Understanding Mental Sickness

TRAUMA-IMPRINT THEORY:

By Andrew D Atkin:

When reality is too much and we have to escape from it, but can't, then we escape from ourselves. This is the essence of insanity.

The relationship between childhood trauma and mental sickness is very well known and, for the most part, rather obvious. However, virtually all of the research that we have today on the subject boils down to surface observations where we try to identify the links between specific environmental causes leading to specific psychological and behavioural effects, rather than understanding the actual process behind the links themselves. The following explains not just that trauma leads to mental sickness, but more specifically how and why it does so.

WHAT IS PAIN?

Pain is a natural stimulant that exists to drive us to deal with a toxic environment. So how does pain do its job, to stimulate us to cope, when it is simply too overwhelming to be felt? That is the story of neurosis. The neurotic system is evolutions' answer to my introductory question.

What we call neurosis is simply the natural mechanism that allows us to psychologically internalise our (toxic) environment, so as to then enable us to regulate how we respond to that environment, but without actually feeling the pain of it - directly.

Neurosis, in short, is how us humans switch onto 'auto pilot' when exposed to serious trauma. Let's look closely at this fascinating system.

INTRODUCTION:

When people think of the human brain they tend to think of an overwhelming soup of unfathomable complexity. However, it's more accurate to think of the brain as more of a tree, than a soup. Yes, of course, the brain expands out from its trunk and branches into a complexity that is overwhelming, but the basic structure of the brain, like a tree, can be simply understood. Neurosis also can be simply understood - because the disease of neurosis originates not in the complex layers of the brain, but in the comparatively simple structures of its trunk and branches.

When we talk about neurosis, what we are talking about is big pain signals running up through the mainlines of the brain that are so overwhelming that they must be blocked and reconverted. This sends the complex layers of the brain into a flurry that leads to distorted thinking and perception (emotionally and intellectually) and all kinds of disorders. So, although neurosis is simple at its core, its manifestations know no limit in terms of colourful diversity.

Understanding neurosis means coming away from an unfathomable (and generally fruitless) analysis of its manifestations, and looking at the founding dynamics that drive the brain to confusion in the first place.

PRELIMINARY EXPLANATION ONE:

Forget your brain and think of a computer.

Once your computer has been to a given website, it stores the files that make up that website in its 'cache memory' on your hard-drive. This means that when you go back to a website already viewed, your computer does not have to download any of the files that make up that website other than the recently changed/added files. So in turn, this means your computer comes to view websites more through its previously stored memory.

The human brain works in essentially the same way - as we get older we view more through our internal "cache" memory, and less directly (exclusively) through our senses.

Neurosis can crudely be described as a 'jammed cache'. This means we find ourselves viewing yesterday's non-updated context in our today. This is supported by buried (repressed) files that, by definition of repression, are not open to modification.

Defining mental sickness:

Neurosis can be defined as a repressed, trauma-induced psychological state which facilitates an imprinted emotional memory of which overrides conscious control.

To define an individuals' mental health on ideologically idealized thoughts, actions and attitudes is nonsense. Of course certain thoughts and actions occur as manifestations of the neurotic state, but that is about as far as the relationship goes. People exercise all kinds of different behaviors for all kinds of different reasons, and getting a neurotic individual to exercise different behaviors via conscious will or conditioning techniques will, in itself, change nothing of their neurosis - that kind of "psychotherapy" has nothing to do with mental health, it is simply behavior-control.

-Psychotherapist tend, in effect, to define people as mentally sick when they have a seriously weak defense system. A weak defense system means the patient can't function in the way that they want to (or the way that their society wants them to), because they are struggling to adequately repress some of their traumatic material. Really, this should be described as a sick defense system, not 'mental sickness' itself, because putting a person back into their well-contained "shell" does not make them any the less neurotic in itself. It only makes them more functional.

PRELIMINARY EXPLANATION TWO:

The Walking Man: How and why a neurosis is formed.

Once upon a time there was a walking man. The walking man loved to walk. One day, as the walking man was walking, he came up to a bridge. The walking man casually walked across the bridge until he got to about half way. It was then that he looked down and made a horrible discovery.

