SUBLIMATIONS: VISUAL SCHEMES AND SCIENTIFIC EXPLANATIONInternal index (of Web site)#up-dates, #paychosomatics, #visual_schemes, #quotation, #definition, #body, #psychological_sublimations, #different_ages, #wide_and_varied, #puppets_or_funny_cubs, #pressure-volume-temperature |
|
|
April 13 2008  ...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 favour 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 to look
at the file prefacing
the English pages, future
first chapter of the English book.
To read a book - a real book on paper, sewn and bound - is easier than reading long files on-line: in a little while the English pages of this site - as has already been done for the Italian ones - will be PUBLISHED, PRINTED and SOLD in book-stores - as a NORMAL BOOK as is already the Italian book from this site Bambini di ieri = adulti di oggi. Adulti di oggi -> adulti di domani Then, to make this possible for English readers, all English pages are printed on a second book:  From
children
of
YESTERDAY to
adults of TOMORROW
is print-ready in the BookSurge system and will be available
for purchase on Abebooks, Webster.it -
holding also all
our books - and in www.Alibris.com and
also
on Kindle.
The book's listing will appear on www.BooksinPrint.com
and in www.GlobalBooksinPrint.com
Any way the site is continually up-graded: to be carefully informed it is suitable to go to the dedicated file Novelties on the site. General home  |
|
PSYCHOSOMATICSIf the files/chapters Children of YESTERDAY = today's adults. Today's adults -> adults of TOMORROW completed by ... from today's adults -> to adults of Tomorrow... should not only be considered the introduction to and beginning of the whole site/book, setting up the essential meaning of the whole, they are also followed and consolidated by the files/chapters evidencing the Author's personal knowledge by showing - even in a not English file/chapter - preliminary excerpts of the message and the sources of her teaching references. Moreover to support them has to be utterly keep in view the mainstream purposes: to straight emphasize the "fourth dimension" of human life, moving from childhood and its obliged passages of development to their everlasting presence into memory - either conscious and meaningful or "removed": unconscious and often damaging.These concepts however are forcefully dynamic and then these topics must ever precisely and timely be enabled by continual basic adds and conceptual revision. Therefore it is not adequate to read them on a static book: the real relevance of such lively - not theoretic - subjects has to be reached and considered often confronting the Web site, moreover on its ever up-dated files Consciousness and memory, Anamnesis? A way for healing.... But the "fourth dimension" of "time" has not to prevail on the other three ones of space and its properties: they are to be compared together and secured on a wholeness. Just this file/chapter has to complete the above quoted parts, but it determines also a more general learning: the interactions between corporeal occurrences and their inter-action - into and from - external world, which can be defined the background of PSYCHOSOMATIC science. Obviously here one touches subjects which can distress some ones and so become open to question: then this file/chapter matches also other most controversial files, to begin from an open to question file, absent in the Italian book: TOTEM AND TABOO REVISITED: awful and fertile rise of new SUPERSTITIONS (but present - as chapter 26 - in another site/book It's Abuse NOT Science fiction) indirectly mirroring and completing an otherwise only Italian, also controversial, essential file/chapter Imbroglio è il contrario di sviluppo which title reflects an Italian pun authoritatively stated on the main Dictionary of Synonyms and Contraries: its approximate translation has been used as subhead on the very title of the fundamental file/chapter Anamnesis: a way for healing... To coil reflects
to involve: is it
the contrary of to
develop? At a
good side: only wrapped
buds can thrive; but
also to uncoil embroiled
matters can
assist development once restored
past, since - at a
bad side - a synonym of involved is embroil/mislead
meaning
also FRAUD]
Even more bitter
controversial
is the
file/chapter presented in
both languages: Opinioni,
fatti, accuse / Opinion, fact, complaint to specify real
design and aims for refuting any risk of
misunderstanding. The
Italian file/chapter only
parallel with this one - Dal
SUBLIMATO al CONCRETO / From SUBLIMATED
towards CONCRETE - is
satirically underlined by a not translated
mocking cartoon: to explain PSYCHOSOMATIC mirroring
real work mixed up with "bowels urge". In fact the normal trend of the anal
complex is "to exert" with every outside,
with every matter regarding every "to
do" and
more specifically
every to put
outside - "facts", actions,
duties: therefore beginning
with really
"inner" simply bodily ones, for sublimating towards "faraway" even
figurative and symbolic deeds. Lupo Alberto
tells about his - external - "duties", his "job", his to
be
so busy, and instead the mole is telling WITH THE SAME
WORDS
about his bowels' CONSTIPATION.
