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Psychiatry and Psychology in the Writings of L. Ron Hubbard

Queenmab321

Patron Meritorious
consider the lilies of the field, they toil not neither do they reap yet solomon in all his glory was not so brilliantly arrayed. if the lord care so for the grasses of the field which are nothing, which are here today and tomorrow are cast into the fire how much more will he care for you who are everything?

mud?

say as you will

but sight unseen i'll warrant you for doing better than you say

I can remember my mother observing, without a trace of irony, that the sparrow still hits the ground.

If it turns out that everything and everyone you have ever known, every emotion you have ever felt, however sublime, may be explained in terms of physical phenomena, if they are only extraordinarily complex arrangements of matter, what is it exactly that you believe will have been lost?
 
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I can remember my mother observing, without a trace of irony, that the sparrow still hits the ground.

If it turns out that everything and everyone you have ever known, every emotion you have ever felt, however sublime, may be explained in terms of physical phenomena, if they are only extraordinarily complex arrangements of matter, what is it exactly that you believe will have been lost?

the 1967 world series. '75 and '86 as well

more seriously, truth is lost. freedom and dignity are lost. b f skinner's materialist behaviourist tome "beyond freedom and dignity" was on the required reading list in hundreds of universities for years and was a battlewagon in an armada of thought that rambled lethally through my own life. zamyatin, huxley and orwell will prove to be dark prophets; shakespeare will actually be a million monkeys with typewriters
 

Queenmab321

Patron Meritorious
the 1967 world series. '75 and '86 as well

more seriously, truth is lost. freedom and dignity are lost. b f skinner's materialist behaviourist tome "beyond freedom and dignity" was on the required reading list in hundreds of universities for years and was a battlewagon in an armada of thought that rambled lethally through my own life. zamyatin, huxley and orwell will prove to be dark prophets; shakespeare will actually be a million monkeys with typewriters

“If they do not understand that we are bringing them a mathematically faultless happiness, our duty will be to compel them to be happier. But before we take up weapons, we shall try the word."

I'm afraid reducing the material world to Skinner is about as misguided as reducing the spiritual world to Hubbard. Both fall in the ditch. But, to his credit, I believe Skinner probably meant well. Walden II is like Brave New World without the dread.

Please do read this as soon as possible:
http://www.chomsky.info/articles/19711230.htm

Also, if you haven't read Chesterton, you should. I think you'd like him. Here's an excerpt from Orthodoxy, c. 1908. This passage has been bumping around in my head lately in relation to Hubbard and his infernal "tech." Why that is should become apparent pretty quickly. (It's public domain now, so everybody calm the fuck down!):

If a man says (for instance) that men have a conspiracy against him, you cannot dispute it except by saying that all the men deny that they are conspirators; which is exactly what conspirators would do. His explanation covers the facts as much as yours. Or if a man says that he is the rightful King of England, it is no complete answer to say that the existing authorities call him mad; for if he were King of England that might be the wisest thing for the existing authorities to do. Or if a man says that he is Jesus Christ, it is no answer to tell him that the world denies his divinity; for the world denied Christ's.


