The Science and Theory of A Bodily-Defined Culture
Erin Likins
Prof. Tracy Goldenberg
in partial fulfillment of the Independent Study
“Cultural Psychology & the Body”
Naropa University
Spring 2014
Introduction.
The age of separate-field sciences is headed towards its end. The information era is now witness to a sharply increasing demand for interdisciplinary approaches to understanding the human condition today (Ausburg 2006). This challenge is both an obstacle to traditional empiricism (Khorsandi 2011) and an opportunity for innovative thinkers to influence the definitions of respected sciences (McLuhan 1964).
Taking an interdisciplinary approach to the field of somatic psychology is one location of compelling promise through the advances in the digital age. Somatic psychology -- or the field which explores the relationship between mind, body, and experience -- stands to gain much support from an interdisciplinary examination, particularly through encounters with sociology and performance art. The time to commit to this examination is unequivocally now, as the technology enabling a more exacting neuroscience is blossoming along side a vastly expanding interest in the possibilities of the field.
This paper will briefly survey both the theoretical/philosophical influence, as well as the neurobiologic aspects of somatic psychology, which together are shaping an emerging comprehension of the body in cultural psychology.
Theoretical Somatics : Bordo, Foucault, and Sartre
Institutions created the “docile body.” Michel Foucault (1924-1986) fiercely lead French critical theorist circles in a movement to analyze the origins of power and knowledge (Eribon 1991). Foucault (1975) defines power as the ability to administer and restrain pleasure/sustenance, and the affliction of pain; power, to Foucault, is enacted both psychologically and physically. His groundbreaking text Discipline and Punish details how the origin of punishment was originally about the ceremonial afflicting of physical pain upon the individual body, with the requirement of audience; it was a ritualistic act of applying (and witnessing) the horrors of punishment. Discipline and Punish reveals the intentionality behind the subjugation of bodies through an increased orchestration of control and manipulation of the body's actions.
Where the body was once regarded simply the targeted location of applied power, Foucault termed the a body that has succumb to docility based upon the actions of discipline and punishment as "the docile body", which is achieved only under a constant and uninterrupted stream of coercion (1975). Foucault uses the docile body to describe a body that is consciously made within a social institution (e.g. schools, factories, and barracks); it is my belief that the docile body is much more common than it first appears.
While Foucault frequently uses the male pronoun to describe that who receives punishment, gendering Foucault's writing is a misstep. Foucault is by no means specifying that the experience of the docile body is specific to men; rather, I suggest Foucault's deduction of pronoun use to be related to the context of male-dominated discourse, as well as the disproportionate male to female ratio of bodies institutionalized in the formalize contexts of the docile body.
Susan Bordo and the locus of control. Susan Bordo (1947-p.) became regarded by many as the most prevalent feminist writer focused on the body, when she debuted her critical text, Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body (1993). The introduction to this book of essays highlights a particular double entendre that helps lay a foundational understanding for how the subjugation of the body in Western culture is borne on the backs of the culturally marginalized. Bordo references “The Heavy Bear” by Delmore Schwartz, a mid-twentieth century poem that names “the body as not ‘me’, but ‘with’ me… inescapably with me” (2). This concept of “the body as animal, as appetite, as deceiver, as prison of the soul and confounder of its projects… are common images within Western philosophy,” (3) Bordo acknowledges, naming the common Western (that is, originally related to the Christian) quest for purity – to be rid of “that which is body [as] albatross, the heavy drag on self-realization” (5). Through this feminist reading, Bordo displays how
the body… is a practical, direct locus of social control. Our conscious politics, social
commitments, strivings for change may be undermined and betrayed by the life of our
bodies – not the craving, instinctual body imagined by Plato, Augustine and Freud, but
what Foucault calls the ‘docile body,’ regulated by the norms of cultural life. (Bordo 1993, p.
165).
Bordo examines how these so-called “gender related and historically localized disorders” (such as agoraphobia, anorexia nervosa, and Body Dysmorphic Disorder) are indeed somatic responses to the power regulations governing the body in Western culture.
Sartre and Meaning-Making Existentialists. Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980) was a prolific writer, attributed with the roles of political activist, literary critic, playwright, biographer, and philosopher, among others. In wearing his many hats, the theorist had several occasions to philosophize on the nature of culture; Sartre is famously quoted as having said, “"culture was always conceived as a process of continual invention and re-invention." Sartre has become a founding voice in the pedagogy of cultural psychology touting the definitive and constant reality of change.
