Archetypes as Masks

Reflections on Girard's "Violence and religion":

Archetypes may be powerful and "true" because they are necessary to mask even more powerful truths.

If “the whore” archetype seems unavoidable for women (as I have been told), is it because the image masks the deeper, more frightening truth of their power . . . including violence?

Re. Oedipus. Is it the father we (men and women) seek to kill, or is it violence? Is violence not the truer father/mother of man and woman? And is violence, also, a defense against love?

Self-sacrific may be a form of intra-psychic mob rule. Are there conditions by which self-sacrifice (as violence against violence) either is or is not acceptable?

Language Mediates Human Consciousness

Copyright 2009 by Christine M. Skolnik

Many neuroscientists and neuropsychologists currently adhere to the broad and convincing arguments of Antonio Damasio, Joseph LeDoux, and Jaak Panksepp which connect consciousness to basic emotions that monitor essential bodily functions. The central theme of Panksepp’s comprehensive and highly authoritative scholarly survey and reference book Affective Neuroscience:The Foundations of Human and Animal Emtoions, for example, states that emotions “reflect our ability to subjectively experience certain states of the nervous system” (9).

Panksepp identifies four “basic emotion command systems” using upper-case font to distinguish his terms for biological systems from borrowed commonplace terminology: SEEKING, RAGE, FEAR, and PANIC (Panksepp 51). This new nomenclature indicates that biologists are beginning to delve into areas once forbidden by behaviorist tenets, while striving to distinguish their work from the social sciences (Panksepp 332). Within this conceptual framework, emotions tell us what our bodies are experiencing and how to evaluate external objects with which we come in contact and which are instrumental to our survival (Damasio 114-18, 139).

If consciousness mediates external and internal realities, then language has become a crucial element of that medium: a techne of consciousness (Solms 283). Language currently mediates our perceptions and representations of the external world and our internal states, for the purposes of survival broadly understood—but also for ethical actions, altruistic choices, and transcendent values (Damasio 124-26). Though I concur with the general concepts of affective neuroscience regarding the development and basic operations of consciousness, I also agree with rhetorical critics who recognize that such arguments tend to deemphasize and even elide rhetorical factors.

Freud's Promethean discovery . . .

“Such awe seizes man when he unveils the lineaments of his power that he turns away from it in the very action employed to lay its features bare. So it has been with psychoanalysis. Freud’s truly Promethean discovery was such an action as his works bear witness; but the same is no less present in each humble psychoanalytic experience conducted by any one of the laborers formed in his school.

As time has gone by, we can trace almost year by year this aversion of interest as far as the function of the Word and the domain of Language are concerned.”

Lacan, Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis (Introduction)

Neu Rhetoric and Memory

Copyright 2009 by Christine M. Skolnik

If memory molds our perceptions and experiences from an early age, then the rhetorical canon of memory might be said to precede invention and arrangement, as personal and collective modes of perception and cognitive processes. Memory might even be considered a trump canon. Semantic, procedural, and episodic memories undoubtedly contribute to style as an acquired sense of the relationship between words and feelings. And, at the risk of appearing to be comprehensive for the sake of comprehensiveness, I also note the relationship between memory and the iterative nature of delivery.

The rhetorical quality of delivery from generic conventions to widely recognized performative rituals is heavily influenced by the fact of their repetition and our memory of that repetition. A generic convention of professional writing is persuasive because it appeals to our expectations as pre-existing cognitive templates. Similarly a performative ritual such as a sacred union, rite of passage, or initiation ceremony is largely meaningful, legal, and/or sacrosanct because of the fact of its repetition over generations, and unique because of variations on an established theme.

Though we tend to associate issues of perception with conscious cognitive processes, perception is influenced by all three types of memory. Over time perception becomes habitual, procedural. Also perception is influenced by emotion- and value-laden experiences as episodic memories. What is more, we are largely unaware of these influences as all these types of memories or traces can become unconscious (Solms 161).

As a means of self-regulation for survival, the purpose of cognitive processes is to reflect on the emotions. However emotions are also brought to bear on cognition in cases of psychological conflict, conscious deliberation, and virtually all value judgment. Indeed affective neuroscience suggests that emotions are the prime movers of all conscious brain activity. Both cognitive and affective processes can be consolidated into unconscious (procedural) memory, and these subcortical traces can subsequently influence perception and cognition without entering consciousness.

Emerging neuroscientific evidence for the existence and influence of unconscious processes has myriad ramifications for rhetorical theory and practice, though the challenge of integrating theories of unconscious with theories of rhetoric presents a unique challenge.

