Psychohistory | Birth, Death, Transformation

I aim to explore the relationship(s) between pre- and perinatal (psychological and cognitive) development and spirituality with a particular emphasis on how the pre- perinatal and early postnatal phases shape ideas about human nature and how these ideas are expressed in beliefs about human purpose, spiritual awakening etc. From there I will proceed to examine how these ideas are foundational to social and cultural institutions and consider what possibilities become available through an improved understanding of the subjective impressions left by birth and its 'objective' biophysical conditions.

Introduction:

In the following I attempt to clarify the principles underpinning psychohistory, a discipline combining insights from psychoanalysis with the research methodology of social sciences to understand social and political behavior. The argument that biology shapes consciousness and that interpretations of the relationship between them play a formative role in defining ideas about human nature strengthens considerably the argument for a relationship between human subjectivity and socio-political conditions. The premise of this article is that a radical transformation can result from an improved understanding of human nature, available through a therapeutic process involving the integration of unconscious or ‘traumatic’ memories of birth. This claim is based largely on a specific understanding of the way society and culture mediate human subjectivity to produce culturally normative responses to assuage existential uncertainty. These normative solutions perpetuate personal and societal crises. An alternative might be available through improved awareness of the possibility of therapeutic integration of perinatal material as a collective ‘response-ability’ of humanity.

Transformation versus Change

When we talk about creating a better world, we often think in terms of ‘change’, a term I will contrast here with ‘transformation’.
Change, as it is popularly defined, is incremental; it seldom necessitates a dramatic transformation of the way we think, something that I believe is a prerequisite to really bringing about a better world. Instead of such incremental change, I believe we need ‘transformation’, a term I define as the ‘creation of an entirely new realm of possibilities, free of the constraints and limitations of the past’.
The premise underpinning this definition of transformation is that certain possibilities are unavailable to us owing to the way beliefs and expectations from our past limit what we see as possible.
To the extent that these beliefs and expectations are products of the narrative processes by which we attempt to make sense of the world, it is also fundamentally within our grasp to alter them, when we acknowledge how the choices we make as we attempt to make sense of our experiences produce results and outcomes we get. And this is not just true of individuals but also of society as a whole. The question we can ask, and need to ask when it comes to thinking about creating a better world is then; which stories are most directly related to the conditions we experience?
It is my opinion that this question points ultimately to existential conditions. These are the very conditions that generate questions about meaning and purpose: where do we come from? What are we here for? What is the meaning of life? What happens when we die? —i.e. the very questions we have traditionally looked to religion and philosophy to answer and that we now hope science might clarify.
What I will be suggesting is that a meaningful answer to these questions may be available through an improved understanding of the way biological conditions shape our consciousness. The relationship between biology and consciousness is, arguably, of the utmost importance to understanding what we call the ‘human condition’. Although the relationship between biology and consciousness remains a subject speculation the way we account for that relationship profoundly shapes our understanding and outlook, and it is my intention to show that our understanding of this relationship is mediated by society and culture in ways that fundamentally define our relationship to ourselves and the world. In other words — to the extent that society and culture mediate our thinking on the questions that give our life meaning and purpose, for instance by providing language and ‘legitimising’ our experiences, the results are translated into concrete social and cultural conditions. Thus, inquiry, particularly of the critical type capable of establishing new understandings of ‘human nature’ can occasion radical transformation at the level of society and culture as well.
Such a transformation is available, in my opinion, from an account founded on quantifiable, measurable facts, rather than on speculation and religious faith in a moral creation. Such an account reveals, in my view, the relationship between human subjectivity and socio-cultural conditions, thus proposing important ways in which to remedy private and global crises.
The ‘constraints and limitations of the past’ mentioned above are very much institutionalised in ideas about human nature, and particularly in beliefs that emphasise that human beings are somehow flawed and incapable of exercising the kind of sovereignty we ideally ascribe to ourselves without being ‘guided from above’. The question is whether this attitude towards ourselves reflects our true nature, or whether it masks some uncertainty about our own nature? Arguably, uncertainty about human nature has had a profound impact on our institutions. For example, author Daniel Quinn argues that the idea that humans are central to creation directly shapes the belief that we have a right to do as we please with the planet. The belief that human beings are central to creation has profoundly shaped our behaviour, e.g. by constraining imagination where empathy for other living beings is concerned.

Ideology or Religion?

Before I proceed I would like to state up front that I am in no way proposing an ideology or a new religion. The reason why I say this is because facts do not actually have any meaning in and of themselves. The ‘meaning’ of the facts I am about to talk about is not implicit in the facts themselves, but in what we do about them. So, for example, it does not mean anything that it is raining outside. But the fact that it is raining opens up a range of choices and possibilities that we can then give ‘meaning’, as when we say that it is ‘bad weather’.
The ‘leap’ that takes us from ‘rain’ to ‘bad weather’ involves an interpretation that reflects our personal preferences, beliefs, perceptions, conditions (some of which are within our control such as whether we own an umbrella etc.). While this leap is relatively insignificant it is an altogether different matter when we try to make sense of important events like being born, or awareness that we will one day die. Interpretations of these events are far more influential in defining the quality of our lives. This is why examination of the ‘interpretative process’ itself has the potential to open up a horizon of radical new possibilities.

