~ I was a king,
and the son of a king … ~
Wednesday, October 3, 2012
Tuesday, October 2, 2012
Appendix to the Appendix on oneiric causation
Our post below, alluding to Traumerreger -- the prompts of dreams -- whetted our further
curiosity.
[Note, btw, in the image above, the morphology of the curtains, which the stallion has pierced. Assignment: Explain. Due Friday.]
Not increasing our confidence in his account, is another dream that Maury recounts (“ein Traum, zur Berühmtheit gelangt”, Freud informs us), in which an elaborately long and detailed story, involving the French revolution and yadda yadda, eventually leads to Maury mounting the steps to the guillotine (pause for station-break) the blade of which then falls on his neck -- omigosh, turns out a bedpiece had in fact so fallen! -- the mystery being how he could have dreamt all that in the instant that the item fell. That is, barring intra-oneiric prescience; but I have an alternate explanation: Maury had read, and cribbed from, Ambrose Bierce’s much-anthologized short-story, “Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge”.
Stimulus: The Bulgarian Men’s Marching-Band plays Hayden’s “Surprise” Symphony at top volume.
In the introductory pages to his masterwork Die Traumdeutung (1899), Freud
cites a number of relatively straightforward or kneejerk-model accounts of
dreams, from his oneirological predecessors, before proceeding with his own far
less directly physiological, much more indirect and psychological interpretations. Among the former, he cites a series
of experiments which Maury (the author of Le sommeil) had performed,
with himself as the sleeper.
The results are almost comically straightforward:
1) Er wird an Lippen und
Nasenspitze mit einer Feder
gekitzelt. -- Träumt von einer schrecklichen Tortur: eine Pechlarve wird ihm aufs Gesicht gelegt, dann weggerissen, so daß die
Haut mitgeht.
2) Man wetzt eine Schere an einer Pinzette. -- Er hört Glocken
läuten, dann Sturm läuten und ist
in die Junitage des Jahres 1848 versetzt.
3) Man läßt ihn Kölnerwasser
riechen. -- Er ist in Kairo … Daran schließen sich tolle Abenteur, die
er nicht reproduzieren kann.
 |
| Shouldena ate them pickles ... |
Usw. (Plus several
examples of the classic, in which what
turns out to be the alarm-clock is
explained-away in the dream as being churchbells or whatever.)
This struck me as implausible, and likely influenced by the
researcher/dreamer’s desire to prove his point. Had the correlations been random, he would have had no
famous paper to publish -- no tenure -- no job, no prospects, hounded by
beggars through the streets of the city:
instead of marrying the department chair’s buxom daughter, and having his
way with the secretaries on the side.
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More analytically:
Such stumpfsinnig insistance
on so plat an S-R causality, in the
face of the enormous variety of dreams, and what must surely be an exiguous
proportion that even in principle admit of such possible promptings -- after all, most of us sleep through
the night without having lab-assistants tickle our nose with a feather, or
carriages rattle by on cobblestones, and dream abundantly nevertheless -- suggest
an actual resistance, in the
psychoanalytic sense, to understanding anything deeper about dreaming: “See, that’s all there is to it! Pay no attention to the daemon
behind the curtain!” -- For our
scornful account of Edward O. Wilson’s equally shallow reductionist account of
dreams -- and this, by way of specific antithesis to Freud, whom he equally
scorns -- click here:
Not increasing our confidence in his account, is another dream that Maury recounts (“ein Traum, zur Berühmtheit gelangt”, Freud informs us), in which an elaborately long and detailed story, involving the French revolution and yadda yadda, eventually leads to Maury mounting the steps to the guillotine (pause for station-break) the blade of which then falls on his neck -- omigosh, turns out a bedpiece had in fact so fallen! -- the mystery being how he could have dreamt all that in the instant that the item fell. That is, barring intra-oneiric prescience; but I have an alternate explanation: Maury had read, and cribbed from, Ambrose Bierce’s much-anthologized short-story, “Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge”.
Just once have I experienced what at first seemed just such
a literalist stimulus-response dream
-- but the results were all the other way. It happened in college, my senior year:
I dream that I am lying in bed in
my college room. A din of
uncertain origin begins to rise within the dream. “Aha!” say I to myself. “Doubtless an instance of the ‘dream as guardian of sleep’,
made famous by professor Freud!
I’ll simply wake up and shut the window against whatever may be making
that infernal racket.
I awoke -- to perfect silence in the room.
(Note: To a
professional, I suspect, such a dream would seem to betoken the imminent
outbreak of a full-blown psychosis. -- Still, it has been almost half a century
since that dream occurred, so it’s probably safe to come out now.)
