Psychosemiotics - formal/neural basis of repression
PSYCHOSEMIOTICS: The formal system
From Greek psyche = soul and sema (semeiosis, semiosis) = sign (signification)- Where psychology and sign-use intersect.
1. Survey of current uses:
C.S. Pierce: obscure, abstract epistemic treatment of what is
clear, distinct and observable (by awareness of oneself speaking). Pierce's obscure work has blocked, by diffusing into verbiage, recognition of an autonomous formal domain. The key to translating his torturous talk of triads into useful analytical categories is to understand his definition of "sign", and "semiosis" as fundamentally distinct from what is meant below by "sign-use": his use takes "signs" as entities, whereas the present use takes "signs" in the act of "signing" - standing for something other than itself, in Pierce's accepted definition. "In act", in context, the sign is not one thing, about which 'theories' properly abound, though grammatical use of the term as a general name suggests that. "It" is two. That which is "in-use" is A. an empirical (hence anatomically based) particular (perceived writing, sound, etc.)-- call this the "token". B. In the process of 'standing for something other than itself' (as Pierce puts it, already somewhat misleadingly), the token acquires "text". Tokens are fungible, never two exactly identical; texts are "constants", the meaning of the word "black", for instance, however tokened. The sign in the act of signifying is A. a token; B. ... exemplifying a text. The context in which a (otherwise ignored) flickering sense datum passes from a heard quality, through motivation of the vocal chords to respond, by acquiring "meaning", is communication. Thus, "Jupiter" evokes, and has evoked, earth's huge companion planet. The way a text relates to its token is unique: it "caps" the momentary particular with "meaning"; the next step is to bring the tokens into a regularized, grammatical form.
This distinction between text and token in any sign-use S* is basic to psychosemiotics as a system. It defines the field of study: the events that take place whenever communication occurs.
The duality of text and token agrees with -- reconstructs --a chief idea of another recognized originators of psychosemiotics: the brilliant Soviet social scientist Lev Vygotsky.
The two-memory cycles he posits can be correlated with memory for text -- meaning connections -- and memory for tokens --perceptual recognition connections. This duality is taken up into the system as two distinct memory-loops in sign-use processing, marked on the diagrammatic schema (the psychosemioptiscope) as factors converging in token-becoming-text (seeing 'Jupiter", thinking of the planet -- or vice versa). However, lacking a systematic schema, Vygotsky does not properly connect the way the two memories synchronize, namely, through the unconscious. This allowed him to supposed native 'folk' memory involved in school learning could be replaced by "socialized" discourse, even learning a new history. The demand industrial modernity made on education theory tore up the roots of Old Russia's historical memory, but that is side bar, illustrating the importance of getting psychosemiotics right.
A third kind* approach to psychosemiotics emphasizes the side of psychology from a cognitivist standpoint. This term itself is a residue of old-fashioned thinking in Latin. Intellectual history in the West from the Greeks forward is marked by textualist metaphysics: equating The Real with The Rational. This is secondary feed-back of textualist metaphysics looping itself into the official grammar of "reasonable discourse".
(*Michon, Jackson, Jorna "Semiotic aspects of psychology"
http://www.xs4all.nl/~michonja/psysemiotics.htm )
2. Consciousness and TokenSpace. (omit at present; these are a mirror-image dyad of the highest, most extensive meta-level totality)
3. The Double Memory Loop System; REPRESSION
The two memories, for text and token, underpin the two levels of repression in Freud's work.
The memory-gaps would be barriers crossed when contents of the system* PrCs (preconscious) are transferred into to the system* conscious (Cs); and, below and prior to that, when contents from the system "UnCs" (unconscious) go over into PrC. Freud's later theoretical language left the 1900 systems* talk behind, even as his general psychological framework shifted from neuropsychology to fantasy-libido personality analysis. However, his early distinction between primary and secondary process, echoed by Vygotsky and others, is crucial to a psychosemiotics based on text and token, since the two barriers can be correlated with the two types of content. Blockage of memory 2 (acquired by learning grammatized sign-use) leaves thought without associations of meaning. The person sees "Jupiter", but something keeps the planet normally associated with it from coming to mind. The flow of coherent. logically connected thought (expressed in strings of sign-uses) requires upper-level, secondary process recall memory to "kick in". If a speaker is asked "What are you talking about?" --they are expected to be able to answer by giving further descriptions of the same thing, not repeating the same tokens over and over as if you* knew the meaning.
A site in brain processing that could allow such an intervention has been located.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/18/science/18memory.html?_r=1&oref=slogin
In Memory-Bank 'Dialogue' the Brain is Talking to Itself.