What he discovered was that the bridge was only one foot wide, and that he could slip and fall to his death at any time. This terrified the walking man to the point where his fear threatened to overwhelm him (too much to consciously deal with). Of course, the walking man could not afford to feel the fear if he was to cope with the situation and survive. His consciousness needed to be devoted towards survival. So what happened?

What happened was the walking man became unconscious, that is, unconscious to the sensation of fear as induced by the dangerous bridge. This cut-off process is called repression. It is a natural survival mechanism. It’s not that the feeling of fear just "disappeared", it’s that it became unconscious (our conscious brain blocked it off, it did not "destroy it").

As the walking man’s fear became detached from his consciousness, his defence (which was to walk in a straight-as-possible line) was still operating, as it obviously must. However, as the defence was isolated from its feeling, it had effectively become a compulsion*.

*I should clarify that our need to act-out is experienced as an "urge" - a trauma-induced drive, a compulsion. Mostly, we only feel the urge, not the repression that’s creating it.

So the walking man walked "fearlessly" to the end of the bridge in his compulsive manner.

Whoops! When the walking man got to the end of the bridge we made a very interesting discovery. Although the walking man reached the end of the bridge and was on safe open land, he was still walking in a straight-as-possible line!…WHY?

When the walking man got to the end of the bridge he entered open land with a repressed feeling. That repressed feeling was constantly pushing to get into his consciousness. The repression made him feel as though he was still walking on dangerous ground. In response to this, he started head-tripping over the possibility of earthquakes - his brain rationalized the fear in the 'open land' context. To keep the fear out of his consciousness he continued to act-out, he continued to walk in a highly cautious straight-as-possible line.

From the walking man's viewpoint he is not responding to an internally generated fear, but only what he interprets as external reality - but he is "wrong". He cannot deduct that his feeling is a subjective reaction and that his brain is merely looking for an external rationalisation for his feeling state to project onto. The great confusion for the walking man is the belief that the external situation came first, as opposed to the feeling. He can't be blamed for this, as his subjective experience qualifies the perceived situation as being the cause of his feeling because that is exactly how he experiences it. He cannot usually see that his 'today' is really just a symbolic derivative of his yesterday.

Authors comment:

The vast majority of us are stuck in our childhoods in the same way that the Walking Man is stuck on the bridge. Early childhood trauma, in particular traumatic deprivations associated with a lack of genuine parental love and very serious infantile trauma, forces us into a psychological 'prison' that ultimately overwhelms adult life. We basically remain children (emotionally) acting out our past in an adult context.

A basic metaphor to describe the neurotic state:

A good way to express the state of the neurotic (from their subjective position) in short terms is to imagine a man walking through a battlefield, wearing a suit of armour.

Though the man feels like he's in a battlefield, he does not feel the fear of it because he's confident that his armour will protect him. The man's goal is to escape the battlefield so he can finally take off his armour and live life. The problem is the battlefield is a projection of his own mind and is therefore inescapable - it doesn't matter where he goes in here-and-now terms, he will always see a battlefield and will always feel the need for his armour. The idea that he will someday "get there" is what keeps him going and stops him from getting depressed.

[It's of interest to note that the ultimate self, the consciousness, does not "go crazy". The conscious response is always rational in response to the context that the brain tells it it is in. Inside every madness is an ultimate sanity.]

MAJOR EXPLANATION:

In the same way that the brain "sees" through the sensorium, the consciousness sees through the brain. When the sensorium becomes distorted or constricted, the brain becomes thwarted and confused. Likewise, when the brain becomes distorted and constricted, the consciousness becomes thwarted and confused.

The following is about how the brain becomes constricted (repressed) and basically jammed into the past through the impact of traumatic level pain, and describes the psychological effect of this process.

1. I once had a dream that a strange boy was grabbing onto one of my testicles, so I was in pain and at his mercy. I was pleading with him to let go. I then woke up to discover that my bedding was wrapped around my groin, and that my testicle was in pain because of it.

What do you notice about the dream? The feeling was real but the story was not. My brain created an unreal story to rationalize the real feeling.

2. Most or all dreams work like this. There is a feeling that it is indeed real, and in response to the feeling the brain creates a story to "explain" it. Dreams are mostly generated by repressed feelings from our early childhood. The closer we are to the repressed feeling, the more intense (and less symbolized) the dream.

