Consciousness and memory



Internal index:
  #site_novelties, #folly and great sorrow(*), #dark_side, #finding past memories(*), #Resilience, #damaged development, #memory and dissociation, #symptoms and 'monsters'(*), #Pathological trance, #healing and traumatizing, #amine precursor uptake and decarboxylation, #delusions, #psychoanalisis, #transference(*), #true_life, #re-living(*), #The_rag_and_bone_shop(*), #Note, #consciousness, #not all think so (*) with new - basic - explanatory quotes also from new reports

April 16 2008

Basic - adds and new explanations are at first on #folly and great sorrow, but not forsake #transference, #re-living#transfert#The_rag_and_bone_shop#sensible_experience
  Therefore to specify real design and aims of this file/chapter it is very suitable to confront it wih Anmnesis: a way fo healing... and also, for refuting any risk of misunderstanding, should be seriuosly considered the more bitter controversy shared in the renewed file/chapter: Opinioni, fatti, accuse / Opinion, fact, complaint



Novelties of the whole site

This site and the book do NOT be a fount of notices but an ENCYCLOPEDIC gather of different subjects: one another to be read time by time, or better to be CONSULTED not only for learning.
All links and quotations are continually refreshed -
supported by SEVENtwentyfour.com - but
so, if this Web site will always be maintained under speedy and diligently revised construction, also every suggestion from every source will be appreciated and followed.

...criticism or suggestions? Send mail...
On the matter of fact people had to lament hindrances on looking through this site, and asked to be better orientated. To favor this need the site's map changed: as first sight one can begin from a simplified page opening wide the whole indexed files, both the Italian and the English and plurilingual ones, eventually before looking at the file prefacing the English pages, first chapter of the English book
BookSurgenow PUBLISHED, PRINTED and SOLD as a NORMAL BOOK - as was already the Italian book from this site: Bambini di ieri = adulti di oggi.Adulti di oggi -> adulti di domani - print-ready in the BookSurge system and available for purchase on www.BookSurge.com, www.Amazon.com, www.Abebooks.com, www.Alibris.com. (The book's listing will appear on www.BooksinPrint.com and in www.GlobalBooksinPrint.com)

 But just after book published, further considerations suggested to better and more precisely complete the personal sources of knowledge: so the files My guides... my roots and Opinion, fact, complaint are so much amplified to occasion a latest, minor book to support the major one, a booklet dedicated only to explanatory data rather than to detailed descriptions.
The present English file does not mirror exactly the Italian one Consapevolezza e memoria, since provided with different first hand quotations, references and links. Any way both are validated and completed by the parallel - English and Italian - Quando la cartella clinica è terapeutica and Anamnesis. a way for healing... files giving the theoretical improvement coming from another point of vue, together with some other files partly already printed on another book It's Abuse NOT Science fiction as chapters: Delgado & Skinner, Flashbacks, Memory Recovery and Screen Memories and also the high-prioriy file TOTEM AND TABOO REVISITED: the awful and  fertile rise of new superstitions (respectively 15, 21,32, 26).
Any way the site is continually up-graded: to be carefully informed also on the past more significant ones it is suitable to go to the dedicated file Novelties on the site.

General Considerations

The present file/chapter is a strict furtherance of the introductory one Anamnesis: a way for healing..., both handling from different sides the same topic: personal past and present linked to settle real personal lives, together with general knowledge of completeness of life-time as basic medical care implement since the contrary - oblivion - can hide harm, weariness, till true illnesses. This English file does not mirror exactly the Italian one Consapevolezza e memoria, since provided with different first hand quotations, references and links. Any way both are validated and completed by the parallel - English and Italian - Quando la cartella clinica è terapeutica and Anamnesis. a way for healing..., Dal SUBLIMATO al CONCRETO / From SUBLIMATED towards CONCRETE, and SUBLIMATIONS: visual schemes and scientific explanation files giving the theoretical improvement coming from another point of vue, together with some other files already partly printed on another book It's Abuse NOT Science fiction: Delgado & Skinner, Flashbacks, Memory Recovery and Screen Memories and also by the high-priority file TOTEM AND TABOO REVISITED: the awful and  fertile rise of new SUPERSTITIONS. From this point of view should be added the suggestion to read and consider thoroughly the new chapter Sublimations: visual schemes and scientific explanation since syntetizing the main concepts of this whole work in not usual but impressive terms. Readers don't be stunned on finding some items presented just alike on two files/chapters since if the subject is the same the contexts diverge: on Anamnesis. a way for healing... and on CHILDHOOD: Times of mutability time, memory and ways for healing share their good side whilst here their dark side requires a most weighty place.

Memory is a splendid possibility to hold on themselves the "running away" of passing times and feeling and acknowledgment. Memory can hold and substantiate the personal "fourth dimension": but against memory a powerful, flattering enemy arises: the search to cling to the present that  gives security, a present that one would like to pass slowly in order to let savor the pleasure of living.... But in reality time runs and runs so fast and the more it runs the more one feels moving towards that abyss of finding oneself at the end of life with only regrets, a comtinuing source of abandonment and "ghosts", as written on this poignant and impressive testimony so concluding:  At this point it’s difficult for me to understand who I am, I’m really confused. But maybe it was time because I’ve been feeling empty for too long. I said to K. too this morning that I felt like “had my balls cut off" (°) almost in the anatomical sense of the word.
(°) So to say "to have my balls cut off " is quite offensive: but why flattering, deceiving words as "security", "to reassure", "to slow down" don't be so much offensive?