One immediately notices A. this couldn't possibly be literally true (without a couple of homunculi); B. the easy projection of communication as metaphor ("dialogue"), as if meanings were exchanged, is cozy, but is a metaphysical obfuscation. C. Overlaying the site where failure of normal memory process could interrupt the flow of conscious textual associations, the notion of "the Brain Talking to Itself" is a "false square": it elicits the place where content of Prs are incompatible with the content of Cs, but then displaces this outside consciousness into brain function.
A micro-second gap in neuro-psychological processing:
New recordings of electrical activity in the brain may explain a major part of its function, including how it consolidates daily memories, why it needs to dream and how it constructs models of the world to guide behavior.
The recordings capture dialogue between the hippocampus, where initial memories of the day’s events are formed, and the neocortex, the sheet of neurons on the outer surface of the brain that mediates conscious thought and contains long-term memories.
during nondreaming sleep, the neurons of both the hippocampus and the neocortex replayed memories — in repeated simultaneous bursts of electrical activity — of a task the rat learned the previous day......Dr. Wilson reported that after running a maze, rats would replay their route during idle moments, as if to consolidate the memory, although the replay, surprisingly, was in reverse order of travel. ....the same replays occurring in the neocortex as well as in the hippocampus as the rats slept. The rewinds appeared as components of repeated cycles of neural activity, each of which lasted just under a second. Because the cycles in the hippocampus and neocortex were synchronized, they seemed to be part of a dialogue between the two regions.
Psychosemiotics can connect this with the site at which the system Pcs, goes over to Cs. The "something" that withholds what is needed by a speaker intent on driving home a point, for instnce -- doesn't want him to finish --comes in when the hippocampus won't supply the image. Someone who constantly veers off topic, unable to complete a sentence at the textual level without the block coming up, yet unable NOT to recur at every opportunity to never-finished matter, whatever it is. At this level, "repression" is more nearly "suppression" of connectedness ('split off'), since both word and image are conscious, but kept rigorously disjoined and opposed. When this memory is psychologically damaged, a person may be unable to complete a sentence without a 'defensive' blocking, diversion, misdirection, spin ("hemming and hawing"), to ward off some threatening content. (Like Gov. Mc Greevey.s "I am a gay American" speech.)
A lower level blockage can occur between the system Ucs., the deeper bio-'psychoid' stratum of S*process, and the system PrC, which more properly deserves the name "repression." It provides a site that would deny content access to even PrCs.. All reminders of of the tabood content are rejected as incompatible with reality. This is "anti-cathexis" of the repressed content.
The work of Jonathan Winson on neuronal gating in the hippocampus* provides an explanation of how this is possible, along the same lines as above. There is a "gating", a transfer of micro-electrical impulses between processes in the lower arms of the fornix, the amygdala, and the upper parts, the hippocampus. It can be hypothesized that a block could occur at this point, preventing routine development of the neuronal impulse chain connecting perception and words.
****
http://www.geocities.com/hairybobby2000/dreamlthetawave.html
*****
It is accepted that the major function of the amygdala vis a vis consciousness is to supply emotional content.* This requires the work of a memory of self-in-earlier-similar situations in order to
connect to present conscious sign-use. as impulse-driven ("instinctual") behavior comes under rules of appropriate expression. Mature development requires this "Id" basis of consciousness, in Freud's later Id-Ego-Super-Ego personality triad, to accept socially modulated, often terribly punished non-conforming belahior. In so far as "the brain" could "send signals to itself", it could well tell the amygdala "don't send anymore of those images over to the hippocampus; the boss don't like it."
****/
http://www.clinicalneuropharm.com/pt/re/clnneupharm/abstract.00002826-200509000-00005.htm;jsessionid=FH5LQdLYr0TJnNYJ95WTCQFVZL2gm9nRY06jJJJBflH8tJmZdLlz!1005135326!-949856144!8091!-1
In reviewing the literature, the amygdala emerges as a brain structure critical for emotional processing. It may also be implicated in deficits in emotional recognition found in two major disorders where DA's implication is clear: Parkinson disease and schizophrenia. In addition, the amygdala's response to emotional tasks is likely to be altered by the administration of both agonist and antagonist dopaminergic drugs
ADDING UP:
The gap between hippcampal and neocortical processes is bridged normally by memory supplying the links between textually connected sign uses. The neocortical processes rule adaptive response to present perceptual content, that is to say, reality* as a psychological content. Some hidden censor watches this bridge to prevent unwanted, dangerous, diseased (you never know), alien contents from crossing over into consciousness. To bring this about, something in the brain must receive a signal from from something else, it relating to living situations as a totality, "NOT!". What this applies to can be there, as a conscious content -- in fact, must be -- IN ORDER TO BE REJECTED. This is sign-use generated by DREAM WORK: having everything both way, splitting every emotional situation into good and bad, reversing whatever is wished for that does not fit under "good", so that it does,
There is a deeper, underlying gap between lived experience and dreams -- between what the person, qua conscious perceptive organism goes through, and the way it is replayed in primary-process memory. The amygdala must readily give over these entirely diffuse contents of waking daily life, in sleep, to forms of expression that binds them over for recollection. If blocked from doing so, this will disturb the mental by preventing emotional consolidation. Schizoid identification with both sides of contradictions can result from disturbance of dreaming, as the ego seeks satisfying reality* in one, then the other, as the external situation beckons.
