Postmodernism and Beyond

by Dr. Peter Meier, Founder of Applied Personal Science APSâ

This is a long and not at all fancy page. Please save it and prepare yourself to read it in peace. To get the context; read ACT 17:22-23, Paul's reference to the "unknown God": The known gods in this world are all the content-free technologies like the Internet, the personally-neutral knowledge worked out by science that is now globally available. However, Paul's "unknown God" is personal and personally interested in each of us as who we are; a unique personality that struggles to get "online" in this world. There is neither a thing nor a generally known concept I can refer to and say, look that is what I am! The question is: Who am I? And the answer is basically given by me fulfilling my life. In trying that, we all struggle with what we call the world. Here I was lucky to have found Polly Young-Eisendrath's very personal account of her relationship to the Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Gustav Jung. I am making a great deal of use of her expressions as an analogy to work out the relationship between man and the world, and how we can overcome it and get online.

 Polly Young-Eisendrath in her pager "Postmodernism: Struggling with Jung: The Value of Uncertainty" provided an incentive for me to work out the psychological description of what I call the ROI (return on investment)-mentality that is now threatening the survival of most human systems (individual minds, relationships, groups, organizations, cultures). It is not enough to turn the resulting human detriment into a new virtue and give it a scientific touch in the name of "chaos-theory"! In discerning the interpretations of reality based on the corresponding brain functions, we have to learn to separate the chaff from the grain. This lesson is not just pointed out in books like the Bible; it is imposed on us by life itself for the sake of survival in order to fulfill our lives:

PSA 1:3 They are like trees planted along the riverbank, bearing fruit each season without fail. Their leaves never wither, and in all they do, they prosper.

4 But this is not true of the wicked. They are like worthless chaff, scattered by the wind.

JER 51:2 Foreigners will come and winnow her, blowing her away as chaff. They will come from every side to rise against her in her day of trouble.

 Postmodernistic Struggles of Individuals in and with the World:

a mere reflection of the struggle of the different brain parts in our heads due to an inadequate understanding of our personal nature in trying to fit in with so-called human nature, and the world?

Humans can put their desires into moods, words and action, e.g. forms, content and meaning. How come this "scattering wind" does not fragment even more people' mind, break up more relationships, team, organizations and cultures?

As children we began with our idealizing identification by playing with forms and words. They are tangible and some even feel good, because through playing with them we received psycho- logical help to deal with people. We thus learn to become subjects that can deal with objects after it dawns upon us that our fellow humans, first of all our mothers, are not so easy to deal with. Our life story then turns our fellow humans into what self-psychologists call "selfobjects". In school we learn to give what at first is a content-free object, form through the associated words. Attached to this tagging is the expectation that the thing behaves as the name suggests! This kind of naming/tagging makes up our know-how about objects through the generally defined (denotational), objective/personally-neutral content, which is often mere virtual knowledge. People then usually struggle with the discrepancy between the virtual and the real meaning of their fellow people for the rest of their lives.

Such struggles lead to the personal and collective history we know and so we end up synchronizing our brain with that dichotomy. Thus knowing that everybody is caught in it, history, or what Jung referred to as archetypes seem to give us coherence and transparency. Our memory thus deals mostly with this corresponding inner struggle (between virtual and real objects, the denotational meaning of words and reality as it is) and the fantasies we use to escape it. In order to be "right" about our memory, we project our own images of others and our relationships and life with them onto the world. Thus this kind of attempted "self-fulfilling prophecy" turns into the now prevailing human attempt to replace the created creation with a man-made world, which is mere virtual reality.

Thus we do not have to deal with facts, others' accounts and the reactions of those who love and hate us. In virtual reality we get a sense of self and feel we understand who and what we are in terms of where our projections achieve ROI, a return on investment. ROI is of course "vitally" important, not just for economic success and failure. And where we succeed is it politically correct to attribute the result to oneself. In short, to become economically successful by succumbing to the laws of ROI is virtually becoming oneself. Are you somebody in terms of succumbing your life-fulfillment to managing a budget, or are you taking a wage or a social security check, that is the question:

Thus ROI fulfills the idealizing transference that is so well communicated to people by the media: For people the world in its ROI dynamics represented by the money system has the character of an indispensable entity that is absolutely necessary for today's life. However infantile this dependence may appear to be, it expresses an extremely important demand which, if disappointed, often turns into people's bitter hatred of the system, as happened in Albania 1997 when a pyramid system of investment fonds collapsed.

