CyberSomatics

I’ve noticed a study has made the news, from which researchers deduce that spanking toddlers makes them more aggressive a couple of years later. It’s called passing on the hit.   While I don’t find spanking sinister, I can envision a scenario in which it might be sinister.  If you spank a child while saying things, you might want to be very conscious of what you say.  You might be implanting hypnotic suggestions.

I’ve long found it fascinating that there is one way in which hypnosis can make someone do what is against their will and values,  even to the point of their own destruction.  It’s called Pain Drug Hypnosis.

It was discovered  in about 1950-51,  that while hypnotic suggestion as normally practiced does not work to make a person go against core values, it can do so in combination with administering drugs and applying beatings.  Being a hypnotist I found this fascinating.  You could get out of your car and be knocked out with a bag of sand, given an injection, and then given hypnotic suggestions.

These would cease to be suggestions and become commands when you began to apply pain.  It would put you in the same relationship to the hypnotist as small child to a parent when a whipping or spanking is the method of securing compliance.  The drug would put you into an altered state, separate from the ego identity.

So in the context of a loss of the critical faculties of the intellect by deconstructing the ego with a drug, then applying a telephone book or a Taser,  you get total compliance.  And one thing you can get compliance on is that there is no memory of the session.  You wake up in your own bed and remember, as you were instructed to remember, that you came in and went to bed normally.  Would this really work?  In theory it would.

When I read about this the first thing that popped into my mind was that spanking or whipping a little child can work the same way.  If the child is very young there isn’t a differentiated ego and no critical faculties to circumvent.  This suggests one should be aware of what he or she is saying to a child when administering physical punishment, at the very least.  Regardless of what is being said, the child is learning how to use force instead of negotiation as a convenient time saver with somebody less powerful than him or herself.

In adults a parental complex often takes over and the ego just isn’t strong enough to assert itself at a moment of confusion or fear.  The person in which this is taking place doesn’t know that, and assumes the entire scenario is himself or herself, making choices.  But there is no choice involved.  The part that might make choices has been rendered passive.  Plus, if there is real anger in the parent, the child might fear being torn apart.  This is the worst fear humans suffer, much more intense than the fear of death.

And one last point, one method of inducing hypnosis is the introduction of an authority figure.  The belief in the authority bypasses the critical faculties.    For example a police uniform and badge can create a trance state, so that a command will be followed without question.  If needed a Taser or blackjack can be added to force passivity.  Doctors wear white coats for a reason, and in the mother church, the further up the organizational structure you go, the more impressive the outfits.

So the child is already confronted with an authority figure, which is inductive and I suspect that the fear of being torn apart can be more effective than the actual physiological pain.  Milton Erickson estimated that most pain is about thirty percent physiological and seventy percent emotional.  So imagine that an angry man grabs a little kid and starts spanking him, while saying, “You’re never going to amount to a goddamned thing.”  Voila.  Pain drug hypnosis.

“Why did you take to drinking and whoring, Petey?”

“Damned if I know, Red.”

I don’t think anybody who’s read Alice Miller ever thinks about children and adults the same way again.  The way in which they relate is a fascinating study, because it is largely unconscious.   By the time a child has a developed ego the early suggestions are set.  A child is seven before reaching the stage of development at which most mammals are born.  Most of the development is outside the womb because the size of the head prohibits a fully formed brain’s passing through the birth canal.  As it is the head has to flex.

So it is expected that if pain drug hypnosis works by displacing the ego and applying pain with suggestion, the same set of factors will accomplish the same result in a two or three year old child being simultaneous spanked and given suggestions.   I saw that instantly when I first read about pain drug hypnosis, many years ago.  I also realized that the application of pain on child can be transference of the parent’s pain. In an adult, pain is often transformed into anger as a way to avoid experiencing the pain.  The anger is preferred by the adult and the child has no choice but to take the rejected emotion, which is fear.

This is  called  substitute emotion. Anger makes one feel powerful, while fear makes one feel vulnerable.   Anger comes up as the parental complex in this instance and the fledgling child ego goes passive.   The parent and child are then in a symbiotic relationship.  Maybe the most famous one was between Norman Bates and his mother. He had a mother complex.  Actually, it had him.  He couldn’t tell what was him and what was mother because his ego was passive to her when another woman threatened the original symbiosis.

I just read this article on a kid in Houston who is being forced to get his hair cut under threat of being ostracized.   At first I wasn’t paying close attention and then I realized this is a four year old kindergartner.  And the school board tells the parents that they have to decide what’s more important to them:  the child’s education or allowing the child his own grooming choices.

I was looking at the picture of this kid, and thinking, “He’s four years old.  He isn’t making grooming choices out of some sense of rebellion against the school board.  He just likes the way he looks and doesn’t want anybody to tell him there’s something wrong with it.”  And in fact he looks pretty damned cool.  My money is on his being kicked out because the men on the board are jealous.  He’s just too cool for school.

His parents understand that it isn’t the province of the school board to tell them how their kids have to wear their hair.  The people on the school board were referencing rock star haircuts, as if these little kids are some kind of double agents from the present, sent back to frighten them.

I think it was Alice Miller who tried to describe how this sort of thing really operates in the reality of the child, and how horrifying people really are when they are bigger and don’t think of their power as being a responsibility, but rather the servant of their authority.   The book I’m recalling is, “For Your Own Good.” She said something to the effect that we come into the world trailing star stuff,  bringing a precious gift of wholeness, but that the gift is not what is wanted.  They want you to be good.