Talking to the Gene

From my forthcoming book.
Copyright 2009 by Christine M. Skolnik

Stress, Cortisol, and Genetic Expression

Physiologically speaking, stress is practically synonymous with the production of cortisol in the body. This hormone regulates the expression of various genes associated with the immune system. Too much cortisol inhibits immune responses; hence the commonly observed, and scientifically-grounded phenomenon of individuals becoming ill after a period of heightened stress (Andreasen 234-39; Martin 167-70). Cortisol production, however, can be controlled through cognitive framing and emotional regulation strategies, among them the explicitly rhetorical.

An experiment conducted by a group of psychiatrists at the University of Michigan showed a significant positive impact of cognitive intervention on subjects exposed to pentagastrin, a stress-inducing substance (Abelson 668). This intervention was obviously rhetorical, meant to lend subjects a greater sense of control by giving them more information before and during administration, as well as an opportunity to ask questions. Subjects in the CI (cognitive intervention) group received more detailed instructions accompanied by a five-minute conversation, a light that indicated pentagastrin flow, and options for controlling or stopping the flow (Abelson 670). Cortisol levels were markedly decreased in the CI versus the control group, even in subjects with panic disorder (Abelson 671). Interestingly, none of the subjects actually stopped the flow of pentagastrin (Ableson 670). These findings clearly indicate that stress responses may be psychologically inhibited and that such interventions could “help ameliorate cortisol-mediated deleterious effects of stress on health” (Abelson 674-75). This experiment also shows a direct connection between a rhetorical intervention, an increased sense of control, and decreased cortisol levels.

The connection between stress and illness is not news. The role of the genes in immune responses, however, is generally unknown, as is the fact that cognitive framing and emotional response can affect genetic expression through the fluid dynamics of hormones. The relationship between stress and cortisol suggests a continuum of various external and internal environments: the external factors causing stress; our personal psychological reactions to those factors; the biochemical environment of our bodies (presence of stress hormones); and the biochemical environment of our cells which afects genetic expression (Cloninger 279; Ridley Genome 150; Schneiderman). This continuum, furthermore, suggests various points of intervention—occasions when individuals can exert influence to reduce the negative psychological and physiological effects of stress. While most of the research on cortisol involves regulation of environmental factors by research scientists, stress can also be modulated by various strategies of emotional self-regulation (some of which are discussed in preceding chapters). To the extent that individuals can reduce their emotional stress responses they can also reduce the production of cortisol and boost their immune systems through autonomic genetic processes. This overall process, then, is paradigmatic of an individual’s ability to “talk back to the gene.” That is to say, individuals can affect genetic expression through cognitive, emotional, and rhetorical strategies.

Faith in Medical Science

From my forthcoming book; Copyright 2009 by Christine M. Skolnik

The legitimacy of medical science rests on faith as well as fact. That is to say the empirical grounds for the positive effects of conventional medicine are clearly reinforced by the rhetorical discursive practices in which they are articulated. Television advertisements for new drugs employ both technical and value language. These messages are compelling not only in terms of the medical information they convey but in the emotional presentation of various medical problems and cures. With compelling speech and visuals they not only promote a particular drug but the value of drug therapy in general. The drug industry itself, though criticized for being profit driven, is also accorded the respect of a cutting-edge scientific enterprise, partly through marketing and partly through a national pride in our research and development accomplishments. Other forms of medical technology also are accorded the same respect if not awe, when we consider and indeed pay related costs. The high cost of medical treatment in the US in general may, in fact, bolster the ethos of medical personnel, technologies, and related industries.

Researchers also suspect that the placebo effect is operative in the administration of conventional drugs and therapies, and there is empirical support for this hypothesis. That is to say conventional drugs and therapies are bolstered by the same factors that contribute to the placebo effect (Vase). Researchers have even speculated that in some cases prescribed drugs simply function as placebos. Antibiotics, for example, often work as placebos when administered for viral conditions, that would not typically require or respond to antibiotics (Hart). Researchers have also suggested that doctors could and should capitalize on the placebo effect by adopting a more psychologically sophisticated bed-side manner: “in practice such an approach could be implemented by interfacing standard treatments with attention to patients’ thoughts, beliefs, and feelings about the treatment and with attempts to optimize their perception of the treatment (Vase). Placebo researchers argue that such an approach would not only be more effective but also more ethical, given what we now know about the placebo effect (Vase).

