This post may be a bit incoherent as things are emerging in new and unpredictable ways, both in my own life/consciousness and at this forum.
I am bumping this thread as a possible place to explore some of those ideas that don't seem to fit at any of the other current threads, even tho they may be sparked by what's being explored there.
What follows is an Excerpt from René Girard's
I See Satan Fall Like Lightning (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2001, the beginning of Chapter 3, "Satan," pages 32-38):
Now I would like to confirm what I call the "mimetic cycle" in the Gospels. To do this we have to turn to an idea, or rather a figure, that Christians today much disdain. The Gospels call him by his Hebrew name, Satan, or his Greek title, the devil (diabolos). (1)
In the period when the German theologian Rudolf Bultmann had such great influence, all the theologians who were up to date "demythologized" the Scriptures with all their might, but they didn't even do the prince of this world the honor of demythologizing him. In spite of his considerable role in the Gospels, modern Christian theology scarcely takes him into account. If the Gospel references to Satan are examined in light of the preceding analyses, then we see that they don't deserve the oblivion into which they have fallen.
Like Jesus, Satan seeks to have others imitate him but not in the same fashion and not for the same reasons. He wants first of all to seduce. Satan as seducer is the only one of his roles that the modern world condescends to remember a bit, primarily to joke about it. Satan likewise presents himself as a model for our desires, and he is certainly easier to imitate than Christ, for he counsels us to abandon ourselves to all our inclinations in defiance of morality and its prohibitions.
If we listen to Satan, who may sound like a very progressive and likeable educator, we may feel initially that we are "liberated," but this impression does not last because Satan deprives us of everything that protects us from rivalistic imitation. Rather than warning us of the trap that awaits us, Satan makes us fall into it. He applauds the idea that prohibitions are of no use and that transgressing them contains no danger.
The road on which Satan starts us is broad and easy; it is the superhighway of mimetic crisis. But then suddenly there appears an unexpected obstacle between us and the object of our desire, and to our consternation, just when we thought we had left Satan far behind us, it is he, or one of his surrogates, who shows up to block the route. This is the first of many transformations of Satan: the seducer of the beginnings is transformed quickly into a forbidding adversary, an opponent more serious than all the prohibitions not yet transgressed.
I think this model directly intersects with Lloyd de Mause's model of the internal abuser that is triggered by too much freedom, the freedom crisis, and "THE PSYCHODYNAMICS OF RESTAGING." From
The Emotional Life of Nations:
The massive secretion of norepinephrine and dopamine, serotonin and endogenous opioids that follows inescapable trauma is followed by a subsequent depletion of hormones, presumably because utilization exceeds synthesis. Eventually receptors become hypersensitive, leading to excessive responsiveness to even the possibility of trauma in later life.96
It is this massive “false-alarm system” that leads to reenactments and then to restagings of trauma reenactments with new anxiety-reducing elements that is at the heart of social behavior in humans.Depletion of neurotransmitters after traumatic flooding results in hyperalertness to any situations that seem to indicate they may lead to reexperiencing the trauma. This, of course, is true of all animals, and they later simply avoid the dangers in the future. But
humans are unique in possessing a developed hippocampal-prefrontal cortical-centered consciousness whose task it is to inhibit action so as to avoid potentially traumatic situations. When trauma occurs—even very early trauma—humans are unique in believing they are responsible for the trauma. It is astonishing how early and consistently this is seen in clinical practice. Lenore Terr tells of a girl playing with dolls and repeating her sexual molestion by pornographers that happened when she was 15 months old.
…
Restaging as a defense against dissociated trauma is the crucial flaw in the evolution of the human mind understandable from the viewpoint of the individual as a way of maintaining sanity, but tragic in its effects upon society, since it means that early traumas will be magnified onto the historical stage into war, domination and self-destructive social behavior. And because we also restage by inflicting our childhood terrors upon our children, generation after generation, our addiction to the slaughterbench of history has been relentless.
. . .
Without a well-developed, enduring private self, people feel threatened by all progress, all freedom, all new challenges, and then experience annihilation anxiety, fears that the fragile self is disintegrating, since situations that call for self-assertion trigger memories of maternal abandonment. Masterson calls this by the umbrella term “abandonment depression,” beneath which, he says, “ride the Six Horsemen of the Psychic Apocalypse: Depression, Panic, Rage, Guilt, Helplessness (hopelessness), and Emptiness (void) [that] wreak havoc across the psychic landscape leaving pain and terror in their wake.”114 Whether the early traumas or rejections were because the mothers were openly abandoning, over-controlling and abusive, clinging, or just threatened by the child’s emerging individuation, the results are much the same—
the child learns to fear parts of his or her potential self that threatens the disapproval or loss of the mother. As Socarides has observed,115 fears of growth, individuation and self assertion that carry threatening feelings of disintegration lead to desires to merge with the omnipotent mother literally to crawl back into the womb desires which immediately turn into fears of maternal engulfment, since the merging would involve total loss of the self. When Socarides’ patients make moves to individuate-like moving into their own apartment or getting a new job-they have dreams of being swallowed by whirlpools or devoured by monsters.