\The two
characters of this cartoon are chatting with very
similar words:
mourning, deploring the time too much full of
grieving, the days without the possibility to have a relief for
themselves,
for - tells the mole - to
keep every filth and have to retain every thing
into...,, for
a terrible lack of stimuli...,
for an annihilating waiting
without making..., to whom Lupo - wolf - Alberto
answers: Yes I
understand you...But he is referring to "sublimated matters" as his own business, affairs, job...: and so he doesn't understand really the mole's discouragement, till when Enrico the mole asks with sympathy Are you too constipated? Visual schemes
|
|
 The
basic concept of Psychosomatic
visualized as movement of Cyclones
and Anticyclones:
From a simple compact
beginning the sum of vital occurrences can manifest themselves in a
wide range of orbits and complexity, but from every step alternatively
can come back
to restrict concrete. It is to say that - as systole and
diastole of the pumping heart - recurrently if all can go on towards expansions, at any time from them vice-versa it can come again
back to material body. |
|
Sublimation (chemistry and psychology)Sublimation
of an element or compound is the change from a solid
directly to a gas
with no intermediate liquid stage.
Sublimation is a phase transition
that occurs at
temperatures and pressures below the triple
point (see phase diagram).
At normal
pressures, most chemical compounds
and elements
possess three different states
at different temperatures.
In these cases the transition from the solid to the gaseous state
requires an intermediate liquid state. However, for some elements or
substances at some pressures the material may transition directly from
solid to the gaseous state. Note that the pressure referred to here is
the vapor pressure
of the substance, not the
total pressure of the entire system. |
|
DefinitionIn the Italian file/chapter matching this one, a not translated cartoon page looks as a visual indirect paradigm regarding psychic and somatic - and sociological - analogies, sharing in a mocking way how much a real work could be "equated" with an inner bodily occurrence. The possibility to "sublimate" a body deed in the direction of an external performance - which is the very concept of psycho-somatic - here becomes a fun description of a continuous misunderstanding by protagonists: chatting the one of real work, the other of "bowels urge". Any way either in Italian files/chapters of site and book or in their English mirror pages it should be pointed out to consider straight together - as reciprocal explanation - this "sublimation" topic with those regarding "medicine" - Anamnesis? A way for healing... - and "work" from its basics - DOMESTIC CHORES. Ergonomics and psychology of a REAL workTo enter on the essence of this matter, first of all it is necessary to clarify a concept used also in a figurative and metaphoric way - unfortunately so often adulterated - which is sublimation. In chemistry and physics, and long before in alchemy - one speaks of sublimation to indicate a reversible phenomenon of passage: the sublimate substances which pass simply from the solid state to the gaseous one (and vice-versa!) subject to an easily definable balance varying with the parameters of pressure, temperature, volume (read above as it happens to the iodine, to the carbonic snow or – in more domestic surroundings – to the camphor and to the mothballs etc. - and the psychodynamic concept is not substantially different: variations of biochemical rhythm of the body (e.g. hypoglycemia) translate themselves – going from the concrete to the more “abstract” – into NEEDS, into activating INSTINCTS, but also into states of mind, into ways of thinking. The biochemical hypoglycemia as its first direct step becomes “hunger”, then “search” or “longing” for food and then gradually “other” always more abstract: sadness, submission, or even mystic ideas of fasting. But the sublimate abstractions can turn “back”: if hypoglycemia/hunger can sublime into sadness, into sense of abandonment, into submission; in a reversible and symmetric way sadness, abandonment, submission can give birth to pseudo-needs, trigger off dependences, deceiving themselves into concrete compensations like an increased desire to eat or to drink – including alcohol and other drugs. And at this point the theme should connect other great sectors of the “body life”, its “foreign affairs” sector, that is all the organs, apparatus, tissue and functions of the life of relation: nervous system, specific senses, muscles, bones. As regards the visceral system all this belongs to the first step on the way of the sublimations: permitting to recognise the “need”, it incites the “doing” of something to placate it - even Beyond the pleasure principle - but it in turn produces chemical variations which have a powerful influence on the “remainder”: on the one side “turning back” towards the pure vegetative, on the other seeking expansion towards the external. As in chemistry and physics so in psychodynamics there do not exist attributions of “value”: the gaseous “sublimate” is not “worth” more than the substance in the solid state or vice-versa; each “material state” has its own characteristics, properties, advantages and disadvantages, and is chilled or warmed from one passage to the other.