3. So what happens when we wake up?

When we wake up our consciousness partly relocates within the brain. This means that our consciousness becomes more substantially removed from our lower brain centers, and in turn more heavily concentrated within the frontal cortex. Of course, when awake the frontal cortex is directly responsive to the outside world.

To avoid dreaming (excessively) while awake we must become, in part, consciously displaced form our lower brain centers. This automatic displacement is called repression. Ideally it would not have to exist, but because we almost invariably suffer from substantial traumatic material, it must happen. We literally become cut-off to the lower brain centers - our feelings.

However, we do not become cut-off entirely and we do in fact "dream" while awake. Our awake conscious experience is partly "polluted" with yesterday’s traumatic feelings.

In short, yesterday’s traumatic context is regenerated in the here-and-now context - in that sense we are permanently living in our dream world, which is our "yesterday world".

Note: When repression seriously fails, we end up literally experiencing a dream while awake. This state is called psychosis. Psychosis usually comes from extreme early trauma facilitated by a seriously weak defense system. A psychotic episode that happens while you are asleep is called a night terror. Night terrors and psychotic episodes are basically the same thing.

4. Why don't we wake up properly?

Take my original dream example. While I was dreaming I thought the reason for my pain was that there was a strange boy squeezing my testicle, as that is exactly how I experienced it. In my dream I was completely unconscious of the real reason for my pain.

The psychological situation of neurosis is virtually identical. We are truly unconscious of the real reason for our general feelings, and in turn are partly or fully unconscious of the pain inside them. We literally "go to sleep" to our feelings to avoid having to be awake to the full painful feeling in its real context.

The situation is similar to receiving a general anesthetic, only with anesthetic the repression comes before the trauma.

Another good way to see the process:

In a professional sporting event a sportsman can become so involved with his game that he does not obtain consciousness to an injury received that could be as severe as a broken bone. It may not be until the game finishes that he becomes aware of his pain/injury.

This is an example of consciousness being channeled into a context which does not facilitate the perception of pain - and that is exactly what neurosis is.

Neurosis is the automatic (meaning out of your control) channeling of consciousness away from pain.

Traumatic level pain drives consciousness into an 'isolating context' as an essentially desperate reaction to overwhelming pain. The more traumatized we are, the more "stuck in a game" we become as consciousness is progressively narrowed to avoid the perception of pain.

Though we become perceptually isolated from our pain, the psychological context that we are driven into is directly related to it. The "game" is where we struggle against the original infliction - though symbolically.

5. Traumatic level pain is always repressed, and what I have just described is the basic psychological effect. With accumulative trauma we progressively become numb and unconscious, and in turn life loses its experiential intensity as we lose our proper conscious response to it. Only a part of us responds to the here-and-now, the rest is swamped in a luke-warm replica of a 'yesterday world' projected onto the present.

As we get older our defense systems usually get stronger. This means we become more repressed (asleep) but less vulnerable to neurotic over-reaction. Neurotic over-reaction is recognized as the strong 'triggering' of repressed material.

-The most obvious example of neurotic over-reaction can be seen with war veterans suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). PTSD is a fancy name for repressed traumatic material that an individual has a poor defense for. If you like, material that is 'close to the surface'. The content and its basis is obvious in PTSD as it is not highly symbolized. However, the only real difference between a PTSD sufferer and the rest of us, is that the PTSD person is struggling to stay "asleep" because he hasn't had a developmental lifetime learning how to deal with his most recent and severe repressed material. Repression becomes an extremely automatic process as the brain progressively learns to control potential over-reactions. Generally speaking, the earlier the material the more deeply it is buried.

6. Neurotic hope:

Neurotic hope is the belief that we can get rid of our bad feelings by dealing with what our brain interprets as the cause of them. It is clearly an illusion, because as soon as we "get there" and "kick off the boy", our brain only generates another rationalization for the same internally generated feeling, in whatever context we may be in. This is why true happiness always seems to evade us, and why we never seem to "get there". Even if we do get what we think we want, we are so often forced to discover that what we have doesn't really do much for us... clinically, because our nervous system did not respond the way we imagined it would.

