Basics Representations Projection and Transference Feature of Transference - a Random Emotion
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As a species, in our dealings with the surrounding context ( be that context real or imagined), we have developed a form of communication and that is through the use of emotions. This realm of emotions is immediate, organic, holistic, parallel. At times this realm can be overwhelming to our personal consciousness since contained in that realm are group behaviours - thus a 'paniced' crowd can 'infect' all who come in contact with the crowd's emotional focus - as can sexual love totally dominate the 'rational' thinking of an individual! [more on the reason/emotion dichotomy]
In the thousands of years that have passed since the original I Ching came on the scene in ancient China, there has been a concerted effort to try and understand our emotional being and so too our neurological, categorical, conceptual, symbolic and metaphoric being.
A discovery in neurosciences has been that our instincts and habits get encoded in, or close to, the input areas of our neurology. The reason apparently is to conserve energy in a thermodynamic universe. This conservation is in the form of allowing context to 'push' our buttons. Thus as a species we integrate with the context through developing instincts and habits where those instincts and habits will contain an emotional element.
The development of 'good' habits and 'good' instincts will, over time, allow for the 'internalisation' of an emotional map of the context that can be used to pre-empt the behaviour of that context and so we can become more 'proactive' in our emotional dealings and more sensitive to its 'push'.
With instincts and habits containing emotional elements (even the notion of 'correct' or 'incorrect', associated with the realm of syntax processing, are initially sensed as feelings that we then articulate) so there is a tie of our emotional nature and the nature of the context. As we realise in group behaviours, our emotions work off resonance and as such we easily sympathise/empathise with others of our species (and all other life forms that 'contain' emotions) but also resonate with images etc that also elicit emotional resonance (e.g. a beautiful image of nature or the sky at night).
In those 'lower' life forms that use emotions, their social interactions are immediate in that the fight/flight dichotomy, the source of our categories of emotions, is hard-coded into their brains. This is also the case with us but with a subtle modification where our frontal lobes of our brain work as 'executives' and are able to suppress the immediate response of an emotion to a stimulus. In that suppression we utilise delay, we postpone the response, to allow for the gathering of more information or just to 'pull our punches' in some special context (e.g. playing vs fighting - lower neuron-dependent life forms have frontal lobes but not as developed as ours).
We can see these differences in responses as we move 'up' the development chain from reptiles to humans where a snake will put the same energy into a strike regardless of the context. On the other hand, a mammal, and more so our species, has developed the skill to pull punches and so be more context-sensitive.
With the refined development of consciousness in our species, where consciousness appears to act as an agent of mediation, we can interrogate our emotions and identifying them in fine detail. It is our consciousness that 'says' "something does not feel right" or "I am getting a bad vibe here" etc etc. These 'vibes' reflect the focus of consciousness to serial processing, to particulars, where it can be VERY precise but in so doing it has little or no access to the realm of the parallel, the immediate where emotions dominate behaviours having their roots in our species-nature, our primateness. In other words consciousness needs to break the 'vibe' down, to extract its spectrum, its parts, before it can make any detailed assessment of what is going on.
One of the aspects of context is that its holistic nature can make it difficult to identify some small, particular, element in the context that is causing us to feel 'uncomfortable'. However, due to the holistic nature of our emotions, so that small, particular, element comes with an emotional trigger that elicits 'resonance'. Once we have resonance we can swing our consciousness into action using a generic form of inquiry. This form of inquiry is through asking some general questions about how one feels in regard to the situation. The questions do not focus on emotions explicitly but on questions that will elicit emotion-determined response; in other words one's feelings will 'colour' the answers and so reveal themselves in that colouring. The resonance factor in our feelings allow us to identify a symbol, a representation, of the context that 'best fits' one's feelings derived from the 'push' of that context.
In the I Ching, the symbol, the representation, is a hexagram (or trigram or dodecagram) where the qualities of the hexagram have been developed from our encoding of emotional qualities in the symbol as we create it and write-down that encoding for later generations. The method of creation is through use of qualities derived from the self-referencing of the original 'fight/flight' dichotomy that seeds all of our emotions (see below). Since the I Ching is also derived in the same manner through self-referencing of 'yang/yin', so there is a corellation of emotions and I Ching symbolisms.