- The reactions can
organise themselves into instincts
- these manifest themselves in behavioural schemata - to the immediate reactions the brain can superimpose reactions more capable of adaptation - it can furthermore prepare perceptive and precautional adaptations - it can organise deliberate actions in which hopefully to involve also the environment of other individuals as well as things - it can finally turn towards continuously deliberate and efficient working actions - notwithstanding it can also provoke
actions not
“useful” in themselves
- sheer expansion towards the limit of available energy - discharges of poisoning “ tensions” - but also free PLAY of actions/reactions – as movements carefully measured and synthetically creative. This is the chain without either solutions of continuity or leaps in quality, which goes FROM the life of the vegetative body AS FAR to sport and even to science and art. And this chain, like the chemical bodies, can either expand towards still wider spaces which will thus receive the imprint of the subject (e.g. art), or can reduce itself. As written above its expansion can either become so sheer to step over limits of available energy or it can compress itself further and further until borderline cases - much more widespread than they seem - in which lacks are so diffuse as to be no longer perceived as needs: alike happensa when over-hungry persons are no longer aware “to be hungry”. Both cases carry a risk: the risk to lose oneself not in creativity but in a frozen, abstractly ghost-like world, or the risk of concentrating so much tension and energy in certain organs of the body as to cause their damage. The case of the starving individual who no longer is experiencing hunger and therefore does not “search” for food is obvious, but there are so many other lacks which are not perceived as needs, leading to even fatal illness: typical is the failure to recognise not only the lack of rest, but the even biological need to use to the best or at least to exercise in some way the great systems pertaining to one essential side of life of relation: the side capableto provide to vital “recreational” distractions by different rhythms, by more liberal activities! Remaining with the analogy with chemistry and physics and the coefficients which regulate the balance between the concrete and the sublimate it is necessary:
But the operating presence of the "I" allows the addition of another peculiar series of transformations to the whole biological complex in continuous transformation: the lacks and mutations become “sensations”; and since besides the sensations have their biochemical structuring they are much more and not only “ideas” to be named in a scornful way. And so the sensations through a new series of chemical movements! can become stimulants to action either immediately or by passing through routes even more indirect and modulated:
For many persons it is difficult to think of the “body” other than with this structure: to the concept of the body is superimposed this “form” as if it were more recognisable like anatomy studied in the Fine Arts Academy. Such a visual form as if it were more controllable and reassuring is less disconcerting than the INTERNAL: only visualizable in a medical-technical center. The inner, hidden, "wild", "dark" visceral ungovernable system is so felt too often at least as always in unknown dangers, if not as a rule ignored, if not considered enemy, “spiteful” and shunned with expressible emotions in the terms: it frightens, it upsets. But its principal components are also distinct organs, and so each one of them also have a life of unstable equilibria and of complicated internal changes and exchanges: even the skeleton which for commonplace people would seem the most fixed structure is instead “alive”, very alive, is a very important organ in the metabolism of the organism; itself is in continuous vital metabolism and therefore equipped with essential requirements: which translate into “needs”. Everybody knows that unused muscles atrophy, diminish, but on the other hand they develop and grow with use. Not everyone knows - or rather not everyone notices - that bones also become smaller with lack of use but strengthen with use: and this is the explanation of “thin wrists” and “tapered hands” and the skinniness of the young girls of nineteenth century tales, yet on the contrary it is the explanation of the wide shoulders of gymnasts, swimmers and those who do heavy work, and of the huge fists of manual workers. And then to demonstrate further that the bone is alive and participates closely in the life of its owner one can cite the legs of jockeys and other clear skeletal peculiarities indicative of practical working activity. Both bone and muscle should proceed harmoniously and work together: an activity like sporting-athletic or - worse - body-building which is too intense with heavy unbalanced training, can lead even to bone fractures by sudden movement because the too