The role of persuasion and faith is most evident in situations where, for various reasons, the subject is completely unaware that they are receiving a placebo. In most placebo trials the possibility that the patient is receiving a placebo engenders an element of doubt as well as faith—and results usually reflect that balance. In cases where subjects believe they are simply receiving an active drug, however, the percentage of positive placebo responses is typically much higher. Of course such conditions cannot be replicated in a conventional experimental setting for ethical reasons. However reviews of trials where subjects were given treatments later discovered to be ineffective, show startling results. In such cases positive placebo responses can be as high as 80 % (Hart).

The effectiveness of the placebo in this case, again, rests on a modern, scientific world view that associates drug therapy with medical cures, and values conventional medical practices. Ironically the findings of placebo experiments undermine these conventional practices to a certain extent, while implicitly legitimizing alternative approaches, especially those that integrate mind and body. Mindfulness-based cognitive-behavioral therapy, support groups, and meditation capitalize on many of the mind-body connections now known to be operative in the placebo effect.

Placebo researchers have extensively studied the neurological substrates of the placebo effect and the relationship between various mind, brain, and bodily
responses. Whereas the placebo affect was once assumed to be the result of response bias, research shows not only dramatic changes in brain activity but also the release of endogenous opioids in response to placebo administration (Hart; Price; Vase). Placebo administration can change not only the perception and subjective experience of pain but also objective factors. In experiments where opioid production in response to a placebo was artificially blocked (through administration of naloxone, an opioid antagonist), patients did not typically experience a placebo effect (Hart; Vase). This is clear evidence that the placebo works on the body as well as the mind and the brain, and that analgesic placebo effects are very real (subject to objective verification). Thus psychological and rhetorical factors involved in the placebo effect are instrumental in actually producing a drug-like substance within the body. This information in addition to the likelihood that a placebo effect is operational in conventional drug therapies complicates the distinction between active and inert substances, and our assumptions about various types of therapy. Just as alternative therapies may be very effective for those persuaded of their efficacy, so too conventional therapies may capitalize on the faith which patients place in the medical profession and conventional approaches.

On Giving an Account of Oneself

(Excerpt from forthcoming book, Copyright 2009 by Christine M. Skolnik)

Ultimately, Giving an Account of Oneself affirms the importance of the narrative mode to developmental and therapeutic processes while questioning the “health norm” and medical ethics of requiring patients to give coherent accounts (53, 63-65). Butler observes that “hyper-mastery” can be as unhealthy as “radical fragmentation” (52). She also argues that the structure of address, in effect, undermines the coherence of the narrative account:

I would suggest that the structure of address is not a feature of narrative, one of its many and variable attributes, but an interruption of narrative. The moment the story is addressed to someone, it assumes a rhetorical dimension that is not reducible to a narrative function. It presumes that someone, and it seeks to recruit and act upon that someone. Something is being done with language when the account that I give begins: it is invariably interlocutory, ghosted, laden, persuasive, and tactical. It may well seek to communicate a truth, but it can do this, if it can, only by exercising a relational dimension of language. (63)

The “addressed” account of oneself is both a representation and “falsification” of life—an attempt to render in the terms of a coherent spatio-temporal logic precisely that which cannot be contained in such a medium. The language and stories which make us also have the capacity to break us if we are held accountable for telling “what cannot be narrated,” or confessing that to which we cannot bear witness because of our “partial blindness about ourselves” or because we are “ethically implicated in the lives of others” (Butler, Account 41, 54 , 64).

The following passage foregrounds the epistemological incapacity and emotional vulnerability involved in an ethic which requires us to risk becoming “undone”:

Perhaps most importantly, we must recognize that ethics requires us to risk ourselves precisely at moments of unknowingness, when what forms us diverges from what lies before us, when our willingness to become undone in relation to others constitutes our chance of becoming human. To be undone by another is a primary necessity, an anguish, to be sure, but also a chance—to be addressed, claimed, bound to what is not me, but also moved, to be prompted to act, to address myself elsewhere, and so to vacate the self-sufficient “I” as a kind of possession. If we speak and try to give an account from this place, we will not be irresponsible, or, if we are, we will surely be forgiven. (Butler, Account 136)

Giving an Account of Oneself illustrates the relationship between narrative production and subjectivity, while cautioning against an ethos of hyper-mastery. Butler’s critical perspective of the unconscious also foregrounds the dual role of language as a technology that enables communication, as well as a trained incapacity that may inhibit psychological growth. Finally Butler’s thesis supports my concept of the unconscious as an aporia, as well as the pitfalls of ignoring this primary source of ignorance.