Self Atman-Brahman, Psyche and Soul An Essay by Derek Dey BA MRE © Sept, 2016 The Individuated Self: individuation is the process in which the individual self develops out of an undifferentiated unconscious and transpersonal realm, seen as a developmental psychic process during which innate elements of personality, the components of the immature psyche, and the experiences of the person's life become integrated over time into a well-functioning whole. What cannot be ignored is the infant’s early experiential world within the family triad and in the mother-infant dyad where nature surrenders to nurture for a time. What follows is a history of an idea which leads us to a scientifically bolstered view of the self, not in isolation but as an attachment model. . . . . !1 To my way of thinking the self and the cosmos have been under examination from time immemorial. One can only think of a dreamer lying out on the grass or on the sand at a beach in the summer months well before the Greeks arose, contemplating the vaulted wonder of the stars, his place in the scheme of things, and what feelings arose within concerning the vastness above; the ripples of consciousness recorded in memory. Ego, the term, emerges first from Vedic and Hindu philosophy. In Vedic it comes up as Ahamkara. Certainly the term persists in the orient and is frequently thought of as an impediment to higher states of consciousness; to the self in contemplation. Ego here dates to around 3000 years ago. However when we say alternately Atman, which roughly equates to self or soul, it never stands alone in Hindu philosophy rather it is integrated to, and participates with Brahman; that is to say self and cosmos are viewed as one if certain barriers formed by the ego are removed from thought and heart. In Greek times the self is closely examined when rationality, emerging from the time of Hesiod (c700), tends to demand it. His Theogony offers us a certain conscious cosmology of which we are a part: “First of all Chaos, …but then Gaia the wide-wayed Earth, …and dark Tartarus in the depth of the broad land and Eros, the most beautiful of all the immortal gods.” I paraphrase but there is a sense of deep cosmological belongingness and seeming reference to elements of the psyche, then he is the first who mentions Eros whom Plato takes to transcendent beauty in his Symposium. It is she, who goes on to supply beauty and the honest lure to the higher ground of transcendent virtues and consciousness of the One. Later it will come again in the Renaissance as a philosophy of art and even later in psychological theory, but Hesiod’s pragmatism otherwise suggests self and community needs to be looked in to. His brother, raised the issues of land boundaries and the legal status of the self in society. So self also mattered as a key to what happened in personal growth and how it functioned in the state. Next, Heraclitus throws us Logos and in this he is pointing to a complimentary agency for Eros even though Eros is not well configured in his works. It comes up as Phanta !2 Rhei, or flow, or nature. Yet, Heraclitus states we do not stand alone, rather we belong to a cosmos of ordered concerns and we are drawn to those things, which unfold in cognition eventually. Logos establishes ideas or patterns for physis, nomos, ethos, and telos, he says. Roughly speaking he taught the cosmos was an ordered aesthetic proposition of great grandeur, and thought the nature of society and self should be much the same. Physis was his cosmology, his nature and what we would eventually call, quantum theory. Nomos became universal principles or political law when brought to the ground; it gave us social order. Ethos could be viewed as the ethical self, so the better one became the less fatalistic and deterministic principles became and the happier we would be. Ethics were necessary; both liberating and as a social requirement. Ethos as character and calling had much to do with self. And telos at the end of the day supplied a sense of direction, a purposiveness tied to being and becoming, in an individuated sense and as a broader cultural directive it became meaningful. We grew up, discovered our talents, and through the expression of what was good within, we found joy and added something useful and beautiful to the lives of our fellow beings and our culture which went on down the road into an advance into novelty and delight. Mind and cosmos here, participated with one another to bring into existence virtues, whether some realize it or not. Of course Heraclitus questioned this point and thought such principles were clearly evident but paradoxically only a few saw it that way; few seemingly understood, so utopia had to wait for a bit. This idea of Logos as an overarching principle flowed through Greek thinking. It was touched upon by Parmenides, Anaxagoras, and runs through Pythagoras, to Socrates and Plato, coming out as the notion of ‘Platonic Ideas’ and later as Archetypes. Self after all, is concomitant to cosmos, community, and autopoietic systems, all of which stood a chance of becoming sustainable and interactive. There were ideas above and ideas below waiting to be expressed. We needed to understand such things so it is Socrates who tells us, “The unexamined life is not worth living” (ὁ ... ἀνεξέταστος βίος οὐ βιωτὸς ἀνθρώπῳ ). So it is up to us what we get up to, but what lies both below and within, is seemingly the greater good and at core, thats what we seek. This anthem for the age becomes both the examined self and the social contract, tied essentially to the !3 new city state which needed new ideas and a whole self. It became a psychological proposal in the broadest sense; a call to explore the fullness of the interior self, a call to furnish the community with a creative and ethical voice, ensuring the state and its culture persisted through time. A mind like this inhered to transcendent virtues and a cosmology full of life. We were not just a brain. So free will, the irrational element of the intuitive subconscious and the rest of the self dwelt together, and with nature: Notwithstanding transcendent ideas might be mistaken for deterministic imperatives, so therein lay the paradox. Were we a free self or not? Of wholeness, we ask, what is freedom and ethical responsibilities? How does it all work? It falls to Aristotle who searched for this self, the psyche, in more detail. He is usually considered the founder of psychology in the West: but he was profoundly influenced by his mentor Plato and latterly to the scientific method. Nevertheless, Aristotle posits the idea of a psyche, mind and soul meshworked into the self. Plato had already supplied a tripartite, interwoven and interactive mind but here it was as Aristotle saw it: • The Logistikon: This was the intellect, the seat of reasoning and logic. • The Thumos: This was the spiritual centre of the mind, and dictated emotions and feelings. • The Epithumetikon: This part governed desires and appetites. The Ideas, and Heraclitean Logos, are not there explicitly. Aristotle for the most part gave us earthbound empiricism but Plato had already suggested a healthy mind was found when these three elements were in balance and referred himself first to the heavens. Along with Ideas, this was important to his Republic, because these qualities defined what he hoped would be the citizenship and leadership of the new city state. Nevertheless, Aristotle thought about the good, an absolute standard often ascribed to the ‘One,’ his ‘prime-mover’ who lay behind the notion of personal being. Thought and behavior were ascribed to some notion of transcendent virtues but he came to focus on behaviors on the ground which might determined personal happiness and his !4 functional city. His work, Para Psyche was about being and the mind; nous as it was often called. His, De Anima is probably better known as his main psychological text but from there he understood the first entelechy, or vital principle, guiding the development of existence or systems. Reason and body, proffered behaviors and more. He likewise understood irrationality and unregulated impulses influenced humankind one way or another, so that such desires composed and compromised the self. For various dysfunctions he placed the arts at the center of his healing processes and called that catharsis, where a good play would raise concerns, resolve them and likewise carry his audience through their own dysfunctions and pathologies and leave them at the end of the day on a higher plane. This theory of catharsis, which took a pathological self back to the world of the good, comes up in his Poetics. Both the whole self and the arts were circumspectly tied to virtues in this way, elevating the person and elevating the social fabric to which such a person might belong. Although there is much more to art he was touching upon a purpose for cultural events, already defined at this early stage in the Western tradition. Art could, on a good day, elevate the soul. Aristotle thereby, proposed the totality of the self as something he could posit as a true self, a proposal, no doubt, which came to define his philosopher king; his true leader; erudite, educated, moral, efficacious, and focused on the good. . . . . Somewhere along the line between the Greek world and now, Plotinus 204-270 spent much time defining his sacred self and the, ‘divine mind.’ An early version of this, The Ladder of Ascent, comes up with Climacus around 630 or so. Here, mind can be elevated by ascending a ladder of consciousness to a transcendent realm in similar fashion to the Vedas where an ascent to the sacred was proffered via meditation. The same idea is arrived at in the Enneads (Plotinus) so contemplation opens to a quieter more peaceful and sacral self, which rises through stages to a more serene spectrum of consciousness; to beauty and to love. It leads the self by steps to transcendent planes where the good abides. This vast, warm and concerned domain is written up first as beauty, next as the ‘One,’ though one could argue just as easily for nature or principles. A couple of terms have been applied to such a concept including, The Way !5 Up and the Way Down in philosophy, and The Great Chain of Being in theology, which is composed of a great number of hierarchical links, from the most basic and foundational elements of creation up to the very highest perfection of the self in participation with the numinous. Self and the ultimate ground are both considered. The ‘Great Chain’ also implies connectivity, a bit like synchronicity, or what I call deep ecology. Meditation in the Oriental sense, raises the self similarly through stages to a state of non-dual consciousness; to enlightenment, but Plotinus, was not talking about an amorphous unitary consciousness per se, rather to a more defined sense of love, heart, and personal belongingness with a father-creator and family of God, compelled by these proclivities. Plotinus touched upon the nature of this self by looking at epistemology (nous) and consciousness. Still, moving through this inner world of the psyche, certain psychological processes needed further explanation. Plotinus and others held to an optimistic notion that