The physiological source of deeper disturbances is trauma. What has inflicted pain and suffering will leave behind a scar-of-irrationality on the reactive side of consciousness; and, a set of signals, later 'threatening' events that can trigger such a reaction. When the trauma has been to a group, as "the holocaust" to the Jews. for instance, such signs as the swastika can trigger an all-or-nothing reaction in individuals who identify with the group. Freud's first views of The Unconscious as a system were, in fact, derived from seeing victims of trauma, especially hysterical girls, and those he saw in the Paris morgue. 'Discovery' (appreciation) of the trauma of birth, when the system undergoing birth is most extremely distressed (75% depletion of oxygen required for life can be reached), provides yet another factual basis for the theory of an Unc. system shared by all; in which "instinctive" behaviors appear organized from birth, as if "inborn", "innate", when actually they are reactions learned in the womb and retained by primary process memory.
Added up this way, the two major repressors of content at the respective gaps filled by memory 1, primary process; and memory 2, secondary process; are trauma and guilt. Guilt constrains the higher, textual memory function to split-off, suppress, keep away, those thing necessary to consciously thing about as real, and this is effected by the dream work. Trauma, commonly of two developmental levels, birth and sex, functions to shatter the unity of consciousness on the token side, leaving it without a continuous internal basis of psychological identity. When Freud spoke of "the Unconscious" as a system, he noted that "its" contents merge, diverge, mix in polymorphous perversity, since there is no such thing as logical negation in it. Distinction and order come only from consciousness and representation.
From Greek psyche = soul and sema (semeiosis, semiosis) = sign (signification)- Where psychology and sign-use intersect.
1. Survey of current uses:
C.S. Pierce: obscure, abstract epistemic treatment of what is
clear, distinct and observable (by awareness of oneself speaking). Pierce's obscure work has blocked, by diffusing into verbiage, recognition of an autonomous formal domain. The key to translating his torturous talk of triads into useful analytical categories is to understand his definition of "sign", and "semiosis" as fundamentally distinct from what is meant below by "sign-use": his use takes "signs" as entities, whereas the present use takes "signs" in the act of "signing" - standing for something other than itself, in Pierce's accepted definition. "In act", in context, the sign is not one thing, about which 'theories' properly abound, though grammatical use of the term as a general name suggests that. "It" is two. That which is "in-use" is A. an empirical (hence anatomically based) particular (perceived writing, sound, etc.)-- call this the "token". B. In the process of 'standing for something other than itself' (as Pierce puts it, already somewhat misleadingly), the token acquires "text". Tokens are fungible, never two exactly identical; texts are "constants", the meaning of the word "black", for instance, however tokened. The sign in the act of signifying is A. a token; B. ... exemplifying a text. The context in which a (otherwise ignored) flickering sense datum passes from a heard quality, through motivation of the vocal chords to respond, by acquiring "meaning", is communication. Thus, "Jupiter" evokes, and has evoked, earth's huge companion planet. The way a text relates to its token is unique: it "caps" the momentary particular with "meaning"; the next step is to bring the tokens into a regularized, grammatical form.
This distinction between text and token in any sign-use S* is basic to psychosemiotics as a system. It defines the field of study: the events that take place whenever communication occurs.
The duality of text and token agrees with -- reconstructs --a chief idea of another recognized originators of psychosemiotics: the brilliant Soviet social scientist Lev Vygotsky.
The two-memory cycles he posits can be correlated with memory for text -- meaning connections -- and memory for tokens --perceptual recognition connections. This duality is taken up into the system as two distinct memory-loops in sign-use processing, marked on the diagrammatic schema (the psychosemioptiscope) as factors converging in token-becoming-text (seeing 'Jupiter", thinking of the planet -- or vice versa). However, lacking a systematic schema, Vygotsky does not properly connect the way the two memories synchronize, namely, through the unconscious. This allowed him to supposed native 'folk' memory involved in school learning could be replaced by "socialized" discourse, even learning a new history. The demand industrial modernity made on education theory tore up the roots of Old Russia's historical memory, but that is side bar, illustrating the importance of getting psychosemiotics right.
