. This is due to self-protective procedures reinforced by a social procedure which makes us focus on our mental productions instead of our body. As the memory of that period is body-recorded, our interest for the mental field makes soon the body field and its memory inaccessible.
Furthermore, therapy reveals that unconsciousness is actively produced by avoidance and repression schemes, that is by active procedures taking a considerable amount of focusing, intensity and energy. This very procedure is constantly active to blot out the past, and thus distorts at the same time the inputs of the external world in the present and makes it unknown to us in its actuality.
We therefore come to three proposals for clarifying this unconsciousness procedure:
Unconsciousness is the concept used to designate the past state in the process of revelation of the facts up to now unknown to us.
What is made unconscious is mainly our archaic past. The activity which puts our past out of awareness at the same time puts actuality at distance.
Unconsciousness is relative since it can be levied by the process of revelation. It is of a more absolute nature in psychosis where past events are amnesied and do not betray in usual life.
The main processes by which unconsciousness is produced are emergency procedures having had to be used in infancy or results of trauma due to the mishandling by adults:
Self-subtraction of the vitality from segments of the body, or from the whole body, thus suppressing sensations, pain, fear, and the reactions they entrain. In some types of autistic cases, vitality has not even been triggered at birth or had been destroyed very early by the persons surrounding the infant.
Desensitising the feeling process is also current, either at the many levels of its path, or worse at the level of the sense organs themselves: kinestesic, hearing, vision, can be numbed or distorted, and especially the body-perception which needs a reactive body to function. The latter is desensitised by cutting vitality, by repression, or by isolation of the body.
One general procedure for producing unconsciousness is to label the facts by words which do not convey their real meaning. Thoughts and words are roughly equal to conscious, and not in the field of thought roughly equal to unconscious. Therefore, sticking acceptable words on unacceptable behaviour, or on unacceptable inner events, creates a distance with the real meaning of those events.
For instance, 'good education' can be used to mean a process of destruction of the individuality by conditioning; 'normal birth' often refers to a birth where the neonate is separated from the mother thus creating a potential psychosis. The procedure of disguising not acknowledgeable truth in the view of self-interests is widely used and the result of severe early mistreatment.
Another procedure widely known is that of subtracting the significance from a fact or an attitude. The fact is then neutralised and blotted out of consciousness and thence does not exist anymore. An example of this is the famous "I did not killed anyone, I simply obeyed the orders".
Confrontation with certain facts or certain meanings will normally produce doubts, at least, or shocks, at most, in our organisation. To avoid this, we use many ways to live as far as possible from the situations where our inner truth and the disturbing 'truth' of the world may be revealed. Then, the world of events which are carefully and actively left aside is deemed not to exist, and really does not exist in our awareness field, a process called also denial and sometimes scotomy.
Repression of the resurgence of unwanted material from the past or from actual meaning is the refrain of the reaction to it. It uses muscular tensions to achieve the goal of not reacting. These muscular tensions become soon quasi-permanent and may be helped by forbidding mental procedures. These tensions greatly reduce the sensitivity of the individual and produces distance with the actual. Furthermore, the effort it takes need also interpretations and produce distortions of meaning and blindness of the actual.
Many other procedures leading or maintaining unconsciousness exist. They have been catalogued in the early days of psychoanalysis as 'defences' or defences'.
Whatever the effort, either to repress unwanted material, or to produce socially accepted behaviour, or to avoid painful situations, or to erase or distort meaning from facts, the non perceivable strong motions inside us produce acts, situations and sometimes words which reflect them.
In the thought and word plane, which is the more controlled to the occidental, we tend to create a discourse according to what is acceptable by ourselves and especially by the others. Therefore, little of what is the case appears in the language.
