Quote:The hidden state may easily be a strategy which is not deviating from any accepted path.
Yes, now you've got it. Strategy is compromise formation. It's a method.
Quote:An example is a lady who is pretending to be the acme of respectability whilst harbouring secretly what might be termed in the interests of brevity a "dirty mind".
Excellent example. How secret the "dirty mind" is to others or to herself depends upon her strategy. Strategies can be more of less conscious and sometimes totally unconscious.
Quote:There is an implicit assumption contained in your description of the superego.It is that the child has an interest in pleasing the goofers who engineered it into existence.I certainly have no recollection of any betrayals of such a nature in my past and this is where Freudians have us. That's why they shoot for the infancy.Nobody can prove them wrong.
It is a bit complicated, but here is a portion of an interview with Joseph LeDoux. LeDoux is a faculty member and researcher at the New York University Center for Neural Research. He and his colleagues have some interesting findings. New technologies are improving our ability to theorize about how the brain/mind works.
Quote:JB: What's the difference between an emotional and a cognitive memory?
LEDOUX: By cognitive memory I'm going to assume you mean explicit conscious memory, the kind of memory we usually have in mind when we use the word memory in everyday speech. Emotional memory and explicit memory happen at the same time, but separately. For example, the amygdala mediates emotional memory and the temporal lobe memory system mediates explicit memory.
Here's an example. Imagine driving down the road and having an accident. You hit your head on the steering wheel and the horn gets stuck on. You're bleeding and in pain. It's awful. Sometime later, you hear the sound of a horn. The sound goes to your amygdala and activates your autonomic nervous system (raising your blood pressure and heart rate, making you sweat), tenses your body muscles, releases stress hormones into your blood, and so on. The sound also goes to the temporal lobe system and reminds you of the accident, of who you were with and where you were going. It also reminds you that it was awful. But these are all just facts about the situation. They are memories of the emotional experience rather than emotional memories. In general, one difference between emotional and cognitive processing is that emotional processing often leads to bodily responses, whereas cognitive processing leads to more cognitive processing. Cognitions are seldom characterized by specific kinds of responses, but emotions usually are. It's important that we understand as much as we can about the biology of these systems.
Many people have problems with their emotional memories; psychologists' offices are filled with people who are basically trying to take care of and alter emotional memories, get rid of them, hold them in check. If anything, emotional memory is more basic than explicit conscious memory. For example, it takes place at an earlier age. It's conceivable, and in fact seems very likely, that a child could be abused very early in life and develop unconscious emotional memories through the amygdala prior to the point where the temporal lobe memory system has kicked in. If that's true then emotional memories are being formed for things that will never be consciously understood, because the system that mediates conscious memory isn't available to encode the experience and can therefore never retrieve it.
http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/ledoux/ledoux_p3.html
Goofers and infants need each other.....if all goes well. And as you say, goofers who reject being tools themselves should desist from procreation. But they so often don't. That's the unfortunate thing. But infants are dependent on goofers, however goofy they may be, so the eagerness to please is a survival mechanism.
And of course, something LeDoux doesn't make clear in the above quotation.....abusive experiences (in this case, LeDoux is specifically studying fear) are not the only emotions recorded by emotion. Good feelings are no exception to the rule. Pleasurable unconscious feelings as well as unpleasureable ones are recorded in early infancy through the amygdala. Optimally, the pleasant ones are the rule......but we're not all so fortunate as that. Emotions rule our associations. That is, one thought follows the other based on emotional memory.
Quote:What is often referred to as "bad" behaviour is simply a process of learning.
No argument here. But on the Lord of the Flies question, I don't agree. Conscience is necessary if people are to live together on one planet, as we must.........conscience works best when it's not overly dependent on guilt and punishment. Gratification is a necessary component of any successful strategy. I don't call it selfishness, I just call it getting what I want. But of course, gratification can't be all because we can't have everything we want........that is, our wants often conflict and interfere with gratification of one wish or the other.
Quote:I used "torture" in the sense of an analyst making the coucho squirm in embarrassment.
But where does the embarrassment come from? We're back to chicken consciousness.
Quote:".If a value is given up in order to achieve a desired result then the desired result must have more value than the value surrendered.
Yes, that's what I meant when I said, everything is true, the question is, what is it true about. It all comes back to wishes. What would be better than keeping your own money and letting the lady get her own drink, or getting it paid for by some other man at the bar? I won't give the obvious answer to my own question.
And from a lady's perspective, why would she feign dependency or submission (allowing the gent to buy her a drink, rather than paying for it herself) unless she was getting what she wanted too. Fun fun fun. The rewards are out there and I intend to get as many of them as I can before I'm gone away. This is where strategy comes into play.
And now to your associations. (Associations are the next thought that comes to your mind without editing.) Of course no one can do that without sooner or later (usually sooner) coming upon a thought one doesn't want to think about. And that's how strategy is investigated. The wishes are obvious, although not everyone agrees. But this is the foundation of Freudian theory. And Freudian theory has infiltrated present day society, just like Shakespeare's assumptions. People take certain Freudian or Shakepearian ideas for granted, often without attribution. The wishes are basic. Sex and aggression. It's the strategy that makes us all uniquely who we are.
So there, alter boy! Take that, you naughty naughty man.
But aren't we letting the CPD off the hook with all this talk of psychic mechinisms?
P.S. "Honing"...to sharpen, make acute, to (not to put too fine a point on it) make pointed; to practice.
