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Continuing with Drew Pinsky on “Attachment and Reflective Function: Their Role in Self-organization” by Peter Fonagy and two articles by Allan Schore.
Fonagy claims we gain the ability to emotionally self-regulate as a result of achieving secure attachment with a caregiver as infants. Schore claims that if this fails, we can end up fundamentally disengaged. So what are the philosophical implications here? What about the clinical implications? We talk shame, experience machines (the matrix), psychic equivalence (not distinguishing between what you know and what you know that someone else doesn't know), and love as the potential answer (though not usually).
Listen to part 1 first, or get the ad-free Citizen Edition. Please support PEL!
End song: "Anything but Love" by Steve Hackett, as featured on Nakedly Examined Music #45.
Finding it hard to see the relevance of this one. Central premise: the self is formed, to some degree, in relation to other people. Ok. So…?
Can someone point out any useful ramifications to this observation? Feels like I must be missing something.
Implications:
A) Aristotle is right that we’re social animals; social contract theorists that think that we’re individuals first who then enter into (potentially corrupting) social relations are wrong.
B) This has implications for how we should think of freedom and authenticity. Popular Western notions have this wrong.
C) I think it also has implications for the kind of self-betterment that Buddhism and Stoicism allege that we can engage in.
Note that none of these actually required discussion of the science involved: these are all points that we’ve hammered in the many episodes about this referenced by part 1. Adding in talk of brain chemistry and therapists’ experiences just serves to better ground some of the potentially wild claims philosophers can make. E.g. I think trying to translate Kierkegaard’s claim into these terms would just show how pathological he was: The question would be “Can we have this kind of growth of self come out of not real interaction with another person but pretended interaction with a God with whom we can have no direct contact?” Can something like a consciously chosen super-ego serve the function of unification of the self? Clearly this wouldn’t be a matter of infant development, so we’re talking about a different aspect of this formation of self: not how it naturally happens in normal human development, but what happens later: Can we “choose” a self in some radical way, or are we beings that are more or less fixed who, in trying to choose a radical shift (whether in the service of God or Stoicism or whatever) are just fooling ourselves? If the latter, then where does that leave the kinds of choice that existentialists emphasize or (less radically) the kind of becoming-who-you-are/self-overcoming that Nietzsche urges?
Listening for the second time – there is this sort of strange space that you get into when thinking about all this stuff and after I read Wright’s book and now this and thinking about what you just said – I find it hard to not collapse into a sort of thinking that is – we are all just deluded animals incapabale of free thought – products of evolution and a complex web of algorithms that determine our actions and motivations. Dissecting how we come to a self and ultimately relating that to how we relate to the world – folding in Freud and his ideas about the preconscious and the unconscious thought we have that shapes us – HOW DOES ONE STAY IN THE GAME?!! It feels a little ridiculous and pointless at times to be this silly human that has his ego and believes I am somehow unique or special or in control in any way or matter in any way! I know that’s kind of a downer take on things. I guess I just keep pushing the fucking rock up the hill until I die and try not to think too hard about it.
turns out Freud was wrong about the mechanics/functions of the un-conscious but with the ever growing list of cognitive-biases over on wikipedia one can see that regardless we are pretty out of touch with (and not a little out of control of) the bodily processes that determine so much of what we do (including knowing)
but see what you make of Dan Dennett’s take on where this leaves us
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wGPIzSe5cAU
also you can know follow @patchurchland on twitter these days for recent developments (including critiques of Dennett)
It has big implications for therapy.
this sort of focus on the family seems to leave out all kinds of environmental/political issues, would be worth asking whose interests are served by domesticating Hegel (and Freud) in this way:
http://www.newappsblog.com/2017/09/foucault-and-marx-on-subjectification-and-exhaustion.html
For a take on therapy that takes account of the context more generally there is Perls, Hefferline and Goodman’s Gestalt Therapy.
thanks but Gestalt is similarly narrow, no focus on our economies/politics/etc the wider environs.
