So I'm sitting in the shower, and to stave off paranoia (smoking a juju - my bad habit) I start thinking about what I was reading earlier in Christopher Bollas' new book "When The Sun Bursts: The Enigma of Schizophrenia"; the cover alone attracted my attention; then I read the name (popular psychoanalyst), the topic, and thought "oooooh, interesting". But the honest truth is, any human being who has a history of traumatic affect dyrsegulation - and the concomitant perceptual disturbances in consciousness, are likely going to be afraid of the most dreaded of cultural images: psychosis, hearing voices, hallucinations, being restrained in a straight jacket. The images alone scream 'horror'.
The paranoia probably began at 17 when I watched A beautiful Mind in m English class. Some context will add to the scenario: I had for the 3rd time experienced a nervous breakdown, defined as a complete retreat from social relations, a persistent negative affective state, chronic paranoia, and the cyclical emergence of panic and anxiety. However, my anxieties were largely "contained" by the social context. Everything about the social world was my area of concern; my inability to function normally within it, an experience of continuous "toxic shame".
Toxic shame is the only appropriate word for the person who has suffered severe relational trauma, such as happens to people who are chronically bullied by a parent, sibling, or peers. The experience is itself a testament to what the "negative" of a human experience can be like. Take away the social relationships, habits, and ways of being that social relations entails - such as embodied response, high affect, and a sense of deep subjectivty - and you are left with a vacuum. In the negative, the presence of other people evoke a state in you that basically corresponds to a past experience. The shame of a past shaming, and the contextual factors that incited it. Contextual factor: other people; activation of shame, fear and anxiety.
Years later, I've learned hat the shame was not so much the problem as the human habit to defend against emotions as if they were external objects. Thoughts, perceptions, on the inside, or facial expressions, body movements, prosody, a word, a topic, a sight, sound, smell, taste or touch, is
neurologically linked to a vagal-brain stem-amygdala "gate". Everyone has a 'cue' outside their core awareness that activates them because it activated them in the past. The traumatized person has a whole network of such cues, some of which are linked to the originating trauma-memory (or cognit), and others are iterations that emerge in being a being immersed in a culture that possesses plenty of commercial material that can activate a hyper-aroused autonomic nervous system. These secondary 'traumas', inasmuch as they create new experiences within the individual, makes every human story completely unique. The feelings people have about their perceptions is fundamentally a function of the state that the autonomic nervous system is in.
So, on to projection - the title of this post, and a subject I have temporally forgotten about. In the shower, I was replaying some of the ideas Bollas was presenting about the schizophrenics way of affect-regulation (what it may be ultimately reduced to). He gave some interesting examples of the contents, or aspects of a persons being, being 'projected' outside the organization of the self, into the world it interacts with. What interests me, is how this could happen? Why is there this assumption that projection exists? Certainly, it does exist, but we do not explore the concept further when we think about evolutionary anthropological implications. The mind evolved in an external social context. Projection exists, which means, essentially, that the human mind can 'trick itself' into believing that a that a thing felt in them (defended against out of hate/fear, oftentimes referring back to an experience of shame) is actually in the other. How can such confusion arise? Or is it not confusion, but an evolutionary adaptation? Obviously, its an adaptation, but psychologically, it speaks to an underlying dynamic 'tension' between the identity of the self and the identity of the other. Self and other are simultaneously in consonance and dissonance with each other, in empathic attunement, and sharing of positive affective states; and conflict, competition, a position of threat-defense, and an attitude of domination towards the other.
The schizophrenic, desperate to get away from the experience of his own self, that is, from the process of reflecting and 'owning' the experience one is having, discovers odd ways of creating separation from the observer self and the percepts, thoughts, feelings and ways of being of the suffering, traumatized self. The effort, of course, is made under dire conditions. Already having suffered a psycho-perceptual breach, that is, the eruption of right-hemispheric dissociated affect (with their own emotional meaning) into the left hemispheric brocas area, creating both auditory hallucinations and a breakdown in perceptual awareness, particularly in the self's ability to keep track of a developing context, as is necessary in writing or observing a developing scene, situation, or phenomena.
This horrific breakdown in perception will typically generate a profound fear and anxiety response. The intiial experience of fear feels like a lightning bolt within the mind; imaginatively, even, one could locate it at the temporal lobes, right at the amygdala. Then, an instant later (though felt as simultaneous, due to the time difference between perceptual consciousness and biological events) the heart drops, indicating that the HPA axis has taken control and the vagus nerve hyper-stimulated the viscera - with stomach anxiety, chest anxiety - affects which drive consciousness into agony.
Consciousness flees from this - from these horrifyingly debilitating feelings and the perceptions, beliefs, and fears they produce in the mind. But when time passes, and affective states soften, and the individual is woken up by genetic social urges to engage and connect, if not with the "human world", than at least the object-world (a more primitive way of organizing) the self, or the brain, finds a way of dealing with the world "out there", by making corresponding shifts "in here". When connection is forged - interest activated - a polarity seems to ensue. The processes of the self and the meanings conveyed by the interacted-with world, organize a way of relating that builds itself from recent "relational" models. The recent past builds from past avoidance strategies, but now with a schizophrenic makeup, processes more easily ignored or dissociated before, are "projected" involuntarily - it seems - into the conscious mind. I think Bollas would agree that this as a breakdown in the selfs ability to experience effectance - or the capacity to effect something. The 'eruption' of an unconscious thought, fully verbalized, into conscious experience, speaks to a breach between the usual ways of processing unconscious thoughts. In a 'normal' unconscious thought (which I can only speak from my own experience) the self perceives something that is not-verbalized, but nevertheless contains meaning. Because we are such a verbally-focused, and superficially motivated society, people usually treat these experiences as "not anything". That they occur, only a self-aware person can aver. But without being able to talk about it and locate it to a particular context and set of conditions, the mind is likely to overlook it and 'return' to whatever their brain usually does.
Projection, then, speaks to a way of dealing with feelings by 'placing' the meaning of something outside the self; in the other, as is common in all humans, or, in the case of the psychotic person, into objects that have somehow become 'linked'. Bollas argues (and I think he is largely right about) that this projective process has different stages to it, with metaphorical projections being "earlier", and more linear (able to be understood and picked up on by a therapist) followed by projections that are tacitly connected, perhaps metonymically, and finally to connections that have become almost random in their nature,
Presumably, because everything which happens has an efficient cause, and is contingently related to events and things around it, these transformations have a "logical" history, no doubt. But it is very interesting to me the way the schizophrenic uses the world around it to order it own self processes. Things which are usually 'organized within', in processes that are basic to organism functioning, are offloaded, as Bollas even writes, in an almost artful manner.
Ultimately, it gets you thinking about how interesting the connections between the organism and the world can be.
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