Thus There is no 'I Ching' psychological interpretation per se, but there is the IC REPRESENTING what the neurology does when mediating, creating a set of categories that at a level of 6+ loops of self-referencing elicits enough categories to form analogies (pdf) where these are hard-coded into the methodology. As such the I Ching is a form of language.
The I Ching 'colouring' is simply local context that customises the categories to fit local conditions (the traditional I Ching covers 10th century BC China, the IDM format (IC+) brings it all into the 21st century AD by showing how it can work in describing a current situation (or imagined one))
Why use the IC? Because other category systems are too primitive in that they lack the level of development of the IC's self-referencing of the yang/yin aka differentiating/integrating dichotomy.
Given the work on category formation (above link) so we find isomorphism (same form) across all dichotomies we use in mediating with reality. As such, we can use one form, our emotions derived from the fight/flight dichotomy, to elicit a representation of that form in another form - the patterns of the yin/yang dichotomy of the I Ching. Thus from an emotional assessment of anything we can derive a corresponding I Ching image that can give us more details about what is going on.
This 'emotional' seeding is very generic to start with and covers our basic interactions with any context where we need or demand or desire to either (a) take over the context, replace it with something we consider 'better', or (b) integrate with the context, 'fit in' by adapting to it through 'new' instincts/habits.
The replacement focus comes in two 'flavours' - erradication of existing competition or replication of self to 'drown out' existing competition. From these flavours come the more emotion-specific labels of 'anger' (erradication) and 'sexual love' (replication). Due to the hierarchy involved that comes out of self-referencing so the labels of 'anger' and 'sexual love' refer to generic qualities that become refined through further self-referencing to elicit such notions of 'self-respect', 'singlemindedness', as well as mental equivalents of sexual love where the overall focus on copying/mimicry leads into such areas as the exchanges of charismatic people with their audience/followers etc where that exchange elicits replication of the charismatic persona 'in' the followers (they copy/mimic the 'star' and s replicate the 'star')
If we take the fight/flight dichotomy, change the labels to 1/0 (1 = fight, 0 = flight), and then apply the dichotomy to itself (self-referencing, recursion) we can derive a set of symbols that represent the spectrum of generic emotions after just three loops of the recursion:
fight / flight = 1 / 0
T1) 1 / 0
T2) 11, 10 / 01, 00
T3) 111, 110, 101, 100 / 011, 010, 001, 000
T3 becomes:
111 - anger (refined into singlemindedness, self-respect, competitive exchange)
110 - sexual love (refined into cooperative exchange)
101 - acceptance (refined into promotion of ideologies, 'group' behaviours)
100 - surprise (refined into enlightenment, awareness, new paradigms etc)
011 - anticipation (refined into notions of cultivation)
010 - rejection (refined into a focus on issues of protection)
001 - grief (refined into quality control, discernment)
000- fear (refined into devotion to others, get identity from context)
If we step back a level to T2 we cover the more generic context-related focus on replacement of context (11) or integration with context (00) and positions 'inbetween' (01, 10). If we step forward then the generic qualities become more refined such that within the generic bounds of the original categories come such notions as 'singlemindedness', 'devotion to self', 'devotion to others' etc etc.
If we move back to T1, the properties of the original dichotomy of fight/flight are found to be synonymous with the characteristics of differentiate/integrate and associated with the feedback dichotomy of positive(push away)/negative(pull together). What we have here is a GENERAL dichotomy template of differentiate/integrate and the application of that dichotomy to the immediate surroundings allows for that context to elicit a set of categories used to described that context where the categories are re-labelled to give us a specialist dichotomy (such as 'fight(differentiate, yang)/flight(integrate, yin)')
In the formation of emotional categories they allow for resonance with the same categories present in the environment in that "emotions" is considered as a specialisation for interpretation of reality and so works as a filter to interpret 'all there is'- in other words reality is 'emotional' and as such any moment experienced will elicit some emotional resonance within the individual. However, since emotions are vague, operate out of the realm of the immediate, the organic, their resonance with a context is complex, holistic, and our particulars-oriented consciousness can sense 'something' but often not be able to articulate that 'something' - we get the "I cant put it into words" syndrome.