mind could embark on a journey from a basic psychological and pathological proposals to an elevated stance, to the divine mind. From there mind could easily connect to universal ideas of goodness and to the ‘One’ from whence all had proceeded in the first place. Eastern mediative traditions likewise took Atman (self) in contemplation, to a similar ‘higher’ and non-dual sate, to Brahman. Yet Christian influence largely set up a negative image of this self. It was “couched in sin” and dystopian by nature. Augustine historically takes much of the blame for this but what he really said was, only the will was weakened therefore this sinful self was redeemable. The will to do good was weakened but the core, the heart of the self, still remained intact. It was not altogether hopeless, just gloomy. Sin came some way to explaining the irrational drives too, but when the Renaissance arrived the dystopian image was contested because it held back human and creative potential. By Renaissance times there were already the seeds of two traditions in existence. The fallen or compromised self was held in certainty by the Catholic Church but within Renaissance culture there had to be something different. A flawed human could not aspire to excellence, to high art, the novel, great music, poetry, and the architecture of the new and to Civic Humanism touted as a pragmatic politic of concern. If fallen, none !6 of these creative aspirations could fully be in him or her and none could aspire to the heights of excellence and accomplishments the Renaissance revealed. The body of work in the Renaissance landscape came to hold to the Greek idea of a, ‘canon’ of beauty, a divine proportion established by Polykleitos around 500 BC and by the math of Euclid who first talked about this as his, ‘golden ratio.’ Yet any form of nudity ideally proportioned or not, to which the human form held to, was frowned upon by the religious majority. Concupiscence, lust was considered a root for sin and the naked form triggered the slide into this bottomless dystopian envelope. In terms of ideas there was no easy reconciliation between church and the humanist state so rebellion followed. It was mild at first and I’ll pick two thinkers here who came to represent the new. The first, Pico Della Mirandola wrote, Oration on the Dignity of Man, 1486. In it he justifies the importance of the quest for human knowledge. He furthermore states God conceived from his desire another sentient being who could appreciate all his works. The dignity of man therefore embraced the intellect, creativity free will, and natural rights, including the right to explore knowledge without church intervention or priestly interpretations. It was a, ‘rights of man document,’ and it became the anthem for an era. It was a declaration that the human psyche and the human self was dignified, creative, intelligent and free to choose but it left the church thinking he had taken away the salvific might and efficacy of the Christ. Was He not the only way to perfection - to real selfhood? So Pico was in trouble with Rome. Implicated in all this is a question concerning the nature of the self. Rightly or wrongly Pico asks, who shall occupy the cultural landscape and who shall not? Many were liberated by his doctrine and within the arts, craftsmen rose to become genius. Pico’s work pointed to man’s capacity for self-transformation and that man held to a symbolic reflection of the divinity of God. Yet woven in to all this, whether Pico understood it or not, was a pointer if you will, to humanism which would soon surge forward to Enlightenment and to the subjective self. Likewise the Renaissance self revealed cracks. In tandem, Marsilio Ficino synthesized esoteric traditions and philosophy with theology. In a similar stance to Plotinus he suggested beauty elevated the mind to its divine !7 stance and hence sought to take self and the arts heavenward. This idea, Platonic by nature, influenced many artists, writers, sculptors, politicians and musicians, to use ideas like these to reach for the sky. Mathematical and divine proportion in the arts supported by beauty including a euphoric journey of ascent hoped to carry art and her audiences to just such a liberating experience. The arts could then function in a cathartic way leading one to heaven. It was not far off Aristotle’s notions on the arts but Ficino took a restored Eros from Plato’s Symposium and told us again, this was true beauty. It was this refined Eros, transcendent by nature, who led us to these wonderful dimensions of exalted consciousness. We were lured, never forced and this was a principle function of the arts which many adopted eagerly in their search for excellence and purpose. Certainly from Botticcelli to Dürer, Michelangelo, Leonardo, Raphael, Tesla, to Gafori of Milan, began to reveal just what excellence and beauty, based on deep principles, could do. In spirit, in art in literature and song, man was tied to the superlunar world of music and the other arts by means of its numerical and proportional harmonies which reflected the harmonic structure of the universe; one supposes the music of the sphere’s, was here given form. The Renaissance was essentially a Neo-Platonic adventure. Christianity, his readings of Plotinus, Hermes Trismegistus, and Plato all came together to offer a sense of beauty which became the engine, which drove the Renaissance towards the virtues and excellence we can still see today; and it was about immanence not just dreams. A question was raised here and not fully answered. Was the self a pathological disaster or did it hold to divine properties and move to what we might call the original self the original mind and original creativity? Or did it go to ego, the subjective self and the unresolved issue of irrational impulses? In this Renaissance period there was a window of opportunity so we might come to terms with both these world views, whole and pathological, but synthesizing these two visions, one utopian and the other dystopian was a tough job. When we move on to the Enlightenment period a humanist and seemingly utopian perspective had already prevailed, though if we read Eric Voegelin it was gnostic by !8 nature, meaning it involved a man-made paradise, which might not prevail for too long because it lacked something essential in that model. Unresolved subjectivity and the contaminated unconscious were left to smolder in the basement. Panpsychic thinkers like Kepler and Leibniz, on the other hand, though marginalized, said something more about the nature of the self. Kepler´s, Mysterium Cosmographicum, began to describe the geometric and mathematical basis for the universe incorporating work he did on Platonic solids. Pythagoras also comes to mind but he was pointing to quantum math well before its time and positing a universe rich in mental-like properties and mathematical harmonies to which we belonged. Leibniz was saying much the same with his Monads, revealing more mental-like properties scattered throughout the cosmos and functioning in harmony with the rest of the field. There was beauty here and Leibniz briefly talks of mental states. Kepler mentions heavenly bodies influencing human destiny too but little of psychology by its very nature, breaks the surface. One could argue beauty here, from his mathematical harmonies and field consciousness inheres to mind. It is an idea extracted from both cosmos and mind, but little more was really said about such a self who might be a participant in all of this. As the zeitgeist moved on, a more rational and empirical approach to what reality was composed of and what mind and body were, began to emerge. Most of what was perceived as being spiritual or mystical was placed on the back burner. Hume, often an erudite thinker, took such a subjective approach to the self but he is limited by his selfcontained propositions rather than addressing the fullness and relatedness of the self. His notion of self was more akin to an isolated ego and to pure subjectivity; to opinions. Then much of this period became defined by Cartesian dualisms; that mind and body are really distinct. Descartes reaches this conclusion by arguing that the nature of the mind is completely different from that of the body and therefore he leaves us with the classic mind-body-dualism still argued over today. As far as existence mattered he mentions soul but he is more famed for his, “Cogito ergo sum” - I think therefore I am. This conscious rationale, suggests we human beings are defined by self-consciousness, where existence can be confirmed by a self-referal outcome. Yet consciousness as sense perception and bodily affairs still lay separate, so the mind!9 body problem remained and the notion that the body was basically a machine functioning separately from mind lingered on. What the Enlightenment really sought was a self suitable to inhabit the European Landscape, a social and competent self; the Greeks again who had sought a whole and virtuous self well suited to their day to day running of human affairs. However reason was not the only descriptor of self now and irrational impulses which remained visible just as Aristotle and others had noticed before gave rise to an agency which came to be called the unconscious; the dark ground upon which we stood. The Romantics took it be so and did much to shape this thinking in their art and literature. And the unconscious, becoming a German affair, was now tagged as such, just when the German states were on the rise and urgently needed a well defined self belonging to such an enterprise. Enter Fichte and Schelling. . . . . The ‘self project’ In the Enlightenment was about defining the ‘I’ empirically from a humanist standpoint. However the German version, which followed, tended to embrace Romanticism and transcendent idealisms. In the Enlightenment version the idea of self tied to the ‘One’ or transcendence was unacceptable. Furthermore, if self was harnessed theologically to the Divine Will it was restricted to moral constraints determined from above. Self was not free. Theology was viewed as a deterministic model and did not suit the Enlightenment way of thinking at all. In many ways when Kant used the term, ‘moral imperative' this was also read as being deterministic. The German states required a self essential to their day to day tasks, to nation building but had to be assigned to both free will and ethical proclivities, whether transcendent or not, yet not shackled by determinisms. So questions arose. These new city states and loose federations, which would soon become Germany, called for persons of interest, who stood out from the crowd ethically and held to free will. In their search the German world largely came to established an affair with the Platonic idea and the Pythagorean world of cosmic harmony. Germany was looking for citizens, rulers and educational !10 models predicated to a whole self who belonged to a deep form of ecology, that is to say, to Transcendental Idealism. The next problem asks, whether self stood in relation to nature, that is, did it emerged from processes of a deep ecology, or not? And if the self did then was it not subject to more determinisms established by the laws