While ever-submerged in the nihilism of existential philosophy, Sartre’s career is highlighted by his contributions to the field of psychoanalysis with his text, Being and Nothingness (1943). In this now-seminal handbook to the field of Applied Existential Psychotherapy (AEP), Sartre’s work has pointed at the body as a locus of liberation. The equation is simple enough: the body -- which is a physical receptacle holding both general experiences and trauma -- combined with emotions -- or the reaction to the experiences -- together construct the two foundations of meaning-making for human beings (Cannon 2013).
How body and emotion make meaning. The Boulder Psychotherapy Institute (BPI) Training Modules on AEP assist body-centered therapists in resourcing their clients to sequence their “stuck” trauma out through an expression of sensation, or feeling. BPI suggests therapists address these three healing levels of meaning-making with their client in facing unprocessed material:
The body: What action needs to be completed?
Emotions: Allowing expression and restoring interpersonal connection
Meaning: Restoring the ability to act, create, and play in an “unsafe” world.
This, the basis of Sartre’s contribution to theoretical somatics, grew in relevance and acceptance throughout the 20th century. It is powerful, compelling work like this that set the stage -- and the demand -- for its science to be tested (and proven).
Neurobiologic Somatics: The science of Levine, Siegel, and Trauma
With the near exponential growth in technology deepening neurobiological research in the last decade (Foundation 2010), the hard science behind Somatic psychology has similarly concretized its credibility. With the advent of functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fRMI), researchers are able to watch the brain respond to stimulus in real-time (DiSalvo 2011). This tool has already been applied to a diverse breadth of neuroscientific research endeavors; among them is the research applications of mirror neurons, or an aspect of neurobiology that regulates empathy and a sense of connectedness in relationships. Reflecting back on the AEP model of meaning-making, we can position an inquiry of neurobiological connectedness in relationship to safety and trauma under the assumption that these construct and dismantle relationships, respectively. Together, the mutual arrivals of real-time stimulus tracking, and the expert investigation of mirror neurons (spear-headed by Dr. Dan Siegel), the hard-science of meaning making in the body has successfully integrated into the Neurobiological field.
Dan Siegel. Dr. Dan Siegel’s (1957 - p.) numerous contributions to the field of neuroscience within the last decade are already recognized as “invaluable...” “indispensable...” “outstanding acheivement[s]” (Stern, Steele, & Beebe, 2014). Siegel has published over 10 ground-breaking texts since the 1990s, and has also contributed an extensive audio-visual collection.
Siegel’s work is so successful not just because of his brilliance, but because of his accessibility. In The Neurobiology of We (2008), Siegel established himself as the progenitor of Interpersonal Neurobiology, a theory that discerns the relationship between the brain (that is, termed to mean the entire nervous system -- from nerve ending to neural memory -- providing neural connectedness throughout the body) and the mind. Siegel lobbies, rather convincingly, that “the mind uses the brain to create itself;” this phrase is particularly powerful coming from a neurobiologist because it unequivocally supports a post-Cartesian integration between the conceptualized mind’s experience and the concrete formation of the experiencing flesh.
As the title suggests, Siegel’s contributions go far beyond the intersubjective realm of an individual experience. The primary thrust of The Neurobiology of We is Siegel’s neurological breakdown of relationship through the mind and body. Relationships, Siegel argues, are the way we share energy and information flow. His stipulation of the “triangle of human experience” represents the brain/nervous system as the mechanism for knowing, the mind as the regulatory filter of energy and information flow, and relationships as providing the food and delivery of this shared content. Siegel further touts the relevance of relationship -- beyond the commonly held perception of the need for “stimulus” -- for the basic developmental need of interaction. To Siegel, “interaction” is the two-way relationality that basic “stimuli” negates in it’s unilateral direction of energetic flow.
Take, for example, the developing mind. To a developing child, interaction means that the other person does not just dangle a toy in front of their face while yelling at someone else down the hall; a child’s need for interaction stems from its need to develop relationships which create a cycling flow of energy, information, -- and frequently, empathy and care -- between child and guardian. If a child only receives stimulus at the negation of interaction, it’s relational needs are not met, and the brain literally degenerates as a result (Siegel 2008). If the needs for relationship are unmet, the child is highly likely to be considered traumatized by the experience of that microculture.
Siegel’s work illustrates the relationship between the neurobiologic individual and their relational context. Since the same chemicals fire in the construction of relationship -- whether between individuals or in a culturally scaled, macro-context -- the neurobiology of experience that promotes stimulation over interaction can be considered neglectful and even traumatizing. Such is the case in the experience of Western culture.
