ShrinkWrapped

Top 10 Things You Can Do to Stay Sane in 2006

Dawn Eden writes a column about bloggers and blogging, Blog On,  in the New York Daily News every Sunday.   This morning, to start off the New Year she quotes from a number of PsychBloggers, including yours truly, with advice for the New Year.  Here is my post originally posted last week:

New Yorkers, like many other Americans, are assaulted daily by sensory and information overload.  It is enough to drive even the most well adjusted to distraction.  Luckily, a number of PsychBloggers have joined forces to offer various tried and true methods of maintaining one's sanity in the riotously cacophonous world of New York.

Sigmund, Carl and Alfred starts with a novel way to maintain self esteem and ends with a surprise.

Neo-neocon suggests a useful approach for down-regulating the global misery index, courtesy of the New York Times, and ends with a useful aphorism all parents should memorize but never admit out loud.

Dr. Helen eschews a Top 10 list [perhaps she read mine first-SW] but has high praise for one of the seven deadly sins that in the context of New York's aggressive energy may just be life saving.

And here are my "Top 10 Things You Can Do to Stay Sane in 2006":

The Council Has Spoken!

Once again, out of a plethora of exceptional posts, the Council, in their collective wisdom, has bestowed the coveted titles of Best Post & Second Best Post of the Week on several deserving blogs.

Among the Council posts, no one was going to best this moving and beautiful Christmas piece from Dymphna.  Read Above Thy Deep And Dreamless Sleep… and marvel.  I was delighted to find my post in second place.  In The Suicidal Pursuit of Perfection, I describe the self-destructive core of  the Utopian.

Among non-Council posts, two stood out.  The eminent Sigmund, Carl and Alfred penned The New, Updated, Alice In Wonderland, a cri de coeur about a particularly evil form of chutzpah.  Second place went to Gagdad Bob at One Cosmos for his Political Entomology and Blue-Bellied Liberals which should be enjoyed and savored; you will never think about blue ants in quite the same way ever again.

All of the nominated posts were excellent and can be found at the Watcher of Weasels.  All are worth your time.

The New York Times & Neurological Neglect

There is a curious reaction that is sometimes seen in patients who have had a stroke (CVA or Cerebral-Vascular Accident in medical parlance) in which they do not recognize the loss of function in the area affected by the stroke.  They may have been paralyzed on one side of their body but act as if nothing is wrong or they may have cortical blindness for half their visual field but be completely unaware of their visual defect.  In my youth I was a passenger in a car driven by a friend's Great-Uncle who apparently had had a silent stroke and had developed left-sided neglect.  Our brief, 5 minute drive was much more interesting than most short jaunts and culminated in my friend reaching across from the front passenger seat to yank the wheel and pull us back into the right lane and out of the path of the oncoming traffic.  The experience was a rather graphic example of the danger of such neurological neglect.

In today's New York Times, there is an example of "news reporting neglect syndrome" that is so significant that it suggests a life threatening condition which has thus far not been recognized by the victim.

The story, Justice Dept. Opens Inquiry Into Leak of Domestic Spying, which was apparently taken verbatim from the AP, opens with this:

Qaddafi's Libya, the Triumph of Solipsism

Solipsism is the philosophical analogue to Narcissism; it proposes that only one's self can be verified and all else is illusion.  Where the Narcissist denies, or is unaware of, his need for other people (while being acutely dependent on their approval) and is incapable of seeing other people as whole, independent other selves with desires and minds of their own, the Solipsist takes things a step further.  He believes others not only do not matter, but do not even exist in any meaningful way.  Other people are mere animated objects which he places into his universe for his own pleasure.  There are many variations on this theme; one which stands out in my memory is an old Twilight Zone episode featuring Burgess Meredith.  In Time Enough at Last,  he plays the role of a bank teller who despises people as intrusive to his desire to read great books.  In a typical twisted Twilight Zone ending he finds himself with all the time in the world to read books without interruption, but lacks the means to take advantage of his opportunity.  At the end the landscape he encounters (after leaving the bank vault where he waited out the nuclear war) is devoid of life, a reflection of his interior landscape from the start.

As you move from the Narcissist to the Malignant Narcissist (which overlaps with the Sociopath) the inner world of such people becomes more and more barren.  Normally, our minds are populated with many complex, often conflicted, collections of three dimensional images that represent the important people in our lives.  These collections of images make up what Psychoanalysts refer to as object-representations; that is, the mental images which help define our relationship to others.  The more such object-representations we have, the more subtlety and complexity our minds have. 