of nature? Fichte picked up on this and the first notion of the self was defined by self-consciousness. The unconscious seemed to have more to do with nature rather than reason but it remained inexplicably irrational so he seemed to have solved this by mostly skipping this vital realm and stuck to subjectivity then according to his peers, made a mess of his self by default. Fichte offers us a science of knowledge (Wissenschaftslehr 1801) which sought to ground the self in the concept of subjectivity: "The pure I.” In all of this he posits the self is basically self-consciousness and self-made. Any reference to the unconscious is largely overshadowed by his focus on self-consciousness. He is running close to humanist psychology where the term self-actualized was used later. In his model, Self is therefore not bound by transcendent and limiting moral principles and it is not bound by laws pertaining to nature or the dark ground of the unconscious but it is also not tied particularly to relationships. The “I” is a solitary posture. Yet, he does posit a weak philosophy of nature and leaves us wondering what our place in it might be. It is inconclusive. Then he throws in his Philosophy of Right concerning his social theory. He examines how the freedom of each and every individual is important but self as an individual given to irrational unconscious material must be externally limited if a free society of free and equal individuals is to be possible. If the “I” with its uncertainties impinges on others how free can others and society be? He held to his self, which becomes a social self despite its rather solitary posture, but it was a compromised self roaming freely, erratically, not necessarily ethically. If nature imposed no laws this errant self had to be limited by other means and that is where the state came in. In all of this Fichte misses the point of community and rushes on to a social contract run by the state. It is the state which will bring the self into compliance, to social norms !11 whatever they were, and by whomsoever decided what these laws should be. Of course who defines the state and its executive functions is another question not well examined but after rejecting Kant’s mind-independent external causes of certain sensations running through his archetypus intellectus, this transcendent and unknowable Thing in Itself, he rejected the internalization of patterns of order and wholeness which came with this. Internalized such patterns offered a systems theory dedicated to ethical relationships polished through the education of the self; not deterministic imperatives. Fichte says however; “Intellectual intuition,” archetypes, cannot be sustained by finite cognition. Reason, he thought, does not support intuition which is not reasonable in itself. The two are incompatible. The implication of this was that if concepts did not have their source in cognition, then it was hard to see how they could have any application to the sensory realm of worldly experience. Phenomenology was all that mattered. The world of the irrational unconscious and transcendent ideas could not be sustained by rational and scientifically examined thinking. On the one hand Fichte broke the individual free from Kant’s unknowable transcendent virtues of an archetypal nature, which he perceives to be both irrational and deterministic as moral imperatives might be, and then nature whose laws likewise diminish free will; then he has thrown his “Pure I” as a subjective self, into a form of bondage to the state so that others do not suffer from the improprieties of this self. In the end there is still no real freedom, no real self, just bondage to the moral and legal constraints of the state in order for people to get along. Yet for Fichte his self remained important just as education of the youth did for him in the period when Germany had been defeated by Napoleon, yet not defeated ideologically. Germany needed to rebuild, so a notion of self, and an educational model, to raise a new generation and re-establish her nationhood as a fortress might was essential. Rebirth of Germany was on his mind, but the subjective self, his science and subjectivity got him into a pickle. Schelling, came in as a philosophical radical, a Proteus who did better but who also had no solid science to help him. Indeed his Protean nature was well suited to the exploration of what is called ‘the dark ground of our being’; the unconscious as the !12 Romantics had named it. This mysterious dark ground was linked to Romanticism and to Kant’s, “Intellectus Archetypus.” This intuitive mind is set against the Intellectus Ecytpus (reason) in his Critique of Judgement. The ‘archetypes' function was unfathomable to Kant’s way of thinking yet present in humankind as an agency within the self. Schelling developed a system of transcendental idealism from this and from a more suitable philosophy of nature whereby mind came to participate with a universe rich in mental-like properties which fielded archetypes. Mind in participation with nature came to define consciousness rather than the limited brain of the subjective ego. And nature became a ‘deep ecology’ as used in this essay. Here was his unconscious. Schelling’s Naturalphilosophie, tells us the unconscious is tied to nature. Here is the dark ground of our being and this is more than simply saying we are irrational. That is to say, he approaches the emotional and intuitive side of an extended epistemology, which dallies with what comes later as a neuron to quantum theory. This field of mental-like proportions held to virtues, holistic patterns, and dynamics, which helped them to come into existence. A profound sense of belongingness to a cosmos in which we dwelt then comes to mind. We could say the unconscious taped into the archetype here. So this infinite regress running all the way down through some form of field consciousness becomes a proposition somewhat deeper than Arnae Ness gave us in his version. The idea was good, the science Spartan, and many think that is what snookered his whole enterprise, for the time being. But it would come again. Both Fichte and Schelling danced with Kantian ideas. Fichte revolved around the mathematical categories of Quality and Quantity, Kantian categories and deterministic laws of nature as he perceived it, whereas Schelling was at pains to show how Kant’s dynamic categories of Relation manifested Plato’s eternal forms that permeates not only human consciousness via the subconscious, but the entire organic structure of the cosmos. And this included systems thinking; social constructs. The categories which tied Fichte to reductionism and subjectivity however led to the deconstructionist works which soon followed in the philosophies of the 20th Century. In this, no certainties could be confirmed by the subjective self because it too was uncertain. He failed to !13 see the whole self and its place within a cosmology, and as a ground for being. Relation however, opened up to expansiveness, attachments and community. Schelling redefined self as the productivity of nature. He is saying that nature may have laws or principles but it unfolds in processes of becoming, it is never complete in itself, and is an advance into novelty and consciousness. It is tied to the processes of individuation so that nature is a ground for being and the unconscious is the primary function of the psyche. The flow of nature is also found in similar processes in the self, in the stages of growth and holds to choices. We can see why Heraclitus places Panta Rhei against his Logos. We are left looking at underlying principles (Logos) which are then expressed as flow or nature, presented to us as an aphorism that, ‘No man ever steps into the same river twice.’ Panta Rhei flows as the stages of growth and life itself does with change. Waters run the same course, the same bedrock, yet ever flow on. Bedrock doesn't change here but flow does as constant change suggests. Nature comes with differentiation and choice at higher levels of consciousness. Oriental philosophy says much the same when presenting us with Li (the underlying order of nature) which participates which Qi as the forces and dynamics of nature, which change, and flow in life itself. Unchanging principles and ever changing fluidity are written up all over the place. The Dao gives us dynamic Yang and Yin emergent from an unchanging Way, for example. Transcendental Idealism is a huge jump forward from the mechanical worldview and the dualisms which went before. Then Schelling goes further by saying this absolute “I” is self-conscious and the unconscious, which is introduced as the agency set as the ground of the self, set as processes of nature and latterly moving into cognition. They interact and there are no dualisms to think of. Conscious and the unconscious are synthetic. This self is grounded and participates with a rich cosmology and still stands free because within our occasions of experience there is free will. Ideas come and go and there is time to pick and choose. Nature (ideas) infiltrates the unconscious and move to rational consciousness. The process works in tandem to bring to us things that become knowable. What we do with these ideas is then our business. !14 This primary function of the unconscious comes to define psychological theory which is now almost upon us as the 20th Century approaches. Nature, and here I think we are looking at the Platonic idea or archetype, is woven into the properties of a cosmology of consciousness. The conscious “I” is predicated to this underpinning of the unconscious ground. What is at first vague or intuited in the unconscious ends in conscious philosophical and scientific knowledge and in human creative endeavors: “The I, is conscious according to the production, unconscious with regard to the product.”