At my sister’s house this evening I saw some photos of my niece and nephew when they were little. There was one of F. at four years old and it made my stomach churn…. It seemed almost impossible that he has grown up so much and at the same time the baby he was isn’t here anymore: for my feeling the "baby" now is "dead".  .
I had a sensation of being blocked, something which makes me feel terribly afraid and that I worry I can’t bear. The pain for that child no longer with us, that child who won’t come back anymore and who in a certain sense slipped away from me. How I didn’t experience him enough, how many things I missed in him and missed in myself. It’s a pain which brings a feeling of emptiness, a pain which opens an abyss – a kind of black hole in into which I fear I will fall.
I cling so much to the present that it gives me security, a present that I would like to pass slowly in order to let me savour the pleasure of living, yet runs so fast and the more it runs the more I feel that I am moving towards that abyss of finding myself at the end of my life with only regrets.
It’s a kind of grief, like that of losing the really passed away Aunt A., like that of when K. began to go out with P., it’s a kind of grief and an abandonment. You can’t imagine (or maybe you can) how difficult it is to make part of me understand that you can’t revive ghosts: that part of me doesn’t want to hear reason.
It would like to see just one time the face of that child, embrace him again. It is obstinate and doesn’t want to accept things as they are.
At this point it’s difficult for me to understand who I am, I’m really confused. But maybe it was time because I’ve been feeling empty for too long. I said to K. too this morning that I felt like “had my balls cut off" almost in the anatomical sense of the word.

The Dark Side

Memory, the basic function to recall data, to get them at consciousness, or simply to get able to bring something to mind...: there are a lot of mixed-up cross-purposes which so often transforms every talk on this subject into a lot of ever more faulty - if not damaging - quid pro quo.
At first it is to be considered that common place people too often mystifies appearance, "broadcast", advertisement, superficial brightness with the whole REALITY itself: to easy memorize is confused with more cleverness; the possibility to find something without conscious effort can be defined not only with the blundering term of intuition, but unfortunately even often it is "burglarized" with the solemn coming on of the mighty name of instinct.
But, very worse, common place people - also badly taught by bad "teachers"- doesn't acknowledge that memory's open go-between on and off function corresponds only to open conscious and at disposal pre-conscious, not to an unconscious great sorrow which doesn't allow to be remembered. Its "forbidden" contents shouldn't be compared with "normal" memory or "normal" oversights or forgetfulness. It is seriously misleading to confuse the normal short time's, middle time's and long time's memories - and their to be suddenly or hardly and problematically recollected from their more or less tidy archive - with the "unconscious unreachable gap": a gap which could be overcome only very slowly and with a long watchful delicate care to separate the forbearance of the scare from the possibility to manage - painful - memories and then step by step also to transform them into - even resilient - esperiences.
In the book Die froeliche wissenschaft Friedrich Nietzsche assumed that Folly is the oblivion of a great sorrow...: then blunting seems to be the final possible defense against hopeless suffering, accompanied in any time by displaced, biased "warnings". If it should even not be sufficient, a blind, wearing forgetfulness growing towards a sort of wicked stupidity seems may help. Providentially this isn't ever an unassailable cruel destiny: even a faint ray of hope could allow it to fade.
I have not to be ashamed to be as sick as I am... I need to move back into my healing zone... that means more in touch with memory and with  pain than with anxiety and terror..., as writes a survivor of desperate tortures.
Therefore the forbearing person can reach wholeness and self authenticity: having undergo a slow, ponderous progression towards real memories of sufferings can reach wholeness and self authenticity, no more replaced by distress displacement covered by pathological, inconsistent "anxiety and terror", deceiving the subject himself, then actual sensibilities can awake again, can further intensify, can further restore more and more skilled receptive feelings to multiply more and more varied stimuli.
It is the healing each of us longs for, and the healing that each of us must accomplish if we are to move forward into our fullest potential. Learning to experience emotions is one of the most difficult tasks that can be undertaken. Many people do not know that they are angry, even when rage flows through them like a river. Some do not know that they are grieving, even when sorrow is the only sun that rises for them in the morning. Most people think of themselves as experiencing emotions only when powerfully emotional currents erupt through their lives, disturbing routines devoted to activities, accomplishments, or survival. Emotional awareness - becoming aware of everything that you are feeling at every moment - is very difficult because we experience so much pain each moment. Becoming aware of our emotions means becoming aware of pain. It is challenging, difficult, and unpleasant. It is also more rewarding than most of us can imagine. That is because most of us cannot imagine a life free from compulsions, fixations, obsessions, and addictions, in which we act with an empowered heart and are free of attachment to the outcome. The alternative to becoming aware of your emotions is to continue masking the pain that you experience. When you do, your pain emerges in unexpected ways distorting your behavior, changing your words, shaping your perception's, and creating consequences that are as unwanted as they are difficult. This alternative no longer works.
Read too: Trauma and Dreams by Deirdre Barrett (Editor) Linda Francis, Harvard University Press, 1996 (Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, England)
Author also of: The Committee of Sleep : How Artists, Scientists, and Athletes Use Dreams for Creative Problem-Solving- And How You Can, Too by Deirdre, Ph.D. Barrett

For years, the brain has been viewed as a relatively static entity, determined by the interaction of genetic preprogramming and early childhood experience. In contrast to this view, recent theoretical perspectives and technological advances in brain imaging have revealed that the brain is an organ continually built and re-built by one's experiences. We are now beginning to learn that many forms of psychotherapy, developed in the absence of any scientific understanding of the brain, are supported by neuroscientific findings.
Written for psychotherapists and others interested in the relationship between brain and behavior, this book encourages us to consider the brain when attempting to understand human development, mental illness, and psychological health. This book argues that the brain is an organ of adaptation, built by interpersonal experiences and capable of change during one's life. Written for anyone interested in the relationship between brain and behavior, it encourages us to consider the brain when attempting to understand others and ourselves.
Babette Rothschild
From the Publisher of The Neuroscience of Psychotherapy: Building and Rebuilding the Human Brain by Louis Cozolino
Thanks to concrete applications of the newest findings, readers will find this         (Babette Rothschild, MSW).

(But these concepts have a double-edged meaning since they can be "used" in a double-edged way: they can explain the possibility of healing even persons who have suffered terrible past mishaps, but can also suggest that the proneness to superstitions in humankind can rather easily allow too many people to be brain-washed almost before having realized that they own their minds.)