A third kind* approach to psychosemiotics emphasizes the side of psychology from a cognitivist standpoint. This term itself is a residue of old-fashioned thinking in Latin. Intellectual history in the West from the Greeks forward is marked by textualist metaphysics: equating The Real with The Rational. This is secondary feed-back of textualist metaphysics looping itself into the official grammar of "reasonable discourse".
(*Michon, Jackson, Jorna "Semiotic aspects of psychology"
http://www.xs4all.nl/~michonja/psysemiotics.htm )
2. Consciousness and TokenSpace. (omit at present; these are a mirror-image dyad of the highest, most extensive meta-level totality)
3. The Double Memory Loop System; REPRESSION
The two memories, for text and token, underpin the two levels of repression in Freud's work.
The memory-gaps would be barriers crossed when contents of the system* PrCs (preconscious) are transferred into to the system* conscious (Cs); and, below and prior to that, when contents from the system "UnCs" (unconscious) go over into PrC. Freud's later theoretical language left the 1900 systems* talk behind, even as his general psychological framework shifted from neuropsychology to fantasy-libido personality analysis. However, his early distinction between primary and secondary process, echoed by Vygotsky and others, is crucial to a psychosemiotics based on text and token, since the two barriers can be correlated with the two types of content. Blockage of memory 2 (acquired by learning grammatized sign-use) leaves thought without associations of meaning. The person sees "Jupiter", but something keeps the planet normally associated with it from coming to mind. The flow of coherent. logically connected thought (expressed in strings of sign-uses) requires upper-level, secondary process recall memory to "kick in". If a speaker is asked "What are you talking about?" --they are expected to be able to answer by giving further descriptions of the same thing, not repeating the same tokens over and over as if you* knew the meaning.
A site in brain processing that could allow such an intervention has been located.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/18/science/18memory.html?_r=1&oref=slogin
In Memory-Bank 'Dialogue' the Brain is Talking to Itself.
One immediately notices A. this couldn't possibly be literally true (without a couple of homunculi); B. the easy projection of communication as metaphor ("dialogue"), as if meanings were exchanged, is cozy, but is a metaphysical obfuscation. C. Overlaying the site where failure of normal memory process could interrupt the flow of conscious textual associations, the notion of "the Brain Talking to Itself" is a "false square": it elicits the place where content of Prs are incompatible with the content of Cs, but then displaces this outside consciousness into brain function.
A micro-second gap in neuro-psychological processing:
New recordings of electrical activity in the brain may explain a major part of its function, including how it consolidates daily memories, why it needs to dream and how it constructs models of the world to guide behavior.
The recordings capture dialogue between the hippocampus, where initial memories of the day’s events are formed, and the neocortex, the sheet of neurons on the outer surface of the brain that mediates conscious thought and contains long-term memories.
during nondreaming sleep, the neurons of both the hippocampus and the neocortex replayed memories — in repeated simultaneous bursts of electrical activity — of a task the rat learned the previous day......Dr. Wilson reported that after running a maze, rats would replay their route during idle moments, as if to consolidate the memory, although the replay, surprisingly, was in reverse order of travel. ....the same replays occurring in the neocortex as well as in the hippocampus as the rats slept. The rewinds appeared as components of repeated cycles of neural activity, each of which lasted just under a second. Because the cycles in the hippocampus and neocortex were synchronized, they seemed to be part of a dialogue between the two regions.
Psychosemiotics can connect this with the site at which the system Pcs, goes over to Cs. The "something" that withholds what is needed by a speaker intent on driving home a point, for instnce -- doesn't want him to finish --comes in when the hippocampus won't supply the image. Someone who constantly veers off topic, unable to complete a sentence at the textual level without the block coming up, yet unable NOT to recur at every opportunity to never-finished matter, whatever it is. At this level, "repression" is more nearly "suppression" of connectedness ('split off'), since both word and image are conscious, but kept rigorously disjoined and opposed. When this memory is psychologically damaged, a person may be unable to complete a sentence without a 'defensive' blocking, diversion, misdirection, spin ("hemming and hawing"), to ward off some threatening content. (Like Gov. Mc Greevey.s "I am a gay American" speech.)
