The Primordial Mind in Health and Illness

A Cross-Cultural Perspective

Michael Robbins

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136673191
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

The universal quest to create cosmologies – to comprehend the relationship between mind and world - is inevitably limited by the social, cultural and historical perspective of the observer, in this instance western psychoanalysis. In this book Michael Robbins attempts to transcend such contextual limitations by putting forward a primordial form of mental activity that co-exists alongside thought and is of equal importance in human affairs.

This book challenges the western assumption that knowledge is synonymous with rational thought and that the aspect of mind that is not thought is immature, irrational, regressive and pathological. Robbins illustrates the central role of primordial mental activity in spiritual cultures analogous to that of thought in western culture as well as its significant contributions to numerous other phenomena including dreaming, language, creativity, shamanism and psychosis.

In addition to his extensive clinical experience as a psychoanalyst Robbins draws on first-hand contact with Maori and other shamanistic cultures. Vividly illustrated by first and second hand accounts, this book will be of great interest to psychoanalysts, those with a psychological interest in spiritual cultures as well as those in the fields of developmental psychology, cultural anthropology, neuroscience, aesthetics and linguistics.

Chapter 1

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The big picture

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There is a whakatauaki, or proverb, in Maori culture that states
“Nga hiahia ai ki te timata aa ka kite ai tatou te mutunga”
(You must understand the beginning if you wish to see the end)

In the pages to come I present the thesis that there is a normal primordial form of mental activity that operates continuously from the inception of life alongside and in relation to thought. It accounts for a rich diversity of human phenomena ranging from the unremarkable to the extraordinary, from things looked upon as “normal” to others labeled pathological. Often its activity is undetectable unless we are trained to look for it, but its most obvious manifestations include dreaming, the mind of infancy and early childhood, the bonding behavior of infants and their caregivers, the modal mental activity in spiritually based cultures, some kinds of creativity, and the psychotic spectrum of illness.

At first glance this may not seem like a new idea. After all, psychoanalysis is based on theories about the relationship between a conscious, thoughtful, symbol-using part of mind and a repressed or otherwise defended against unconscious part. However, these theories were created from the perspective of western rational thought, which is equated with psychic consciousness or awareness. From that perspective the primordial aspects of mind are looked upon as inferior – un-conscious, irrational, immature and primitive. I argue and illustrate that a new model of primordial mind in relationship to thought is necessary – one that appreciates both that and how it is different from thought and not inferior to it, and that in complex interactions with thought it contributes in significant ways all the time to all our lives.

Origins of the Western View of Mind

As western culture evolved out of its tribal and spiritual roots it has come to value change and progress, and to put its infancy behind it. Objectivity and rationality are among its cherished goals and science and technology are at the apex of its accomplishments. Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny, and the evolution of the culture has been repeated in the development and maturation of each of its members. Western cosmology – one might even say western mythology – believes that it is normal to expect development of a relatively self-sufficient individual who adapts to a world of separate others and external reality. This individual self or psyche has internal complexity or stratification. “Within” it rational logical thought and related moral sense or conscience are looked upon as the highest or most mature strata. The “lower” stratum of self, which is related to our tribal origins and to infancy, is believed to consist of unconscious forces that are immature, irrational and uncivilized, and to have the potential to be disruptive to the social order and the community.

The conception of a self stratified into conscious and unconscious components originated with the birth of western culture in ancient Greece and subsequently was elaborated by Kant. Plato (1927) envisioned the psyche as a spectrum ranging from reason to impulse, divided into rational, spirited or affective, and appetitive parts. The appetitive part was believed to emerge while the rational part sleeps, and was said to be characteristic of children and responsible for dreaming. It is described as sensory-perceptual, somatic, sensual, concrete and unbounded; a realm of shadow and illusion where meanings are in a state of flux or oscillation and contradiction abounds.