It’s always easier to control people if you can make their personal choices, such as grooming, diet, behaviors, etc.  I remember starting at a community college on the G.I. Bill, where the Dean, who’d just a few weeks before been almost obsequious when speaking to me as a newspaper reporter, told me I had to shave my beard to stay in school.  The justification for dress and grooming codes, he said,  was to keep  the school from becoming another Berkeley.

That particular college becoming another Berkeley would have been a miracle to outshine the fish and loaves.  He meant he wanted people to dress and behave like they did when he was a young man, but for that he would have to wait for the fashion wheel to make it’s inevitable revolution.  We were our own generation and needed our own identity.

But that was forty years ago, and it was a college.  Taylor Pugh is in kindergarten, and being confronted with being socially ostracized from the group for having his own grooming choices.

Maybe they’ll find some other way to express their displeasure at this little renegade.  Can they Taser a four-year-old?  Or do you have to be six?

Quentin Crisp wrote that when Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor were in Rome, the public lavatories had no top on them, and the people were climbing up to look at them pissing.  The solution to this, he said, is not to build higher walls around the latrine.  It is to piss with style.

Our attitude should be existential, he said, which means to swim with the tide, but faster.  If something is going to happen anyway, make yourself over to it immediately. If you can’t hide from the cameras and recorders and computers and monitors, then man up, like Letterman.   “Yes I did.  Deal with it.”

Eventually this will create an egalitarian society, as the walls between public and private fall in the famous and powerful, uniting them with the poor and disreputable.

This continues the process of unification of black and white represented in our President.  We get something that’s not either one.   We get something like Tiger Woods.  What a name that is.  Barrack Hussein’s got nothing on him.

“Tiger, as in tiger tiger burning bright, and wood, as in can we throw wood on the fire sweet sugar mama?”

“I thought it was Woods, as in, we’re lost in the woods.”

The golf club crashes through the window.  ”Let me Sweden that for you.”

The shadow shows up in every play, because when the play begins to drag you bring in a man with a gun.  The audience won’t know why he’s there but they’ll be glad he showed up.

That couple that crashed a state dinner was the man with a gun, and while the debate centers on whether they were or were not invited, there is a dreaming level where they are the trickster element in the play.

There are levels circulating around Obama, the innermost being his bodyguards, then the social secretaries who control access, another layer of security …

It’s hard to move through that layer into the inner circle, and those two people  managed to get in and get photographed with everybody.  They are duplicitous, social climbing, egoists.  That’s a part of the American psyche that had to show up because it has become defining.

Nobody out here on the line can miss it.   We see it all the time and hear it all the time, as the cameras devour those who want to be devoured, and then they learn to hang out on street corners staring at everybody with unblinking eye.  ”Is this you?”

“It does look like me, but …”

There are dire warnings about how information can be used against you.

“Did you write this?”

“Is this you in this picture?”

“We just want to know who sold it to you.”

Who can escape the cameras and recorders and computer console logs?  Your telephone can signal where you are and your credit cards leave  footprints on the highways, at gas stations and restaurants and motels.  If you find a briefcase full of cash there’s a responder in it.  You can run but you can’t hide.

There’s nothing left to do but let all the players come to the party, and own them all.

So whatever your names were, who crashed the party,  good performance.

The shooter was first dead and then he was alive and stable.  There were three shooters and then there was one.  The picture gradually clarified into the face of a Palestinian man who is a member of the Muslim faith whose family tried to dissuade him from going into the army.  They had a bad feeling about it.  ”They call us camel jockeys and sand niggers.”

But he went anyway and got through medical school and became a psychiatrist, and then he wanted out, because the deployment to Iraq or Afghanistan caused him a lot of cognitive dissonance.  If he was the object of disrespect because he’s an Arab, and if he doesn’t want to cut himself off from his mythology as an Arab man … well, you get the idea.   Joseph Campbell said that a culture, or civilization, can survive anything except the loss of its underlying myth.  America can survive anything except Americans who can’t tolerate the loss of their previous underlying myth.

In America we make a deal with people.  In exchange for the primacy of the myths they bring with them from  their old world, we give them a new mythology, which can be found at the barber shop.  You get your hair cut according to when you came in. Now men go to salons and have an appointment so the analogy doesn’t hold up so well, but the traditional barber shop was the secret church of the American dream, and it’s alive everywhere you take your number and wait your turn, same as everyone else.  No cutting to the front of the line, even if you’re the archduke.

And all the time,  we’re trying to keep this alive so that we have something real to trade for these other mythologies.  Freedom is an abstract.  To one person freedom means being armed with enough firepower to take out an aviary, while to another it means accepting a high level of violence and homicide in exchange for the support of the munitions manufacturers and their lobbyists.  Sometimes they’re the same person, like Dick Cheney for example.  But having the right of habeas corpus is real, and so is the right to eat lunch without becoming a two dimensional character in somebody else’s ideological nightmare.

Obviously this Palestinian psychiatrist was smart enough to get through medical school, and he was promoted to Major.  It was expected that he had traded in the old country’s mythology for his American Dream  of a place where there’s not much point in praying five times a day to a god with way too much time on his hands.  ”I’m sorry, an omelet is made with potatoes, not tomatoes.”   A god who’s got it all set in stone has an obvious propensity to turn everything into stone, and if you make spirit solid it isn’t spirit anymore.

If god  becomes one of those old people who use the bank teller as a social life, business comes to a halt and things fall apart.  In America we have potentially elevated the citizen to a level once accessible only to kings, where the man and the god are the same size, and can finally see eye to eye.

With that kind of relationship you can get some practical information, such as, “Never trust a religious psychiatrist,” and, “If an Arab really doesn’t want to go to fight Arabs, don’t send him, especially if he’s a psychiatrist.  Didn’t anybody here read Catch 22?”