With the development of consciousness, as well as the creation of such texts as the I Ching that describes 'all there is', we are in a position to interrogate our emotions through the asking of general questions focused on how we feel about a particular situation. In other words the context in which we are involved has an emotional element that is 'transmitted' and received by our unconscious-sourced emotions (emotions having developed pre-words). Anomolies in that reception allow for feelings to whell-up in us to become noticable by consciousness and we end-up with a generic 'feeling' of being uncomfortable, irritable, or over-joyous 'for no apparent reason'.
Knowing how the brain deals IN GENERAL with novelty so we can ask generic questions focused on communicating with our feelings where those feelings manifest the resonance of our emotions with the context. The answers to the questions are in the form of yin/yang line combinations that manifest the emotional nature of the particular hexagram that 'best fits' the context and so is 'pushing our buttons' - causing the emotional resonance.
Given the particular hexagram for the context we can flesh-out its details including how it will ideally develop and so take us with it - OR we can either (a) try and replace the context with one of our own making or (b) move on.
Thus, given the 'Emotional I Ching' we have a demonstration of how the I Ching can work without any references to myths, legends, or other 10th century BC perspectives nore the use of random or miraculous methods of hexagram derivation - we are utilising a basic specialisation in our nature that is used in the categorisation of 'out there'. As we have developed from a species to a conscious species so those categories are written-down in books (e.g. the I Ching) and become accessable through the use of consciousness to interrogate our emotions and then look-up the category best-fitting our feelings.
The current set of questions for using the emotional IC, as presented in the program, are where the questions asked are aimed at extracting how you FEEL, and so the emotional elements resonating with the context. Thus the form of the question is asked of the I Ching is more like "What is going on here?" "What is pushing me?", "How is it that I feel as I do given(about) context X" - We do NOT deal with such questions as "does he/she love me?" since our focus is on emotional resonance between you and the external context and such questions as 'does he/he love me?' is more a question focused on one's resonance with one self! (better resolved by asking him/her.) - we are focused on the influence of the surroundings on the individual and so we focus on the implicit, the hidden, the holistic, the organic where these are missed or literally 'out of conscious awareness' but very much 'in' emotional awareness.
Once we derive the hexagram so we can use our consciousness to derive more details on what we are dealing with. These details are possible for a hexagram by deriving its full spectrum that manifests all hexagrams expressing their natures through a particular hexagram. We can thus identifty the 'correct path' through a hexagram (its 63-ness) or a description of the hexagram's 'generic' form, its infrastructure prior to adding the furnishings (27-ness). See the section "Line Meanings" in the text of the hexagram or the page on hexagram spectrums. This particular hexagram text is on page 2 so if you cannot find it in the page displayed, just click on the hexagram image to get to the other page.
Mirror neurons allow for mimicry and so, from an emotional focus, the development of empathy. (search using Google to give an extensive coverage)
With that tit-bit lets add the fact that, in the brain, any bias in its oscillations across left-right brains will introduce, over accumulated time, the particular characteristics of the left or right 'side', into the GENERAL emotional expression of behaviour of the individual. Thus a timing issue that favours the 'right' side can lead to a 'depressive' affect dominating general thinking etc.
For this particular research (and associated research refs covering neural degeneration affecting emotional expression etc (change in art colourings etc - see Miller's work) see :
http://www.uq.edu.au/nuq/jack/procroysoc.html
So above we have (a) mimicry and so response to a stimulus with a copy of such stimulus - like shaking hands or smiling at someone smiling at you (unless you are neurotic and so don’t trust the smile without reason - IOW any such smile will elicit unconditional distrust and so universal distrust - neurosis at work!) (b) a timing issue that allows for small increments of an emotion working as stimulus to 'suddenly' elicit an emotional response 'in kind' where memory 'links the temporal dots' such that the experience is AS IF a momentary one of intense emotional interaction.