hurriedly exercised muscle became more robust than its related bone. One can observe and then get to know the vicissitudes of the locomotor apparatus, but it is rare even in the medical field to advance beyond the reasoning that if an organ, a tissue has such a rich life, it follows that all its variations will have repercussions on the life of all the organism; and that since this “life” will send “signals” to the rest of the body: it try to explain its own needs and its search for fulfillment, and this will influence the remainder. But in the body exist other “organs” equipped with intrinsic life and sources of modifications and of needs which will have repercussions on everything: there are the specialised “senses” delegated to the “foreign affairs”, specifically sight and hearing; and those more linked with the “internal affairs” as touch, thermal touch, smell, taste. And there also exists the enormous brain, programmer of whatever other organ and internal function and coordinator of every form of exchange with the outside. Bones, muscles, sight, hearing, thinking and communicating brain do not function on brief and forced rhythms like the metabolism, the activity of assumption and excretion: strictly speaking one can survive in a coma but to live properly one needs to maintain these senses functioning. Their “cries” do not translate themselves into so imperious needs as for example suffocation or at least thirst, but however into discomforts: into an almost "sublimated suffucation", into a weariness which at best could be named boredom. But one can't imagine the consequences of a lack of connection between these and the others: just as bones and muscles need to work and to maintain themselves at a well harmonised level of parallel development, so the brief and forced and manifold and self-linked rhythms of the internal visceral life influence and unite in openings and/or coalitions on the life of external relation. From the most intimate of the internal organs to the most abstract creations of the mind, all must proceed in continuous movements, like the systole and diastole of a great metaphorical heart in which there is represented all the organism in its worldly active presence. (On line the Italian file representation can be seen in animation). Brain, hearing, vision, muscles, bones, not having their own fixed biorhythms must be fed externally in order “to function”, but must indeed be fed because their inertia damages the whole body. A first phase of the perception of this special “hunger in sublimation” is boredom: at certain moments it can be named accentuated by the more or less joking adjective “deadly boredom”, but really sensory deprivation can be used as a real torture, i.e. it produces a real state of illness. Any way the body with its internal sensorials can remain active and so these signals can become the sole stimulus and aim, but – even without reaching the situation of consciously induced torture - this unexpressed need acts against the “remainder” of the body, of every “internal affairs”, of the visceral body, of the body as a living totality: in their character however of “organs” biologically “internal” the organs of the life of relation as an integral part of the living body in turn act against the whole organism. In the same way in the continuous game of vital existence, sublimations and concretes, anatomical-physiological structures responsible for the life of relation and internal organs influence each other: this is why it is so important to consider the “life” of the bone and not only its function of dynamic scaffolding. So the “body” is not that articulate dummy that many would like to believe for convenience; that dummy to which a hypothetical “will” imposes orders, habits, determines “behaviour”; that dummy on which one can even condition “style” so as to cut a fine figure before an hypothetical "I", its owner. It is instead a unique whole and interacts with the outside environment – which in turn is not made only of interpersonal relations – according to modalities which stem from the internal biological instability and move into even wider spaces.
The “Coefficients” of "Psychological" SUBLIMATIONSExcerpted from Encyclopedia Britannica on-line: Sublimation as Defense mechanism. Sublimation
is
the diversion
or deflection of
instinctual drives, usually sexual ones, into noninstinctual
channels.The
compromise generally involves
concealing
from oneself internal drives or feelings that threaten to lower
self-esteem or provoke anxiety instead SUBLIMATION, is the diversion of an instinctual
desire
or impulse from its primitive form to a more socially or culturally
acceptable form.
Nietzsche's beliefs
on the primary aim of education, the conscious
production of the free man
through the process of sublimation, the
active redirecting of one's life energy in the service of creativity The fundamental
premise that permitted Freud to
examine cultural phenomena was then called sublimation
in the Three Essays.