- (Schelling SW 1/3, p. 613). Therefore the unconscious works with rational consciousness together towards an end. From now the unconscious is not simply irrational drives which detract from freedom but a ground from which an ontology arises. Moreover irrational drives can be identified for what they are, set against meaningful or transcendent virtues and patterns dedicated to growth. . . . . At the risk of oversimplification I will say Freud picked up on Fichte and CG Jung picked up on Schelling, and on German aesthetics and transcendental idealisms. Karl Hartman with his Philosophy of the Unconscious 1869 influenced Jung, as did others including Kant, Goethe and so on. Jung, lest we forget, was a qualified medical provider and a committed academic. So it is CG Jung who takes his examinations of the self beyond philosophy and the intellect and crosses over into to the empirical, the esoteric, to the Orient, and to a multi disciplinarian approach. Schelling’s picture of the unconscious referred itself in part to Kant just as Jung did, so we find Jung named as a child of Weimar and linked that way to German Classical Aesthetics. Jung and Freud worked as a team for a short time. Freud otherwise strove to give us a self liberated from religion, a free standing autonomous being who might be favorably compared to Fichte’s “I” or Nietzsche’s Ubermensch; a superman. Freud touched on Darwin, Brentano, Albert Moll, Nietzsche, Feuerbach, Charcot and lived in the Fin de Siècle era, then deliberately set his self against religion as an Enlightenment replacement for the transcendent self and called his theory, Metapsychology where he posits a structural self in pseudo-religious terms set to dazzle. The structural !15 architecture of Freud’s self was much less than the grand project he envisioned. Yet his topographical model held to Ego, id and Superego. Id, the unconscious, was filled, he said, with rage, perversion, and anxiety, so it didn't bode well for creativity and it illustrates the first dualism in his theory. This contaminated unconscious was set at odds with the ego and presumably the rational and creative self, and it was populated by drives, which impinged on freedoms. The rational ego is therefore attacked by the irrational and neurotic drives of his lower realm of the Id. These drives, weak or strong, can be held in check by repression and when the pressure builds can be sublimated he says, channeled into activities designed to offer release from the unbearable tensions which build therein. But drives, do not a free man make. Drives are mechanistic. Sublimation like this did little for civilization as he noted. Irrational impulses which dogged the Enlightenment project were still not dealt !16 with and creativity became a matter of sublimation rather than a pure act. That is to say neuroses, pathologies and other problems set as drives dictated a need for the release of pressure but because of cultural norms such things had to be disguised in acceptable forms. This was icing on a cake gone bad. This pessimistic formulation of the self, and pseudo-creativity found in the arts and culture was the best we get. We are then presented with pessimism. He was not all wrong in this as we see looking around us as such ideas colored and tainted the cultural marketplace through the early 20th century and on to this day. If there is little knowledge or discrimination over these drives we can be led down the garden path quite easily. Freud's topographical model is a contradiction; self at war with itself. Moreover we have an isolated ego where ego-identity forming at 5 is how we become a self; a subjective self dealing with the material world only. Freud had his reasons for making certain assumptions like these whereby not much was said about self being a relational proposition and where the timing of his ego-self was out of sync. Freud’s self emerged at age 5 but later studies give a more accurate time as we shall see. Oedipal pathologies, revealed in his letters, are also encoded from his family into his works. Psycho-sexual development as theory puts it, confirms sexual instincts and libido lie within the Id and become a life force in his thinking: but why? Freud’s thinking is grounded in is his own roots, some of which became visible in his period of intense self-analysis in 1895. This was when his Etiology of Hysteria positing real abuse as the root of neuroses, shifted to his Oedipal theory, which said the child’s wish, his fantasy world was the real roots of neuroses. Problems were not to be found in actual abuse. But there seems to be personal denial here so he writes he disavowed his father, calling him an abuser and pervert who damaged his own children: "Unfortunately, my own father was one of these perverts, and is responsible for the hysteria of my brother… and those of several younger sisters.” (Letter to Fliess, Oct 23, 1896) The Oedipal constellation, which he says is universal, is also no such thing. Oedipal theory is an incest model and it too reflects his personal baggage. The psychosexual theory of growth echoes his own trauma of a sexualized childhood rather !17 than the broader developmental functions and agencies of the self. His metapsychology stands in cold isolation, his subjective self is fatally flawed. His proposals seem to emerge from his pathological history. The id, remains catastrophic by nature and Freud goes on to further conflate his self by adding yet another contradiction; his death drive. This drive mysteriously appears and has never been clearly explained though it was renamed by Freudians as Thanatos. Thanatos appears in his thinking when he was going through a life crises including heart trouble, which his doctor reports and again later when he wrote it in 1923. It challenges the life force. We see part of Freud’s struggle in a letter dated June 22, 1897, then In Freud on a Precipice, Robert Langs clearly portrays Freud as being suicidal. The death drive is therefore not too surprising in this case. But what of the mother we mentioned? From Freud’s works and letters his Oedipal conflict becomes clear and there is his identity confusion regarding who his father really was, which we will come to. The Oedipal world presents a hatred of the father and a desire to take the mother incestuously. Freud therefore reports his own Oedipal conflict when he says: ”I have found in my own case the phenomena of being in love with my mother and jealous of my father, and I now consider it a universal event in early childhood… If this is so we can understand the gripping power of [the Greek legend] Oedipus Rex… “ - (Letter, October 1897). There is more: the additional confusion over the father. Who is he? Freud wavered all his life between thinking Jacob, his supposed biological father was, or his son Phillip by another wife of Jacob was. Freud in fact recalls asking Phillip to stop giving his mother babies at one point. Then in a famous Freudian slip we read: “Thus the relations between our ages were no hinderance to my phantasies of how different things would have been if I had been born the son of not my father but of my brother….” - (The Psychobiology of Everyday Life.) The unnatural bonding to the mother in an Oedipal scenario is only one stage of !18 Oedipal dynamics. The second emerges as the murder of the father who is viewed as competition for the mother’s love and this act opens up to a third element of talion revenge, which sentences the murderer to death. In Freud’s case the sentence of death was not passed but like Oedipus in the myth, he is blinded. He reports such a thing in a dream at the time of his father’s own death when he is instructed to turn away from his uncomfortable truths. Freud does so and becomes blind to abuse and in denial formulates his psychology of infant wish and fantasy rather than accuse the father of actual abuse. Like Oedipus, Freud is sentenced, blinded, and problems tied to his family are never resolved, only to come forth again as he notes in this way; “Unexpressed emotions will never die. They are buried alive and will come forth in uglier ways.” As Freud’s life unfolded the Oedipal triangle followed him through his life and works in one way or another. It forms as a template. The triangle of two men vying for one woman can be seen in his struggle with CG Jung and Sabina Spielrein. This trianglelike template defines much of Freud’s relationships and to disastrous effect as so many jumped the Freudian ship because of such discord but it also shows up through his portfolio and at the end of his life in Moses and Monotheism he posits two versions of Moses one of which is murdered so that the other gets the girls of the tribe; girls being a metaphor for the women in Freud’s life. He used this ploy before in, Irma’s Injection Dream. Essentially this Oedipal template points to pathologies and an identity crises which precludes Freud from offering us a clear idea of self. What additionally shows up are his two fathers posing as Moses 1 and Moses 2. - Jakob and Phillip. The book was not researched and had no support from whatever records there as he tells us, rather it came from his family romance. He is drawing on his own unconscious record of his confusion. Freud leaves us with huge problems like these regarding the self and he also proffers huge insights. His royal road to the unconscious, The Interpretation of Dreams 1900 otherwise offered us "dreamwork" in terms of opening a door to the primary processes of unconscious thought. Latent elements in the unconscious became manifest, often in !19 narrative form so that the work of the unconscious could be interpreted. Drives, repression, object relations, defense mechanisms, repression, reaction formation and so forth, also entered the language of psychology so not all was obfuscated; indeed we shall follow object relations down the road of further development to Attachment Theory and Affect Regulation. And we shall look at neuroscience which Freud worked on but shelved in favor of his psychoanalysis, fearing that a biological explanation of psychodynamics would unhinge his project. . . . . The ego is not the self. Freud had intervened in the important debates about aphasia with his monograph of 1891, Zur Auffassung der Aphasien, in which he coined the term agnosia (brain damage or defects ) and counseled against a narrow perspective of this biological explanation of neurological deficits. He emphasized brain function rather than brain structure gave rise to psychological dysfunctions and in doing so was coming out in favor of his psychoanalysis rather than the neuron which he perceived to be separate and merely biological. Biology was not psychoanalysis. This was another Freudian dualism which didn't hold water for long. This notion of biology comes up circumspectly in a partition of mind in Kant who distinguishes between two possible forms of reason, the intellectus archetypus and the intellectus ectypus. These patterns come up in the, Critique of Reason where the first category points to a domain of intuitive dimensions; the unconscious. According to Kant, the unconscious function, lies beyond human understanding. This means he does not elaborate on the intellectus archetypus rather he is saying transcendent issues are beyond us for the most part. Yet Freud opened the door on that with his, Royal Road and developments of a psychobiological and transpersonal dimension follows in CG Jung’s work, particularly when he teams up with Wolfgang Pauli, the quantum physicist, who is famed for his, ‘Exclusion Principle.’ In letters to Pauli, Jung rejects libido and says the life-force of the self is spirit and the transpersonal archetype functions with mind. Pauli adds quantum factors to the equation. !20 Jung tags Augustine for the term archetype and says the Platonic idea is the archetype but he is aware in esoteric works such as that presented by Hermes Trismegistus, that it comes earlier. Trismegistus talks about a mold or pattern as being archetypal; blueprints for the creation and self. Still, by 1950 Jung has tied the function of what is basically Platonic ideas to the neuron in what he calls the psychoid archetype. Pauli and Jung follow with the, Atom and Archetype and the formulation of synchronicity, a connected universe. We are in no doubt as to what is meant, that some form of consciousness runs all the way down to the particulate level, and in addition the notion of an acausal connecting principle (synchronicity) is thrown in to the mix by 1948. This in turn tells us this conscious universe is connected throughout, meaningfully, and here we have a base for a connected and conscious universe to which the self belongs. Synchronicity and archetypes support the dynamics of the self. !21 In Jung’s Red Book we read, “The experience of the self is always a defeat for the ego” - p244. The self therefore becomes something more expansive than ego, which is not bound by narrow terms of subjectivity, nor by classical epistemology, but to a wider transpersonal and integral model. In Jung’s world, the ego is placed as only one function within the circumference of the much larger circle of the self. The ego is a functional agency of the self, which addresses the world of sense perception, our phenomenological world and how we deal with it. Self on the other hand embraces more; the broader unity of the personality including transpersonal concerns and comes up in symbolically as the iconic mandala. The mandala is about wholeness and individuation. It tells us that elements such as the circle and the square contained therein offer masculine and feminine iconography, yet both were contained within the broader outer circle of a transcendent principle. So all was related to a circle of broader transcendent concerns. The task of individuation was therefore to integrate all, experiences and transcendent issues, into the fabric of being. From this transcendent and integral realm came his archetypes, as patterns, dynamics and potentials, not determinants especially when free and spiritual creativity came into play. Self was an archetype or dynamic pattern of wholeness, which Jung examined in Aion. This was the Christ-Archetype so the idea of the Imago-Dei as a root for this pattern was also factored in as an exemplary image of wholeness. Such virtues were attached to this integral self and needed to be realized: hence individuation became a process of nurture and growth whereby it was brought to life. Anima and animus likewise lay within this self and were soul-images insofar as they were archetypal and agencies which found their origin not in the history of humankind but beyond, as transcendent universals. This Imago-Dei, or image of God defined as THEM, masculine and feminine, was the updated pattern of the aesthetic universe. Logos as the same pattern, pointed to psychological wholeness and it contained both masculine and feminine images; hence the solitary Christ was updated to a marriage theme and to Logos and Eros (found in The Red Book), as a theme of participation and balance. Marriage as a Psychological Relationship and his, Mysterium Coniunctionis also talks about synthesis and harmony of opposites; marriage as a relational and fecund proposition rather than !22 conflict. That is to say, he understood that male and female, anima and animus, Yang and Yin, are all eventually thrown into synthetic processes, rather than leaving masculine and feminine to their own devices where serious imbalance and pathologies will come about in both. Jung is fond of the term individuation and says: “In the last analysis every life is the realization of a whole that is, of a self, for which reason this realization can also be called “individuation.” (CW 12 para 330) These archetypes and their attendant dynamic natures therefore offer anima as a feminine element lying within the male and animus as a masculine agency inhered to the female. It would not be wrong to take anima and animus to the Yang-Yin model found in the orient, and to the creative powers of the dynamic and harmonious synthetic powers of generativity and complementarity extracted from the I-Ching, which Jung wrote a commentary on. Li and Chi likewise offer an ultimate principle where this vital force of Chi (Qi) emerges to offer us flow, change, and growth; the dynamic world of nature, so here is another expression of much the same thing. This world of seasons and flow gives us the huge variety we see in species yet holds to constant proclivities; principles are individuated into unique expressions. Indeed the creative self is defined this way by its masculine and feminine psychic interplays. No creativity can emerge from a single and solitary agency unless it is defined by such harmonious and purposive dual-characteristics. If everything were the same then nothing would happen. There is always some version of polarity yet not set in war or antagonism, nor even in Hegelian synthesis-antitheses, but in clear harmonious purposiveness. Self is likewise a creative proposition where conscious and unconscious work in flow and in harmony together. Jung’s unconscious to conscious model is therefore very different from Freud’s conflicted and closed trash-can idea. James Hillman, a Jungian, went to great lengths to explain archetypes and ideas had to made real, to be grounded in life otherwise they were useless. This was particularly true of the Christ Archetype which came up in Jung’s mind. It was a nice idea, a !23 pattern of an original self and altruisms, but if not lived out it was just that, an unrealized archetype left floating in the world of dreams. Hillman explains the archetype of the self also unfolds int character and calling; a clear sense of self and works. Individuation therefore meant becoming, so human potentials and spiritual proclivities had to be translated into one’s personal meaningful existence, indeed into identity and a sense of what we have come to do and to realize as our value in the world. Self in participation with his archetypal world, was likened by Jung to the idea of AtmanBrahman where self as Atman inhered to Brahman, to the transpersonal, but then it had to address immanence in the relational, real and tangible, social and psychological world. We did not live in mystical isolation; there was community to consider. . . . . Jung took these archetypes then took consciousness all the way down to the carbon structures of the body; his term for biology. Spirit, psyche, and matter, were indivisible. The cell was a proto-conscious affair tied to neuronal structures. Psyche was inseparable and interactive with the cosmos and it was a relational affair too. This synthesis confirmed the notion of immanence. In part the big question of how mind apprehends this conscious and archetypal universe was resolved in part but more had to be done. In work with Wolfgang Pauli Jung introduces the term spirit as a life force, not libido. Then from psychology, the new physics, and the neuron, Jung posits consciousness running down from archetype to carbon. Body and mind are indivisible. Mind and nature are married to one another. There is no mind-body dualism or selfworld dualism here but there is the psychoid archetype which provides us with a link where the psychoid archetype serves the individuated self as a proto-consciousness function. A form of field-consciousness is presented here which Bohm talks about and as the scientist John Eccles proposed in 1995, where he suggests the neuron, a group or psychon offering a critical mass and number for consciousness, participates with quantum properties. From Jung’s, The Nature of the Psyche he says: “The archetype as such is a psychoid factor that belongs, as it were, to the invisible, ultraviolet end of the psychic spectrum. It does not appear, in itself, to be capable of reaching consciousness.” (p 213) Then in believing the psychoid archetype is a bridge between psyche and matter yet requiring processing by the self, he again suggests: !24 “Since psyche and matter are contained in one and the same world, and moreover are in continuous contact with one another and ultimately rest on irrepresentable, transcendental factors, it is not only possible but fairly probable, even, that psyche and matter are two different aspects of one and the same thing.” (p 215) Work from the medical field of anesthesia has been significant in following this issue, suggesting the protein based microtubules in the axon could function like a processor as they form in a binary-like structure. But whats the point then? If a neuron or critical mass of neurons picks up on field consciousness this would support the idea of archetypes to a point, where ideas in the sky (skylore) as they were called by critics in Plato’s time now became a lot less laughable. But we are not finished with Freud. Freud’s rather thin, object relations serves as a jumping off point. Freud gathered a number of well known disciples around him most of whom rebelled against his system and left. Notwithstanding, Melanie Klein, picked up on object relations and on what she called reparation; healing. The wounded soul in her estimation had the capacity to re-establish creative impulses. The wounding was an infant-bad mother affair so here was object relations from a dysfunctional perspective where the mother is found lying as an unsatisfying object to the infant. The problem was elicited by Freud but not so well; but when examining the rather perfidious Oedipal mother even Freud sensed there was more to it. The real and helpful mother lay somewhere behind. So there were good and bad. Whenever Freud thinks a dream refers to his mother, he suggests that the dream refers to the Oedipal mother of his family romance. Yet standing behind that figure of the seductive Oedipal mother is the Pre-Oedipal mother. As an Oedipal child, in analyzing and searching for the nature of the mother in her PreOedipal State, Freud cannot really find her. He resents the bad mother of Oedipal fame but as Freud says, his interpretation never went far enough to reveal the concealed other mother. “There is at least one spot in every dream at which it is unplumbable,” he said, - “the navel as it were, which is a point of contact with the unknown.” - (SE 4:111, The Interpretation of Dreams). He understood mothers of both stripes and from the bad !25 he understood severe neuroses formed. This was also the stuff of Klein’s work, though she saw hope in some form of recovery for the infant struggling with a bad mother. Erik Erikson, as a Freudian, changed things substantially. Freud's psycho-sexual growth stages tailed off at age 5 but Erikson broadened human development to other tasks beyond ego-identity and extended the time period from infancy to old age. He took an integrative view of life and suggested there was much more to this business than just the exercise of one’s libido. For example, beyond Freud’s boundary lies the late school age where the child is comparing his self-worth in relation to others. These and other factors leads Erikson to suggest there is a competency-industry event taking place which leaves a child with inferiority if failures mark this period; more healthy growth if there is success. Likewise after 60 one can set wisdom and integrity against despair, depending upon how life tasks and accomplishments pan out. Erikson’s work !26 falls under the rubric of Psycho-social Development. In this sense it is a humanist psychology which broadly takes a similar journey to Abraham Maslow’s work. Maslow builds a pyramid of psycho-social events related to needs and where needs are met, success marks the ongoing journey of life when the foundations of one’s existence are solid. If so, we come to maturity and what he calls self-actualization. Good foundation building therefore