A lower level blockage can occur between the system Ucs., the deeper bio-'psychoid' stratum of S*process, and the system PrC, which more properly deserves the name "repression." It provides a site that would deny content access to even PrCs.. All reminders of of the tabood content are rejected as incompatible with reality. This is "anti-cathexis" of the repressed content.
The work of Jonathan Winson on neuronal gating in the hippocampus* provides an explanation of how this is possible, along the same lines as above. There is a "gating", a transfer of micro-electrical impulses between processes in the lower arms of the fornix, the amygdala, and the upper parts, the hippocampus. It can be hypothesized that a block could occur at this point, preventing routine development of the neuronal impulse chain connecting perception and words.
****
http://www.geocities.com/hairybobby2000/dreamlthetawave.html
*****
It is accepted that the major function of the amygdala vis a vis consciousness is to supply emotional content.* This requires the work of a memory of self-in-earlier-similar situations in order to
connect to present conscious sign-use. as impulse-driven ("instinctual") behavior comes under rules of appropriate expression. Mature development requires this "Id" basis of consciousness, in Freud's later Id-Ego-Super-Ego personality triad, to accept socially modulated, often terribly punished non-conforming belahior. In so far as "the brain" could "send signals to itself", it could well tell the amygdala "don't send anymore of those images over to the hippocampus; the boss don't like it."
****/
http://www.clinicalneuropharm.com/pt/re/clnneupharm/abstract.00002826-200509000-00005.htm;jsessionid=FH5LQdLYr0TJnNYJ95WTCQFVZL2gm9nRY06jJJJBflH8tJmZdLlz!1005135326!-949856144!8091!-1
In reviewing the literature, the amygdala emerges as a brain structure critical for emotional processing. It may also be implicated in deficits in emotional recognition found in two major disorders where DA's implication is clear: Parkinson disease and schizophrenia. In addition, the amygdala's response to emotional tasks is likely to be altered by the administration of both agonist and antagonist dopaminergic drugs
ADDING UP:
The gap between hippcampal and neocortical processes is bridged normally by memory supplying the links between textually connected sign uses. The neocortical processes rule adaptive response to present perceptual content, that is to say, reality* as a psychological content. Some hidden censor watches this bridge to prevent unwanted, dangerous, diseased (you never know), alien contents from crossing over into consciousness. To bring this about, something in the brain must receive a signal from from something else, it relating to living situations as a totality, "NOT!". What this applies to can be there, as a conscious content -- in fact, must be -- IN ORDER TO BE REJECTED. This is sign-use generated by DREAM WORK: having everything both way, splitting every emotional situation into good and bad, reversing whatever is wished for that does not fit under "good", so that it does,
There is a deeper, underlying gap between lived experience and dreams -- between what the person, qua conscious perceptive organism goes through, and the way it is replayed in primary-process memory. The amygdala must readily give over these entirely diffuse contents of waking daily life, in sleep, to forms of expression that binds them over for recollection. If blocked from doing so, this will disturb the mental by preventing emotional consolidation. Schizoid identification with both sides of contradictions can result from disturbance of dreaming, as the ego seeks satisfying reality* in one, then the other, as the external situation beckons.
The physiological source of deeper disturbances is trauma. What has inflicted pain and suffering will leave behind a scar-of-irrationality on the reactive side of consciousness; and, a set of signals, later 'threatening' events that can trigger such a reaction. When the trauma has been to a group, as "the holocaust" to the Jews. for instance, such signs as the swastika can trigger an all-or-nothing reaction in individuals who identify with the group. Freud's first views of The Unconscious as a system were, in fact, derived from seeing victims of trauma, especially hysterical girls, and those he saw in the Paris morgue. 'Discovery' (appreciation) of the trauma of birth, when the system undergoing birth is most extremely distressed (75% depletion of oxygen required for life can be reached), provides yet another factual basis for the theory of an Unc. system shared by all; in which "instinctive" behaviors appear organized from birth, as if "inborn", "innate", when actually they are reactions learned in the womb and retained by primary process memory.
Added up this way, the two major repressors of content at the respective gaps filled by memory 1, primary process; and memory 2, secondary process; are trauma and guilt. Guilt constrains the higher, textual memory function to split-off, suppress, keep away, those thing necessary to consciously thing about as real, and this is effected by the dream work. Trauma, commonly of two developmental levels, birth and sex, functions to shatter the unity of consciousness on the token side, leaving it without a continuous internal basis of psychological identity. When Freud spoke of "the Unconscious" as a system, he noted that "its" contents merge, diverge, mix in polymorphous perversity, since there is no such thing as logical negation in it. Distinction and order come only from consciousness and representation.
posted by Sid Thomas | 11:06 PM
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