The chemico-physico sublimations are subject to coefficients of temperature, pressure, volume; in the case of the psychic sublimations these terms can be used to synthetically define concepts basically analogous:
When instead prevails the anal complex, the complex of distrust, of expulsions: the condition ever moving from destructions to construction, from waste to recyclings... any increase in pressure produces anguish, as does the impossibility to throw it off because of the increase of aggressiveness and because of over-stimulated interior conflicts: this falls in the most “anal” periods as the period of “no” at the age of two, the period of the elementary school, the period of the adult working life. The genital complex in its two aspects “yin” and “yang” – Oedipus and castration – requires however greater space: to expand, to adapt, to assimilate, to renew itself, to invent, to discover to create: in the more “genital” ages fantasy and sentiment take command but when they are fed and not discouraged and not only performing on a close familiar surroundings. It is not for nothing that at four years of age children would stay “out” all day, at thirteen the “escapes” can be so very frequent, from fifteen to twenty/twenty five people should be in the better disposition to travel willingly and to consider “boring”everything not stimulating. In other terms, from the practical viewpoint and in general: for every one - especially but not only when child, and therefore involved in development - the free and available going from and forth of physical and psychological sublimations should have a prepared necessary background to ensure at best this aim if warranted by
Who is at the “genital” - expansionist - phase tends to sway the others, to make them participate in his ventures. However if at any age the concepts of food and affectionate warmth, to feed and tender relations are mixed; and so on reverse at any age one can suffer indigestion or feel uneasy on eating and digestion when it is not possible to digest properly not food but environmental "situations"; vice-versa without a corresponding growth of “warmth”, the growths of “space” “grow cold”, disorientate, and under this bewilderment lead for a hypersexualisation of relations, of experiences, of a deceptive “warming” compensation. When pressure without parallel compensation increases, the aggressive/expulsive energies are incentivated: in the best case the very internal pressure stimulates the finding of obstacles against which to act and incentives to follow in undertaking certain actions - like unrefined foods help avoid constipation - but in too many cases it goes only in the direction of destructivity. But there does not exist only “abusive” medicalisation: to enhance pressure on the whole environment relapsing back from one to others certainly exist structural collapses of physical bodies as real and proper illnesses; reversibly whoever is in conditions of intolerable environmental pressures, without sufficient effective equivalents, without proper plans of direct action, and without expansive outlets, can risk maximum damage also directly to the body. And there exist even fatal “illnesses” involving together physical and non-physical bodies like conscious and active suicide, but also at least restlessly or even active research into accidents: until arriving at the maximum irreversible return of the sublimations towards the concrete as death through self starvation, anaclitic depression, depressive “marasma”...: conditions when lacks are no longer perceived as needs, when everything becomes a "nothing", indifferent, empty. But sublimations of inner homeostasis can open also outside: when internal pressures are not otherwise canalised, when the external world doesn't offer no warmth or no sufficient space one can reach at maximum of destructiveness without an end in itself. Unaccompanied by sufficient effective warmth the pure destructivity against itself – illnesses, drug addiction, accidents, chaotic recklessness – or against “the others” can widespread unconcerned and unlimited not having lived as such but only as a “dumping ground" of one extra to get rid of (e.g. the” useless crimes” of the bored boys/girls from “good families”) Also a mistimed excess of affective stimulations can become disorganising for the subject who already finds himself in or who is just entering a phase of directioned activity or of creative expansion: so interior conflict arouse, so a blamed energetic will to perform is transformed into awkwardness, disability, and errors: instead of in efficiency or in enterprise all collapses in fear, in anxiety, in preoccupations - i.e. literally in occupations that come first, before the deed to happen. This is the condition of
DIFFERENT AGESThe present file/chapter and Anamnesis? A way for healing... are strictly bound together, since managing a similar subject with different purposes and different resources to highlight the earliest origin of this whole work; and many of its concepts have to be strengthen by the description endorsed on Childhood: times of Mutability.But to straightforward enter on the main subject related to this file/chapter it is to point out that ever body and its emotions - either the good ones or else also those, as "nostalgia" or "boredom", as near a sickness deed - are not absolute platonic ideas since factual moving - e-motion: from ex-, e- + movere to move - occurrences; and besides the bodies of developmental ages have their own characteristics phase by phase, also the adult stage in its turn is not so static and definitive. In fact at any age even the everyday functioning, even the short banal rhythms of whatever part of the bodies are varied, and involve energies, exchanges, methods of relationship from time to time differentiated and uneven: indeed at any age certainly are not equal the methods which control the lacks and the fulfillments, which organise the surpluses and the waste, the destructions and the reconstructions, the recyclings and the expulsions, or