Peter Levine. Another major progenitor in the field of trauma is Dr. Peter Levine. Levine (1942 - p.) is the founder of Somatic Experiencing (SE), a body-centric therapeutic model that focuses on attending to, and the sequencing of, somatic memory imprinted in the nervous system through traumatic experience. His seminal text, Waking the Tiger stresses the human’s innate capacity for resilience having undergone trauma; SE works to resource individuals to process their “stuck” trauma in ways that reintegrate a sense of completion to the trauma. Levine is famous for his use of the term “sequencing,” which SE uses to relate to a completion reached, or a Gestalt, of a trauma. Traumas, by their nature, fragment in the individual psychophysical experience (Levine 1997). This process of healing -- from the body, through the body, and by the body -- puts SE at the forefront of body-based therapeutic techniques. From this place of prominence, SE has been able to make the need for integrating somatic experiences a mainstream discussion in the field of psychotherapy.
Waking the Tiger cites a massive study of over one hundred thousand men and women who were asked if they’d been traumatized in the last 3 years. A powerful 40% answered in the affirmative, typically citing such experiences as sexual assault, serious accidents, or witnessing injury or murder of another person. How can this number be understood in reference to a culture with a systemic occurrence of violence?
Marrying Science,Theory, and Context: An Integrated Reflection of Body, Trauma, and Culture
Siegel’s definitions of relationships being key to the construction of human understanding and Levine’s prompting of trauma-sequencing both support an individual’s process of meaning-making through the scientific processes of the body. But the body, just like the mind, cannot be addressed without a context; since we are relational beings neuronally wired to relate within a culture, regardless of its size or duration, our embodied experience remains a critical and under investigated lens. In creating a complete narrative about the role of the body and trauma today, interdisciplinary scholars have left a largely egregious oversight. In marrying existential philosophy with neurobiology, cultural studies can finally demand a deep and inclusive inquiry about the body’s place in cultural discourses. Without it, the continued exacerbation of a disembodied culture will continue to oppress, marginalize, and silence every being outside the accepted norms of privilege. Extensive, practical dialogue on the role of the body in Western culture is painfully overdue.
Christine Caldwell defines culture as a co-created relational setting in which everything from body language, tonal expression and intellectual content is regulated by agreed-upon norms (personal correspondence, 31 January 2014). Culture, to Caldwell, is highly aligned with Siegel’s definitions of relationships. However, I share in Caldwell’s crucial expansion from the realm of direct and conscious interactions into the realm of subliminal, subconscious enculturation. Sociologists exist to study the relationships that form a culture. From my perspective, the most overlooked relationship does not exist within the cultural network but is in fact the individual’s relationship to the network itself. In Western culture, critical examinations of the individual’s relationship to culture have been few and far between.
Now, re-contextualized in the seat of Foucault’s “docile body,” I now suggest that Western culture is inherently made to traumatize. But just as recovery and resourcing is contextualized by each individual experience, so the occurrence of trauma is individualized, rooted in a context, and impossible to determine unilaterally. Fellow psychoanalyst Robert D. Stolorow considers trauma “constituted in an intersubjective context in which severe emotional pain cannot find a relational home in which it can be held. In such a context, painful affect states become unendurable––that is, traumatic.” (Stolorow 2007, p. 10).
Whether witnessing a natural disaster or a burglary, a terrorist attack or a rape attempt, trauma lives in the body and manifests through the individual psyche if and only if the witness feels powerless in the situation. Instructor Robyn Chauvin of the Boulder Psychotherapy Institute remarks that those who feel capable of responding and mobilizing in such incidents of compounded injury will later respond that they do not feel traumatized by the incident (Robyn Chauvin, personal correspondence, 22 November 2013).
In drawing the curtains back on cultural psychology, particularly in the US, we need to start asking more questions. The most powerful questions will begin addressing the relevant socio-political notions about rampant apathy and political disengagement from youth in the US (Lassiter 2008, Launer 2014).
How shall we begin this post-Cartesian inquiry? The first question, while perhaps daunting in scope, is actually quite simply: is there a chance that the marginalization of the body, the institutionalization of docility, and the normative suppression of sequencing has left certain people(s) traumatized in Western culture? Unequivocally, the answer is yes -- rampant social inequity is highly likely to live in the bodies of marginalized peoples, and in the marginalized body itself. (Columbia University Teaching Projects, Hochschild et al, 2007). However, the more challenging, practice-based questions remain. It’s the one aspect of this theory that we as individuals must answer -- and act on -- for ourselves.
Have you been traumatized by Western culture?
And would you come, if I beckoned you, to heal?
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