As we come to know the ROI-world in greater detail over the years, we cannot avoid getting disappointed by it, e.g. there is no fulfillment in the ROI-world. This is because we as Creatures of a Creator are not of this world, however much we wish or pretend to be. To the degree we are able and open to analyze the complexity of our relationships in the world, we can overcome the urge to develop a bitter hatred. We are often in conflict with the prevailing ideas and trends, especially its theories of gender and ethnic differences, class and above all, chaos.

In the ongoing analysis of the world based on how things work in terms of ROI short-term results, we dissolve the persona-restoring stage, get worn out by the madness of discharging our complexes at each other, and desire to enter a stage of secure symbolizing, e.g. man-made, virtual reality. We humans, in historical terms are still working through a rather intensely negative transference, which results in neuronal inhibition. With it we have sacrificed among others personal, connotational values to the collective ROI-simplifications expressed in personally-neutral denotations, and we feel quite contained in being able to displace symptoms. Worse, we begin to appreciate the depth and richness of the relationships that arise in a free market of symptom displacement technology. This approach is based on the ultimate simplification; quantitative thinking assuming the laws of numbers, Math to be Power.

As in any "good", i.e. promising return on investment relationship, we feel also that we help sustain this world by revising and furthering some of its fundamental paradigms so that the underlying ROI-basis cannot be easily be dismissed by contemporary philosophers, psychoanalysts and feminists and other potential alternatives. We all seem to be forced to save the world that otherwise disgraces us, from the stumbling blocks of reification and essentialism. We seem to have no other alternative to save ourselves from self-hatred, dissociation and alienation. More and more Current Topics highlight the undealt with HoTopic.

In working through the fragments the world is revealed to us. What we work out ourselves over the years is increasingly teaching us the value certainty. By uncertainty, "modern" (Babylon by the way means confusion) chaos theory, adapted to the trend. It intends to create the kind of (man-made) reflective space in which there is no premature foreclosure on meaning. Just when you think you understand something between yourself and the world - as, for example, where we each stand on the theory of contrasexuality - we discover something new in the media or rediscover something we've forgotten. Then the struggle and the dialogue moves on. In the remainder of our life, if we are lucky, we experience in greater detail why this dialogue depends on both trust and conflict, and how it has saved us from turning our personal idealization into bitter hatred of God and the world.

Although the prevailing paradigm is as old as the money system, people who founded it saw only the dimmest beginnings of post-structuralism and its development into post-modernism. The leading intellectual's interests after the Age of Revelation turned increasingly to ethnology, evolutionary biology, and man-made developmental processes of all sorts. It made people believe the world was moving in the direction of contemporary developmental and post-modern self-liberating psychologies. But history in the meantime has left behind it a trail of different assumptions and interpretations that span the range from realist to idealist, from essentialist to post-modern, from traditional to radical and has left an incredible trail of blood in the resulting wars and thinking catastrophes. It is possible to read modern history from highly divergent perspectives and believe (and find "proof" in the form of quotations) that the world agrees with you (agreeing with it...).

I want to take a moment to highlight the contemporary critique of truth and culture since it is important in our relationship to the world. What I mean by "post-modern" is the critique of truth, history, fact, or reality as being simply found or discovered "out there" or "in here." Post-modern critiques have been successfully aimed at both realism and idealism. The belief that reality lies within the physical and chemical processes of our world has been (in the view of Polly Young-Eisendrath) fundamentally defeated by a number of philosophers, particularly Thomas Kuhn and Hilary Putnam of M.I.T.

Similarly, the belief that our mental or psychic experiences are primarily imposed on us by forms, ideals or categories that structure the mind (such as Kantian categories) has also been fundamentally put to rest, especially by philosophers like Charles Taylor, Rom Harre and Richard Rorty.

