No Apologies; But Deep Gratitude

Readers comment about the difficulty of following some of the ideas presented here.  They are abstract or conceptual or philosophical.  Lay readers -- mentors, creative types, friends of the project -- find the notions here strange and hard to follow.
I cannot apologize, and I have to ask readers to do the work, follow what they can, and/or ask me to do a better job clarifying the ideas.  But I can't do away with these ideas.
Why?  Because breakout creative figures are about aspiration, and such a mindset and lifeway has to be appreciated on its own level.  Aspiration is about what is coming and doesn't exist yet, and still commands the decisions and values of people who hold them.
The breakout creative project intends to do a these things:
1.  Inform and train mentors to support these aspiring people.
2. Foster conversation among the creative types, and so increase communication and amplify the potential reception and effect of their work.
3.  Provide each type with a defining picture of their "mindsets," such that they experience the difficulties they do, and they are able to envision the breakout worlds they do.
4.  Provide each type with a sense of how their mindset connects with the larger human endeavor;  and that is, to grasp how this kind of creativity came to have around it the expectations and preferences it does -- as a matter of evolution and history.
5.  Most importantly, to help these figures and those who care for them and support them to see how this work is generative, making more alive and acting closer to the heart of what makes the human endeavor the difficult and yet commanding way it is.
To do this, we are forced to consider how it is that breakout creatives' values and life choices and needs do not track with the mainstream -- and how those who aspire to be "creative" need to deviate from the norming, leveling, dulling routines, prescriptions and "common sense" notions that prevail.
And so our ideas have to be "out there," and then get difficult to explain.
Our ideas cannot rely on common sensical, technical and managerial notions, but they do rely on deep research into what great thinkers and creative people are envisioning for a more expansive and encompassing human endeavor.  Nothing presented in this project is a matter of pure speculation, but comes from a deep study of people worth studying.
Self-organization and generativity underly all our work -- and so departs from cause and effect logic, or theological ideas of "presence" or mechanistic notions of "personal development."  Instead, we have to see how we grow through a process of gathering recollections that accrete and amass until a "symmetry break," a new frame of openness to life exerts itself.
Then contemporary work in philosophy, literary criticism, social thought, biology and neuroanatomy, new research in history all come into play.
I attempt to synthesize these influences into a narrative about each figure that accomplishes the objectives listed above.  This narrative is difficult because it uses new ideas not yet taught in schools in order to give substance and veracity to the feelings and drives that constitute aspiration.
This blog will focus on some of the seminal ideas used in the project in hopes of providing another stab at clarity.  The rest is up to the reader.
My deep respect and admiration, and deeper appreciation and gratitude is offered to each and every one of you who does try to stay with me.  My deepest respect and care is offered to all those who want to join with all of us who share the need to firm our aspirations into thoughts an actions that will open the human endeavor to the new horizons it craves, at the core of its being.
Please tell me what ideas you would like to know more about.
Please read the drafts of work published in the public folder (see www.breakoutcreatives.net.
Work with me.

We Need a New Psychiatry

   Louis Menand’s article “Head Case,” in the March 1, 2010 of The New Yorker asks,  “Can Psychiatry Be a Science?”

     There is no simple answer to that question.  Freud’s whole life was devoted to making psychotherapy into a science.  The immediate fragmentation of his work into multiple schools gave an indication of how fraught with ambiguities such an effort is. To make psychiatric treatment a “science” requires definitions of diseases, their origins, etiology, diagnosis and treatment that are as materially based as those applied to the treatment of physical diseases.  Instead, psychiatric efforts are dogged by ambiguity, litanies of expanding “syndromes,” some of which supposedly relate to the same “disease.” The derivations of these syndromes, as collected in the “manual” of psychiatric diagnoses, called the “Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), turns out to be more indicative of social norms than “material” conditions of disease. 

     This is no surprise.  Anyone who is familiar with the termination of persecution of witchcraft or of the wider acceptance, in some circles, of the deviant behaviors of artists, for instance, knows how social norms shape our perception of what constitutes a mental “disease” or “disorder.”  Of course, the increased diagnosis of ADD, for instance, indicates a (compensatory? – we always need our demons) shift toward increasing ascription of deviance and less toleration of disruption to the machinic processes we think of as being normal.  For the philosophers, Foucault’s Madness and Civilization speaks exactly to this issue (while his The Birth of the Clinic speaks to the social basis for the identification and treatment of what we now call disease – creating two moving targets in this discussion). 

      I see the whole discussion as stemming from a huge category mistake.  Grant that the medical diagnosis of physical diseases has merit and is effective – a proposition that also seems to be contested by holistic and homeopathic orientations.  Medical treatment of physical tissues is made possible because physical tissues are relatively stabilized into somewhat machinic, repetitious sequences and relations (still vast, not fully demarcated or understood) for which triggers and modulators, if not effective blockers, can be found. 

       Treatment by pharmaceuticals or surgery or rehabilitation is effective within prescribed ranges.  By contrast, psychic processes are completely relational and self-generating, differentiating and auto-stabilizing from moment-to-moment.  Even so-called “normal” behaviors are set in motion by complex, variable and only partially stable (within a range of internal and external limits and thresholds).  Thus, there is no firm basis on which a “disease” can be labeled (other than neuronal dysfunction or atrophy or over –production) in a way that is analogous to physical disease.  This is a largely mistaken route engendered by an over confidence in the materiality of the “mind-brain” connection. 

     This overconfidence is precisely the “affliction” that quantum mechanics and relativity and their offspring overcame in the realm of physics.  Freud’s model suffers from exactly the classical presuppositions of materiality, action/reaction and absolute space that marked the (Newtonian) physics of his time.  

The model of self-organization, the model of psychic/somatic self-generation and ordering holds great promise for re-orienting our comprehension of the mind, just as quantum physics offered whole new vistas of comprehension and engagement with the physical world. In this model (see Theren and Smith, Stuart Kauffman, Varela or Kelso, for example) there are no fixed mental parameters, only the massively collective self-organizing dynamics of self-forming engagements.  

     If Freud had the self-organizing model to appeal to, for instance, he could have cited the drive of the psyche to generate new awareness out of free flowing energies (in language and in abundant physical connection) as being constrained into certain channels, instead of having to defend “material” forces (Newtonian point-to-point constellations of motion) such as libido, sex drive and even the death instinct. 

        Instead of contemporary “anxiety” or even “depression” we might be able to embrace highly differentiated modes of engagement of an organism grappling with radical self-organization on more or less moment-by-moment bases, as opposed to “fixing” a body of machinic processes that is “supposed to” behave in prescribed ways.  From there, we could engage in ameliorative actions that all parties work through so as to foster the greatest expression of those energies, without stigma, without drugs, but with genuine prospects for “health” of that being, We could engage with each other as beings living their ways into ambiguity and community. 

       This would be a new psychiatry, a generative one for all involved, to be sure. 

       We have far to go.