Still, one anecdotal instance does not refute a theory; to experiment we must have recourse! Accordingly, having secured a
gigantic grant from NIH, I
repaired to the sleep laboratory, accompanied by my faithful famulus, the
hunchback Igor.
The following are the laboratory results:
 |
| My lab assistant, attending to some technical details |
The following are the laboratory results:
Stimulus: Igor and his assistants fill the bedchamber
with indistinct whispers.
Response: Dr. Justice dreamt he was a penguin.
Stimulus: They tickle the dreamer’s forehead with a feather.
Response: Dr. Justice again dreamt
he was a penguin.
Stimulus: The Bulgarian Men’s Marching-Band plays Hayden’s “Surprise” Symphony at top volume.
Response: Dr. Justice is now quite certain that he is, indeed,
a penguin.
Stimulus: Igor reads aloud from Der Witz und seine Beziehung zum
Unbewußten.
Response: “I am walking through a town square, somewhere in the
Alps. I ask a stranger the
direction to the Rathaus. The
villagers point and whisper, ‘Look, a talking penguin!’”
Stimulus: Brooding bedside, Igor eats some Chinese takeout.
Response: Dr. Justice dreams of delicious fish.
Stimulus: The electro-encephalograph that has been monitoring the
experiment, malfunctions, filling the room with smoke.
Response: Dr. Justice dreams that a skua is glaring menacingly at the
chicks.
Stimulus: Igor frantically calls
911.
Response: Dr. Justice dreams that he is being pursued by an irate
leopard-seal.
Stimulus: The fire brigade rushes
in, dousing everything.
Response: Dr. Justice dreams of a polar bear -- then realizes he is at
the wrong Pole.
Stimulus: A brazier of hot coals is held directly over the dreamer’s
head.
Response: Dr. Justice dreams that the iceberg he had been placidly
standing on is melting.
 |
| Actual EEG image of that dream, courtesy of our friend Pyesetz, who himself enjoys the honor of being a dog. |
Stimulus: Igor, screaming,
sets the bedroom on fire.
Response: It suddenly occurs to Dr. Justice that all this talk of
Global Warming might have
something to it after all. He
wakes, and warns the other penguins.
[Our thanks go out to NIH, MIT, FBI, and the Illuminati, for
funding this ground-breaking research.]
~
~ Posthumous Endorsement ~
"If I were alive today, and in the mood
for a mystery,
this is what I'd be reading: "
(Ich bin Sigmund Freud, and I approved this
message.)
~
~
~
.
Causality: an appendix from Depth Psychology
Our principle series of essays on causality may be consulted here:
As a follow-up, just a couple of footnotes. Rather than work them into the essays
where they might be most relevant, we publish them apart, since the
philosophical and scientific interests
are cross-cutting.
Freud was deeply imbued with the
principles of causality and determinism, so pronounced in the Helmholtz school
that had dominated his early scientific discipline. Instead of dismissing the wandering associations as accidental, unconected, and
meaningless … he felt intuitively that there must be some definite agency …
guiding and degtermining the course of these thoughts.
-- Ernest Jones, Freud: the
Formative Years (1953), p. 45
Terminology: Here we see a number of causation-related terms
used rather kunterbunt:
Für die Wissenschaft erhob sich alsbald die Frage, ob der Anreiz zum Träumen
stets der nämliche sei, oder ein vielfacher sein könne, und damit die
Erwägung, ob sie ursächliche Erklärung
des Traumes der Psychologie oder vielmehr der Physiologie anheimfalle. Die meisten Autoren scheinen anzunehmen, daß die
Ursachen der Schlafstörung, also die Quellen des
Träumens, mannigfaltiger Art sein können, und daß Leibreize ebenso wie seelische Erregungen zur Rolle von Traumerregern gelangen.
-- Sigmund Freud, Die
Traumdeutung (1899)
For his part, Freud’s wayward onetime-disciple Jung is well known for his notion of
“synchronicity, an acausal connecting principle”.
Brücke would have been astonished had he known that one of his favorite
pupils, [Freud], was later … to bring back into science the ideas of “purpose”, “intention”,
and “aim” , which had just been abolished from the universe. [Nevertheless,
Freud] never abandoned determinism for teleology.
-- Ernest Jones, Freud: the
Formative Years (1953), p. 45
Jung greatly de-emphasized determinism, both in theory and
in therapy.
Meteorology à la mode du docteur Justice
Today’s nowcast:
Rain, rain, rain.
