[Paleopsych] Freud and traumas

[David Smith]

Except that for Freud, trauma is basically an internal state.  The computer
is, so to speak, baked from the inside.

David
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Steve Hovland" <shovland at mindspring.com>
To: "The new improved paleopsych list" <paleopsych at paleopsych.org>
Sent: Thursday, July 01, 2004 9:48 PM
Subject: Re: [Paleopsych] Freud and traumas


> Trauma is like "baking" a computer- running
> in an environment that is too hot.  The computer
> continues to run but does all kinds of weird things  :-)
>
> ----- Original Message ----- 
> From: "Werbos, Dr. Paul J." <paul.werbos at verizon.net>
> To: "The new improved paleopsych list" <paleopsych at paleopsych.org>; "The
new
> improved paleopsych list" <paleopsych at paleopsych.org>
> Sent: Thursday, July 01, 2004 6:36 PM
> Subject: [Paleopsych] Freud and traumas
>
>
> > Hi, folks!
> >
> > There are a lot of cognitive psychologists who are as traumatized by
> > Freud's ideas as
> > Freud's patients were by childhood experiences. This may be due in part
to
> > many of them
> > associating of Freud with sneaky girls who really did use Freud out of
> > context to try to traumatize
> > any easy victims like young nerds. But it is also due to the diificulty
of
> > "making sense" of Freud's
> > ideas in more operational, functoinal terms.
> >
> > Before you hit the traumas -- there was a famous, beautifully clear
> > critique of psychoanalysis
> > (including Freud and others) by Baret and Yankelovi(t)ch years ago, a
nice
> > cheap paperback.
> > It described Freud's theory of psychodynamics and the flow of
cathexis -- 
> > and characterized it as hopelessly
> > mystical. But in fact, for my Harvard PhD thesis, I translated it into
> > mathematics -- and it maps
> > into a very general useful theorem, and to the most powerful and widely
> > used algorithms available in the field
> > of artificial neural networks.  (Unfortunately, most folks only use a
> > stripped-down version
> > of backpropagation, whose power is limited, but something close to the
> > original more complex translation of Freud
> > has been proven out on some very tough engineering control tasks; see Si
> et
> > al, eds, Handbook of Learning and Approximate Dynamic
> > Programming, literally in press at Wiley and IEEE Press.) The history
and
> > links to Freud are discussed in
> > my book The Roots of Backpropagation: From Ordered derivatives to Neural
> > Networks and Political Forecasting,
> > especially chapter 10, Wiley, 1994. (A good university library should
have
> > it, as it contains the original material
> > on backpropagation, for which the popularized versions are generally
very
> > inadequate.)
> >
> > -------
> >
> > But... well... it has taken a long time to catch up to that one part of
> > Freud, and really understand what's going on,
> > functionally.
> >
> > The trauma part I discussed 'way back in my paper in the 1977 General
> > systems yearbook, in a small section entitled
> > "syncretism." And I have tried to revisit it, in a simpler way, many
times
> > since. But I haven't had time to
> > really hammer home all of the key points to the general community.
(There
> > is a book on supervised learning edited by Roychowdhury,
> > and the IJCNN proceedings from 1994...).
> >
> > Basically, global generalization requires many iterations through
> > experience. Learning "from memory" is critical to
> > our ability to generalize without needing to relive bad experience over
> and
> > over again in real life. That's one
> > reason why we need these kinds of memories, which might be called
> > subsymbolic episodic memories.
> > "Assimilation into the ego" basically means adapting our more coherent
> > "egoic" generalizing model
> > of the world so as to be able to "backcast" or "explain" the memory,
> > retroactively. But for the most accurate expectations,
> > we need to COMBINE our "egoic" predictions together with a kind of
> "nearest
> > neighbor" kind of
> > allowance for memories we have not been able to assimilate, which point
> > towards weaknesses in our egoic model.
> >
> > Maturity does NOT consist in reducing the influence of the "id," the
> > collection of unassimilated engrams;
> > rather, it involves a process of better assimilation of existing
memories,
> > COMBINED WITH teh formatoin
> > of new memories or experiences which "expand the being space" (in
> > Heiddegerian terms).
> >
> > Of course, people vary in their drive to assimilate (intolerance of
> > cognitive dissonance, driving need for ego ...)
> > and their drive to accumulate new experience (novelty seeking).
> >
> > --------
> >
> > All for now...
> >
> > Best,
> >
> >     Paul
> >
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> >
>
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