GUILT . and . MEANING

part 2 - Trauma . and . Slow-onset . Catatonia

The links in the table on the left take you to sub-headings in this article.

Criticism of the family is nearly always focused on the physical or sexual abuse of the child by the parent. The problems arising from mental and emotional abuse are not adequately understood. Least of all is it realised that parents who are strong-willed and/or strongly moralistic pose severe problems for the young and sensitive child ; my critique of the family is oriented to such parents.

My mother was pleasure-loving at times, but she had a dominant will and a narrow sense of morality. My father had fine leadership qualities of character. I related more to my mother than to my father. Alas, what I most needed as a child – love and affection – was usually absent or in short supply. What I mostly remember about my childhood was mother's lack of sympathy and her fault-finding. This may be termed the ‘Spartan’ view of child-rearing : the parent is unable to offer much emotional support to the child, and expects him to become self-reliant (again without much help from the parent).

The Spartan upbringing may be fine for a child who wants to develop dominant willpower, but is a disaster for a sensitive child who orientates on emotion. I define sensitivity as being a characteristic of a person whose ideals are not limited to materialistic ones (and may even reject the importance of materialism itself ), together with a subconscious emotional mood of fear. If a sensitive child begins to develop ascetic virtues then the underlying fear becomes more dominant. However, this fear is often masked by a less dominant, though more visible, influence of guilt.

When such an ascetic person reincarnates back to Earth then he poses severe problems for parents. If the parent cannot offer love when the infant needs it then the infant's fear creates an unstable base for the developing ego. Trauma is likely to be experienced. In times past this conflux of difficulties from the child and from the parent would automatically steer the child into the direction of following a religious and/or monastic life. Within such a scenario the young adult would seek a teacher in whom he could have faith, and would often develop willpower through the need to repress his childhood problems.

However, when the adult chooses not to repress his difficulties then the childhood trauma will sooner or later, in suitable circumstances, flower into some intensity of madness. Difficult situations and poor relationships can induce anxiety, fear or guilt. Any one of these emotions, when intense enough, will stimulate the subconscious dynamics of trauma, and the adult will replay some form of it.

What I am implying by these ideas is that most people who can be considered to be the best examples of ethical humanity have a latent brew of simmering trauma in the centre of their being. This latency is not visible so long as life is fine and harmonious ; but when fortune departs for other pastures then sorrow becomes one's constant companion.

If humanity is to prosper then the conditions of child rearing have to be changed. Aspiring parents need to be instructed in the psychological issues involved in caring for babies and children, and not left to learn by trial and error. Trial and error means that the parent gets the trial but the baby gets the error !

Negative Influence of Morality

What are the problems that a strong-willed and/or moralistic parent presents to the sensitive child ? . If a person is willing to submit his moral beliefs to an empirical analysis, if he is willing to correlate his beliefs to the subconscious moods that sustain them, he will find that Nietzsche's criticisms of morality are correct. Morality as it exists now and has existed for all historical time is founded on resentment and hatred and other negative emotions. This fact applies not only to Christianity and humanism but to Indian religions as well. [³]

Usually this resentment is not visible – it is subconscious. And because it is subconscious the person is not aware of it. I do not deny that some noble feelings exist but these are comparatively rare ; and they are much too rare to compensate the child for his experiences of the parents' subconscious resentment. What is worse than resentment is hatred, especially the hatred within pride. Strong-willed and moralistic people always have a dominant sense of pride, and it is this pride (in the mode of hatred of other people) that crucifies the infant. [4]

The mind of the young infant, at the stage when the infant is beginning to form its ego, is still mainly subconscious. So the infant is fully alive to the emotional states of the parent's mind – both to the conscious mind and to the subconscious one. A strong will requires an emotional dynamic of hate ; it is hate that gives the will its resoluteness, its ability to disregard attachments and to overcome obstacles. It is pride (mode of hatred of other people) that gives the will the ability to repress other emotions. And it is these two hatreds that the infant experiences regularly from a moralistic parent. When the parent handles the infant then the infant's aura is within the parent's aura. In this way the infant absorbs the parent's hatred undiluted, by direct transmission through the auras.

The experience of the parent's subconscious hatreds generates self-hate in the infant : he turns the parent's hatred onto himself. Now he feels that he does not deserve the parent's love. He feels rejected and excluded ; if this experience is intense enough then the infant is traumatised. Trauma centres on the feelings of being rejected and excluded.
The infant's emerging ego becomes de-stabilised.

Whether the parent is actually rejecting the infant is immaterial ; it is always the infant's interpretation of his situations that is of the greatest importance. It is the infant's interpretation of his relationships that determines his responses to them.