The most serious social side effect of pathological trance is the reduced awareness and disabled communication. Communication of information is critical for any system to function. Human systems as well as computer systems, ecological, biological, political and social systems and more all require clear, accurate, timely communication of information in order to function. The lack of clear, accurate, or timely communication between individuals is the basis for misunderstandings, disappointments, hurt feelings, resentment, and violence. The human, economic, agricultural, industrial and social systems that rely on people who are in pathological trance has disastrous consequences.
Trance as a Tool Dennis R. Wier Director, The Trance Institute, Bruetten, Switzerland
There are light trances, deep trances, short-term trances and life-long trances. There are pain relieving trances and pain producing trances. There are healing trances and pathological trances. I have been studying trance for the past 25 years and I want to explore with you just a few important areas where trances can be found: hypnosis, addictions, religions and work. So what is a trance? To many psychologists a trance is a state of limited awareness. Some psychologists would also characterize trance as a form of sleep, or dreamlike awareness or a kind of altered state of consciousness. Certainly trance has long been associated with hypnotic states, and with the altered states of consciousness of dervishes, shamans and yogis. Meditation does produce strong trance states. However, in my opinion, trance states are much more common than is normally believed. If the unusual trance state of a shaman or a yogi is desirable, then we might be tempted to believe that all trance states are desirable states. Powerful yogic trance states are often created by the long term practice of meditation. When the mind is temporarily anchored in trance, a yogi may become sensitive to subtle influences or may gain enhanced and subtle perceptions. In addition, yogic trance states can also produce effects at a distance. Trance is a repetition or looping of consciousness. When the content of the trance has achieved a resonance, special types of psychic forces are generated. The effects of these special psychic forces are often identified with the behavior which produced them. Trance- for a yogi - is merely a tool consciously chosen to produce a specific result. Trance for most other people is an unconscious choice made to relieve pain or to avoid uncomfortable feelings or situations. Pathological trance is unfortunately almost universally encouraged within business organizations. The more an employee can with single-minded determination execute the orders and policies of his organization, the more that employee is rewarded, promoted and respected. Single-mindedness, however, is a pathological trance. And trance always implies that there are areas where the employee is "asleep", unaware. When organizations encourage trance in their employees, and since trance disables communication, then there can be no wonder why there are so many system dysfunctions in the world. When, unlike a yogi, we do not choose our trances, and we are unaware of the types and nature of the pathological trances in our lives, then there are things we are unaware of. What we are unaware of causes more human suffering than the sometimes painful knowledge of the truth. One goal of a robust and magical life is to be as aware as possible of our options. When our unconscious pathological trances cripple our options the result is often disaster and tragedy in our personal lives, our society and in the environment. 


Pay attention also to: FREE ONLINE TRAUMA SYMPOSIUM PRESENTED BY THE AMERICAN GROUP PSYCHOTHERAPY ASSOCIATION AND FUNDED BY THE NEW YORK TIMES COMPANY FOUNDATION AND THE AOL TIME WARNER FOUNDATION.
Counter transference: Effects on the Group Therapist Working with Trauma
A discussion of:
1.  Hazardous Terrain: Countertransference Reactions in Trauma Groups by Maggie Ziegler and Maureen McEvoy, pp. 116-140.
Objectives:
1. To learn to identify countertransference when working with trauma groups. 
2. To learn to identify vicarious traumatization when working with trauma groups.
Complex PTSD / DESNOS
This website is provided as an educational resource concerning PTSD and other enduring consequences of traumatic stress.

Finding past memories...

Conscious and Unconscious Processes: Psychodynamic, Cognitive, and Neurophysiological Convergences
by Howard Shevrin (Editor), James A. Bond, Linda A. W. Brakel, RichaHertel, William J. Williams 
The notion of an unconscious mental life has been a source of controversy for more than a century...
If you are hoping to see evidence that psychoanalysis is becoming a science, you'll want to read it. If you are one of those critics who claims that psychoanalysts can never agree on the interpretation of such matters as real people's unconscious conflicts, or a believer in the hermeneutic approach who feels that clinical judgments about important matters in patients' lives must be bent out of recognizable shape by the demands of scientific method, you must read it! Provides a model example of a methodologically rigorous project that nonetheless retains the richness of the clinical endeavour. Clinicians and researchers alike will be happy to see the clear example of intriguing and important psychoanalytic research.... Conscious and Unconscious Processes is essential reading for analysts who feel it is valuable to demonstrate the empirical basis for fundamental psychoanalytic assumptions.... Shevrin and colleagues... constructed a groundbreaking method through which to evaluate the notion of unconscious conflict. They have succeeded in demonstrating nothing less than evidence for the existence of the dynamic unconscious... The crucial importance of this work will be readily apparent to the interested psychoanalytic reader.
Therefore, on RECALLING previously unaccepted PAST MEMORIES one can FIND ONESELF again and AWAKE again to self assured, but previously blocked then never developed emotions: including curiosity, fantasy and participation as well as future projects. In such a way, conscious affectivity and controlled aggressiveness could expand, DEVELOP and grow richer: feelings, true relationships, interests, skills and proficiency in learning, no longer enslaved by suffering or blunting can grow again and THRIVE. It has been said: Folly is the oblivion of a great sorrow: but so far - as written at the beginning - is furnished a bit of hope within such numb oblivion, the sleeping reason that breeds monsters can still be found and awaken. 
It is nevertheless always a very difficult and painful task, as a "survivor" wrote: 
I cannot keep all  things straight. the remembering goes back and forth  and not straight in a line... Taking very shaky steps in a crooked and zig-zagging manner, approaching and avoiding the awful truth that this happened... but knowing there was a cause for my pain, and that this cause makes sense, allow these multi-level memories... [even if and  when] the inner work, the therapy has lost [inevitably] its sweetness... So hard to go back and forth between therapy and life - whatever that is...
However, if for the suffering persons this "crooked" way seems to give rise to more and more discouragement, notwithstanding FOR THERAPISTS it is exactly this ZIG-ZAGGING manner of the emergence of memories, which denotes and GUARANTEES the truthfulness of them: an all too bold precision has ALWAYS to be trated as warning sign, since, as in all testimony, this accuracy is always a trap. It can be prone to deceive and drag towards deceitful directions every times, towards a tricky area in memory recovery research, towards the accidental scrambling of [contaminated] memories, which without even realizing this, after having reappeared in flash-backs can be "changed" by others' suggestions, by fear, by unbearable pain, by inner unwillingness, by proneness to commonplace certainties (aka: 'collective consciousness’)... 
Much of the journey involves a walk through Dante’s Inferno. Pain and every form of death are inherent to the process. This journey requires going much deeper than‘collective consciousness’ wants to go... (excerpt from ~ The Way of the Wound ~ by Robert Grant, PhD quoted in November Survivorship Monthly Notes). 
(Read and ponder the quotes below chosen in the transcript of the presentation by Kathleen Sullivan at The Fourth Annual Ritual Abuse, Secretive Organizations and Mind Control Conference, August 10 - 12, 2001:
Ordinary memory tends to be more conscious, voluntary and flexible, while traumatic memory is usually more involuntary and unconscious, and is often rigid. Ordinary memory tends to be more oriented in time, whereas traumatic memory is usually frozen outside of time . . . coming more from our unconscious mind. And even while it is frozen in time, when it surfaces unconsciously or when we consciously remember it we feel like it is happening right now, at this very moment, as opposed to having happened in the past. Trauma memory is stored as state-dependent memory. According to Dr. Whitfield, state-dependent memory means we tend to remember better when we are in the same inner or experiential state that we were in when we first experienced or learned something.
This is why survivors and therapists talk so much about triggers. Triggers are stimuli that we felt or experienced during the original trauma. The memory gets attached in our mind to the triggers. And then later, encountering the triggers again will bring up the memory of the trauma. This is an example of state-dependent memory. The effect of encountering the trigger brings up the memory. Now I want to talk about a tricky area in memory recovery research - accidental scrambling of memories. Please bear with me. I will explain where I'm going with this. I'm not a member of the False Memory Syndrome Foundation and frankly, I think the basis of their so-called foundation is purely evil. However, that does not mean that I don't believe my traumatic memories can't be contaminated after I've remembered them. I've talked with several therapists who are very dedicated to helping trauma survivors. They have confirmed what I've learned. This information I'm about to give you is simply to help us all sort out verifiable memories from those that can be used in a negative way to discredit us in public or in court.