Kant (1781, 1798) postulated a tripartite mind model consisting of reason, understanding and sensibility, which resembles Freud’s superego, ego and id respectively (Brook, 1997). Kant believed that much of the mind’s operation is unconscious. The conscious world is phenomenal and the unconscious, which one can never know directly, is noumenal. In his view the process of becoming conscious involves abstraction and conversion of intuitions from the sensory-perceptual or phenomenal world into representations by a process of understanding. These representations possess the quality of reason, the dimensions of time and externality/ internality, and can be expressed in language and remembered.

Freud gave these ideas contemporary credibility. His study on hysteria (Breuer and Freud, 1893) was the basis for what in 1895 he called a “scientific” psychology, a “topographic” model of consciousness and unconsciousness modeled after the neuroscience of his time. His study of dreaming (1900) led him to expand on his model and postulate primary and secondary mental processes. The lower or irrational appetitive part of the Platonic mental spectrum Freud called unconscious – das es or the “it.” In Strachey’s effort to lend scientific credibility to Freud’s work it is translated into science-like terminology, the id. The id is the unconscious “place” or aspect of mind ruled by the primary process, a set of operations that produce hallucinatory or dreamlike phenomena; experiences that seem quite real to the subject. Freud believed that the primary process accounts not only for dreaming, but for the mental activity of infancy and early childhood, and for schizophrenia, but he never explored the subject of psychosis.

Being and Knowing in Spiritual Cultures

Because the western view of person and cosmos is indigenous and not universal, models that iterate its assumptions need to be reconsidered. Whereas science, based on objectification, is the ideal product of western culture, spiritual cultures specialize in other ways of knowing and healing. Beliefs and perspectives in the world’s many spiritual cultures are quite different. Most of us know what is meant by western industrialized culture, but spiritual cultures are more difficult to categorize. Mostly they are indigenous tribal cultures that practice shamanism, of which there remain an astounding number in the world (Bourguignon, 1973). However, there are important ways in which spirituality has determined mind and social behavior in large eastern cultures that are based on Buddhism and Hinduism as well.

Western and spiritual cultures have very different perspectives on the nature of the cosmos and the relation of the person to the world. Spiritual cultures are socio-centric (Robbins, 1996); they are based on the spatial or existential idea of a unitary collective consciousness, consisting of the animate and natural worlds and the ancestral world. Members of such cultures appear self-effacing to western eyes but they are not. They do not aggrandize themselves as individuals or stand out in relation to others because they believe that it is the timeless eternal collective of which they are a part that is important. What is stratified vertically within a separate self in western culture is conceived of existentially or laterally in the spiritual cosmos. While they distinguish between the corporeal body and the soul, distinctions between inner self (subjectivity) and outer world (objectivity), internal layers of mind, waking and dreaming, past and present time, are not made in the same way as in western culture; these are simply different realms of a unitary experience that have equivalent “reality” value. In western culture passions, rages, conflicted impulses and wishes to be repressed are believed to exist mostly in a suppressed unconscious part of the psyche and to emerge in disguise in nocturnal dreaming. In spiritual cultures such things are perceived as good and evil forces existing in the natural and social (spiritual) world, a cosmos that is animated as a geographical underworld in which the person journeys or travels and struggles in waking life. The dream state is not distinguished in terms of waking and sleeping, rationality and irrationality, but is considered an essential source of information about individual and community. What in the western psyche are conceived of as memories are similarly distributed in the cosmos; the ancestral world is alive and active. While death of the body is accepted, ancestors continue to exist in spirit as audible and visible presences, voices and visions that are just as real and present as any other experience. The disciplined awareness and use of these primordial mental processes is considered the highest form of development in such spiritually based cultures; something that enables and enriches community life.