The book does have the theoretical space to include the broader social (perhaps not the ecological) – though the later developments, and practises of most practitioners, don’t.
It does mention what were some contemporary social issues.
I found this series remarkable, so good. I felt so sad at moments, thinking about the kids.
So this episode was like my version of porn. I’ve spent the last six and a half years of my life (my daughter just turned 7) reading about all of these things. I’ve been a huge fan of Schore for a long time. For anyone who might be interested – there is a very easy to follow version of many of these ideas in The Neurobiology of We by Dan Siegel. I’d also suggest that you temper, particularly if you are a parent, all of these ideas with the writings of Winnicot. His writing about how we learn to be alone is just not to be missed. Mark’s comments about the times we fail and “just can’t do it anymore” turn out to be helpful and seemingly necessary. The fine line will likely always remain a mystery and so I am guessing that parents will always wonder if they did enough. I can only sleep at night because I’m hoping that the repair really DOES count in a big way! AND that hopefully at ages 4 and 7 I still have time and that I didn’t need to be fully “analyzed before my kids were born! Chances are I’ll be paying for therapy though.
What has been interesting is that I have dissociated so much from some of the traumatic events and couldn’t seem to find my way to integration but have found that the extremely difficult moments in parenting, when I take them into therapy and sit with the discomfort of them, they mimic the same kinds of injuries that I had as a child – those images come back for me – and I come to a sort of integration by working through them because they are feelings that I can actually access whereas the ones from my childhood seem to be walled off in a way that I see them as bad intellectually but don’t really feel it.
I just really really loved how you guys took this subject and related it so much to the ideas in many of your other podcasts. I would listen to them and never have been able to make the connections. They intrigued me and because I can barely grasp around the edges of your language at times, I didn’t get it but this episode has helped me so much! Now I see! The I, me, the self, all of that makes so much more sense when I junk about theory of mind as I read it in psych books. I think separation and Individution – Theory and Practice or something along those lines is a great book also when discussing the formation of the self. I’m not sure how far into you all would go and how or if it relates to any philosophy but I would LOVE it. The only sad fact is that I can’t get anyone I know to listen with me (clearly I have friends with poor taste) and so I can’t discuss this! I listen and then turn it off and look around and realize everyone else is just going about their day with their mind not blown at all….
I haven’t listened in a while and then this, and then Debord, and then Wright!! – it was CRAZY fun for the last couple of weeks here. You guys are my FAVORITE!
http://www.psychology.sunysb.edu/attachment/online/inge_origins.pdf
@dmf – saw your link and didn’t know if there was something in particular you wanted me to see as it looked like a reply!
hi JT, just thought you might want some other names/resources around the development of attachment theory and its intellectual genealogy including ethology (see Robert Sapolsky for a contemporary take), and cybernetics/information theory which is quite timely stuff for our social-media-ted world.
also you might like http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.511.9537&rep=rep1&type=pdf
for a more overtly philosophical take on these matters.
Thanks!
Oh! And Bessel Van Der Kolk!! I just finished his book this summer The Body Keeps the Score – SO GOOD! It’s a little kooky in parts but if you like this topic, it’s a must read!
I realize that this may be a bit off topic, but I was really curious about who was this lady that Fonagy found to be very effective. Do you have any more information?
Dylan. One way to begin to get a sense of the difference with early trauma is that there isn’t a ‘therapy’ – you can’t restore ‘normal’ because the normal for those people is traumatic. In one sense it means building something new and better, rather than repairing.
Re shame.
It gets used in two ways. An ‘existential’ one: I evaluate myself negatively. “I am bad”.
A relational one: shrinking from others. ‘I can’t face them’.
These are usually mixed in an experience. But they are distinguishable.
Anecdotal evidence of children attributing a “theory of mind” to inanimate objects?
Co-Parenting With Alexa
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/07/opinion/sunday/children-alexa-echo-robots.html?action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=opinion-c-col-right-region®ion=opinion-c-col-right-region&WT.nav=opinion-c-col-right-region&_r=0