Nevertheless he is wrong. But if we attempt to trace his error in exact terms, we shall not find it quite so easy as we had supposed. Perhaps the nearest we can get to expressing it is to say this: that his mind moves in a perfect but narrow circle. A small circle is quite as infinite as a large circle; but, though it is quite as infinite, it is not so large. In the same way the insane explanation is quite as complete as the sane one, but it is not so large. A bullet is quite as round as the world, but it is not the world. There is such a thing as a narrow universality; there is such a thing as a small and cramped eternity; you may see it in many modern religions. Now, speaking quite externally and empirically, we may say that the strongest and most unmistakable mark of madness is this combination between a logical completeness and a spiritual contraction. The lunatic's theory explains a large number of things, but it does not explain them in a large way. I mean that if you or I were dealing with a mind that was growing morbid, we should be chiefly concerned not so much to give it arguments as to give it air, to convince it that there was something cleaner and cooler outside the suffocation of a single argument. Suppose, for instance, it were the first case that I took as typical; suppose it were the case of a man who accused everybody of conspiring against him. If we could express our deepest feelings of protest and appeal against this obsession, I suppose we should say something like this: "Oh, I admit that you have your case and have it by heart, and that many things do fit into other things as you say. I admit that your explanation explains a great deal; but what a great deal it leaves out! Are there no other stories in the world except yours; and are all men busy with your business? Suppose we grant the details; perhaps when the man in the street did not seem to see you it was only his cunning; perhaps when the policeman asked you your name it was only because he knew it already. But how much happier you would be if you only knew that these people cared nothing about you! How much larger your life would be if your self could become smaller in it; if you could really look at other men with common curiosity and pleasure; if you could see them walking as they are in their sunny selfishness and their virile indifference! You would begin to be interested in them, because they were not interested in you. You would break out of this tiny and tawdry theatre in which your own little plot is always being played, and you would find yourself under a freer sky, in a street full of splendid strangers." Or suppose it were the second case of madness, that of a man who claims the crown, your impulse would be to answer, "All right! Perhaps you know that you are the King of England; but why do you care? Make one magnificent effort and you will be a human being and look down on all the kings of the earth." Or it might be the third case, of the madman who called himself Christ. If we said what we felt, we should say, "So you are the Creator and Redeemer of the world: but what a small world it must be! What a little heaven you must inhabit, with angels no bigger than butterflies! How sad it must be to be God; and an inadequate God! Is there really no life fuller and no love more marvelous than yours; and is it really in your small and painful pity that all flesh must put its faith? How much happier you would be, how much more of you there would be, if the hammer of a higher God could smash your small cosmos, scattering the stars like spangles, and leave you in the open, free like other men to look up as well as down”!
 
There are two basic tendencies in the universe. Entropy (towards dissolution and chaos) and Syntropy (towards order and coherence). Life seems to be syntropic.

But let's not forget that we have a built in part of our minds to see things in patterns and order.

It would be more precise to say that we see in the world a tendency towards order and chaos, but we don't really know what is really going on.

The Anabaptist Jacques
 
“If they do not understand that we are bringing them a mathematically faultless happiness, our duty will be to compel them to be happier. But before we take up weapons, we shall try the word."

I'm afraid reducing the material world to Skinner is about as misguided as reducing the spiritual world to Hubbard. Both fall in the ditch. But, to his credit, I believe Skinner probably meant well. Walden II is like Brave New World without the dread.

Please do read this as soon as possible:
http://www.chomsky.info/articles/19711230.htm

Also, if you haven't read Chesterton, you should. I think you'd like him. Here's an excerpt from Orthodoxy, c. 1908. This passage has been bumping around in my head lately in relation to Hubbard and his infernal "tech." Why that is should become apparent pretty quickly. (It's public domain now, so everybody calm the fuck down!):

If a man says (for instance) that men have a conspiracy against him, you cannot dispute it except by saying that all the men deny that they are conspirators; which is exactly what conspirators would do. His explanation covers the facts as much as yours. Or if a man says that he is the rightful King of England, it is no complete answer to say that the existing authorities call him mad; for if he were King of England that might be the wisest thing for the existing authorities to do. Or if a man says that he is Jesus Christ, it is no answer to tell him that the world denies his divinity; for the world denied Christ's.