In the acts plane, much more appear whithout notice: one may beat children for example and feel safe and 'normal' at the same time. This strange fact is due to our very strong emphasis on words instead of acts: acts are thus not deemed to be a display of our inner motives. The effort to believe in what we say and label it 'true' is a procedure of dissociation from our acts and our responsibility. For instance, making war or preparing war is but the search for a release of inner tensions, the meaning of which is the necessity to kill, a standard pattern of mistreated neonates. So is slavery, and so is the economic exploitation of the populations. However, it will be worded otherwise and it is the words which are going to be taken as 'true' leaving the acts neutralised by normalisation.
One is regularly surprised to discover while in therapy how our acts are self-expressive of our heretofore unconscious inner movements. However, they also show in a definite order of emergence depending of the possibility of manifestation given by the environment. It is to be recalled that we are completely active in generating the conditions where this expression is possible: it is the creation of these conditions which betrays most the patterns our unconscious seeks to unfold. This is true also of avoidance schemes which only point to a domain we deliberately reject.
In the context plane, whether professional, familial or social, we are constantly looking for situations where the release of unconscious patterns is possible, and if not easy to get, we put all our efforts to create these conditions. This context creation procedure is one of the most powerful for the revelation of the unconscious, but it takes a great deal of pressing the close society to achieve its secret purposes.
Regression, that is re-living an infantile pattern is the fundamental event of all therapy strategies. This may be obtained with as little induction as possible in a number of ways. The experience is: one feels, moves, reacts, sees and hear exactly as the child, infant or even neonate one has been. The first spontaneous reliving of an emotional pattern is a duplicate of the original up to the point of its blockage. Afterwards, the cycles tend to progress and produce what has not been lived then.
It takes one to re-live part of one's infancy to assess how astonishingly accurate this process is. Regression is also the gate to the repair mechanism of the psyche.
Regression usually entrains an acceptance of one of the most feared constant process of our psyche, the need to release inner repressed or encysted events, act them fully in the open and free them of their painful content. The inner pressure for this is so strong that nothing can be done to avoid it, whether using therapy or not. When not using therapy, one will try and use the family and social contexts to the utmost to achieve release.
The experience of charge, release, discharge and that of the cycles of imprints, reactions, emotions and orgasm is fundamental to understand the processes of the unconscious, since the most important part and the most powerful part of our archaic past is recorded in our body.
Also important is the experience of how we organise the perception of the field of sensations to evoke the unconscious emotional pattern seeking release. Only when one has released the emotion in case can one discover how the 'reading' of the field at hand (the selection and arrangement of the items in the field) was done precisely to trigger the re-living of that pattern. Furthermore, one may soon discover that the whole context was also created by the unconscious patterns of the psyche, either by putting one into a suitable context, or even by making efforts to bend the others and the group to create that context.
As the experience is fundamental to the psyche, we devote to it a whole page.
Transference is fundamental for the theory in the following aspects which are highly demonstrative:
As for therapy, what is of paramount importance is that transference creates a bond which is the locus of regression and reconstruction.
Fundamental to the understanding of the psychic is the effect produced by group dynamics. The two major effects are 1-the constitution of a group unconscious (or group psyche), and 2-the regressive effect of the group once the group psyche is made.
The group psyche is not something obvious, nor is it automatic. In principle, transference between members of the group may be sufficient for the group psyche to form, but as some group members may be reluctant to be taken in this process, there are a number of tricks to prevent group psyche to form, such as: centring on an external objective, cancelling one of the rules of group formation (de-framing group), individualising and externalising self from group, dismembering group, etc.
Under definite conditions, a collective psyche is formed by transference between members in groups.
When the group psyche is formed, the automatic effect is regression of all members present and the collective living and sharing of emotional patterns, evidently archaic. From this follows the rule:
A group psyche lives archaic patterns. The larger the group, the more archaic the patterns shared and expressed.
This is the reason for collective movements in large groups such as rebellion, destruction, hysteria, and group decompensation. Combining the need for release, regressive effects, and the operative perception rule, we get:
The group tend to organise around the need for individual release of archaic patterns and their subsequent discharge. The individual seeks to use and/or produce group emotional release for its own benefit, i.e. release. Groups tend to induce a temporary diminution of defensive process and some let-go.