supports an emergence of a mature creative self where competency, relationships, spirituality (his peak experiences) and specific personal achievements are all hung upon the coat hanger of one’s existence. Psychology like this talks of his peak experiences as a mature accomplishment and tends to be subjective when we consider Maslow’s term self-actualized. If no man is an island however, selfactualization becomes a bit of a misnomer and he probably knew that. However most of Humanist Psychology took into account real needs, notions like unconditional and positive regard for others, and a full creative potential tied to a creative self. Humanist psychology like this is sometimes called, Third Force Psychology. !27 Heinz Kohut, emerging from World War 2, quickly realized a new definition of the self was still needed if we were to rebuild healthy communities and culture. His SelfPsychology was rooted in object relations theory and therefore looked at the primary relations in one’s life. Not surprisingly the mother-infant relationship came to the fore but others who helped gratify and nurture the infant followed in these footsteps. As far as the self was concerned the question of empathy with significant others came to the fore, so self was not an isolated individual, rather self was a relational proposition tied initially to the family triad and to self-objects which could be persons, objects or activities, which come to support personal development. Developmental needs became a question of empathic responses, mirroring functions, and idealizations. Such idealization was a natural outcome of mirroring, particularly when it was tied to a good mother but what comes out in the end is a sense of secure identity and the idealizations and hopes that come with it. Healthy dreams, which an individual might pursue in life, set the self up for robust sequential idealizations Such hopes and dreams persisting through life were marked by healthy socialization factors and an ethical stance of the self related well to primary and social relationships. Healthy normative and creative developments flowed from such axes running through a healthy triad and eventually extended themselves into the world. This self creatively and adaptively encountered life and participated altruistically with the cultural landscape. Donald Winnicott 1896-1971 also picked up on Object Relations Theory and added a clear distinction between the good-mother, the good-enough mother and the badmother. There was a little more to life than simply drawing a line between black and white but then he adds play. Play became essential to emotional health and bonding in both adults and children. Self - a synthesis of ego and id emerges as a true integrated or spontaneous self, or in failures a false self replete with attendant defense-masks comes with rigidity. This self is usually made compliant to the expectations of others and marked by cognitive dissonance. Nevertheless, it is a healthy family life which brings us to an authentic self rather than a mere presence using various personas to screen our wounded self. !28 Winnicott’s healthy self develops in relation to others and the environment. The Self (or subject) relates to ”Objects” in the unconscious and responds appropriately. "Objects" here are usually images or internalized patterns of behavior of one's mother or father, these being created at a formative and pre-rational stage of development which gives these agencies and dynamics a power we sometimes don't fully understand as they lie in the deepest layers of the neuronal mind. This is not quite the unconscious of archetypal proportions per se but if a healthy ego develops, whatever is rising to surface consciousness possesses few problems. Nevertheless a good father-mother image supplies a point of healthy reference carried through life. To think that the neuronal world and early experiences and patterns can be changed if dysfunctional, is welcome. Strategies designed for revision and transformation of any negative !29 wounding or trauma carried within are not set in stone. The neuronal mind is thought to be plastic even late in life. There were others such as William Fairbairn and Margaret Mahler who took child development studies to new levels and examined the processes of life and early growth closely (See: Studies of Personality and the separation–individuation theory of child development) but for the sake of the essay Daniel Stern, in particular, transformed the Freudian landscape with massive data taken from clinical studies. Remember, Freud had no such studies to back up his theories; even his seminal case study on Little Hans 1909, was done through a surrogate, the father Herbert Graf. But what Stern gave us was a healthy or normative perspective on family, which he came to call The Motherhood Constellation, the relational matrix of the mother-infant and the processes of individuation, which took place within this constellation. He tells us that with the birth of a child, the mother experiences a profound re-alignment in life. She separates from her own mother and a new triad lying beyond the Oedipal triad comes into existence. Now lying beyond any Oedipal pathologies, the Motherhood Constellation, as a predominant and normative proposition, gives us a very different picture of these primary relationships. Stern is deliberately addressing the Freudian model and saying, ‘it isn't so.’ The pre-Oedipal mother can now be identified. Nurture in the positive sense now births self-esteem, personal authenticity and healthy communication with others from the early stages of infancy from the constellation. Meanwhile across the pond, John Bowlby is saying much the same and roughly at the same time. By the 1970’s Mary Ainsworth, in full support, already had studies out on how attachments profoundly effected infant behavior. Children from the age of 12 to 18 months were studied where they were briefly separated from their mothers then reunited. These studies (1978) revealed how infants responded from a secure attachment base, and from an insecure or ambivalent foundation, so a spectrum of good to bad mothers were involved. Attachments then revealed how good, goodenough and bad attachments affected infant behaviors and moreover how such behaviors continued in later life. Ainsworth and Bowlby worked together on clinical studies at Tavistock in London. Bowlby wrote a groundbreaking work on Attachment !30 and Loss in three volumes with early studies dating to 1950 and his trilogy, which arrived in 1969, following through to 1982, can be summarize here describing four distinguishing characteristics of attachment depending on how securely they are felt: 1. Proximity Maintenance - The desire to be near the people we are attached to. 2. Safe Haven - Returning to the attachment figure for comfort and safety in the face of fear or threat. 3. Secure Base - The attachment figure acts as a base of security from which the child can explore the surrounding environment in safety. 4. Separation Distress - Anxiety that occurs in the absence of a healthy attachment figure. The central theme of attachment theory is that mothers who are available and responsive to their infant's needs, establish a sense of security, this becoming a secure base for life, whereby the child can explore his world without worry. An internal model of relational security is created for the child, which becomes a source of reference even in later years. Bad attachments cause distress and therefore life long problems like anxiety, avoidance, relational ambivalence and hostility occur; defenses. In simple terms the world becomes defined as relational and infants with a secure base move from their secure self to good socialization habits. From a secure base, and a normative family triad, the child feels free to explore the world in a meaningful, creative, empathic, ethical and relational way. Likewise these ethics and virtues are inculcated from the family triad and continue on the way through life. Oedipal pathologies in contradistinction, open to dysfunctional, non-relational models, and narcissism which serves no one. Moreover the Oedipal model belongs to a pathological family triad and in no way address any normative standard. In the light of advances in biology, John Bowlby started to fuse cognitive science, developmental psychology, and evolutionary biology, to support his thesis. Bowlby’s attachment theory has since become the dominant model of personal, social and emotional development, but from there, another paradigm shift embraced more advances in Biotechnology, imaging, noninvasive studies and clinical work in infant !31 research. So it is from a full multi-disciplinarian perspective we now move to the neuroscience of attachments which has come to be known as, Affect Regulation Theory, where ‘affect’ means emotional agencies in the psychological world. . . . . Affect regulation evolves from Freud’s object relations and his work on neuroscience, which was dropped for reasons which have already been explained. Hence, Affect Regulation Theory comes to provide science which operates within the mother infant dyad and the triad. It posits a, psychobioneurological theory, which begins to offer scientific affirmations regarding attachment and growth lying between mother and infant, though the father is also embraced at a slightly later stage. This would mean the father’s influence is more widely felt from age three. Genetic factors have been significant in some studies but genes do not specify behavior completely. Epigenetic studies were available in Freud’s time, which he ignored. Perinatal and postnatal environmental factors are now understood to play a critical role in the developmental origins of the infant. The social environment, particularly found between mother and infant, functions specifically in these growth models and has long and enduring effects. Nature may be one thing but the detailed mechanisms whereby natures potential can be realized is facilitated by nurture. There is also a timely shift in most disciplines from Piagetian models of cognitive development, to psychobiological models of emotional development. The primary force in attachment and affect regulation is emotional. We now know the growth of the infant brain occurs in critical periods beginning in the last trimester of pregnancy, continuing from birth through 18-24 months of age. Myelination of the brain, a maturing process, forms a protein sheath around the fibers or axons of neurons rather like insulation found on electrical wire, supports conductivity and confirms the functionality and speed of communication between neurons. This development is so rapid and extensive through this period, the brain takes on an ‘adult-like’ appearance by the end of the second postnatal year (18months). Myelination tells us much but numerous other studies posit that the cellular architecture of the cerebral cortex, for example, is in fact sculpted by bioenergetic !32 input from the social environment and specifically from the mother with later input following from the father. Of course behaviors come with the territory. The basic premise of Affect Regulation tells us that the emotional bond