Nevertheless he is wrong. But if we attempt to trace his error in exact terms, we shall not find it quite so easy as we had supposed. Perhaps the nearest we can get to expressing it is to say this: that his mind moves in a perfect but narrow circle. A small circle is quite as infinite as a large circle; but, though it is quite as infinite, it is not so large. In the same way the insane explanation is quite as complete as the sane one, but it is not so large. A bullet is quite as round as the world, but it is not the world. There is such a thing as a narrow universality; there is such a thing as a small and cramped eternity; you may see it in many modern religions. Now, speaking quite externally and empirically, we may say that the strongest and most unmistakable mark of madness is this combination between a logical completeness and a spiritual contraction. The lunatic's theory explains a large number of things, but it does not explain them in a large way. I mean that if you or I were dealing with a mind that was growing morbid, we should be chiefly concerned not so much to give it arguments as to give it air, to convince it that there was something cleaner and cooler outside the suffocation of a single argument. Suppose, for instance, it were the first case that I took as typical; suppose it were the case of a man who accused everybody of conspiring against him. If we could express our deepest feelings of protest and appeal against this obsession, I suppose we should say something like this: "Oh, I admit that you have your case and have it by heart, and that many things do fit into other things as you say. I admit that your explanation explains a great deal; but what a great deal it leaves out! Are there no other stories in the world except yours; and are all men busy with your business? Suppose we grant the details; perhaps when the man in the street did not seem to see you it was only his cunning; perhaps when the policeman asked you your name it was only because he knew it already. But how much happier you would be if you only knew that these people cared nothing about you! How much larger your life would be if your self could become smaller in it; if you could really look at other men with common curiosity and pleasure; if you could see them walking as they are in their sunny selfishness and their virile indifference! You would begin to be interested in them, because they were not interested in you. You would break out of this tiny and tawdry theatre in which your own little plot is always being played, and you would find yourself under a freer sky, in a street full of splendid strangers." Or suppose it were the second case of madness, that of a man who claims the crown, your impulse would be to answer, "All right! Perhaps you know that you are the King of England; but why do you care? Make one magnificent effort and you will be a human being and look down on all the kings of the earth." Or it might be the third case, of the madman who called himself Christ. If we said what we felt, we should say, "So you are the Creator and Redeemer of the world: but what a small world it must be! What a little heaven you must inhabit, with angels no bigger than butterflies! How sad it must be to be God; and an inadequate God! Is there really no life fuller and no love more marvelous than yours; and is it really in your small and painful pity that all flesh must put its faith? How much happier you would be, how much more of you there would be, if the hammer of a higher God could smash your small cosmos, scattering the stars like spangles, and leave you in the open, free like other men to look up as well as down”!

i should read g.k. and many others too. wittgenstein!

but to hell with intellectual constructs in general

dylan?

now yer talking!

yes that exact verse from our beloved laureate did more to innoculate me against dyadal thought than anything

yeah, stressed, chafed, wounded i can slip into right/wrong good/evil etc but i mostly roll with Right(?), right, less than right...

but materialism is off on the less than right, and rather dangerous.

it is a great challenge to know our spiritual nature but i have had some success and may god forbid the materialists should succeed in their ongoing efforts to pave us all over

p.s. skinner was a scumbag
 

Seda Rashidi

New Member
THE CIRCUMCISION REFERENCE LIBRARY
Psychiatric Clinics of North America, Volume 12, Number 2, Pages 389-411,
June 1989.


The Compulsion to Repeat the Trauma
Re-enactment, Revictimization, and Masochism
Bessel A. van der Kolk, MD*

During the formative years of contemporary psychiatry much attention was paid to the continuing role of past traumatic experiences on the current lives of people. Charcot, Janet, and Freud all noted that fragmented memories of traumatic events dominated the mental life of many of their patient and built their theories about the nature and treatment of psychopathology on this recognition. Janet75 thought that traumatic memories of traumatic events persist as unassimilated fixed ideas that act as foci for the development of alternate states of consciousness, including dissociative phenomena, such as fugue states, amnesias, and chronic states of helplessness and depression. Unbidden memories of the trauma may return as physical sensations, horrific images or nightmares, behavioral reenactments, or a combination of these. Janet showed how traumatized individuals become fixated on the trauma: difficulties in assimilating subsequent experiences as well. It is "as if their personality development has stopped at a certain point and cannot expand anymore by the addition or assimilation of new elements."76 Freud independently came to similar conclusions.43,45 Initially, he thought all hysterical symptoms were caused by childhood sexual "seduction" of which unconscious memories were activated, when during adolescence, a person was exposed to situations reminiscent of the original trauma. The trauma permanently disturbed the capacity to deal with other challenges, and the victim who did not integrate the trauma was doomed to "repeat the repressed material as a contemporary experience in instead or . . . remembering it as something belonging to the past."44 In this article, I will show how the trauma is repeated on behavioral, emotional, physiologic, and neuroendocrinologic levels, whose confluence explains the diversity of repetition phenomena.

Many traumatized people expose themselves, seemingly compulsively, to situations reminiscent of the original trauma. These behavioral reenactments are rarely consciously understood to be related to earlier life experiences. This "repetition compulsion" has received surprisingly little systematic exploration during the 70 years since its discovery, though it is regularly described in the clinical literature.12,17,21,29,61,64,65,69,88,112,137 Freud thought that the aim of repetition was to gain mastery, but clinical experience has shown that this rarely happens; instead, repetition causes further suffering for the victims or for people in their surroundings.


http://www.cirp.org/library/psych/vanderkolk/

I had no idea about Freud's patients re-experiencing fragmented traumas, over and over. Interesting journal.
 

