Objects of Desire

New or slightly altered perspective on desire . . . . The other is surely unavailable, withdrawn (to use OOO terminology), but the psyche might confuse emotional and physical needs/access (re. contemporary psychological and neuroscientific research on cognition and affect). This makes sense of pathological jealousy--the lover is possessive, obsessive, and controlling of *the psyche* because he cannot bear the thought of loosing physical access.

On the other hand I think it quite proper to physically want, crave (yes, “crave” my Buddhist friends), need, and be devoted to another. It can be fun, healthy (good exercise), adaptive, and unavoidable. A contrary view might even be masculinist. (Though, in truth, I am an unrepentant romantic.)

Maybe the error is in trying to consciously or unconsciously employ the psyche to control, guarantee, or even understand the challenges and opportunities of physical access. If two people cleave, they cleave. Why regret physical desire that isn't mutual? "I'm Scandinavian and everything is what it is [and what it's not]" (Timbaland v. Nephew). In fact the emotional pain of not being with another we desire may just mask the even more painful, but ultimately liberating, reality that everyone (even mummy and daddy) is dark, strange, and withdrawn. (I'm thinking of O3 and the Gothic novel suddenly, the labyrinth of Northanger Abbey . . . ).

But when two people cleave (two meanings, yes) —that can be good. Beautiful. True. Love. We are inseparable, because we are incapable of separation, even in our strangeness.

Interesting to me is not that everyone withdraws (though they do), but that some withdraw more than others, and that some may withdraw emotionally and not physically, or the opposite . . . or can't help but withdraw. I think of my former analyst’s over-the-top, knee-jerk reaction when I touched his shoe on the way out of the office one day. (The one who called me on vacation when I first terminated, and whose “little voice inside said, ‘don’t leave me’” the second time.) What more obvious tokens of withdrawal . . .

Empiricism and the Unconscious

Given recent and robust scientific evidence of the existence of the unconscious, it behooves us to become our own observers and/or analysts, in a sense. I don’t mean by that interpreting dreams and such. I mean taking seriously the notion that we can’t understand our deepest motivations—at least not based on our own current tales. At some point we have to look at our behaviors and derive the deeper motivations from the behaviors. This also means looking at one’s behavior with an empirical eye.

If I want to paint but never find the time, doesn’t that prove that I really don’t want to paint, so much? If I want more leisure time but keep taking on new projects doesn’t that suggest that I am somehow afraid of or don’t feel entitled to that leisure? And what about “tough-love” tactics that aren’t so tough after all. In the classroom, for example . . . if I never follow through on my “threats,” who am I kidding?

The existence of the unconscious challenges our illusion of a unified, coherent self . . . but that’s another story, for another time.

Nested Questions

Thank you very much for the article which is indeed relevant to my work.

A few sincere questions regarding "primary" and "secondary" consciousness in that article: If "awareness" of feelings, let's say, requires some type of verbal representation (as in naming or definition, even in addressing oneself) is there always some distance between the immediate feeling (X) and the mental representation? In other words, how do I consciously know or recognize a truly unmediated, outwardly directed, feeling (as a feeling)? (Again honest questions; I'm not prone to employing overused figures.)

Also, if LeDoux (as I recall) posits the possibility of a "short circuit" between immediate perception and "procedural" response (in some cases), is the immediate affective response conscious or unconscious? To put it another way, when I am startled am I immediately aware of my response or does it, perhaps, seem so because conscious awareness follows fast on the heels of the initial "physiological" response?

Well, this may be all to close to that debate between Lane and Pankseep a few years ago, which (as Locke might have predicted) had a lot more to do with terminology than the interlocutors understood at first . . . .

But I appreciate "The Freudian xxx," and will review/revise my unpublished MS accordingly. (I have undoubtedly misrepresented Freud more than once.)

Regarding James, for whom I have a deep affection: Have you seen *The Mind & the Brain" by Jeffrey M. Schwartz or Henry Stapp's *Mindful Universe*?

Christine

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.