7. Compulsion and Tension:

Compulsion: Though overwhelming pain is repressed, as far as our nervous systems are concerned the original pain signal (that is blocked) still needs to do its job. It does this by creating compulsion. Compulsion is just the derivative effect and substitute reaction of the originally blocked pain signal.

Pain exists to drive us to deal with a toxic environment; compulsion is the unconscious conversion of blocked pain. With compulsion we are defending ourselves automatically as we have lost touch with the experiential bases of our pain. The problem with compulsion-based defenses is that because they are cut off from their reality base, they continue indefinitely out of context as they do not seem to know to shut off. An out-of-context compulsion-based defense is called a neurotic act-out. It is well understood that "the neurotic acts out in the present as though he/she is still in the past". The effect of compulsion is we spend the rest of our lives struggling with a 'yesterday' that isn't really there.

-We usually only recognize a neurotic act-out for what it is when it has failed to be applied to a "normal" context. The truth is most of us are constantly engaging in them on one level or another - we are "busy in our dreams".

-A dream is nothing more than a neurotic act-out occurring in your sleep. The only difference is that with a dream you have a pure hallucination because there's no external context for the feeling to integrate with.

Tension: Tension is the bases of the compulsive drive, and also the subjective experience of blocked feeling.

Most people have no idea how deeply tense they are. This is because our most severe pains usually occur in very early childhood - in short, we simply don't know any different because we have a distorted subjective perspective of what a 'normal' level of tension is.

Neurotic tension is largely diffused throughout the body, leading to psychosomatic illness. It appears that it has a huge direct and indirect impact on our health, and most likely a major impact on our longevity. Our bodies are constantly fighting general inflictions and degeneration. Relating to the objective of achieving good health, neurosis is like an anchor that our bodies have to constantly drag (like malnutrition and toxic build-up).

The negative health effects of neurosis should not surprise us - neurosis is basically a constant stress, and as we know all stressors compromise our health.

Note: I will point out that compulsion is not necessarily overt or active. The process of inhibition can be a compulsion also, established where inhibition was once a necessary defense. Indeed, inhibition can be a dominant compulsion of a particular neurosis, with stress effects at least as potent as any other compulsion.

POST NOTES:

Needs and humanity:

Abraham Maslow, a leader of the humanistic psychology movement, believed that humans responded to a need-hierarchy, and that hierarchy was the core basis of what drives our behavior. Fundamentally I believe he was right [our needs clearly conform to hierarchy - more pressing and fundamental needs push our attention away from less pressing needs], though his specification of what our need-hierarchy actually is was crude, and questionable. Here is his need-hierarchy, as he asserts is, in order of importance:

1. Physiological needs (food, shelter, protection etc.)

2. Social needs (love, belonging, friendship etc.)

3. Self esteem needs.

4. The need to understand.

5. Self actualising need.

6. Aesthetic need.

I think the first two needs in his hierarchical list are essentially sound, but after that it gets spurious. For example, what we recognise as self-esteem seems, on closer analysis, to be a symbolic-derivative of the social-need. Hence, what looks like climbing the need-hierarchy may only be an elevated state of repression i.e. what looks like satisfying a need may be more like detaching yourself from it.

If I was to comment on Maslow's hierarchy, I would simply say that human needs are more complicated than that, and with the impact of neurosis we can clearly understand why people become "stuck" on primary needs that they cannot progress from. Regardless, a 'need hierarchy' is a good way to understand people, and why they do the things that they do. What we know is that when a person is not taxed by lower needs (real or neurotically induced) they are free to be tolerant, reasonable and humane. They do not have brick-wall ideological secondary defense systems, or the desire to exercise behaviours that are broadly recognised as inhumane.

Regressive psychotherapy:

Regressive psychotherapy is, functionally, the act or claimed act of bringing repressed trauma into consciousness, where it can be fully experienced and therefore "resolved". Quite simply, it is de-repression - neurotic-development reversed.

Though the possibility of regressive psychotherapy is fascinating (to myself at least), it is considered a controvercial and unproven possibility by the mainstream psychology world.

Recommended site (regressive psychotherapy)

The following video clip is an introduction to the basis of Arthur Janov's therapy:

Though the possibility of regressive psychotherapy should be respected as a research topic, it is not politically relevant in itself. Even if people could ultimately deal with their trauma (working through it - not just managing its effects), it is still an unrealistic possibility for the vast majority of people, of whom would never undergo the regressive process even if this option was available to them. Hence, regressive psychotherapy is an irrelevant possibility from a political outlook. Clearly, our primary focus must be to avoid trauma in the first place.