This confirms moreover that sleeping reason breeds monsters, not only in the present and not only in a single person. Monsters breed other and other monsters: monsters deceiving, disqualifying, harming or at least threatening creating solidarity among criminals to cover - present and past - misdeeds. More often reason and truth are sleeping merely, but are not less damaging, either due to lack of skill in listeners / healers or an - at least plausible - avoiding the awful truth in the victims themselves.

We Can Implant Entirely False Memories Laura Spinney
 on our remembrance of things past... The Guardian - UK Thursday December 4, 2003
...Alda was the unwitting guinea pig of Elizabeth Loftus, a UCI psychologist who has beenobsessed with the subject of memory... Neuroscientists admit that by administering beta-blockers like Propranolol, they can induce false memories in susceptible people, particularly those who have suffered a traumatic experience, (torture) leaving them "open to memory distortion - so true and false become harder to disentangle...
(Such a bold, stiff, opposed, ill-meaning and disparaging reasoning is defined in the site of the False Memory Syndrome Foundation where you can read also some samples of FMS FOUNDATION NEWSLETTER.
Significant books by Elizabeth Loftus, just one of its main Authors are:
The Myth of Repressed Memory
Witness for the Defense: The Accused, the Eyewitness and the Expert Who Puts Memory on Trial
Elizabeth F. Loftus, Katherine Ketcham (1991) St. Martin's Press
.
But not only theoretic psychology tries to suppress memories: also the factual disease mongering of pharmaceutics production uses this process to purchase and maintain an inventory of goods to be sold. To beware how distressing consequences could have even helpful findings, consider that concrete researches using brain imaging scans identify the neural systems involved in actively suppressing memory, can be misused:
this research suggests memories can be manipulated because they act as if made from glass, existing in a molten state as they are being created, before turning solid. When the memory is recalled, however, it becomes molten again and so can be altered before it once more resets. The drug used by the scientists is thought to disrupt the biochemical pathways that allow the memory to "harden" after it is recalled. The researchers used propranolol, a drug normally used to treat hypertension in heart disease patients but also known to cause memory problems.

Notwithstanding on the contrary these concrete scientific and technologic proofs do technically confirm the - for his time being only theoretic - Freud's core findings. To be then more "fair" when facts are to be praised, data regarding advantageous researches should be acknowledged: look at Stanford Report, Jan. 8, 2004
Stanford report Research reveals brain has biological mechanism to block unwanted memories BY LISA TREI: For the first time we see some mechanism that could play a role in active forgetting

Using brain imaging scans to identify the neural systems involved in actively suppressing memory reinforcing Sigmund Freud's controversial century-old thesis about the existence of voluntary memory suppression in a 2001 paper published in Nature by Michael Anderson titled Suppressing Unwanted Memories by Executive Control: the big news is that we've shown how the human brain blocks an unwanted memory, that there is such a mechanism and it has a biological basis.