between mother and infant is crucial to development. In fact, when the child responds to the mother in laughter, joy, excitement, and euphoria, as laughter sometimes reveals, these behaviors result in the production of neurochemicals in the brain, which then become the building components of the brains architecture. Data therefore specifically suggests that this organization of the infant brain occurs in relation to another self and another brain; the mother and infant dyad and the interplay between father and infant at a later stage are all evolutionary factors in the regulation of the infant brain. Processes supported closely by an attentive mother and father allow the infant to move from attachments ultimately to self-regulation, to autonomy, personal identity and to an ability to return from various emotional responses and tasks in life, to a state of homeostasis. This type of self-control and return to psychological balance is called self-regulation, which in turn becomes a descriptor of psychological health. How does this work? By what mechanisms does the mind of an infant begin to unfold from birth to an adult-like early function at approximately 18months? Our first understanding must be what we already know, that emotions are the highest order of expressions in bioregulations, which address development in complex organisms such as human beings. More specifically, the human cerebral cortex adds about 70% of its final DNA content after birth. So developmental sequences and bioregulation are important. Both brain DNA and RNA syntheses continue from birth through the second year to growth, then continue on in other stages. Genetic material is composed of nucleic acids and their biosynthesis is mediated by a unique series of biochemical reactions. From around the second month, for example, we have heightened processes tied to the ‘ontogenesis’ of the brain. One function is known as the, hexose monophosphate shunt. In biochemistry, this metabolic pathway converts glucose into high energy compounds; NADPH (nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide phosphate) and pentoses (5-carbon sugars) as well as Ribose 5-phosphate, which function as a !33 precursor for the synthesis of nucleotides (basic structural units of nucleic acids i.e. DNA). In short this biosynthetic function is observed in a critical period of RNA synthesis, and expressions, which have been observed and where neurochemical responses like these lead to growth in the infant brain. This all kicks in to high gear when visual functions come online at this time. Facial recognition and visual communication lying between infant and mother becomes highly significant as the visual cortex comes online in infant development. Visual communication is a well studied developmental factor, although there are others such as the holding environment. Nevertheless, the mutual-gaze-transaction lying between the two, comes to be a central engine of change for both mother and infant. Growth in her infant implies adaptions, which need to be developed in the mother’s responses. The mother’s face, mutual-gaze-transactions, and exited responses, amplifies positive affect in the infant. Joy and excitation then promote cycles of neurobiological, neurochemical mechanisms, and neurobiological development. Neurochemical responses and subsequent neuronal growth are triggered during such events. From early on neonates attend to their mother’s face and specifically by the age of 2-3 months the visual cortex and its functions in the infant has significantly increasing then again a growth spurt comes at 8 -10 months when visual associations are linked to the prefrontal cortex. With the visual cortex online, face-to-face recognition, mutual gaze, non-conscious and spontaneous facial, and gestural communication begins in earnest. Moreover in eye to eye contact the infant is focusing on the fovea at the back of the mother’s eye which opens to her visiolimbic pathway, hence to the mother’s nervous system. The mothers nervous system, accessed this way and supported by subconscious messaging, is understood to be a part of a functional, ‘stamping mechanism,' a neural base of reinforcement and a type of downloading mechanism, which transfers patterns of the mother’s mature brain and patterns of behaviors to the infant. These mechanisms of regulation are also known to induce alterations in the opioid peptides in the child which is another regulation factor leading to ACTH, a hormone known to facilitate such imprinting. Opioids are well known to play an !34 important role in attachment behaviors where they function to signal RNA sequences in the cell, generate the expression of proteins leading to neuronal growth. These changes in cells also contribute to the phenomena of a critical period of RNA synthesis. So stages and specific tasks are therefore defined by a clear timetable which functions within specific windows of neural plasticity. The idea of such imprinting was already evident in Bowlby’s work. Looking at the gleam in the mother’s eye therefore becomes more than folklore. Both brain development and behaviors associated with specific areas begin to come into play from such attachments. High levels of positive arousal give rise to episodes of what is called, affect synchrony, whereby mother and infant learn to become sensitized to one another. These periodic spurts of excitation occur in gaze transactions and begin as a visible cycle and repeat in diminishing intensity through 5 sets. These episodes of joy, laughter and excitation set in rhythmic episodes begins as a process where the mother becomes attuned, not only to behaviors, but also to the internal states of the infant and to her own internal responses to them. This ‘visual’ dialogue and the subsequent ‘merger experiences’ form as a mirroring transaction between the two, facilitates biosynthesis. The visual imprinting stimulus, then assists the infant’s developing nervous system. The child's growth patterns are therefore regulated ‘invisibly’ by the mother’s patterns in what might analogously be called a downloading function where the mother’s more highly developed mind is downloaded as patterns to the child’s developing brain. Subsequent behaviors are a part of this transaction. There are numerous operations within this biosynthesis model, however before leaving these sequences it might be useful to note one more. A10 catecholaminergic neurons originating in the Ventral Tegmental area of the lower mid-brain are involved in trophic processes. Catecholamines, and a cohort of brain neurotransmitters, play a crucial role in the control of growth producing neurons, which shape the architecture of the two hemispheres of the brain. Catecholamines involve adrenaline, norepinephrine and dopamine, so the two hemispheres develop in a noradrenergic inhibitory function and a dopaminergic excitatory function. The noradrenergic inhibitory area comes to involve !35 passive modes of coping, withdrawal, and other strategies in the reduction of stress found in the left hemisphere, which is also orientated to language. Local growth spurts naturally occur in the blood vessels, neurons, and connective tissues of the prefrontal cortex especially in the early maturing right hemisphere. The right hemisphere and right frontal area is our dopaminergic area, which is given to emotions and active coping strategies. Hence the differentiation of hemispheres, their function and their mass is established. The right side of the brain, from the amygdala, cingulate, the right hemisphere and frontal area also shows greater development in our studies and confirms again, that life is primarily an emotional business. Mind is predicated to this primary emotional function and to the subconscious, as such a ‘foundation’ might suggest. Naturally, both left and right hemispheres are in the business of communication - they are interactive agencies. Communication functions through the corpus callosum, estimated to consist of 200 million axons which integrate different functions from one side of the brain to the other. !36 Higher order reasoning in the brain develops from this specific hierarchical order of development. It is a form and function architecture. ‘Windows of plasticity’ describe the timing of processes so the timetable of events and growth spurts are quite specific. The final development of hemispheres and frontal lobes in particular, represent a control center sometimes described as, ‘the executive function.’ It both receives information and regulates the system allowing us to engage in complex mental processes. It is also a top down, bottom up system where other functions may take primacy for a time. This 18 month window of development, of which we speak, brings the infant to his first level of what we call an adult-like function, to self-regulation and to an early sense of identity, self-consciousness and to the empathic considerations of others. Indeed much of this notion of self and identity can be encapsulated in the emergence of self-consciousness where an awareness of self to other forms as a circuit extending beyond the self to one’s relational place in the world of social events. Already from John Bowlby’s time the term imprinting was understood as an irreversible stamping of early experiences upon the developing nervous system where the mother acts as a, “Hidden regulator” of the infants endocrine and nervous systems. Specific behaviors and responses also imprinted into the infant self is often called the protonarrative envelope; early experiences and the unfolding story of life, which when recorded, continue to serve us as a reference into late years and sometimes functioning in an unconscious way. Self-esteem, self-regulation, healthy socialization, sequential idealisms, virtues, ethical and moral proclivities, are all established within the good or good-enough mother matrix, and stored in this envelope (early neurological layers) as a referential source for life. The development of the frontolimbic system, the master-cylinder of brain functions, is therefore described as close if not identical function to the ego-ideal described in previous psychoanalytic literature. This is a realty principle, whereby we navigate our way through life and its vicissitudes. By 18 months a child can exhibit prosocial, altruistic, behaviors and finds an ability to comfort or help regulate the negative affects or distress of others. Therefore empathy which marked the mother infant dialogue becomes an important social regulator. !37 Of behaviors, the question of shame looms large in these studies. Shame was attached to the superego as a collection of formations characterized by cultural inheritance and parental disapprovals. However this function is tied to the developing cingulate and the time frame attached to it. Studies by Alan Schore tell us, neuroscience demonstrates a right hemispheric dominance in the processing of unconscious negative emotion. This is concomitant with the neurobiology of insecure attachments. Shame and embarrassment are therefore first noted around 14 months and may emerge from the substantial shift which takes place through the ‘late practicing period’ (12-18 months) where the infant