Note: I personally have faith in the regressive process as a very real possibility, because I experienced a regression, as I believe, when I was seventeen years old and it was indeed fully curative with respect to what I was dealing with. This personal event was entirely spontaneous and not suggested; in fact I tried to forget about it at the time because I did not understand the process, and the experience of truly losing control of my defense-system scared me. Another reason why the regressive process interests me is simply because of the logic of it. Consciousness is the theatre of learning: it is where psychological information is encoded, integrated, edited and filed. Likewise, if we can indeed comprehensively bring repressed trauma into consciousness, without being totally overwhelmed by it [so that the information can be developmentally processed, and not just reacted to] then there should be no fundamental reason why previously blocked material could not be "learned" i.e. fully processed and accurately re-filed. If successful, then the orginal trauma should be filed into the correct context within your brain, and that, in turn, should lead to a rational here-and-now response with respect to the original infliction. You can understand that the rational response to an historic reality is that it be only a memory of the past that once was - not a memory that makes feel like you are still in the past, the latter of course being the neurotic reaction to repressed traumatic input.

I must also clarify that personal experience is, as of yet, the only non-ambiguous way to prove the/a regressive process as effective, if in fact it is. If it works, then the only individual who can qualify its effectiveness is the individual undergoing the regression themselves, because they are the only one's who can see what's really going on within themselves (in the same way that I cannot prove the experience that I had when I was seventeen -nor its impact and effectiveness- to you. It is and only can be "proven" to myself).

Remember that mental health, other than the extremes, cannot be defined on the bases of behavioral parameters - which, from a clinical perspective, are the only paramenters that can be measured. In other words you cannot, as of yet, measure mental health in any scientifically robust way (advanced neurobiological studies may one day change this, and indeed a lot of very interesting progress is being made here). This is why psychotherapy is still much more of an art than a science. The science of psychotherapy that we have today is really just a scientific analysis of the observable behavioral (and sometimes physical) consequences of some of the psychotherapeutic "arts". It has little 'authoritative' substance in itself.

When it comes to psychotherapy, we are still basically living in the age of alchemy. I believe that the come-back of electroconvulsive therapy makes an example of that. Electroconvulsive therapy traumatises the patient, but it can achieve a desired behavioral outcome (passivity) for those who are trying to deal with a very difficult patient. Electroconvulsive therapy emotionally 'knocks out' the patient, making them more manageable. Electroconvulsive therapy is not really a therapy in the assumed therapeutic sense: it's basically just an extreme method of behavior control. And, like with the use of intense drugs, I believe it exists as a striking [and unfortunate] example of our current incapacity to deal with psychological problems.

Evolutionary insight:

The interesting thing about humans is their ability to survive (inter-generationally) in a highly neurotic state. Other animals [that always conform to their "raw" instinct] do not. Other animals, when heavily damaged, tend to to quickly self-terminate, and in the process allow less damaged specimens of their kind to expand into their place.

So why don't humans do the same? Really I can only speculate, but I think, in a sense, that we may have become too brainy for our own good. Not only do we have the ability to understand what we must functionally do to survive inter-generationally (on a higher cognitive level), but we have the ability to exercise behaviours in striking contradiction to our 'primary will' from an abstract or higher-cortical position.

The result? We quickly and intelligently compensate for the destructive tendencies of our neurosis with cultural control-systems. Indeed, I think a lot of what we call 'culture' is nothing more than that - a control-system to get us to act the way we need to to survive, in spite of ourselves.

A classic example, I believe, can be seen in traditional Indian culture where young people cannot choose their own bride. You could speculate that this might be necessary whithin a society of people that can't pair-bond properly, due to certian kinds of infantile-damage and maternal-deprivation. Hence, in this example, the family-unit is stabilised not by love (which doesn't exist) but by strong social threats instead - hence, with the help of cultural-control, successful inter-generational reproduction continues in spite of our 'primary' dysfunctionality.