[A coherent collection of object-representations is integrated and synthesized by the mind to form a mental "object", that is, the correlate to a person with whom we have a relationship.]

The Narcissist, because he sees other people's minds as being just like his own has a less complex inner world than healthier people.  The Malignant Narcissist's mind is practically devoid of psychologically meaningful objects; he does not even accept that other people have minds of their own; their only purpose in life is to support the Malignant Narcissist. (Think of how Hitler, Stalin, Mao, et al, have traditionally treated other people.)  Solipsism is a pure culture of Malignant Narcissism.  Such people have minds that are akin to the most arid deserts, with no life in them, barren and dead.

Michael Totten describes what happens when a country is ruled by such a monster.  Libya today is a reflection of the mind of its ruler [HT: Roger Simon]:

The Suicidal Pursuit of Perfection

Many years ago a young woman entered Psychoanalysis for chronic problems she was having in maintaining her relationships.   She announced at the start that she was an ardent feminist and that her feelings about this were not subjects for analytic review.  Early in her treatment, her primary interest seemed to be to initiate arguments with me over male perfidy and oppression of women.  It was not easy to maintain my neutral position in the face of near constant attack.  (Her attacks felt like assaults, usually couched in terms of the patriarchal form and design of the analytic situation where I sat back like a typical male authority figure and made her suffer from my inane and stupid comments.)  After several months of this I began to wonder if I would ever be able to actually start the process of exploring, as therapeutic allies, how her mind works, rather than remaining stuck in the "inherently oppressive" analysis, which was the only way she could experience my efforts.  The breakthrough came when she casually mentioned toward the end of one session that her ankle was bothering her and she was annoyed (she was almost always annoyed about something, I might add) that she wouldn't be able to jog that night.  Since I knew that she was living in a marginal area of Manhattan and this was at a time when crime was at high levels and much in the news, I had concerns that her jogging might be putting her at risk.  When I asked her where she jogged, she confirmed that she jogged in a relatively dangerous area.   Her response to my comment to that effect was that women should be allowed to jog wherever and whenever they wished without fear of men and that nothing and nobody, including me, was going to stop her from doing what she wanted.

I was greatly relieved that it did not take long for her to recognize that her angry feminism (which had roots in long term feelings of disgust with her mother and envy of her brother's exalted position in her family) was inadvertently providing her with a rationalization for dangerous and self destructive behavior.  I should point out that both of us agreed that she and every other woman should be free to jog wherever and whenever they wished, but reality required that until such time as this Utopian ideal could be arranged, prudence dictated that she jog at a different time and place as was her wont.  When, as often was reported in the news in those days, a woman was assaulted and badly injured near the area she had been jogging, she responded with an anxiety attack; she was stricken with the thought that it could have been her and that there was an unconscious part of her mind that had been inviting just such an outcome.  This was the true beginning of a very successful analytic treatment.

Maneuvering Between the Headlines

In the last week, the name of Muhamed al-Durrah has returned to the news.  He was the 12 year old Palestinian boy whose death on September 30, 2000, in his father's arms, caught on camera by a French journalist, triggered the second intifada, which cost so many Israeli and Palestinian lives and lead directly to the separation fence/wall between Israel and much of the Palestinian territories. 

Once the picture of al-Durrah being held by his father had appeared around the world, it became the icon of the Intifada, yet questions always lurked in the background.  Five years later, the Second Draft has been able to do the investigation none of the MSM ever thought to do and presented a wealth of evidence with which an independent person can determine for himself the likelihood that the death (there are even questions if the boy died on that day) was, to use Wretchard's formulation:

Israel on purpose;
Israel by accident;
Palestinians by accident;
Palestinians on purpose;
Staged

Wretchard applauds Second Draft for allowing for some doubt to remain in their summation.  Unfortunately, though this is laudable, most of the world has had no trouble dispensing with any doubt; Israel is always to be seen as having the worst of motives and all her actions are to be cast in the worst light.  The perfidy of the French government supported media in perpetuating the notion of Israel purposely killing al-Durrah is also sadly unremarkable.

Neo-neocon has looked at the evidence and finds that Second Draft's Richard Landes has done and continues to offer a great service:

Christmas Day

Merry Christmas!

Happy Hanukkah!

Happy New Year!