those which control the expansions, the adjustments, the assimilations, the renewals, the syntheses. Also on turning round, during the momentary course of a single day even in the body of a baby-in-arms (and of a foetus) as well of an old person - or else of every "animal" - these patterns and vital processes pursue each other and engage each other. But during the development something more happens: in the differentiate course of each particular life time/stage each of these modalities is assumed as emblematic of the whole mode of existence, becomes a forma mentis, a prevailing system of relationship with the environment. Furthermore: there are working out these "famous" - but too often so misrepresented - complexes. Every development of the individual personality and of the interaction between individual and environment has its mark also in the physical sense and not only as relational one: between individual striving and sentimental aims, between pursuit of self-centred well being and social relationships, between enjoying rest and pleasure of action etc. Categorically at any time and age every attainment of aspects of the internal and external reality must be occur as preferential target through these well defined and uneven evolutive phases. But it does not only concern the “outside world”: each stage of development has from time to time its own representation-materialisation in well defined organs and bodily functions; also on the body itself the discontinuity exists and build separations between complex and complex. Within the scope of each of them lies instead the healthiest continuity, well balancing and capable of re-equilibrating itself in turn between the physical and the “sublimate”: the more harmoniously if not the more completely the infantile phase has permitted it, the better it will get access to a fruitful “development”. In fact "complex" literally means complicated, composed of various elements operatively joined together: so complex behaves precisely as a whole and a real "whole" not only expressing itself occasionally. Perhaps the mathematical absolute term of structure would express better the meaning than the term “complex”, instead too often so easy to be mixed up. Each complex is formed by nature itself in an organised and typical way by biochemical and functional imbalances which have to be made ready and effectual in a systematic way at EVERY AGE: towards their biological broadening progressive orbit of translation
Wide and varied potentialityA complicated, wrapped connection of different entities: apparently erratic? Then their internal logic has to be studied following its real "language", accepting their special characteristic which is of setting up for every individual a wide and varied potentiality to avail at the same time to become aware of what is different from himself and aware of the relations which link him with the outside world: it is to say that, feeling so differentiate inner experience, one can master manifold aspects of the outside world, and can become apt also to literally com-prehend them from their manifold points of view. The psychological complexes differ however from every abstract subject of mental study other than by their breadth, because they have a very precise base in the health body, each one in a specific part and precisely in those organs which make the boundary between internal and external. From time to time they put in parallel communication the differentiate and moving outside with the personal internal, but with an internal world itself which is also in continuous change, with an internal world ever moved by balances and needs. Surely just the possibilities offered by all this changing inner world means to "be - really - alive"; but also it is just this mutability which can aid to move into and then "com-prehend" a not narrow exterior: an exterior to be after gathered into conscious memorized EXPERIENCE - of persons and things, of activities, of affections, of relationships and links, of facts and knowledge. But the "sublimation" concept implies into itself every facets of every situation: circularly in turn, it is just such a "vortex stream" which allows to recognize and manage also the transformations that the individual induces in what surrounds him.The human being however does have an inept and very prolonged infancy, also granted by a prolonged dependence on human environment and really caracterised by an ensuing series of "in succession orbitals", not by "capricious switches" as mistaken by an exterior defective, non-participating vision. Unfortunately these so frequent faults imply not only actual mismanagement but a lot of disarrays increasing in the long run, since this inept infancy - and the successive to be protect childhood - after all are only preparatory stages of a very difficult job to be regularly performed. If instead all proceeds according with the changing development, if the external circumstances and the adult behaviours are not opposed or do not disturb each other and each phase, systematically and opportune inter-faces among the activated corporal zones and the inter-human relationships evolve and mature: to become more and more fully available in a full and complete form of existence. And turning round in accordance with their precise systematic internal calendar - to be repeated: due to an utter far-reaching range throughout the development - these alternate phases and different if not antithetical manners can point out and find on the surrounding all specific instruments to join the right way to be activated, even also “using” the near persons as “actors” making them to recite on the scene of the experiencing life. And finally, coming back to the more concrete matter of the sublimations, during the course of infantile development a purely interior process does make certain organs and bodily functions become spontaneously protagonists: their psychic representation becomes overloaded with emotiveness, and the resultant sensations become privileged and therefore capable of unleashing neurovegetative storms - even till actual physical damage - so much as to attract, condense and intensify, focussing all available energy. Long-term memory is