Psychologists offer proof of brain’s ability to suppress memories by LISA TREI
For the first time, researchers at Stanford University and the University of Oregon have shown that a biological mechanism exists in the human brain to block unwanted memories. The findings, published Jan. 9 in the journal Science, reinforce Sigmund Freud's controversial century-old thesis about the existence of voluntary memory suppression. The big news is that we've shown how the human brain blocks an unwanted memory, that there is such a mechanism and it has a biological basis, said Stanford psychology Professor John Gabrieli, a co-author of the paper titled Neural Systems Underlying the Suppression of Unwanted Memories. It gets you past the possibility that there's nothing in the brain that would suppress a memory -- that it was all a misunderstood fiction. The experiment showed that people are capable of repeatedly blocking thoughts of experiences they don't want to remember until they can no longer retrieve the memory, even if they want to, Gabrieli explained. Michael Anderson, a psychology associate professor at the University of Oregon and the paper's lead author, conducted the experiment with Gabrieli and other researchers during a sabbatical at Stanford last year. It's amazing to think that we've broken new ground on this ... that there is a clear neurobiological basis for motivated forgetting, Anderson said. Repression has been a vague and controversial construct for over a century, in part because it has been unclear how such a mechanism could be implemented in the brain. The study provides a clear model for how this occurs by grounding it firmly in an essential human ability -- the ability to control behavior. In recent years, the question of repressed memory has attracted considerable public attention concerning cases involving childhood sexual abuse. That was very controversial because it went through two pendulum swings, Gabrieli said. The first swing was that people thought, 'What a horrible thing.' The second was that people said, 'How many of these might be false memories?' Then people started asking does repressed memory even exist, and can you show that experimentally or scientifically? The big news is that we've shown how the human brain blocks an unwanted memory, that there is such a mechanism and it has a biological basis, said Stanford psychology Professor John Gabrieli, It gets you past the possibility that there's nothing in the brain that would suppress a memory -- that it was all a misunderstood fiction.
EDITORS: Photographs of John Gabrieli and Michael Anderson and brain images are available online at http://newsphotos.stanford.edu (slug: Memory). The paper, Neural Systems Underlying the Suppression of Unwanted Memories, is available from the AAAS Office of Public Programs at (202) 326-6440 or scipak@aaas.org Relevant Web URLs: http://gablab.stanford.edu.

Resilience and evolution

From Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary: re·sil·ience Pronunciation: ri-'zil-y&n(t)s Function: noun
1 : the capability of a strained body to recover its size and shape after deformation caused especially by compressive stress

The strength to dare to bear also awkward sufferings, does not outline masochism: on the contrary it is the only way to care for oneself and also to become more "sturdy" on absorbing the adverities. Pain and deep sadness aren't weakness, neither really more intolerable nor worse than illnesses such as anxiety, compulsivity or silly, irrevocable frailty: 
VULNERABILITY AND RESILIENCE:
Basic behavioral science research on the nature of and variations in personality is illuminating the sources of these differences and revealing ways to bolster people's ability to deal with life's difficult and painful aspects. Studies to date suggest that there is no single source of resilience or vulnerability. Rather, many interacting factors come into play.

Read here below a quote written by a very suffering, courageous "survivor":
[When] the pain and depression are deepening. Am I a masochist or is it just a relief to have the pain instead of the intolerable anxiety? even if  only to restore the sadness over the anxiety. How crazy this sounds. But how right. It's called "being as sick as I am", and right now feels as bad  as the compulsivity.
Either a distressing anxiety and/or compulsivity, or a self-complying search of erratic novelties and/or capricious sentimentalisms are very unsteady ways: every selfishness conveys towards a NARROW, stiff path. Fragility is an attribute of "stiffness"  when instead an elastic Resilience shows the capacity of a material to absorb ENERGY under shock, moreover to be improved by shocks themselves. Fragile materials ABSORB limited energy? Ductile materials absorb, tame and upgrade much energy. However if fragility is always associated with rigidity as the incapacity to absorb shocks, sometimes the almost similar "delicacy" can be present in a not rigid way: it can protect itself, but only within a narrow and limited space; the main and most worse case is the multiple personality disorder artificially induced or perhaps spontaneously coming from otherwise unberable suffering.
(In the file/chapter Consapevolezza e memoria one can find - damage: only in Italian - a very FIRST HAND emotional testimony referring to an artificially induced "multiplicity" till the first childhood.)

Nevertheless in confined space, and in precise times a similar non-rigidity can give way to a certain plastic flexibility: this is NOT an evolutive solution since it restricts the situation to a single direction, which can be defined in the more optimistic situation with the terms of conformist adaptability,  in the worse one as the "induced indifference" of ... for example the guilt-free soldiers. In the best of cases the adult vulnerability brings only forth stagnation in a static environment to prevent every possibility of renovating those experiential enrichments too difficult and painful to be sustained and managed. Therefore children and young people are the "new" are the "different", are a big trouble upsetting this pseudo-adaptability. The despised children brought up according to this static world will miss the best of the developmental wealth, could not profit by each new experience, cannot modify the whole system of development, will grow only finalized to a static and narrow pseudo-maturity. Therefore they will not only miss the best of the developmental wealth, could not profit by each new experience, cannot modify the whole system of development with often devastating results. Generation after generation they cannot start new syntheses and renewals also since they miss and disparage their baby's and childhood's souvenirs if not the whole memory.
Flexibility and capacity to fit in well are thus NOT synonyms of ductile elasticity, which is, on the contrary, the resilient capacity to absorb and validate energy contributions: starting from there, new creative openings towards new evolutionary routes are always possible, and these assimilated experiences - whether good or bad  - once integrated into one’s life constitute the sources of vital wisdom.
A semantic note on the terms evolution and development is here required. EVOLUTION means something more than development: only entities, already present and still unvoiced, can develop, while great creative forces can promote, one could almost say GENERATE, evolutions in new and totally unexpected directions.

A metaphor to visually explain these concepts: THE TREE.

tree as metaphorpersons and tree

    1. Originary personality as roots, plunging and nurturing into a rich or poor, favourable or difficult ground
    2. Trunk as development with its regular year by year phases and improvements (or faults);
    3. Finally: the unceasing and unpredictable EVOLUTION of branches, leaves, flowers, fruits and seeds.
On considering again in this point of view, RESILIENCE has to be connected more with EVOLUTION.
Fragility and vulnerability are the OPPOSITE of RESILIENCE, with its capability to incorporate and be improved by the force of hits: so "human" resilience could also be considered as a way to master even the worse damages by absorbing it into an evolutionary, increasing wisdom. (A quick remark: evolution is more than development: only what is already existent as blossom can "develop" whereas the evolutionary ways can more and more expand in new and manifold directions.