As had been shown by the study of Erika Bourguignon [see Bourguignon >], trance is institutionalised in 92% of the people, in the 488 ethnic groups she studied. Although there are around 3000 such ethnic groups in the world, the one studied are sufficiently representative to prove the actuality of the phenomenon and its generality. Groups which do not use trance may also be shown as having deliberately killed the method and subsequently denied it. This happened in a number of steps in Europe from the beginning of the roman catholic invasion in the 3rd century: systematic eradication of the trance rituals by repeted popes orders forbidding drumming and street dancing, slaughter of the Catarrhs and of the Knight Templars, forbid of the pagan rituals and their eradication by christianisation of the sacred dates and places, torture and burning of the so-called witches and alchemists, the last of which in 1937 in Germany!. Our (celtic) mythology having been scrupulously erased, little is known on how trance was used in pre-christian Europe. The foreign mythology borrowed and enforced during the Renaissance (greek, roman and jewish) however abounds in hints at various trance states used in religion although they are today not acknowledged as such.
Trance is a state where the psyche is evacuated from the body, partially (light trance) or totally (deep trance). The body can then be driven by foreign psyches.
Then, the body is left either void of its usual control system and lives what it can on its own, or is able to take up another psyche at hand and be driven by it. The body in that state loses its perception system and its tension system, and is able to receive other systems of tensions and/or perception.
This experience is fundamental in that it demonstrates
Trance is generally used for a number of events useful to the community, such as:
Transformation is the process by which one frees the painful and fearful recordings of infancy, re-structures self, and integrate into a whole and more efficient being. This process is known to all the systems of society and described in their mythology. In our corpus of antique 'texts' (those for which we have approximate translations), the best known are the zoroastrian, mithraic, orphic, eleusian and odysseian myths. Then we have the traditional methods of the hinduists and buddhists, of the various sufi brotherhoods, and the words and methods of Jesus and early christians. There is some known ritualry amongst the pagans and celtic shamans. Later, we come to the works of the knight templars, of the alchemists. Finally, we have the modern schools of psychoanalysis, the jungian individuation process, and structural therapy.
The associated myths are described in another page. The process runs more or less along constant lines such as:
|
PSYCHOLOGICAL |
ALCHEMICAL |
DESCRIPTION |
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doubt and suffering |
call |
A shock of some sort wakes up the need for unveiling the realm of the unconscious. |
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need for help from another one |
encounter with a special being |
One meets a special person and resolve to let be guided by him or her for a time. |
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surrender and dependency |
bath in the adequate ingredients |
Then, one has to surrender to a favorable environment and a method where the process, although unknown, or work of some forces, can take place. |
|
regression into infancy |
going down |
One is taken and overwhelmed by the resurgence of the heretofore hidden emotions and events of the past, and cannot help the process, |
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re-living the traumas |
to hell |
until one is finally confronted to the root of its being, the wounds of early infancy and their painful consequences, |
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decompensation |
dismemberment |
and to the terrible truth sheltered in the depths of our psyche, shattering even the faintest of the surviving illusions and references, down to craziness, |
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depression |
and death |
leaving some sort of psychological death which may last for a while. |
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re-structuration |
rebirth |
Then one begins to feel alive again and getting strength |
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appearance of new states of being |
let-go and ecstasy |
and may have unusual spontaneous experiences of ecstatic type, and/or surrender to foreign forces, |
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individuation |
integration |
until at the end of the process a feeling of wholeness comes, together with clarity of vision, access to reality and knowledge, feeling part of a whole, and the possibility to help others. |
The last stage is the result of 'the work' and correspond to the integration of the law of nature (the laws of the psychic world) into one's being, becoming part of it, and more functioning with the law of nature as if it was almost physiological, that is silently and automatically.
Initiation is the ultimate process which can take place after transformation. It corresponds to creating a permanent link with the 'beyond' and the more or less permanent incorporation of one or several of the great psyches of the collective.
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