All the existing models of primordial mental activity are of necessity constructed through the epistemological lens and bias of western rational thought – which is assumed to be the way of knowing about self and world – some more than others. The generally accepted western model of thought and the unconscious, with its implicit devaluation of primordial mind, does not seem adequate. Jung’s perspective, which was heavily influenced by his hospital work with psychotic persons at the Burghölzli clinic, is less judgmental though impressionistic. Perhaps because he himself struggled with psychosis (Jung, 2009) and came to have respect for the potential richness and creativity of primordial mind he did not judge it according to conventional western ideas. He believed that mind has two qualitatively different manifestations that are in continuous dialectical relationship throughout life; a rational realistic aspect and a creative, fantastic mythopoetic one (Jung, 1956). He anticipated relating mind and culture with his belief that western mind’s mythic aspect is the residue of human evolution from tribal-spiritual origins. More recently Matte-Blanco (1975, 1988) addressed the limitations inherent in the necessity of viewing mind through the lens of logical thought. He made the bold assertion that primordial mind is not lesser and irrational. He proposed that mind uses two qualitatively different kinds of logic in a variety of dialectical permutations. He concluded that it is not possible to know primordial mind directly, only through the ways in which it perturbs what he described as the asymmetric logical mode that is the predominant element of ordinary thought. The concept of logic, however, still carries implicit connotations of thought. When all is said and done it is not clear that it is possible to adequately and fairly conceive of a fundamental way of knowing oneself and the cosmos through an epistemological lens that is qualitatively different.

Pathological Bias in Existing Models of Mind

The western cultural bias inherent in theories of primordial mind is reinforced by another bias related to the clinical psychoanalytic background of most of the theorists. Freud formulated his model of normal mind for the most part from his clinical work with mentally ill adults, including a theory about infant mind and about normal development. Melanie Klein, the other theoretical giant in this area, derived her model of primordial mind from work with persons she believed to be psychotic. A quarter century after Freud described the primary process and seemingly without awareness of its relationship to her work, Klein formulated her model of the paranoid-schizoid position and phantasy, in dialectical relationship with the more mature depressive position. Other than my own work (2004, 2008) and a couple of peripheral references that I note in Chapter 2, there has been no direct comparison in the literature between Freud’s model of the primary process and Klein’s of the paranoid-schizoid position and phantasy. Their striking similarities have gone unrecognized. One of the similarities that is not surprising in light of their common data source is that both models portray the “normal” infant as psychotic, at war with its own impulses and with reality, and development as a kind of therapeutic process.

Confusion between Thought and Primordial Mental Activity and Problems of Conceptual Language

There is a further source of confusion that pervades these and other efforts to model primordial mind. In his formulation of the primary process it is not clear whether Freud intended a single model of unconscious mind or two. In some places he describes repressed thoughts or memories which are a symbolic part of the thought system, and in others he outlines a mental process of sensory-perceptual actualization or hallucination which is entirely different from thought. A similar confusion between normality and psychosis pervades Klein’s model of the phantasy-dominated paranoid-schizoid position and Kleinian clinical practice.

Significant contributions to the nature of primordial mind have been made by developmental psychologists, most notably Werner (1948) and Piaget (1936). Their work is limited because it is based entirely on the study of normal individuals. There are more recent contributions by observers of infancy and proponents of attachment theory as well, both psychoanalysts and psychologists, but they have yet to be woven into a comprehensive theory of primordial mind.

For the most part these important contributions seem to be efforts to describe a common primordial phenomenology. However, the models are difficult to compare and to reconcile because each theorist has adopted an idiosyncratic conceptual language that has little or no connection to any of the others. Werner and Piaget have gone furthest toward formulating concepts that are widely understood and readily shared.