Projection by a person of an imagined or real person onto another due to sameness in look and/or personality will include the dominant emotion associated with the person projected appearing on the face, and especially the eyes, of the projector. This is often unbeknownst to the projector.
However, the projectee can see the emotional expression but need not know of the projection, and so consider the emotion applies to them.
Seeing the emotion can elicit 'censorship' behaviour by consciousness if the emotion is considered 'inappropriate' or no reason is detected and the emotion is ignored. On the other hand, the emotion can also elicit attempts to respond to it.
As mentioned above, there is evidence to show that exposure to some expression of emotion, repeated on a regular basis over time (even if just a smile and 'hello') can lead to the accumulation of that emotion such that emotional resonance is achieved 'instinctively', the smile and hello are incorporated into an emotional 'event' where the presence of projector/projectee elicits the emotional content expressed originally in the smile-hello. - thus if the smile-hello was originally 'one sided', from the projector, eventually the projectee will 'resonate' by usually responding back in the same way (mimicry). This can operate in minutes as it can over months of exposure (or not at all - and this gets into issues of susceptibility - for example, parents/children are susceptible to 'family' emotions that are not registered or are just ignored by those not in a present, strongly involved, family dynamic)
This stimulus-response dynamic works around mimicry and the notion of emotional resonance where, like the skins of drums, if tuned to a particular frequency, exposure to that frequency will elicit resonance without any necessary 'intent' to do so.
In the context of emotions, from an animalistic fight/fight situation, one member of a collective can communicate fight/flight to all others without any of the others seeing what is causing the communication - the resonance sets in and whole herd can turn and run 'instinctively' (and as such can lead to 'blind panic')
The development of consciousness serves to control and so regulate this 'turn and run' or 'turn and fight' instinct through the serialisation of the event in the form of finer, context sensitive, details that contribute to determining the necessity to turn etc - and so a focus on local context sensitivity. (as mammals, in play with our young, and so the local context, we learn to pull our punches etc). This focus gives the emotion some context and so some history. In so doing it 'discharges' the emotion, releasing it from a raw, overwhelming, unconditional experience, to something manageable and 'defused' by local context relationships (memories etc contribute to the overall 'feel' of the emotion in that each link give 'meaning', a local contribution to the 'whole' and so something to link to without being overwhelmed)
Lets consider a more complex emotion than smile-hello; lets consider adoration. This form of emotion is of interest since it is complex enough to DEMAND a history be associated with it - one does not 'adore' someone 'instinctively' - this is not about lust/love, it is about a cooperative set of interactions over time that elicit the 'stars in the eyes' quality of adoration.