Look at Mental Health Problems and Young People: Concepts and Practice by Louise Rowling, Graham Martin, Lyn Walker

IFTA Congress 

IFTA

REFLECTION, HOPE & RESILIENCE
Strenghtening Foundations

Damaged development

However not only traumatic stress illnesses exist, not only an original great sorrow. As happens in analogy with the embryogenesis' biological "organizers", where function has to follow strict patterns of mode, times and ordered SEQUENCES to create "perfect" beings and not "monsters", also in the psycho-sociological and emotional field there are particular needs (to be emphatized: "NEED" not "wish") acting as organizers. Therefore, if they are not timely FULFILLED and in the correct series, they violate a basical Nature law: from an apparently "small" trauma at the start, this can perturb not only a crucial developmental phase but all the ensuing outcomes. Here is the new "monster" which can start a chain of errors worsening up to the point of sweeping away the whole of life in a vicious circle coiling in on itself, even beyond the suffering person until it overwhelms many existences in the present as well as the future: ones's own and other peoples'.
(Look at the embryogenesis' biological "organizers":
A Selective History of Induction II. Spemann's induction experiments The Spemann-Mangold organizer
In 1901, Curt Herbst wrote that he thought it possible
to establish the occurrence of formative stimuli which are exerted from one part of the embryo to another, and to demonstrate eventually the possibility of a complete resolution of the entire ontogenesis into a sequence of such inductions.
 This prediction of inductive cascades was a bold statement, given that no sequence of events had yet been observed (1, 2). But that was soon to change. That same year, HANS SPEMANN (3) published one of the most significant and seminal papers in the history of embryology (4). his experimental analysis of lens formation in the frog.... In 1924, while working on the relatively large eggs of amphibians he discovered, together with Hilde Mangold, the existence of an area in the embryo, the portions of which, upon transplantation into a different part of a second embryo, induced the secondary embryonic primordia. The name "organizer centre" or "organizer" was given by him to those parts. For this discovery of the organizer effect in embryonic development, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1935.
A crucial developmental phase... can well happen in order to heal the worst traumatic sufferings, so all is NEVER lost after a faulty childhood: 
I am nothign but a foolish old woman who is still a child if she has ever been a child.... [But] an adult in strong need of regression can truly go  back to an earlier stage of development... yes, even a missed or badly done one.
(A crucial developmental phase...: how to know and PROTECT the perfect, basic discontinuity of the different stages of thriving...: this is exactly the main aim of the book Childhood: times of mutability revealed already in the plan of its title.)
So if folly is the oblivion of a great sorrow this isn't an ineluctable destiny. Development has NATURALLY a typical  regularity of its own in its performing towards the Future, and likewise for the Past where such a basic regularity is held in the memory where it stays and can be regained. Nothing can be lost: neither the past facts nor even any disaharmonized or refuted developmental phase. Every time the whole sequence of deeds carried out and also of not-completed evolutions can be reactivated and performed towards a possible utter RIPENESS.
Unfortunately snaring "monsters" go on and on breeding other monsters. Unfortunately not always, only seldom, can these beneficial memories be regained: the opposing forces are too many: environmental, as well as human unwillingness, weakness and/or wickedness.
Even without reaching true madness, blunting can be disguised or covered not only by true pathological symptoms but more often by a swaggering and/or vain style of life, in a rough world of inconsistent "very high" and "very low" feelings - or even by their only shared exaggerate expression - investing both memory and mutual communication. Once the defensive dulling is activated (be clear that it happens in a totally unconscious way) it unrelentingly provokes a series of vicious circles, investing not only memory but also self-consciousness and social communication. The trodden dignity of the self, as well as that of the other, the reneged sensibility to RIGHTS and WRONGS and disregarded needs turn into susceptibility, claims, interpretations of reality, reduced to exasperated auto-referential differences being only apparently compensated by the availability of second and fallacious allurements and/or threats (the so-called give and take policy). The needs are only quantitative and unchangeable, defined for ever in the static concept of INFERIORITY and/or “superiority”. Research into the EXCEPTIONAL, which has not an evolutionary, but a "miraculous" character, opens scenarios of acritical expectations, of vain hopes (such as gambling), of contempt and desperation that aggravate the needs that have been overlooked. Fragility, incompleteness, failed experiences and openings, existential inadequacy… - all equipped with sham compensations - add public misconduct to personal misfortune by making the “inferiors” a very easy pray for whoever - credited as the “powerful” - wants to enslave them by allurement. At the same time, they find relief in further vindications that induce a further depersonalization, creating both enslavement and thoughtlessness towards the "superior", and maldisposition, up to maltreatment, towards the ”inferior”. It is a world - or rather: an imagined, immaterial world - made up of wants not perceived as needs or vice versa; reality avoided into inconsistent phobias (look at a well explained in the animation launched from the site Scienza e psicanalisi); malaise turned into wild hostilities; blind admiration for presumed exceptionality changed in the direction of proneness to incitement.... Anger so often assumed to be... a panic attack (!), as well as sexual whims mistaken as the only way to feel one does exist...
In such a delusive world one can crouch in silly, irrevocable frailty, or waste oneself by running towards erratic novelties, and/or pure outward appearance / amusement / excitement; one can equally and often alternatively cuddle up to sufferings "sine materia", or to guilt feelings without any sense; or can boast the real suggestibility believed instead to be emancipation; one can be proud of capricious sentimentalisms and/or selfishness propagandized as goodness; can flatter himself with envious longing for dependence and undeserved praise mixed-up with blind rebellions and blackmailings.... To sum up above all it is a fatuous but dangerous hatred of freedom and a despising of awareness (take a look at Aldous Huxley's classic book Brave New World, and then warn "our" not-brave "first" world).

Memory and dissociation

BETRAYAL: parents place their children in unprotected abusive situationsSPLITTING THE MIND: overwhelming pain

As written above, there are in actual extreme cases of either double or multiple personality, that is to say people who forget their true body, who believe they are another/ or unrelated different persons, and behave accordingly. Probably all this originates from different causes: however here is not the right place to discuss them.
Read this very telling books for accessible examples:
Sybil book coverF.Reta Schreiber 'Sybil'  1975 Penguin books. There is also a movie from this book:Sybil (1976) (TV: director: Daniel Petrie, actors:
Sally Field = Sybil Dorsett, Joanne WoodwardDr. Cornelia Wilbur). 
Cornelia Wilbur,M.D.: August 26, 1908
April 9, 1992
Shirley Ardell Mason (Sybil):
January 25 1923 - February 26 1998
Shirley Ardell Mason has been reported by the press to be Sybil, the real-life prototype for the book of the same name, a case study based upon her life. Dr. Cornelia Wilbur was the courageous analyst who dared to see that something very different was happening with her patient. This page is under construction. I will gradually add quotations from news articles about the real life women behind the story.


