From: rc@depsych.Gwinnett.COM (Richard Carlson)
Newsgroups: alt.postmodern
Subject: Re: Trash
Date: 8 Oct 92 12:49:33 GMT

blz1@cunixb.cc.columbia.edu (Betsy L Zucker) writes:

> But Richard, I too have some bones to pick with you on the
> Surgeon General thing.	To say that prior abuse is the prime
> predictor of future abuse does not automagically mean that culture
> has no relationship with violence.  There are a variety of possible
> relationships which aren't mutually exclusive with that finding.

Of course you're right.  The real question is: how much is it one
or the other?

Right now there is a debate in academic psychology between the
constructionists and the realists.  It's pretty much the same
debate that has been going on within Western culture for two and a
half millennia between realism and idealism, but the human psyche
seems to be a good topic for it to center around since the mind
appears to be complex enough that the "idealistic" or
constructionist position has a reasonable chance of being the true
one.

Freud began with an essentially "realistic" view centered around
the notion of psychic "trauma," which is pretty much identical to
the contemporary idea of "abuse," except that Freud (although his
patients actually _described_ sexual and physical abuse just like
the abuse we hear of today) thought, for a variety of reasons,
that the trauma was seeing or witnessing events which the patient
misinterpreted as violence or the result of violence (rather than
personally experiencing actual violence).  For example witnessing
the "primal scene," i.e. h/er parents having intercourse, the
immature child misinterprets that as the father beating up the
mother, and seeing a girl's vagina for the first time the boy
mistakenly concludes that someone has cut off her penis.

Freud's early view that the young child became overwhelmed by the
arousal and stimulation and couldn't process the sensory
information and place it into normal memory involves fairly
mechanical psychic mechanisms, not too dissimilar to the kinds of
things behaviorists were to come up with a few decades later,
which could be understood with a minimum of interpretation.  It
was later, as he began to try to trace the transformations of
these memories and the (inhibited) behavioral responses to them,
that Freud's system changed from a simple model of behavior (i.e.,
realistic) to a complex and interpreted (i.e., constructivist or
hermeneutic) one.

The questions now are: 1) _Where_ do you look to understand the
behavior and pathology of _individuals_ for purposes of
remediating it.  (And, incidentally, for what it's worth, like
Freud I make the money I actually live on doing _that_.) and 2)
Where do you look, what forces do you examine, to understand the
actions and events taking place in society.  (And, also like
Freud, no one pays me a nickel to investigate that but I am
personally interested in understanding it.)

The two places you can look are: 1) in the real, physical world,
using methods of empirical observation.  2) in the cultural world,
using methods of hermeneutic, constructivist interpretation.  If
you think 1 is the right way to go you try to get measures of
actual abuse and study its propagation in society the way you
might study the propagation of waves and ripples in a pond when
you toss in a stone. If you think 2 is the way to go you study the
cultural superstructure, the stories and myths and norms
circulating in the intersubjective ooze.

> Perhaps violence in the culture is a reflection of physical
> violence rather than a cause and therefore worthy of study as an
> indicator of trends.

It is almost certainly that.  And no one, not even the most
hard-shelled, dust bowl empiricist behaviorist would be that
restrictive.  Everyone would guess that there is _some_ degree of
feedback or interaction or mutual reciprocation or something
between the culture and the overt behavior of individual persons.
The question is: how much?

> Perhaps the widespread cultural message that violence is the best
> means of solving disputes predisposes people exposed to abuse to
> perpetuate it themselves rather than seeking other methods of
> dealing with their own pain.  For example, what about those who
> were abused as kids but managed to turn their own lives around
> anyway (I certainly know some fine therapists whose compassion
> arrises from personal experience with abuse) -- can we say that
> cultural messages are unimportant in increasing the percentage
> who are able to escape from their personal histories?

Again, that almost certainly happens. We can find examples of it
in individual cases.

> Further, what if cultural messages legitimating racism, sexism,
> homophobia and violence against 'weirdos' encourage abused
> individuals to transform their own pain into *both* abuse of
> their own children *and* abuse of culturally denigrated groups.

That too almost certainly happens.  But here the basic question
becomes interesting again.  If our interest is something like
intergroup relations do we study the propagation of impulses
toward violence in individuals, with the cultural forces and
belief system which channel them being seen as secondary, or do we
focus our attention precisely on the content of those social
belief systems and systems of norms and narratives?  No one today
knows which is the best strategy.

> On the other hand, if my main concern in life was reducing the
> amount of child abuse in our society, I think I'd be spending my
> time working with victims of abuse, rather than critiquing
> pop culture on alt.pm, so perhaps the SG is right.


Reducing child abuse would of course be a good thing in itself.
The question is whether or not it is necessary to do that, or
whether it should be a priority item, if the goal is to reduce the
_general_ level of violence in society.

%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
Zucker  c/o  <blz1@cunixb.cc.columbia.edu> >
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
Richard: Cocteau did Orpheus, not Renoir, and a fine,  fine,
Orpheus it is -- death on a motorcycle, mirrors as entrance  to
the netherworld, lesbian poetesses as Bacchantyes, ah, them
frogs sure know how to make films.

Thanks for the correction.  I saw that one when I was a kid and
I've been a devotee of the French cinema ever since. I was
especially intrigued by the idea that Hell would be filled with
petty bureaucrats that reminded me of Assistant Principals!  So it
remains a mystery to me why the bulk of the French themselves
prefer the American movies to their own.

--
Richard Carlson
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Newsgroups: alt.postmodern