In the context of projection/transference [and counter transference where the emotion is thought at first to be originating in the projectee and so projected back onto the projector] we have:
(1) person A sees person B. (2) person A notices the look and/or personality of person B reminds them strongly of person C. (3) the reminding is so strong that whenever person A sees person B they in fact see person C, ignoring, marginalising person B - person B has become the canvas onto which C is projected and no more than that. (4) The moment person A projects person C, so the dominating emotion associated by A to C will appear on the face of person A, especially in the eyes. Here we focus on the 'adoration look'. (5) Meanwhile, person B is not a passive observer here, person B will see the emotions on the face of person A but NOT necessarily the projection going on. As such person B can interpret the emotions on the face of A as being applied to them. (In active psychotherapy the projection is expected, in the passive dynamic of everyday interactions the projection can be missed - and it is not a subject covered in 'social dynamics 101' at high school). (6) In the particular case of adoration, if the adoration is of a daughter for a father or a son for a mother or a brother for a sister, all that is seeable is the 'stars in the eyes' of the projector but no history is supplied. This look can register but be ignored due its unusual form however.... (7) If this 'look' is applied to person B repeatedly casually over time (5 minutes one day, 1 the next, 10 the next etc), where it is registered but with no acknowledgement or seeking of understanding of the 'look' (social dynamics not allowing for such socialisation etc), person B's emotions will, over accumulated time in this state, start to resonate and so actively start to respond to the stimulus; any previous censorship by consciousness is over-ridden and the emotion can suddenly over-whelm. (8) Thus the particular response here will be in an overwhelming 'adoration' for the original projector by the original projectee 'for no reason', as if it has 'come out of nowhere' - the lack of history about the 'look', about the projection, means the emotion is 'raw' and as such overwhelming. (9) The adoration can be finer understood if accompanying it comes 'support' emotions of 'nesting' - these emotions are the irritating, intrusive thoughts that pop into mind 'suddenly' with a focus on the care of one's offspring ("did she pack clean underware?" etc etc - this thought suddenly taking over the mind in the middle of some business presentation etc!). As such, person B starts to have these thoughts about person A The presence of such thoughts indicates the adoration is of the father-daughter/mother-son/brother-sister 'type' (overall focus on 'kin') - and with that comes all of the history of that relationship but here it is missing, all person B 'has' is the adoration and no more (but with the presence of 'nesting' so an indicator of what is being delt with in general) (10) When the 'resonance' takes over it is unconditional, it does not work like the original projection of a 5 minute 'look' every day, it takes over and 'demands' release at any hour, for many hours, of the day. As such the emotion becomes destabilising and a threat to 'everyday' living as it seeks a history so it can be 'discharged'. (11) The important focus here is on the emotion coming with a need for a history, it is not an 'immediate' emotion such as lust or anger - it as a 'family' emotion, an integrating, socialising emotion that, on its own acts like a 'cancer' in that it has lost its 'place'. (12) These sorts of emotions, if not 'discharged' (e.g. learning of, and understanding the projection and so getting some history) can gnaw at the psyche and elicit neuroses where anxieties develop of a situation that can turn into character neuroses and go on to influence the life of person B 'for no reason'. (13) The necessity for history shows it is 'talk' that discharges these events, not drugs, since the talk gives the necessary history that 'diffuses' the intense emotion and so grounds it. As such, the emotion needs a 'story' to go with it (and this gets into issues of 'rewriting' one's history to 'remove' such 'random' emotions by grounding them even if artificially - the ability to project/transfer passively means allowing for 'unpermissioned' emotions to be 'planted' in individuals and we do find this in the every day in the form of music and advertising where the repetition forces 'transference' BUT we are more often consciously aware of what is going on and so apply censorship. The issues come where we cannot or do not think there is a need since all 'looks fine') (14) In the focus on discharge, drugs can help the physiological affects and effects of the transference but not the mental conditions of the singular nature - unless the memory can be selectively wiped, but I gather this is still in the 'testing/development' phase! ;-) (15) The essential issue here is that such transferences can be totally unconscious, there is no recollection of any 'look' since consciousness has 'censored' it and so all we have is the emotional 'unconscious' developing this 'festering' emotion that has no perceptible 'reason' and can apply not just to an individual but to a collective or some 'thing' or 'god' etc - the emotion has been 'picked up' like a virus and can turn into a 'cancer' due to its lack of 'place' (as cancer cells lose their sense of 'place' in the body and so express themselves 'universally', context-free)
In the context of the above comments etc on projection, transference, counter-transference (and mirror neurons) I have been considering the neurological aspects of the methodology where an emotion is transferred but with no history. As such, a transference can elicit a 'random' emotion that can take-over or severely destabilise consciousness due to the lack of history and our brain's 'demand' for such.