This is a happy day for ducks, an unhappy day for squirrels.
This makes us both happy and sad.
Beschimpfungen eines Unpolitischen
» Ha ha ha! Ich finde Sie
aber spöttisch, Herr Settembrini. «
»Spöttisch? Sie
meinen: boshaft. Ja, boshaft bin ich ein wenig. Mein Kummer ist, daß ich
verurteilt bin, meine Bosheit an so elende Gegenstände zu verschwenden. -- Ich hoffe, Sie haben nichts gegen die
Bosheit, Ingenieur! In meinen
Augen ist sie die glänzendste
Waffe der Vernunft.«
-- Thomas Mann, Der Zauberberg
(1924)
Widerwillig muss ich die Narren verspotten, die in diesem
Lande schalten und walten: contre
mon gré; voire, à contre-cœur. Nach den Gipfeln streben -- und im Sumpfe leben.
Hier also das palmarès meiner schön-schmutzigsten Beschimpfungen:
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Millionaire moochers
The Romneyite fantasy of “makers vs. takers”
(fantastic because they include such parasites as arbitrageurs, K-Street flacks, and casino
magnates among the makers) has led some
enterprising journalists to notice some surprising elements among the moochers:
The headline apparently actually understates the case. A fairish number of Americans are
“millionaires” (a term deflated by inflation) in the sense that their total
family assets reach that amount.
But those on this dole reportedly include a much more select bunch:
“Oct. 2 (Bloomberg) -- Almost 2,400 people who received unemployment insurance
in 2009 lived in households with annual
incomes of $1 million or more, according to the Congressional Research
Service.” That is quite a
different matter. And bad cess to
the WaPo headline-writer who cannot read as far as the first line of the
article.
-- My my, and now this too: a millionaire moocher of a different stripe:
A Michigan woman who became a
poster child for welfare fraud when she continued collecting food stamps after
winning a $1 million lottery last year has been found dead of an apparent drug
overdose.
We shall only add that food-stamps mooching is less corrupting
of the public character than is the casino-mentality fostered by
state-sponsored lotteries, and by such scum as Donald Trump and principle Romney backer Sheldon Adelson.
Dumbo Does Diplomacy: the Prequel
We earlier sketched Romney’s fumbling fiasco of foreign
junketry in “Dumbo Does Diplomacy”, but without putting it into any
perspective, thus leaving open the possibility that the footless performance
was peculiar to Romney, with no larger political implications. But he in a sense was following a
precedent: that of another
handsome clueless politician, Ronald Reagan. The fact that, after ample evidence of his ignorance
(and senescence, harbinger of Alzheimer’s) in his first term, he won a record landslide victory in
his re-election bid, which sent the message: the President doesn’t need
to know anything, just make him photogenic, the gullible public will slurp down
whatever we spoonfeed them.
And yet, a kind of bright side: We have a system in which the evil of schemers is tempered by the stupidity of jurors and voters. The result (to continue in the agrarian context above) is such costly tomfoolery as the farm programs; but we avoid, say, the famine and genocide of Lenin’s and Stalin’s collectivization of agriculture. And while there have been plenty of boneheaded jury decisions, at least we are spared the likes of the Moscow show trials. The voters are not rocket scientists (or, more relevantly: statisticians and epistemologists), but -- apart from the tinfoil-hat crowd -- they mostly have basic common sense, and respect for that wisely crafted document, the Constitution.
Ronald Reagan had terrific stage presence, and was good at
glad-handing, so long as nothing of substance had to be said, beyond what he --
an actor reciting lines written for him by others -- could read off his ever-present index cards. In his first term, Nixon sent him on
goodwill trips to cultivate our favorite
right-wing rulers: Marcos, Chiang,
Yew and Franco. Later, in preparation for his own future Presidential bid, he went on a whirlwind
junket across Europe and Asia; as
former Washington Post political reporter Lou Cannon put it, “This enabled
Reagan to deal with questions about his inexperience in world affairs by rattling off a list of all the
foreign leaders he had met (usually omitting Franco).”
So long as all the public learned was from the White House press
release, rather than seeing the
often dismaying performances from up close, this scenario worked just
swell. Cannon describes a 1982 state dinner in Brasília:
Reagan raised his wine glass in a
toast to [the] Brazilian President … and “the people of Bolivia”, a gaffe which
he attempted to correct, and instead compounded, by saying “That’s where I’m
going next.” Reagan’s next
stop was actually Colombia, and his
faulty toast became big news in that country as well. The double blooper so
dismayed the White House press office
that it altered the public transcript and quoted Reagan as toasting
“the people of Bogotá”.
