Making meaningful connections

Making meaningful connections

I have, in the last 24 months, been studying two disparate sciences, which have ?'magically joined-hands' for me in a meaningful way. I have been studying cognitive science by Lakoff & Johnson, and psychoanalysis by Becker.

Psychoanalysis uses the unconscious as an instrument for therapy and for comprehending the nature of our species. Cognitive science provides us with empirically based scientific theories that illuminate how the unconscious manages to be such a dominant factor in human behavior.

These sciences represent, for me (perhaps not for you because they may be interested knowledge to you), what I call disinterested knowledge; I study them, not because there is money-in-it, but because I wish to understand what they can mean to me. As separate sciences they have become meaningful but it is in their confluence that I have found each to enrich the other and together to form a meaningful and satisfying experience.

I have found reason to believe that this experience of connection might correctly be called an artistic experience. We do not need an exceptional talent to ?'do art'; we all can practice the art form just with our ordinary talents.

Cognitive science informs me as to how our earliest, common, every-day type of experiences becomes an integral part of our complex abstract ideas and our symbolically driven sense of reality. Our neural structures that result from many of our experiences, especially our very earliest experiences as infants, become an integrated part of later neurological structures of abstract concepts that we develop throughout our life. One might think of these ?'primary experiences' as forming a kind of herbal seasoning that ?'season' the abstract concepts we develop constantly in life.

These early cognitive structures, these early neural structures resulting from first experiences, these early ideas formed by experience become ?'primary metaphors'. These neural structures season many of our abstract ideas that we create later in life because these structures act like metaphors for later abstract ideas. Our unconscious maps (transfers the structure) copies of these primary metaphors onto subjective ideas and thus these later subjective ideas have copies of primary experiences as permanent parts of these subjective abstract ideas.

Becker informs me that the child begins the process of becoming "human by forfeiting the aegis over his powers" first to the mother and then to society as s/he matures. The subjective concept we call conscience forms into each child by the child's need for affection and anxiety over abandonment. The child's natural animal instincts are placed on hold in order that s/he might fit parental demand.

The child's instincts, established in its primate body, give ground to the symbolic social fictions of the parents and to society in general. S/he strives for meaning without the aid of an enlightened consciousness. This meaning becomes part of the embedded subjective concepts later constructed with the primary metaphors as part of the structure.

In a nutshell, I have learned that the neurological structures created in the very earliest experiences of a child become deeply and physically embedded into the neurological structure of subjective concepts of the adult throughout that individual's life.

These are difficult to understand concepts that demand study; and if you are interested in reading more about such matters you can find them in "Philosophy in the Flesh" by Lakoff and Johnson and in "The Ernest Becker Reader" edited by Daniel Liechty.

Have you experienced that ?'eureka moment' when understanding happens, when connections are made that provide meaning for your life?

Would you not agree that such moments must be what the artist feels when such a thing happens with their painting, or music, or dance, or etc.?