This ability to transfer as such seems to stem as an artefact of the dynamics of memory encoding/recall. In this encoding the amygdala encodes emotional content whereas the hippocampus encodes the date and time stamp (sequencing) and so allows for the generation of, and association of the emotional memory with, a history. (recall from a previous post, the hippocampus can phase-lock with, for example, pre-frontal cortex in the running of a maze. There is also research linking the hippocampus to methods of map-making (waypointing (use of locals) vs vectoring (use of globals))
In the case of 'passive' transference, as one projects someone onto someone else (a look-a-like) the emotions associate with that someone appear on the face of the projector. The projectee detects this emotion but the date-stamp dynamics are NOT communicatable in this form - you need to communicate date/time events through a different mechanism (speech etc)
All the projectee has is (a) an intense emotion and (b) a date-time stamp mapping the emotion to the presence of the projector, and no more. (and this can occur 'unconsciously' to leave an apparent emotion with no history at all and so no 'ground' and so in the form of a universal; the emotion is all 'new' and overwhelming to start with - thus one has to workout by recall the point of emergence of the transference and those in the surrounding context at that time to figure out the possible projector - one can see here the roots of, and so continued existence of, psychoanalysis and other methods of focusing on trying to link a destabilising emotion with some history.
What is implicit here is there are TWO, semi-autonomous, paths of information encoding/decoding with our emotional path being semi-independent of the temporal/rational path (order, sequence, position focus).
Meaning-as-memory is an entanglement of the hippocampus and amygdala interactions that require dis-entanglement to be communicated- I can get the emotions of a memory to appear on my face and so communicate that, but I cannot get the date/time/sequence data to appear on my face - THAT information needs explicit communication through speech, writing etc.
Thus it is possible for a 'look' to communicate the emotional element of a memory but 'free' of its history - the projectee's emotional system will, if the look is consistent and long enough, resonate where this resonance is a property coming out of our social nature and so allowing for an emotion to trigger a behaviour without detection of the stimulus - and so we can get the herd to turn and run through an alarm from one member of the herd.
The consequence of receiving an emotion with no history by the projectee is the 'need' for history for interpretations such that our consciousness, if it cannot detect a history for some emotion associated with the projector, will create one - and here we find the counter-transference process at work where the projectee thinks the emotion is 'theirs', originating in them, and so projects it, transfers it, back onto the projector.
The essential element here is the lack of a date-time stamp, explicit historic details that come with hippocampus dynamics, in that a situation occurs where the transmission of such information is not possible for psychological or sociological or physiological reasons.
The ability of the "Emotional I Ching" material to do what it does is that it communicates using the amygdala 'path' to extract emotional descriptions of a situation. Any temporal/sequence information comes from consciousness/reason regulating the emotion (and so sequencing events etc - a hippocampus activity)
Of note there is that the notion of the 'random' covers something with no history and so no apparent cause. This notion shares space with that of the 'miraculous' such that the differences are in qualitative interpretations.
Refs/Further Reading:
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?chanID=sa017&articleID=0007F06E-B7AE-1522-B7AE83414B7F0182
A Look Tells All
By Siri Schubert
We do it automatically. As soon as we observe another person, we try to read his or her face for signs of happiness, sorrow, anxiety, anger. Sometimes we are right, sometimes we are wrong, and errors can create some sticky personal situations. Yet Paul Ekman is almost always right. The psychology professor emeritus at the University of California, San Francisco, has spent 40 years studying human facial expressions. He has catalogued more than 10,000 possible combinations of facial muscle movements that reveal what a person is feeling inside. And he has taught himself how to catch the fleeting involuntary changes, called microexpressions, that flit across even the best liar's face, exposing the truth behind what he or she is trying to hide.
Ekman, 72, lives in Oakland, Calif., in a bright and airy house near the bay. As I talked with him there, he studied me, his eyes peering out from under bushy brows as if they were registering each brief facial tic I unknowingly exhibited. Does his talent make him a mind reader? "No," he says candidly. "The most I can do is tell how you are feeling at the moment but not what you are thinking." He is not being modest or coy; he is simply addressing the psychological bottom line behind facial expressions: "Anxiety always looks like anxiety," he explains, "regardless of whether a person fears that I'm seeing through their lie or that I don't believe them when they're telling the truth."
The professor calls the ever present risk we all take of misreading a person's visage "Othello's error."
© 1996-2006 Scientific American, Inc.
I HAVE A QUESTION!