Teenagers are known for rebelling against their parents dictate. Is this related to a growing humanity trying to break out of a not-so-necessary cultural control-system? Again I can only speculate, but at the heart of it I think this may very well be the case.

Paternal authority and social control:

In our society, I believe that social control is mostly achieved through utalising the common individuals neurotic responsiveness to "paternal authority" (or maternal equivalent). Basically, our society taps into a common psychological state established in early childhood, which can be summed up as "living underneath the father".

As I have previously shown, we are stuck in our childhoods in the same way that the walking man is stuck on the bridge. Likewise, I think that most of us are stuck in a psychological context where we almost constantly feel as though we are in the presence of paternal authority. We don't feel the threat (relating to the threat that was in childhood), just the automatic defensive need to conform to that perceived authority.

The more a given individual functions as a symbol of a paternal authority to another individual, the more they can influence and control their thinking (or more specifically, the thinking that the subject feels they should conform to). But of course, for this to work you have to lay the foundation for passive paternal responsiveness first, and this requires a certain type of childhood where the individual is left feeling that they must inordinately conform to their parents dictate to avoid serious rejection. Likewise, the motive within the conformity-pressure will come from a deeply imprinted feeling of threat.

The position of paternal responsiveness is so common, I believe, that virtually anyone you meet will give off an aura of distinct psychological subordination to someone else's [a paternal figure] rule. As it is for the heavily subordinated individual, they become repressed into a fundamentally inhibited foundation, and from there they run their lives from a "what am I supposed to do" question, as opposed to a "what do I want to do" question where they directly feel their own autonomous will, first and foremost. This becomes their new normality, and as I believe the common normality of our time. Our society exploits this function by "playing the father" so as to achieve social control.

Hypnosis:

I believe that our responsiveness to paternal authority has been shown remarkably through hypnotic experiments. For example, under hypnosis a man can be ordered to put on his raincoat when leaving the hypnotists office, and once awakened he will do it. If the subject were honest when explaining why he put on his coat, he would simply answer: "I just felt that that is what I should do". Instead they usually rationalise and create vague reasons for putting on their coat, for even if it is a warm day.*

So what did the hypnotists do? The hypnotists simply induced a trance-state that completely omitted critical-thinking in his subject [I believe that that is all hypnosis really is - the dissociation of consciousness from the parts of your brain responsible for critical thinking, in turn leaving us with the deep suppression of objective thought], and this in turn allows the hypnotists to install a direct command via "paternal authority".

The same process occurs when the individual is awake, the only difference is that it's more subtle and indirect as the commands cannot be blatantly irrational or mindless. The hypnotist just took a short cut - really, the subject was already responsive to control.

-I also believe that suggestion can be reinforced with ignorance, distraction and confusion - all of which also serve to supress effective critical thinking, like the hypnotists, and to there make people more responsive to "authoritive" suggestions. If the supression of critical thinking is deliberate, then I think it can be described as a serious form of manipulative propoganda.

*In this example the individual has become an "unconscious conformist". An unconscious conformist, as I put it, is a person who conforms to an external demand primarily because they have an emotional need to do so, but rationalises so as to make themselves "agree" with what they are conforming to. From here the conformity is unconscious, because the individual can believe that their agreement is an incidental reality coming from autonomous objectivity, as opposed to an emotionally motivated rationalisation.

Note: It's interesting that our society generally interprets the unconscious conformist as mature. As it seems, the more we agree with "the father", the more grown up we are recognised as having become. Of course the actualised emotional need to conform to the ideology and dictates of your general society has nothing to do with real maturity in itself. The maturity label is basically just a reward for psychological subordination to the "right" father.

Living in fear?

The following insight relates to the previous note on social control:

Take the scenario of being employed within an institute where you know that you are totally dependent on your job to survive, because there are no other survival-alternatives available to you. If your employer understood your situation, he could ruthlessly intimidate you with the incessant threat of losing your job, should you not absolutely conform to his dictate, and maybe control you right down to the detailed way in which you must relate to your colleagues, for example. This described scenario may be hugely stressful, as you would be forced to live in constant fear so as to control your behaviour (the fear is the psychological stimulant to control your behaviour) because the consequences of not doing as such are simply too serious. If severe enough, the stress would, over time, reach the point of clinical trauma and therefore repression. So what would happen then?