Queenmab321

Patron Meritorious
i should read g.k. and many others too. wittgenstein!

but to hell with intellectual constructs in general

dylan?

now yer talking!

yes that exact verse from our beloved laureate did more to innoculate me against dyadal thought than anything

yeah, stressed, chafed, wounded i can slip into right/wrong good/evil etc but i mostly roll with Right(?), right, less than right...

but materialism is off on the less than right, and rather dangerous.

it is a great challenge to know our spiritual nature but i have had some success and may god forbid the materialists should succeed in their ongoing efforts to pave us all over

p.s. skinner was a scumbag

My point, CB, and I think it's Chomsky's point as well, is that Skinner wasn't wrong because he was a materialist. He was wrong because he drew unwarranted conclusions about the implications of materialism.
The powerful intensity of the emotions produced in us by our moral sensibility moves us to objectify our values and project them on to the natural world, but, after all, there are no moral phenomena. There is no objective standard of conduct. There's just us and what we choose to do. But, in here, within this merely human community of people like ourselves who may or may not possess immortal souls (Does it matter at all?*), the great "spiritual" challenge remains because we have each other to love.

* Most likely, we long for eternal life because we're scared shitless of dying, and we're scared shitess of dying because animals that are scared shitless of dying are more likely to survive than those who aren't.
 
My point, CB, and I think it's Chomsky's point as well, is that Skinner wasn't wrong because he was a materialist. He was wrong because he drew unwarranted conclusions about the implications of materialism.
The powerful intensity of the emotions produced in us by our moral sensibility moves us to objectify our values and project them on to the natural world, but, after all, there are no moral phenomena. There is no objective standard of conduct. There's just us and what we choose to do. But, in here, within this merely human community of people like ourselves who may or may not possess immortal souls (Does it matter at all?*), the great "spiritual" challenge remains because we have each other to love.

* Most likely, we long for eternal life because we're scared shitless of dying, and we're scared shitess of dying because animals that are scared shitless of dying are more likely to survive than those who aren't.

i don't long for eternal life, i'm not scared of death, i vastly enjoy mortal life in spite of it's absurd torments and chomsky chomps choad

read the handwriting on the wall. i'm pushing hack in boston...
 

Queenmab321

Patron Meritorious
i don't long for eternal life, i'm not scared of death, i vastly enjoy mortal life in spite of it's absurd torments and chomsky chomps choad

read the handwriting on the wall. i'm pushing hack in boston...

I think I've found your Wittgenstein, Commander:


"Go ahead, believe. It will do no harm."
 

uniquemand

Unbeliever
But let's not forget that we have a built in part of our minds to see things in patterns and order.

It would be more precise to say that we see in the world a tendency towards order and chaos, but we don't really know what is really going on.

The Anabaptist Jacques

We cannot understand everything at once in our present state. However, specialists DO understand both syntropy and entropy. Books like this explain them: http://www.amazon.com/Entropy-Syntropy-Causality-retrocausality-sciences/dp/3843392730

Retrocausality really freaks people out, but it makes perfect sense in terms of "strange attractors" (physics and mathematics ideas https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attractor), and is very well proven.
 

Queenmab321

Patron Meritorious
But let's not forget that we have a built in part of our minds to see things in patterns and order.<br>
<br>
It would be more precise to say that we see in the world a tendency towards order and chaos, but we don't really know what is really going on.<br>
<br>
The Anabaptist Jacques
<br>


You seem almost to doubt there is a world to see, but I think I take your meaning. I think this business of imposing patterns onto the world is fascinating. Wouldn't you say the collective realization that we are prone to draw spurious connections and the resolve to avoid this error, is an essential aspect of the scientific enterprise that began in 17th century? We tend to think of superstition as childish and simple minded, but just a mustard seed of credulity renders it dazzling and profoundly compelling. I believe this intellectual frailty lies at the heart of Scientology. Hubbard's cosmos and tech are an exceptional example of laying over the the world a cobweb of mesmerizing, orderly absurdities. It's similar to astrology. Having once taken for granted the patently ridiculous premise at the heart of astrology, it becomes possible to build intricately beautiful worlds of significances. I can recall as a Christian feeling uneasy at how believers would reflexively construe evidence of God's mercy from the most horrible tragedies. God visits cancer or a house fire or a car accident on a some poor soul and is joyfully praised for sparing his life.
 