Birth

I do not aim to provide more than a cursory glance at the state of contemporary research findings concerning birth and the ways in which its biological dimensions shape development, predisposing us toward specific beliefs and attitudes. I am confident that others in this conference will provide much needed discussion of this subject, and if not, I provide an extensive reading list on the subject at the end of this paper.
What I want to discuss is how the condition of birth has shaped theological speculation and how this speculation in turn shaped cultural institutions. This is a historical fact but it requires both some understanding of psychology and an exercise of imagination to grasp. It also requires an open mind to understand how the physical circumstances of birth and our subjective experience result in the feelings of loss and disconnection that are the basis of all kinds of neuroses as well as of those very intuitions that religion and philosophy strive to interpret and give meaning.
It is my opinion that these feelings of loss and disconnection are the primary motive for the account of Adam and Eve’s expulsion from the Garden of Eden in Genesis. This allegory, dealing with the separation of man and God, is quite different from the rest of the Old Testament and probably predates it by many thousands of years. It became the basis for Augustine’s ‘Original Sin’ and thus a source for conceptions of human fallibility and corruption that profoundly shaped Christianity and continued to impact secular institutions such as Law due to the way faith continued to shape beliefs about human nature. To paraphrase Jedediah Purdy in ‘After Nature’, ‘law [guides human action] by translating ideal images [...] into concrete regimes of power.’
The world as we encounter it today is, as it were, living proof of Augustine’s theological claim that man is fallible and corrupt from inception. And we increasingly face a type of despondency in our politics suggesting that many people actually believe that humanity are incapable of doing better for ourselves due to some fundamental flaw in our design. In other words, Augustine’s claims about human fallibility, no matter how poorly reasoned, seem to confirm many people’s experience. The question we should ask is whether this confirmation amounts to proof? I believe Augustine got it wrong and that the intuitions that Original Sin addresses actually lead towards a liberating understanding of our relationship to the ‘divine’. But to get there, we shall have to abandon the theological premises of Augustine’s day, namely faith in a supernatural and moral creation, and abandon any notion of human consciousness as a metaphysical phenomenon. Instead, we should, in my view, strive to understand the relationship between biology and consciousness, mind and matter, not in dualistic terms as separate categories but as different aspects of a single whole. It is my contention that the allegory of Adam and Eve’s ‘fall from Grace’ is actually about a cognitive transformation that occurs as a consequence of the existential transformation that follows birth, when we are quite literally ‘separated from our Creator.’
This separation has important implications in human development and the ‘traumatic’ consequences are easily aggravated by social and economic conditions, poverty, injustice, poor parenting and institutional practices such as ‘poisonous pedagogy’ that further alienate individuals from themselves, disrupting the ‘divine dialogue’ within and transferring authority and power to official institutions such as Church and State. The same can be said of any situation or condition that ‘destroys the love of life in another human being’ or causes us to distrust or doubt our own intuitions and gut feelings, to neglect our creative urges and curtail our curiosity about ourselves and the world in general (e.g. sexual abuse, violence, authoritarianism).
This usurpation of the wisdom and power of individuals is a fundamental problem of modern society and is in many ways the major obstacle to our ability to solve contemporary global crises. These crises are often cast in terms of technological problems, and thus as necessitating ‘change’ rather than ‘transformation’. This is, in my opinion, why the present political system is incapable of resolving the crises it creates and why a radically new kind of politics is needed, one that I believe ought to be grounded in a radically transformed relationship to ourselves. The solution to these crises is thus, in part, therapeutic —aiming to restore wholeness and integrity within the individual. This restoration is in my view fundamental to the renewal of our relationship to the rest of creation.
One subject that regularly comes up in the context of integrating (traumatic) memories of birth is death. Birth and death are not merely symbolically related as the beginning and end of life, but also (psycho-) dynamically related in the way that feelings about birth are transposed onto our expectations of death. This is impossible to understand if one presumes that life only begins after birth, in other words that we have no recollection of birth and intrauterine life, a position that seems untenable in light of serious research. The transposition of feelings about birth onto feelings about the end of life, and possible afterlife is in this light closely and causally related to the awareness we carry, perhaps unconscious, of a phase of life during which we were literally part of another human being and inside her (the Latin term for womb is “matrix”). This awareness, even if unconscious, is moderated by the circumstances of early childhood in which we may either develop a deeper sense of grief, anguish and loss, or in which any residual sense of loss is assuaged by the care and respect lavished upon us by parents assisted by favourable social conditions.
Integration of memories of birth, including traumatic ones, and awareness of their origins and how these shape our intuitions about death as well as how they predispose us toward a whole spectrum of beliefs and perceptions thus provides what I term a ‘radical new horizon of possibility.’ This horizon of possibility remains unavailable to those in whom the memories of this phase, especially its specifically traumatic characteristics, remains unconscious, or who strictly adheres to normative beliefs that hold that children do not retain any memory at all of birth. The integration of memories and feelings from this phase of life is not merely a psychodynamic accomplishment, it also entails a radical reorientation of our beliefs and values that has significant implications for our attitude towards death. This is why I refer to the process of integration as an ‘ethical’ transformation. As Sogyal Rinpoche counsels us in ‘The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying’ it is worthwhile to meditate upon death every day of our lives. Meditation on death and dying empowers us to establish priorities, to decide what is most important and meaningful and to actually choose to live according to those principles. And it is through living according to these principles that we can actually overcome our fear of death, make it a meaningful event instead of a tragedy. In other words, as long as we continue to experience life as if it is some sort of mistake, as if our birth were a ‘fall from grace’ we are unable to embrace our own lives in their totality, including death.
It is in this sense then, that we must acknowledge the profound impact of Augustine’s legacy; the entirety of Western culture is constructed, so to speak, on a distorted understanding of human nature. For Augustine, Original Sin confirmed his understanding of the injustice and pain he undoubtedly saw in the world as ‘the wages of Sin’. There can be little doubt that the lives of many people were and are ‘nasty, brutish and short’ (Hobbes). But the allegory of the Garden of Eden was never intended to justify these conditions or impute that human nature is flawed. What I am proposing is that there are two ways to read this allegory and that the process of integration described above reveals it in an entirely different light.