May the next year bring Peace, Happiness, and Well Being to all who love life and freedom.

The Council Has Spoken!

Once again, amid a collection of outstanding blog posts emerge five that stand out.

The Winning Council post is by the esteemed Dr. Sanity, THE IDIOT"S GUIDE TO VICTIMHOOD - Getting It and Keeping It, which will tell you all you need to know to attain and maintain your vaunted status as an aggrieved victim.

In second place is a post by the lovely and talented Dymphna at Gates of Vienna, Gender Warfare Without the Glass Ceilings, in which Dymphna elucidates what real sexism looks like.

Among the non-Council posts, first place went to The Volokh Conspiracy for Legal Analysis of the NSA Domestic Surveillance Program:; it is helpful to have a lawyer who knows what he is talking about discuss complex legal questions which the MSM and various political partisans prefer to oversimplify for their own ideological ends.

In second place was a tie between the dawn patrol's post, Planned Parenthood Boasts It Covered Up an 11-Year-Old's Rape, which is about an outrage that is frighteningly just what the title implies, and a post by the  Belgravia Dispatch, December 15th 2005: A Day of (Cautious) Hope and Optimism, which offers a guardedly optimistic view of the recent Iraqi elections, a view conspicuously missing from most MSM stories about Iraq.

Finally, all the nominated posts can be found at the Watcher of Weasels and all are worth your time.

The Mind's Immune System and the Lack Thereof

The human immune system is a marvelous system which is able to quickly recognize foreign invaders, bacteria, viruses, parasites, and mobilize defenses against them.  Without a functioning immune system, an infant has no chance of survival (recall the "boy in the bubble").  The immune system has evolved over the course of millions of years of constant warfare with microscopic invaders, who have constantly evolved as well, in a microscopic arms race of deadly seriousness.  The immune system works exceptionally well, though it ultimately fails in all of us; it is noteworthy that it works so well because it is one of the oldest systems in our body, evolutionarily speaking.

In contrast, the Conscious, rational mind, based on the neo-cortex, is one of the most recent evolutionary developments, with modern homo sapiens having evolved only in the last 250,000 years.  The modern neo-cortex is the most complex part of the brain; it integrates multiple inputs and sends inhibitory signals to lower, more primitive parts of the brain.  It is no surprise, then, that our rational minds are exceptionally sensitive to derailment.

Dr. Sanity favored the blogosphere with a review of many of the more commonly used defense mechanisms.  You can see from the list that there are relatively few which are considered healthy and mature; those few defenses tend to be fairly sophisticated and are only available to people who have achieved a very high level of psychological development.  Of note, even among such sophisticated people, the frequency with which they resort to more primitive defenses is significant and potentially alarming.

This brings me to Thomas Lifson's article, The Liberal Bubble, from Wednesday. 

Consciousness and Conscious Robots

One of the great mysteries of science is the origin and the nature of consciousness.  In The Emperor's New Mind, Roger Penrose suggested that consciousness was "non-computable", that is, so complex that it could not be adequately described by any executable algorithm.  However, as our understanding of the brain and its behavior has progressed, computer scientists have become more and more adept at modeling the brain (what Ray Kurzweil has called "reverse engineering" the brain) and surprises are now becoming expectable.

Two months ago I wrote a post, based on a Scientific America article, summarizing some of the data on  the Neurobiology that is involved in the development of the sense of the Self.  I noted the existence of self-reflective areas in the brain:

Debra A. Gusnard of Washington University describes one such area [involved in integration and synthesis-SW], the medial prefrontal cortex, an area located in the cleft between the hemispheres of the brain , directly behind the eyes (where most people imagine their "self" to reside.)  The medial prefrontal cortex may act as an integrating and synthesizing structure.   Of note, this area of the brain has a high concentration of neurons called spindle cells, which are thought to be very involved in information processing.  [Recent work suggesting the computational ability of single neurons may be more robust than we have recognized will need to be factored into the mix as time goes by.]

It is worth noting that there is a significant area of overlap between such a hypothesized brain structure and the psychoanalytic concepts of "object constancy", "ego structures" and "ego boundaries"; these concepts are relevant to determining the boundaries between self and not-self (or self and object.)

Furthermore, there appear to be specific areas of the brain that respond to our experiences and our traits and determines how they fit into our sense of ourselves.  For example, a novel experience triggers areas of the brain that are self reflective, that is, they think about our self involved in the event.  [Emphasis not in the original-SW]