moves from the caregiver to they're early socialization experiences in the world beyond. The infant may embark here, upon exploratory forays only to get into some trouble. Yet on return to a good-mother the child is ‘re-regulated` and brought back to a state of homeostasis. Return and regulation avoids the worst of shame and embarrassment. Shame is sometimes used as tool, usually in small doses, in the socialization period. However if there is some misattunement between mother and infant, the psychobiological state of shame distress or anxiety may persist; may even become toxic. Naturally shame can be inculcated through ‘the bad mother’ and other traumatic experiences but within the dyad it can be reconciled, integrated and managed if regulated. Otherwise shame is stored, imprinted and comes to display itself in tactics of withdrawal, avoidance and other defenses. Shame is tied to the coming online of the anterior cingulate cortex but responses to shame extend through other regions of the brain and male and female differ in how they cope. In extroversion we might find shame-rage occurring and in introversion shame-depression. Additionally the cingulate area is also assumed to play a prominent role in the generation of moral feelings. Healthy and manageable natural shame can just as easily act as a moral compass for the self. More on moral development: The regulation of infant related narcissism, aggressive impulses, and shame-rage are also tied to neural correlates and to the principle of regulation. Neural connections established between the cortex and hypothalamus enables cholinergic axons to establish a cortolimbic inhibition of the hypothalamus. The hypothalamus is currently linked to fear, defensive behavior, aggression and to !38 various forms of healthy regulation. Therefore the development of this system in the experience-dependent critical period, up to the mid-second year, reveals how the caregiver mirrors regulation of rage-influenced narcissistic transactions to become appropriately regulated by the child. External regulation offers the maturation of an internal mechanism which transforms unmodulated rage into forms of aggression transformed into physical activities such as sports and creative pursuits. Tied to the psychoanalytic function of the ego-ideal (ego ideal: part of the superego) are the ideals and ideas of perfection which the self strives to become. Identity is therefore tied to the self, where character and calling strive towards perfection meaning and satisfaction. In this we find the move to self-regulation in the late period acts as a guide to the ego, indeed to the whole self in this manner. Hence self-esteem, self regulation, socialization and self-affects act as a positive pull tied to life creating images and internal goals for the child and later, for an adult to strive towards. These are natural internal and appropriate goals and dynamics attached to the child's identity. Moreover the emergence of empathy and altruistic behaviors become a prerequisite to later social and moral development, which promote positive regard for others and places the self creatively and appropriately into its cultural settings. Hence moral behavior, character and calling, are related to ties of affect to the parents, then to behaviors in the world. Accumulated experiences contributing to moral behavior are related to the right hemispheric emotional imagistic processes involved in this cortex. These pro-social and altruistic behaviors and the frontolimbic structural system now identified as the ego-ideal function emerges at 18 months and are essential to the adaptive and moral functioning of an individual within a broader context . Families rooted in good tradition therefore serve the community with sustainability in terms of confirming a moral order running through their progeny. In the case of infantile sexuality and psychological gender identity, the development of genetic systems and the increases in nucleic acid synthesis, influences gonadal steroids. These hormones regulate gene expression and influence the maturation of the cerebral cortex and organization of brain circuits. This gives rise to differentiation. !39 Gonadal steroids influence parcellation and a resultant dimorphism of the frontolimbic system. Therefore the ontogeny of permanent feminine or masculine circuitry begins to appear. Gender identification thus emerges in the middle of the second year and if supported well within the dyad and triad it will not give rise to shame, gender confusion, or unregulated socioemotional functioning. Input from the father occurs as early as the second year and also relates to gender identity and the formation of the full transpersonal unconscious but certainly both father and mother are both required in affect regulation processes. The infant’s third year becomes significant for cognitive development tied to the approaching school years. However the neural biology of emotion and regulation shows that, even at young ages, emotional dysregulation inhibits the prefrontal cortex. We can say here cognitive dissonance begins to appear. However the good father, supports and activates basal areas of the brain, effects the control of aggressive social tendencies and moderates such impulses through his mirroring. Attachment theory integrates fathers into the theory as a secondary attachment and represents a child's needs to trust both caregivers. Indeed if emotional dysregulation will interfere with higher order reasoning and cognition the father is just as important as the mother. Secure infant-father attachment is correlated with opening the child to the outside world, fewer behavioral problems and higher levels of sociability in kindergarten, as studies have shown (Verschuren & Macron 1999). The non-punitive establishment of dominance through play with the father teaches children to follow rules along with the regulation of aggressive and angry impulses. This is also predicated to authentic systems of control and authentic selves in hierarchical positions otherwise a rejection or even revolt against the inauthentic may take place. Nevertheless our old friend Winnicott could not have put it better, telling us that play is more fun than discipline and functions better as a developmental regulator. To recap: a clearly marked hierarchical development runs from the amygdala (online at birth ), to the cingulate (online between 3-9 months), to the cerebral cortex and frontal areas, which come online at around 12 months then moving to adult-like functionality !40 by 18 months. These markers denote the child's early maturing functions of the hierarchical brain, behaviors and emergent identity. Developmental stages function within specific windows related to bursts of neural plasticity and subsequent development. Within the maturation process, the cingulate area becomes responsive to social clues, shared pleasure states, or alternately, separation anxiety and dysfunctional behavior when the good or good-enough mother is not present, otherwise avoidant behavior emerges. If separation from the mother becomes too stressful, or if the mother is in some way absent or in a state of missatunement, anxiety and other problems including avoidance tactics form. If negative emotions are regulated well however, a dynamic template mirrored by the mother becomes a model for positive behaviors and individuated wholeness, which in turn adds positive input into the social and cultural system. The unavoidable influence of the father and mother, in helping the child self-regulate and give shape to his dynamic psyche, take us back to the earlier psychology of Jung who suggests feminine and masculine elements of the regulated self are universal agencies, which form and develop through the processes of individuation and give rise to a creative self. The self is then a dialogical proposition involving differentiated agencies of unconscious to conscious, yet functioning synthetically and in creative harmony. Jung, in fact, uses the terms anima and animus to denote these attributes so from the biological roots of conception onwards, Affect Regulation proposals hold to the idea of complimentary opposites. A more philosophical or spiritualized postulate of a Yang-Yin synthetic propositions could be proffered here in support of the dynamic nature and architecture of the individuation process and the architecture of the self. The structure of the self therefore holds to dual characteristics, which function together in support of a model of self-regulation, just as the primary unconscious and secondary conscious model does as proposed in earlier psychoanalytic postulates and in most psychological theories. Such studies mentioned present us with food for thought regarding the universality of such themes, as they are archetypal by nature and suit the patterns we have !41 uncovered in such developmental theories of the self. The self can no longer be successfully defined as an isolated psycho-sexual and subjective event as it was in the past, nor can ego-identity be placed at the 5 year developmental marker. Self, selfregulation and identity, emerge in an ‘adult-like’ fashion by age 18 months along with attendant virtues learned empathically on the way. Self forms from relational dynamics. It is not a solitary project. Likewise the Oedipal model is not normative and Freud’s hatred of father and sexualized mother is pathological. CG Jung proffers the Christ Archetype as a virtuous and dynamic pattern for the self, which affect regulation tells us, is formed within processes which have been described. I would suggest the synthetic nature of masculine and feminine agencies supported by a biological framework found in the family triad are part of Jung’s individuation hypothesis where self is patterned on the regulations of both mother and father. More work has to be done integrating transpersonal dynamics than found in this essay so the transcendent function, Centroversion, belongs to another work. Nevertheless the family triad is supported well as a certain and sustainable crucible of virtues, ethics, creativity, and sociability. The psycho-social adaptions and patterns of behavior emerging from this regulation theory, give rise to ethical proclivities and personal ethical conduct, which persist and develop through the season’s of a man’s and woman’s life. Sequential idealisms can also be added to this as a lure for the self to pursue. The universality of this archetypal dynamic of the self has been noted to belong to the Imago Dei. In this Jung reaches back into an archaic and persistent collective record, where the Imago forms as a template concerning the father-mother image, anima and animus, and other masculine feminine proclivities, including gender differentiation. This is furthermore concomitant with other systems of thought tied universally to the basic tenets of what has been touched upon in this essay. Ethical norms and transpersonal dimensions open to how self, family and community can be termed as an emergent and sustainable property of what I have come to call, a deep ecology. The self in this regard is the fulcrum of all human activities. The Self does not stand alone: self matters. !42