subdivided into explicit
(declarative) and implicit (procedural)
memory. Explicit memory provides factual knowledge of the
world (semantic) and personal past (episodic). Explicit memories
are recollected in consciousness, with long-term encoding dependent
on the hippocampus (Squire
& Kandel, 1998). Implicit memory
stores our skills, tasks, habits and emotional reflexes;
however, their expression does not necessitate immediate transfer
into the consciousness or require the hippocampus for long-term
encoding, but is likely to be mediated through the cerebellum,
basal ganglia and amygdala (Squire
& Kandel, 1998)
Notwithstanding at
any age of
life the human environment as interpersonal society and determined
“culture” tends to become -
well or badly succeeding - an integral
part of everyone whole life: usually so pervasive and heavy to be no
more felt - the implicit language
of Anthropological folk
psychology - acting on every field of life but perhaps more
strictly on narrowing the ways to rear children. Nowhere and almost nobody claims
directly to “hate
childhood” but, even if recently someone tries to promote that Let children to be
children almost none
of
rhetoric studies - and also "laws" - refers to "child" as a concrete
being, refers as losing sight of specific essence of the
child being mutability , as that child is a being working at the
difficult
job of managing transformation, towards
a varied and global preparation for a varied and uncoiled thriving
life. Unfortunately to
constrict spaces
every
time and everywhere society and culture exact a very strong pressure
either on conscious and willing or on reluctant members: as implicit knowledge
this pressure "dwells" inside everyone, comes to be part of internal
psychosomatic organisation, deeply interferes on choices, on prevailing
forms of relationships and affections, on interpretative model of reality - so
building "implicit" not acknowledged unassailable prejudices. Implicit and then ill-considered this internal command compels how to
organise the selection of acquaintances, determines personal style of
actions and even of
determined somatic attitudes, if not somato-visceral patterns. Beyond restricting traditional
cultures also inconsistent but powerful fashions do
exist: if every type of static culture tends to privilege one or other
style of being and acting,
one
or other type of “complex”, it
is not contradictory if at
the same time temporary, whimsical
"fashions" do try to reach their “ideal” integration. A totally
successful adaptation to the surrounding small - fixed and/or
inconsistent - human world itself implies
then a large
denial of otherwise, because the prevailing manner can become
only a
suffocating disapproval of the others.Does each of the great complexes possess its own materialisation in specific zones and functions of the body? Each of these developmental and environmental sectorialisations will tend to provoke in the body itself particular and specific defective imbalances till real peculiar illnesses. But also from unlike ways the various cultural milieus can hurt the same organs: is true that modern “civilisation” can induce particular psychosomatic illnesses, but even the “simpler” civilisations certainly no less, and not even the animals are immune. “We civilised beings” die of heart attacks through excessive environmental demands, “they – the simple ones” – animals included – die through taboo or of desperation or nostalgia. A frigid only abstract rhetoric, a lot of suffering and/or denied feelings of nostalgia and regrets coming from personal past occurrences, the concrete actual, familiar way and organization of living, as well dogmatism and convention have led to floods of words regarding children and their presumed needs, putting forward a bulk of "studies" - and pseudo-studies - regarding “how” to set up an “ideal” rearing. Floods of rhetoric, not always disinterested, are courses concerning the “sentimental needs” of an hypothetic so called "child" not taking into account that with the word “child” one can mean as much the new-borns as the sixteen year old ones. On the adult and environmental side it is almost disorienting to join the mass of chatting work "pontificating" sometimes in exaggerate favor sometimes furiously against its need of "Mummy", or of its need for “play” and for permissiveness; or for application, for “socialisation”, for learning. It is claimed that is possible to overcome certain tendencies in the children by modifying them even with toys; as well either to transform the human "cub" into a permanent funny toy, or to compel as soon as possible to make intensive and unilateral working performances. As above reasonably explained, "sublimation" doesn't be considered as a platonic idea nor as an only theoretic scheme, besides this description doesn't allude to a generic entirety: every constituent of each complex takes its place on the " unfolding anticyclone and collecting cyclone" scale of sublimations. Does oral complex need an everlasting warmth and relaxation? Do secluded "buds" thrive only if sheltered, fed and pampered? Is this state the happiest condition or rather a temporary balance where to achieve or regain rest and improvement? Then: is this alternatively a necessary passage of pause to refresh after and when the pressure has received relief on its expansion to external spaces? Or rather: are both of them part of a ring-shaped occurrence of ever renewed passages from rest to leisure, to gratification of conflict solving, to accomplishments and vice-versa recurring again to rest? For a plenty existence is it therefore enough to "fuse" into a family, to enjoy with sentiments, to be wrapped into feelings? Or on the contrary - if destitute of satisfactory issue - don't the throwing out forces boost so much temperature and pressure to result in the whole system at risk of