A preview: Primordial Mental Activity and Thought

The authors whose work I have mentioned have achieved major insights into the workings of primordial mind. My reasons for proposing yet another model rather than elaborating on one of those are addressed in detail in the first part of the book. For now I should like to make a brief introduction to some of the characteristics of what I call primordial mental activity (PMA), which I shall be referring to throughout the book. Thought is the aspect of mind that represents and reflects about itself and about the body, and that represents specific emotions. PMA is the body’s mind. It is driven by raw affect and is sensory-perceptual and except in dreaming, involves motor activity. It makes and receives deep impressions. As it is a concrete operation it communicates not by exchanging meaning but by pressure and induction; acting on or feeling acted upon. It is not a modality of expressing and receiving meaning but rather of expressing and assimilating belief and certainty. Primordial mind is holistic and does not differentiate what in western cosmology is within the self from what is in the external world. It creates a sense of actuality that we call belief rather than mental event. Perception and narration is in sequences determined by inner affective states rather than logic or rationality, so from the standpoint of thought it is not integrated. Experience is immediate and stimulus-bound, without a sense of time and memory. It does not observe thoughtful or logical distinctions involving time, space and causality. PMA is readily confused with thought because it has access to and utilizes whatever content the person may have learned, including language and socio-cultural experience, albeit in their concrete forms rather than the abstract, symbolic, representational way that characterizes thought.

PMA operates continuously from the inception of life, both when awake and asleep, and in a variety of permutations related to thought ranging from dissociation to different forms of integration, it accounts for such disparate phenomena as I have enumerated, including infant mind, attachment behavior, dreaming, creativity, cultural differences and psychosis. The labels we give to the manifest phenomenology and the judgments we make about them depend on a number of variables: the context in which they occur (waking or sleeping, interpersonal, social and cultural); their adaptive or maladaptive function in that context; and whether they are under the control of thoughtful mind or are dissociated from it.

PMA is the mental adaptation of infancy because thought, which develops separately, is rudimentary and matures slowly over the first decade of life. PMA is not transformed into thought; however, in the ordinary course of development thought gradually plays an increasingly prominent role. PMA comes under the regulation of thought with regard to the times, places and purposes for which it is employed. A complex set of variables – including constitutional factors, the nature of the infant attachment experience and related interpersonal processes of infancy and early childhood, the degree of integration or dissociation between PMA and thought, and the personal, social and cultural context within and outside of the primary family – determines whether the ultimate behavioural outcome for a given individual is adaptive or maladaptive, or considered normal or abnormal.

In spiritual cultures there is much more recognition and reinforcement early in life for manifestations of PMA, which are looked upon as ways of knowing and communicating that are beneficial to the community. Although thought, as we know it in western culture, is less valued, it is still relied upon to control the time and place for using PMA and the purpose to which it is put. When members of spiritual cultures are required to function in western culture, which not only does not offer a supportive community role for PMA, but actually defines some of its manifestations as psychotic, disaster can ensue (see Chapters 13–15).

There is evidence to suggest a more or less common neural substrate to the diverse phenomena I have noted and hence for primordial mind. I present possible constitutional elements in Chapter 11, and in Chapter 16 turn to contemporary neuroscience and findings based on newer technologies such as functional neuroimaging. These investigations are as yet in an early stage and differences in the phenomena under investigation and the methodology and language used in various studies make the results difficult to interpret, but the evidence is both suggestive and exciting.

The organization of the book reflects a tension between theory and exemplification. The first part of the book is weighty with theory. Especially during the twentieth century and beginning with Freud a number of important models of primordial mind have been proposed by persons including Klein, Bion, Matte-Blanco, Jung, theorists of attachment, relationship and implicit knowledge, and developmental psychologists, including Piaget and Werner. In highlighting their strengths and limitations I provide the rationale for proposing the model of primordial mental activity that is the foundation for understanding the examples that are presented in the latter part of the book. The remainder of the book has theory as well, but much more in the way of illustration. This includes biographical and autobiographical accounts, numerous examples from my clinical practice with psychotic and less severely ill persons, dreams of my own and of my patients, and remarkable, thoughtful first-person reflections about the nature of their psychoses from patients in advanced stages of therapy. There is an extraordinary account written for this book by a Maori shaman who left the family and culture in which he grew up in order to get a western education. He developed symptoms which were diagnosed by the western mental health system as psychosis and was treated unsuccessfully with western medical methods. Eventually he was healed by Maori methods and has gone on to achieve a remarkable degree of maturity. ...