Getting back to the Garden

The central event in the allegory of the Garden of Eden is the eating of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge. This act precipitates the events that lead to what Christian theology describes as ‘the Fall from Grace’ and the alienation of humans from the divine. The symbol of the Tree of Knowledge suggests that all subsequent events can be interpreted as ensuing from the ‘acquisition of knowledge’ and particularly ‘self-awareness’; in fact the very next thing Adam and Eve do is to hide themselves from God after they become aware of their nakedness. This interpretation is also favoured by authors like Robert Alter who argue that given the context of ‘disobedience’, when God forbids the man to eat from the Tree of Knowledge, he warns that if he does so, he is "doomed to die". In other words, the condition of man subsequent to eating of the Tree of Knowledge is that of ‘knowing death’ or being aware of impending death, a condition that is inseparable from awareness of the self as a distinct and separate being rather than as undifferentiated from the rest of creation (including ‘God’).
The transformation from the state prior to eating of the Tree of Knowledge to after it can be interpreted as both cognitive and existential. The separation is nothing other than awareness of self that casts all else, including God, as ‘other’. This process is eloquently described by philosopher Martin Buber in ‘Ich und Du’. Buber's main proposition is that we may address existence in two ways:

The attitude of the "I" towards an "It", towards an object that is separate in itself, which we either use or experience.
The attitude of the "I" towards "Thou", in a relationship in which the other is not separated by discrete bounds.

And it is probably not a consequence that Buber refers to the child in the womb as undergoing a sort of awakening where it first acquires the sense of itself as opposed to other. Numerous references to the womb as the primary model for our sense of self and relation to God can be found in religious texts. The important issue here is that the separation between human being and God can be interpreted as a reversible precisely because it is fundamentally a state of consciousness.
This provides us with a comprehensive way to understand how a therapeutic integration of the self encompassing our earliest memories and traumas can radically transform the basic conditions of our life and thereby reestablish the ‘Unio Mystica’. The Unio Mystica is arguably nothing other than our own reunited integrated self, fully open and awakened to the ‘undifferentiated state’ in which all things are truly One. So what should we, or can we do with this awareness?

Implications:

It is time to consider some important implications that ensue from awareness of the way birth shapes human development and to consider how social and cultural institutions mediate this awareness. And it is necessary to consider this because it points to our collective responsibility.
Knowing what we do about the primary importance of birth in e.g. mental health, does this not propose both radical new options for treatment as well as for prevention of mental health problems? Surely this awareness commends excellence in the care for and support of women, mothers and children, especially in all matters pertaining to pregnancy and birth, childcare and parenting. Since the way we raise children actually determines our collective future, should we not do the utmost possible to ensure children are brought into this world and cared for with all due attention and respect?
It would appear that many cultures have indeed understood this lesson well, but it is a lesson that we seem to have forgotten with dire consequences. This problem is political in nature in that it points to a collective responsibility to ensure that our institutions are geared towards human wellbeing instead of towards maximising production and profit for the few. A comprehensive model of human development that clarifies the relationship between human subjectivity and the type of society we have as well as how trauma from early life is reproduced within these very institutions provides compelling motives for doing everything within our power to promote integration of individuals. Armed with an awareness of the actual conditions that shape human psychological, spiritual and ethical development it is possible to envision a society dedicated entirely to the fulfilment of human potential rather than merely ‘managing’ human beings as if we are indeed ‘flawed from inception’.