explosion, of discharges of violence, even deadly violence as for typical example the possessive fake-jealousy? Therefore: are to be more "praised" calm or activity? Yin or Yang? Inward or outward? Or this a very fatuous problem? Since without any doubt the inner individual presence urge to manifest itself by the physiological energy to expel physically concrete substances - from bowels and bladder, or even by sneezes or cough - as well the "animal" life itself compels to spread out "energy" by skeleton and muscles, and also by mental willing to perform and move. So then why does not exist in anyone the anal complex with its forceful pressures thrusting outside? But if typically this complex has charge of internal tensions - which, if badly regulated, can lead to illness - it acts the same handling sublimated forces which have to manage the struggle for existence and every external difficulties to be overcome. Just so this physiological complex can display and establish - from another more outwardly sublimated point of view - the aggression-escape pattern with its various methods of realisation, transformation, redirection, with its endorsed "normal" - and normally apt to be managed - destructiveness. Civilization and Its Discontents? If everyone wishes to arrive - or better: has permission - to possess and dominate to ripen at maximum his interior being, or - more modestly - to assure for the "psycho-somatic" body a balanced functioning, this can happen when during infancy a long and seemingly illogical road is pursued and achieved as if as a succession of various perceptions and fantasies, of variable conceptions and actions. Thus the instincts prevalent at that given moment can bit by bit, with the necessary gradualness and completeness, re-dimension the internal and external reality: each one will thus be able to become experienced with the maximum intensity, and with deeper personal participation. Transformed more profitably into the baggage of experiences those participations become not only “savoured” but also truly usable in both enrichment and protection. As the oral one therefore also the anal complex is "normal" - both built either by concrete or sublimated constituents - as every life plan, but both are more involving at times specific ages and moments of everyones life: when anal one is at work its rough realities prevail over every inner feeling and longing for rest; and not only when compelled by necessity: if these are the forces which in adult life will become “work”, at any age can manifest themselves also in "contradictory" leisure games repetitive and “serious", in which the aim is to search for difficulties with which to test and to challenge oneself. The anal complex regards "things", "facts" not living deeds: as well to prove oneself against obstacles - effectual for profit or searched for taming overflowing energies - besides for mastering a too plenty of these forces one can - productively or for play - purposely be faced with “rules”: abstract structures onto which a person can act out as a part of a material "not living" organisation. The hard pleasure to experience and learn to control seems paradoxical, but how many also adults find extremely “restful” (“re-creative”) challenging themselves with tiring and pressing activities: not only sporting but even sedentary - from crosswords, to cards, to chess, to detective mysteries, to the "ship in a bottle"? And how many schoolchildren - and therefore already subject to activities of this type – conduct furious competitions of crosswords, naval battles etc., swap picture cards, play skittles etc.? Children as puppets or funny cubsChildren as puppets or funny cubs? Mystified motherhood as a long lasting covering task? "Control" as ability to precisely perform - or even rather to master - or "inhibition" as means ar least an impeding shyness, or worse to become a programmed tool: for adults' amusement, for work, if not for being slaved to become a mute accomplice of evil aims? And respectively are to be ever get children to avoid difficulties, weariness, efforts, trials with their errors, "discontents", even "routs"?Also for children as trainees to uncoil a plentiful life, often can be more important for the whole organism to exercise itself, not only to be cleaned in order to drop material waste: for healthy and joyful children/cubs it is mandatory to have allowed spaces and possibility where and when make the best use of their energetic aggressive tensions in order also to experience and learn to control them: an utter advantage for the total body/mind organization. (Joking on a pun regarding this "total organism functions", an old advertisement for a laxative promised to "regularize the functions - as antonomasia - of the organism".) Children, whilst passing through every phase, ought to manage to resolve the Oedipus' Enigma of the Sphinx – what is this animal which is always changing, which passes from “four legs to two, and then to three”: the main "Enigma" which asks wait the answer regarding the "Self", the whole identity of every person being the same through every age. To manage to “uncoil” in the interior and to “understand” – that is literally to take inside – the complexes is travel over every of their "orbit" or component without however canceling any of their moments, without neglecting any of their aspects, and especially without forcing or squandering their own individuality in order not to alienate themselves from the world or the self from themselves. To preserve the "self" beyond the times in its really lived present, in its experienced past - as memory - and its more sublimate - open to future - willing, thoughts, purposes and fantasies - makes also to be able to prepare the best way for a real proper human evolution (even to plan ahead the phase – senile – of the three legs), to balance all the changes of energy implicated in it. But there does not exist only the theoretical cultural rhetoric, the sublimated abstractions: the child is truly “in the hands” of the adults who
|