On Air Force One returning from the five-day trip …
Reagan said … “I went down to find out from them and their views. And you’d be surprised, yes, because,
you know, they’re all individual countries.”
-- Lou Cannon, President
Reagan: the Role of a Lifetime
(1991), p. 462
Each with its own individual and precious and special, but
easily confusable name.
I mention the incident, not to rake up cold coals, but
because of the striking parallelism with Romney, and the continuing success of
the Reagan-derived “President-as-Ken-Doll” strategy. Again:
[Reagan] was briefed before each
meeting by the appropriate experts, and he dutifully read the requisite
policy points from his cards, floundering only when he departed from the
prepared script. During a meeting
with Indian Prime Minister Indira Ghandhi, the Indian delegates were pleased
when Reagan lauded the “green revolution” that had vastly improved their
nation’s agricultural yields. But the Indians were also bothered
that Reagan did not seem to realize that the Indian government had played an
important role in this agricultural revolution, which he depicted as strictly a
triumph of capitalism.
Later, during a conference session
on food production, Reagan was expounding on the accomplishments of
free-enterprise farming in the United States, when Tanzanian President Julius
Nyerere interrupted and said, “Let me tell you something. U.S. agriculture is the most heavily
subsidized in the world.”
-- Lou Cannon, President
Reagan: the Role of a Lifetime
(1991), p. 469
That sound familiar?
Obama’s line, “You didn’t build that”, pithy and easily mocked, contains
more wisdom in its four words than
many a press release or campaign speech;
in this it resembles Clinton’s wise and (except by legal professionals)
widely misunderstood “It depends what the meaning of is is.” The booboisie
(to resurrect Mencken’s term, still applicable) do not feel obliged to even
attempt to comprehend the things they snicker at.
So it’s not just Romney. Buoyed by the success of The Great (when pre-scripted)
Communicator, the Republican Party, and its easily-dazzled voters, has come to
welcome leaders devoid of expertise or intellectual curiosity. It worked before, it’ll work again, so
long as you don’t flub in front of the cameras. (Of couse, this has become more difficult to do in the age
of the iPhone, since cameras may lurk even in invitation-only conclaves of
fatcats, in the dens of Boca Raton.)
Ironically, the Potemkin-village approach to the marketing and
micro-managing of candidates was
given a substantial boost by the case of an earlier Republican politician who,
by contrast with the crop today, was unusually knowledgeable: Richard Nixon. But he wasn’t at all likeable (stiff in
a Romney way, but additionally unsavory), so he had to be packaged: consult the classic of Joe McGinniss, The
Selling of the President.
So again -- Why even write? No facts, no reasonings will convince the Birthers and Voodoo-Economists and their
kin. Ours is the Society of the Spectacle, best symbolized by that empty and amiable actor.
And yet, a kind of bright side: We have a system in which the evil of schemers is tempered by the stupidity of jurors and voters. The result (to continue in the agrarian context above) is such costly tomfoolery as the farm programs; but we avoid, say, the famine and genocide of Lenin’s and Stalin’s collectivization of agriculture. And while there have been plenty of boneheaded jury decisions, at least we are spared the likes of the Moscow show trials. The voters are not rocket scientists (or, more relevantly: statisticians and epistemologists), but -- apart from the tinfoil-hat crowd -- they mostly have basic common sense, and respect for that wisely crafted document, the Constitution.
[Historical footnote on the theme of the perilous schemes of
cabals and autocrats being
frustrated by the amiable indolence of their servants and subjects]
In 1894, Kaiser Wilhelm II’s choice of Reichskanzler, Prince
Hohenlohe, had a
… reputation for stubbornness and
evasiveness, which had led a member of his staff in Paris to say, “It is quite
impossible to make him do anything of which he disapproves. He flutters away like a little
bird when you try to catch him.” These qualities served to baulk some of
the Emperor’s more dangerous designs.
-- Gordon Craig, Germany
1866-1945 (1978), p. 262
Qui custodiet ipsos custodes?
This one’s like a koan -- one that actually has an answer.
Answer -- La police
des polices!
(Linguistic note:
And not “de la police” or “des policiers”.)
Plusieurs policiers de la Bac nord
de Marseille ont été interpellés ce matin par la police des polices (DGPN) qui
menait une perquisition dans leurs locaux pour une affaire présumée de
corruption. La police des polices fouillait notamment les vestiaires des
policiers.
*
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friandises
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du docteur Justice,
consultez:
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