Dissociation: Clinical and Theoretical Perspectives
by Steven Jay Lynn (Editor), Judith W. Rhue (Editor)


Covers the major aspects of dissociation, from the predominant models and diagnostic and treatment approaches, to research, clinical, and conceptual issues. Presents practical information for diagnosing and treating clients suffering from dissociative disorders, post- traumatic stress disorders, and the consequences of sexual victimization and cult involvement, and discusses social and cultural factors. Annotation copyright Book News, Inc. Portland, Or. 

Much more frequent however are cases of memory lapses where disturbing reminiscences are pushed back. (In the main text DSM-IV these are technically called dissociations). They can regard real facts - objectively serious or even only subjectively disturbing - but they can then lead to the avoidance of, or even comply with, the will to throwing away unbearable EMOTIONS, and/or emotions unacceptable because they are embroiled together, or cannot adapt to displeasing facts. 
Possible "dissociations" from memory or from awareness of the present can hit everyone, but this is NOT a problem concerning brain power, or age, or how long ago the facts happened: it is well-known that old people can remember faultlessly events in the distant past, much better than recent news and it has been proved that one can participate in and remember birth's and pre-birth experiences.
Memory preserved and memory to be lost... : look also to the recent movie Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004) 
Directed by Michel Gondry
Writing credits (WGA) 
Charlie Kaufman (story) & Michel Gondry (story) ... Genre: Drama / Romance / Sci-Fi / Comedy 

Plot outline: 

A couple (Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet) undergo a procedure to erase each other from their memories when their relationship turns sour, but it is only through the process of loss that they discover what they had to begin with.
Memory laneMemory Lane is the story - an emotional autobiography of an elderly Italian film director commissioned by a French producer to make a film on the life of Proust. During the preliminary preparations - which take him back and forth between France and Italy - Proust's great description of involuntary memory becomes real for him as he starts reliving key moments from his own past. In a series of free associations (visual, tactile, acoustic) he experiences breaking with a group of partisans fighting the German occupation, falling repeatedly in love with the same woman whom he fails to recognize after a long separation, taking her to Switzerland for an abortion, his relationship with his twenty-year-old son who mirrors back to him his own youth. The film has a simultaneous foot in both the past and present. It embraces an entire life and, by doing this, touches the common experience of a whole generation.

Symptoms and "monsters"

Nevertheless "oblivion" is neither a fault nor a weakness: it is like an unconsciously deliberate, even exhausting, interminable CENSORSHIP that demands an unrelenting effort, drawing in and wasting repeatedly energy, mostly from the sexual sphere. Therefore this drags increasing consequences, both of impoverishment and/or of actual risk. The EMOTIONS, these real vital, inherent factors of life, these sources of energy which can move us towards awareness and enriching experience, become instead only a dangerous conglomerate of explosive or rotten matter, out of all control. They are unfortunately also at any moment, at any subjectively "traumatic" occasion ready to explode or to wreck the whole person, often dragging his/her relatives and even acquaintances. In a series of joking poems, for this very reason extremely effective, R.Laing's book Knots gives an - only at first - amusing insight on how this lack of self-awareness could indeed seriously and unremittingly damage every relation beyond the wasted person, towards and against all his/her surrounding people and happenings.

Pathological trance is unfortunately almost universally encouraged within business organizations.The more an employee can with single-minded determination execute the orders and policies of his organization, the more that employee is rewarded, promoted and respected. Single-mindedness, however, is a pathological trance. When, unlike a yogi, we do not choose our trances, and we are unaware of the types and nature of the pathological trances in our lives, then there are things we are unaware of. What we are unaware of causes more human suffering than the sometimes painful knowledge of the truth. One goal of a robust and magical life is to be as aware as possible of our options. When our unconscious pathological trances cripple our options the result is often disaster and tragedy in our personal lives, our society and in the environment.
The dissociative, temporary "oblivion" may be an occasional situation for everyone, but, as said above, it is never a problem of age or temporal distance. Old people remember remote experiences far better than recent ones, while the possibility of recalling prenatal experiences has been proved some time ago. (for ex. there was a whole session on it at the - noticed below - 5th° International Congress of Psychosomatic Obstetrics and Gynecology, 1977, Rome).
(Look at a simple and descriptive explanation in Dissociation.)


Very mighty proposals regarding the recover of memory and its outcomes can be also reached in the mainstream literature: the largest work (12 volumes, a series of seven individual novels that constitute one larger one)  - of the famed French writer Marcel Proust is just called A la recerche du temps perdu (Remembrance of Things Past). "The memory of scents and tastes fills his thoughts and colors his health" is written on the cover page of its hardcover edition: it depicts how NOT conscious reconsidering, but the making the most of "involuntary memories", of sensorial sudden happenings gave a profound sense to a continual searching passages of past life. Marcel Proust was a true humanistic writer, not a scientist, but his "emotional autobiography". his way to take advantage of sensorial flash-backs have been praised as a great discover, which made even him and his work a "cult", his so enthusiastic followers jokingly defined "sick of proustitis".

Marcel Proust

Remembrance of Things Past (3 Volume Boxed Set) Marcel Proust, Terence Kilmartin (Translator), C. K. Scott-Moncrieff (Translator). Many famed Film directors tried to get the Recherche as a film: but not as the whole, only separately some of the twelve books. The most recent film is Memory Lane.