There is a branch of post-modern theory called deconstruction that often gets confused with the necessity of Timely Exchange of Project-Orientated Competence, TEPOC. Deconstruction originated with philosopher Jacques Derrida in France. It has been carried into psychoanalysis, especially by some followers of Jacques Lacan. Deconstruction explicitly rejects a psychology of coherence, integration or universal principles of development in favor of a psychology of discontinuity, lack of coherence, and local influences on development. Deconstruction is also a political critique of human ideals and virtues. Often I have heard Jungians be negative or critical of post-modernism, based on ideas about deconstruction. Deconstruction is a skeptical philosophy of doubt and criticism of established methods and theories in many disciplines. There seems to be little resonance between the ROI-driven world and deconstruction. Applied Personal Science suggests that 16% of all people are fundamentalists, and 42% are either constructive or deconstructive as is so typical for a plenum assembly...

As in a two-party system, the now ruling deconstructive party makes us now believe that the world is a covert support system of a branch of affirmative post-modernism e.g. in terms of share-holder values. The "past party" constructivism on the other hand did not reject universals such as archetypes or universal emotions, but it assumed that both the concepts and the experiences to which they refer come directly from human interpretation. That is, archetypes do not move and shape human consciousness; nor are we caught in morphogenic structures. In the world we create our worlds, but not unilaterally our experience is interdependent, an interaction of our perceptions and attitudes with an environment in flux. Since even our perceptions are interpretations the worldly ROI-mentality concludes that nothing is absolutely fixed and eternal in our phenomenal world, as we constantly influence its construction. In many passages even of the current media, we still find significant traces of constructivism. This is merging especially in view of tragedies, such as Princess Diana's death.

For instance, at the onset of WWII, in 1939 we find how human beliefs about the reality have really shifted around over time, and how these beliefs inescapably constitute "reality". Only our generation begins to look "objectively" at what happened then, and even that is done in terms of the still unsorted out financial transactions mainly of the victims and eye witnesses who are now dying out.

On a primitive level people are afraid of witches; on the modern level we are apprehensively aware of microbes. There everybody believes in ghosts, but here everybody believes in vitamins. Once upon a time men were possessed by devils, now they are . . . obsessed by ideas.... Jung (1939/1994, p. 58)...

But the world's claims and premises are contradictory. Sometimes it sounds like a constructivist, then it sounds like a Platonic idealist, and then again occasionally like a biological realist. Consequently, we have learned that the world also is a shifting project of interpretations and of a complexity that demands an ongoing dialogue in the media. With this as background then, the world implies a framework that seems to help people enormously in working through their symptoms; the ROI-mentality: Based on fragmenting everything we can expect a return on investment and thus get a sense of "god-like" control.

If I grab an apple from a tree and halve it, I can expect to predictably satisfy two people in the short-term. While if I leave the apple on the ground and care for it until the eventually growing tree bears fruit, I might be able to feed my whole clan in the long-term. More and more people have left the former for the latter kind of business, where the meaning of business is simply business...

The framework that is real in terms of life-fulfillment comes from what we now know about the brain. It can deal in other times and other realities in the direction of life-fulfillment or life-destruction for as many as possible. The brain consists of three models based on the evolution of reptiles (stem-brain), mammals (mid-brain) and the specifically human cerebrum with its right and left hemispheres. In an ROI-world we thus have three competing and equally valid reality mapping and altering generators struggling in our heads for attention and return on investment...

Before we go into these in detail, I want to review the brain's central meaning. For life to be fulfilling as a transformation of perspective, the brain and its user (remember, you have a brain - you are not your brain) have to become aware of these three realities and explore them as different worlds. When the brain and its user, e.g. his or her awareness, get stuck in one reality, there tends to be a standstill or a rupture.

The fluidity of perspective (different worlds) that the three brain functions advocate are consonant with Jung's transcendent function--the dialectic of opposites--and with D. W. Winnicott's play space or potential space, and with Tom Ogden's dialectical space. All of these seem to point to a particular kind of uncertainty. It seems to be an ability to hold multiple meanings in mind without foreclosure. Similarly the psychoanalyst Arnold Model, "In Other Times, Other Realities: Toward a Theory of Psychoanalytic Treatment", describes three competing and equally valid realities of psychoanalysis.

Constructivism adds the caveat that to create a coherent interpretation is to constitute a reality. Holding in mind three different realities and moving among them interpretively, both humans and the world, patient and therapist are able to try out meanings and to discover what seems safe, exciting, coherent or persuasive not just in the moment like a reptil, but in view of the life-fulfillment of as many as possble.

In order to find out the psycho-neurological perspective clickto: brains

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