Helena Handbasket

Gold Meritorious Patron
I can recall as a Christian feeling uneasy at how believers would reflexively construe evidence of God's mercy from the most horrible tragedies. God visits cancer or a house fire or a car accident on a some poor soul and is joyfully praised for sparing his life.

That's like saying unemployment has gone from 7% to 20% in the last year but when it goes DOWN to 19% in the month after that, everybody is celebrating because the economy is improving so beautifully.

Both of these viewpoints are wacko.

Helena
 

Cat's Squirrel

Gold Meritorious Patron
We cannot understand everything at once in our present state. However, specialists DO understand both syntropy and entropy. Books like this explain them: http://www.amazon.com/Entropy-Syntropy-Causality-retrocausality-sciences/dp/3843392730[/B]

Retrocausality really freaks people out, but it makes perfect sense in terms of "strange attractors" (physics and mathematics ideas https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attractor), and is very well proven.


It's certainly an intriguing subject, but $76 for a paperback of 128 pages (and used copies are even more)? Sorry but I think I'll pass.
 

Udarnik

Gold Meritorious Patron
We cannot understand everything at once in our present state. However, specialists DO understand both syntropy and entropy. Books like this explain them: http://www.amazon.com/Entropy-Syntropy-Causality-retrocausality-sciences/dp/3843392730

Retrocausality really freaks people out, but it makes perfect sense in terms of "strange attractors" (physics and mathematics ideas https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attractor), and is very well proven.

WTF? That book is .... Jeebus Key-rist on a chrome-plated, jet powered pogo stick I can't say what that book is without searching for non-English swear words, because there are not enough expletives in my mother tongue to convey the shitheadery and jackassery contained in just the blurb for that piece of garbage.

Do the two clowns who wrote that book have any idea about the current search in physics for a Unified Field Theory? Oh, silly me, chemical physics-type dude that I am, I never knew that someone came up with it in 1925.

Well, no. No one did. Not in 1925, and not in 2013, either.

Oskar Klein
and Walter Gordon never worked together as the blurb eludes (but carefully avoids stating outright). In 1926 (eff me, why can't these pseudoscientists get the smallest details correct - oh, right, if they paid any attention to details, they would have the skills to be real scientists), Klein and Gordon independently came up with a relativistic wave equation that bears both their names.

What this means is that they accounted for the fact that electrons are moving at high fractions of light speed, and unless you account for that, non-relativistic equations such as Schrodinger's original wave equation do not yield answers that completely agree with experimental observations. This in NO WAY is an equation that unites these two fundamental theories, it simply dumps in relativistic motion terms into the QM wave equation, because experimentally we know electrons travel that fast. The technical term for this is a kludge. :eyeroll:

This is the equation:
klein_eqn.gif



I know what every term is in there. I had to solve the damn thing by hand in grad school. There is no goddamn "syntropy" term in it or implied by it. Psi is the wave function, t is time, the inverted delta is the Hamiltonian operator, m is mass, c is the speed of light, and h(bar) is Plank's constant. The funny "d" shapes are partial differential signs. Fuck, there isn't even an entropy term there, this is Quantum Mechanics, not Statistical Mechanics.

The equation is incomplete, too. It neglects the spin of a particle introduced by Pauli in 1927.

I can see where some half-educated charlatan like the founder of a certain cult (cough, LRH, new-clear physicist, cough) or those two dipshits who wrote that book might seize upon a QM equation that has relativity in it and think it's some sort of unified field, but where they pulled "syntropy" from (other than their posterior orifice, I mean) beats the hell out of me.

Speaking of "syntropy" - they keep using that word. I don't think it means what they think it means.

Here's a protip on sorting science from probable pseudoscience at a quick glance (though this does skate on the edge of ad hominem, life is too short to be constantly waylaid by people willing and eager to throw garbage into open minds) - always give books on a topic that are written by someone with a degree in another discipline a little more scrutiny than books written by experts in that given field:

Dr. Vannini (Ph.D) works as an Ericksonian psychotherapist and conducts experimental research, in the field of cognitive sciences, on the implications of the laws of entropy and syntropy. Dr. Di Corpo works in the field of social research and has developed the Vital Needs Model.


Emphasis mine.
 
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