The only salvation from these maternal engulfment wishes/fears is a “flight to external reality from internal reality,”116 a flight in which social institutions play a central role, as we shall shortly discover. [And not just social institutions but
ideologies]
http://psychohistory.com/books/the-emot ... f-history/
From
The Origins of War in Child Abuse Chapter 5: "The Seven Phases of Going to War," by Lloyd deMause:
With each new generation, more evolved parenting with reduced child abuse (psychogenesis)6 in a minority of the population produces new historical personalities, new “psychoclasses,” who begin to create greater economic and social progress that involves greater challenges and more independence from the values and obedience patterns of their parents. This makes the majority of society—the earlier, more authoritarian psychoclasses—fear the nation has been guilty of hubris, of sinful freedom from parental values, and this fear of growth sends them down the path to sacrificial wars. ...
In my book
The Emotional Life of Nations, I have described the psychodynamics of growth panic in psychoanalysis and in history—what Erich Fromm calls “
the fear of freedom.”7 I show how psychoanalysts like Masterson and Socarides have described the origins of all fears of growth in child abuse and neglect. They describe in their patients how they
reenact their early traumas when too much progress makes them feel “annihilation anxiety”—fears that they are being abandoned by the punitive parent embedded in their brains. “If we grow, we will never be what Mommy or Daddy wants us to be, and we will never get their love.”8 As Masterson interprets to his female patient: “The function of the mother in her head was to help her deal with the feelings of being alone; by fusing with the object, she defends against being alone.”9
Entire societies also react to innovative, progressive historical phases by defending against the loss of parental approval. They move toward war through seven phases, first splitting off both the Bad Motherland and their Bad Self and projecting them into “enemies,” who are then killed, sacrificed, because they have fused with an all-powerful Killer Motherland. As each phase is reached, the group switches further into a war trance. 1. FREEDOM: Increasing independence, innovations, growth of real self
2. FEAR: Growth panic, loss of parental approval, disintegration of real self
3. FISSION: Splitting into “in-group” and “out-group”
4. FUSION: Merging with powerful punishing Killer Motherland
5. FRACTURE: Projection of Bad Self into helpless victim “enemy”
6. FAKED PROVOCATION: Faking a provocative attack by an “enemy"
7. FIGHT: Becoming the “Hero” of the Killer Motherland and being sacrificed for Her while killing the Bad Self “enemy
http://psychohistory.com/books/the-orig ... ng-to-war/
Compare this also to Donald Kalsched's
The Inner World of Trauma: Archetypal Defenses of the Personal Spirit :
Most contemporary analytic writers are inclined to see this attacking figure as an internalized version of the actual perpetrator of the trauma, who has ‘possessed’ the inner world of the trauma victim. But this popularized view is only half correct. The diabolical inner figure is often far more sadistic and brutal than any outer perpetrator, indicating that we are dealing here with a psychological factor set loose in the inner world by trauma—an archetypal traumatogenic agency within the psyche itself. [T]he traumatized psyche is self-traumatizing. Trauma doesn’t end with the cessation of outer violation, but continues unabated in the inner world of the trauma victim, whose dreams are often haunted by persecutory inner figures. [T]he victim of psychological trauma continually finds himself or herself in life situations where he or she is retraumatized. . . . It is as though the persecutory inner world somehow finds its outer mirror in repeated self-defeating ‘re-enactments’—almost as if the individual were possessed by some diabolical power or pursued by a malignant fate
Here are a few notes that I hope relate to the above, and that stem from insights gained at this forum, while mucking in at the recent gender-debate, mostly.
Dehumanization/objectification is not a practice that’s restricted to any single ideological regime (i.e., Patriarchy), but one that’s common to all forms of ideology. This is how mimetic violence (which begins with dehumanization and objectification, i.e., scapegoating) escalates.
The seamless transition from (neo-)liberalism to totalitarianism (and even "fascism") is everywhere apparent in this dynamic. "If we listen to Satan, who may sound like a very progressive and likeable educator..."One of the primary goals of any system of control is for the control to become fully internalized. This is how ideology propagates. "an internalized version of the actual perpetrator of the trauma . . . has ‘possessed’ the inner world of the trauma victim. [T]he traumatized psyche is self-traumatizing."It is a lot easier to fool people than show them how they have been fooled.
with the afore-mentioned podcaster and his leftist ideologies and I think it relates to how he has entered into the double bind but doesn't know it (but also, to be fair, presumably how I have, in subtler ways, since I am still trying to "fix" something by getting him to see that).