You would control your behaviour automatically - via compulsion. You might think you feel better because you feel more secure, but your freedom to relax and express yourself in a real way may be destroyed because you no longer even feel the urge to be yourself of which could contradict your employers will (intense conformity becomes automatic and therefore psychologically effortless). The cost is that in this situation you would struggle to even experience yourself as a psychological event, and in turn your capacity for joy and authentic self-determination may be heavily dampened. You would be living and acting in fear but without even knowing it (abstract understanding of repression notwithstanding).

My point is that I think the described scenario happens in practice (usually in response to different variable, such as the threat of humiliation, assault and rejection etc.) to very large proporations of people throughout their childhoods, and those people as adults reconstruct their fears and fear-cultures within traditional institutes and society at large. Parents and schools neurotically programme fear into society in so many different ways--consciously and unconsciously--and right at the point where we are most vulnerable to pain and therefore trauma*. Once this repression (that translates to fear-control) substantially occurs within childhood, the work is done. You will have a populace easily controlled by the dynamics of fear because they won't even know what has happened to them (remember with neurosis you can't actually feel the fear and its basis) and what it is that they should be rebelling against and reforming. A society with neurosis could, potentially, enter into a fascist regime and not even see it for what it is or understand why it should be any different. And indeed, to say, is it any wonder why fascist regimes are so concerned with "getting them while they're young"? You don't need to explicitly control a society with an armed police force, if there is already the psychological equivalent implanted in everybody's heads.

*Children are biologically programmed to be more vulnerable to severe pain signals because they are in the developmental stage of their lives. This is understandable: The consequences of toxic disruptions to the child are much more serious in terms of the ultimate bottom-line, that is the survival of the species. An adult, by comparison, is fully developed with natural (not neurotic) defenses and only has to maintain themselves. A child's general defenses are immature, and they have to develop as well as just maintain themselves. Nature, quite rightly, gets very upset when we mess with our kids, so to speak.

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Update: 29-4-2010

This is an interesting video [Bomb in the Brain: I provide the third part of the 5-part You-Tube series] which brings attention to the statistically observed links between childhood trauma and later dysfunction.

Though the 5-part presentation does not touch much on the post and prenatal periods, the Bomb in the Brain series nonetheless makes it explicitly clear that reducing childhood damage, in whatever reasonable way that we can, should be amongst our most pressing priorities. And to that end it is an impressive production.

Note: It's important to note that MRI scans have provided a particularity penetrating perspective on the relationship between trauma and structural (biological) changes within the brain, of which develop in response to deprivation.

The Bomb-in-the-brain series demonstrates how neurosis and later dysfunctionality is rooted in psychological/biological distortions which run far deeper than factors like "learned patterns of behaviour", etc. And indeed, this is exactly what social workers and people involved with social policy today now need to realise.

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Addition: 11-11-11

I stumbled across the following documentary online. I think it provides an excellent look into the disturbing world of severe child abuse - it makes it "real" for the viewer.

What is presented is what I would call a morbid extreme, but the reality is that the vast majority of us suffer from abuses to a given level, and most of us are more emotionally shut down and affected than we can understand. There are countless less extreme but still severe cases similar to this little girls, world over.

It just cannot be over stressed that child abuse is the No1 social problem of our time.

Review: The abused girl in this clip has incredible pain imprinted into her, and it will never realistically be assimilated. The therapy she has been subject to is basically just support, the withdrawal of abuse, and in turn the opportunity for the development of a stabilising defense system, and therefore less extreme and destructive acting-out. But the pain, though better contained and managed, will always be there.

It is sad and unfortunate, but cases like this little girl should never be allowed to go on to have children themselves. It would be impossible for her to be a reasonably capable mother in the future. The emotional damage is just far too severe - the cycle would otherwise inevitably be repeated. Indeed, the little girls parents who perpetuated the abuse would have similar stories to tell about their own childhoods, you can be sure. See here for my piece relating to reproduction licencing.

Note: It's only my guess, but I would not describe this little girl as a psychopath - I don't think she is. She would probably be a case described as severe anti-social personality disorder, which is not the effect of a stone-cold epigenetic shut down of feeling (which is the heart of psychopathy), but the effect of chronic child abuse leading to dangerous acting-out. The two conditions are often confused.