It failed to bring Jim Carrey happiness in the award-winning film Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, but scientists have now developed a way to block and even delete unwanted memories from people's brains. Researchers have found they can use drugs to wipe away single, specific memories while leaving other memories intact. By injecting an amnesia drug at the right time, when a subject was recalling a particular thought, neuro-scientists discovered they could disrupt the way the memory is stored and even make it disappear. The research has, however, sparked concern among parliamentary advisers who insist that new regulations are now needed to control the use of the drugs to prevent them becoming used by healthy people as a "quick fix".... In a new study, revealed in the Journal of Psychiatric Research, psychiatrists at McGill University, in Montreal, and Harvard University, in Boston, used an amnesia drug to "dampen" the memories of trauma victims. Prof Karim Nader, of McGill University, said: When you remember old memories they can become 'unstored' and then have to be 'restored'. As the memory is getting restored, we gave patients a drug that turns down the emotional part of the memory. It left the conscious part of the memory intact, so they could still remember all the details but without being overwhelmed by the memory. The research suggests memories can be manipulated because they act as if made from glass, existing in a molten state as they are being created, before turning solid. When the memory is recalled, however, it becomes molten again and so can be altered before it once more resets.The drug used by the scientists is thought to disrupt the biochemical pathways that allow the memory to "harden" after it is recalled. The researchers used propranolol, a drug normally used to treat hypertension in heart disease patients but also known to cause memory problems. They treated 19 accident or rape victims for 10 days with the drug or with dummy pills, while they asked to describe their memories of a traumatic event that happened 10 years earlier.

Healing, psychoanalysis, ripeness... and their opponents

Even when the "repression" is massive and malignant (often "helped" with alcohol or drugs, if not authorized or even forced with so-called medicaments and/or elettroshock) at any time sudden violent flashes of vivid memories (rightly called FLASHBACKS) can spontaneously either fleetingly unblock the memory, or progress when the censorial effort gives away. These do NOT occur due to a  a particular brain power, or a decision, or an external inducement, or some "magical" occurence. The flash-backs, with their vivid emotional psychological reliving, are nevertheless often accompanied by a lot of real BODILY manifestations: one can perhaps hypothesize the possibility that "these" specific memories can be STORED not in the brain itself but everywhere in the "visceral body", in the nervous cells of the A.P.U.D. system, in its so-called paraneurones, which surround bowels and even lodges in perhaps all visceral systems (for example: even in the so called glomes).
(Look also at: Anmnesis: a way for healing...) and on the wide bibliography of Medline / PubMed

And for easier to-read other scientific subjects and bibliographies:

Brain talk communities

Look into at: Physical (somatic) memory

And on the wholesome physiological site one has to notice the PHEROMONES and their actions. It was in 1986 that Dr.Winnifred Cutler, founder of Athena Institute, and her colleagues conducted the first controlled scientific studies to document the existence of pheromones in humans. Prior to their landmark research there were no conclusive indications that pheromones were excreted by humans. By 1999, from a biological perspective, the term pheromone can be defined as a chemical excreted by animals that promotes behaviors [mostly for to] PERPETUATE THE SPECIES.... She published her first scientific paper on the subject back in 1986, and she has gone on to isolate these'naturally occurring ingredients' and bottle them...
Read for example also:
The fertility effect of breastfeeding Breastfeeding emits chemicals which affect other women
Being around breastfeeding mums alters the length of other women's menstrual cycles, say researchers. Chemicals called pheromones given off by the mums - or their babies - Pheromones are chemicals which are emitted by one individual, causing a physical or behavioural change in another.

Welcome to the Pheromone Group website!


SCIENTIFIC DATA 

Record from database: MEDLINE Physiology of the APUD system. Abstract
The characteristic biochemical pathway of the APUD cell, namely amine precursor uptake and decarboxylation, are illustrated by the examples of serotonin and catecholamine metabolism. Increasing understanding of the origins of APUDomas as well as the biochemistry and physiology of the hormones they produce, has led to improved methods of detection, imaging and treatment of afflicted patients.
APUD Neuroendocrine and Peptide Systems. Pearse postulated in 1969 the presence of a dispersed system of apud cells -- all of neural crest origin -- so proposed a far-flung 'APUD' neuroendocrine system, secreting peptide mediators. The amines and peptides function variously as neurotransmitters, hormones, and modulators of neural action.  In the 1970s, the focus was on the amine metabolism that gave a unifying aspect to rather perplexing cells, scattered in many organs, which had been noticed and considered on an individual basis as clear (empty looking), or having granules reacting with silver salts. It turned out that most of these cell types made and released non-cytokine peptide mediators, to act locally or at a distance. The peptide story has now overwhelmed the amine or APUD idea, because these peptide factors are many, and are made and used for signaling in every part of the body, including the brain. The basis of the APUD classification is outlined below, because it helps explain aspects of pathology.
1. APUD (APUD cells of neural crest origin: Uptake and Decarboxylation)
Within some endocrine glands, chemoreceptors, the brain, and dispersed in epithelia, are cells that form amine compounds. After an Amine Precursor has been taken Up, the cell Decarboxylates it to form serotonin (5-HT) from 5-hydroxytryptophane, or a catecholamine from dihydroxyphenylalanine (hence APUD).Tumors of these neuroendocrine cells often draw attention because of symptoms resulting from an excess of ectopic (out of place) polypeptide hormone, e.g., ACTH from the bronchial neuroendocrine cell, and/or an excess of serotonin, resulting in the flushing, bronchoconstriction, diarrhea, [to add: sudden temper tantrums] etc. of the carcinoid syndrome. Carcinoids produce a variety of biologic amines, especially serotonin.
tryptophan--> 5-OH/tryptophan--> 5-OH/tryptamin (serotonin) 
serotonin------> DEAMINATED*------> 5-OH indole-acetic acid (5-HIAA)
5-HIAA measured in urine : DIAGNOSTIC TEST

And the whole matter popularized in books as these:
Body remembers

I Remember It Well
: somatic memory of trauma experienced.
by Babette Rothschild
Molecules of EmotionsMolecules of Emotion: Why You Feel the Way You Feel 
by Candace B., Phd. Pert, Deepak Chopra 
Childhood Trauma, the Neurobiology of Adaptation and Use-dependent Development of the Brain:
How States become Traits
Bruce D. Perry,M.D., Ph.D.
Ronnie A. Pollard, M.D. 
Toi L. Blakley, M.D. 
William L. Baker, MS 
Domenico Vigilante
The Child Trauma Academy