Handling Trauma

One way of handling this traumatic situation is for the infant to generate self-pity (as a mode of guilt). For the sensitive infant, the addition of fear (as the base of his sensitivity) to the guilt collapses the will, thereby precipitating catatonia. Catatonia is a response to intense feelings of rejection and exclusion. (Another common response is the generation of schizophrenia).

Catatonia in the infant is not visible because he binds himself to the parent via the stratagem of identification with that parent. He identifies with the parent's will and masks the collapse of his own will. This stratagem becomes the unstable support to the infant's ego. So long as he can identify with the parent, so long can the child survive. [5]

When he becomes an adult he can continue the identification by picking for a partner a woman who has similar traits of character to his mother. But if the stresses of life become greater than the support that identification gives to him then he may find that the effects of childhood trauma begin to rise into consciousness.

The intensity of the trauma will differ between different infants and different parents. Nevertheless, in my view, infancy trauma is either the originating cause of all forms of madness or else it helps to create the necessary conditions for later madness, simply because it de-stabilises the emerging ego. The ego, once it has been formed, will have fragile foundations. The intensity of adult madness will depend on the intensity of trauma in childhood.

Whether an adult ends up being catatonic, schizophrenic, manic depressive, suicidal, etc, these forms only reflect the fact that infancy trauma has been experienced. In other words, catatonia, schizophrenia, manic depression, etc are just different strategies for handling the subconscious memory of infancy trauma when its influence can no longer be repressed in the adult.

As an example of a strategy, catatonia implies fear of asserting power [6]; this fear occurs when the infant feels (rightly or wrongly) that it has been rejected by the parent. The infant feels that it is to blame. Then it cannot learn to assert itself (unless it decides to be rebellious, which is an unskilful way to self-assertion !).

The infant absorbs the parent's hatred and feels that it has been rejected. In my case I accept that I had a major problem with rejection in my previous incarnations ; this problem carried through to this life and sensitised me to being rejected as an infant. [7]

I assume that the same cause holds for all cases of infancy trauma ; that is, the problem of rejection is carried over from the end of one life and then is re-experienced in the next life during infancy. For an ascetic person this cycle may become self-perpetuating in all future incarnations, unless the person can learn to handle it harmoniously through an understanding of dynamic psychology. This sensitivity to rejection is one of the main reasons that advanced ascetics, such as mystics and meditators, usually prefer to avoid the company of the rest of humanity.

Slow-onset Catatonia

In my case, the onset of adult catatonia was instantaneous. This event is described in the previous article, which focuses on rapid-onset catatonia. Perhaps most cases of catatonia arise from a slow, insidious paralysis of will. I label this process slow-onset catatonia, or insidious guilt.

What is the difference between rapid-onset and slow-onset disorder ? . In my view, slow-onset catatonia is brought about by the gradual intensification of guilt. The guilt slowly creeps up on the person. Whereas rapid-onset catatonia occurs through the rapid intensification of fear. Fear is binary, or complementary, to anger ; both emotions can be explosive in their intensity. While this explosiveness is a familiar feature of anger it is not readily realised that it is also a feature of fear, presumably because fear is usually diluted into anxiety. Intense fear can turn me to jelly in a few seconds.

Consider the effects of the gradual intensification of guilt, that is, insidious guilt. The necessary pre-condition for it is that trauma has happened in childhood. If infancy trauma has occurred then the ego has been constructed on an unstable basis of fear and guilt.

In due time the child becomes an adult. If the stresses of life are sufficiently intense, this ‘endogenous’ guilt slowly begins to spread all through the person's being. Guilt becomes dominant in the subconscious mind and continually destroys all meaningful activity. The person's life becomes wasted, and doubt arises – the person says to himself ‘something must be wrong with me’. The doubt corrodes his sense of pride and makes him even more susceptible to insidious guilt. There seems to be no antidote and the person's life gradually falls to pieces. Quite often, at some stage of this process, the flight into religion is precipitated.

For the person who is an individual, this slow corrosion of meaningful activity is most noticeable when it occurs in his adolescence. The normally highly-energetic adolescent is reduced to apathy, vagueness, and indecision. Now he may be diagnosed as suffering from a variant of ‘schizophrenia’. This is where I part company with orthodox medical views. In my view, there is only one genuine form of schizophrenia, which I discuss in the next article. The other varieties of schizophrenia found in psychiatric textbooks are usually forms of either slow-onset catatonia or of paranoia.

It needs to be understood that slow-onset catatonia need not go all the way to the full catatonic state ; it all depends on how the stresses of life are handled. In my late adolescence and my 20s I drifted through life, with no goals, no ambitions, eventually living on the fringe of society, knowing that something was wrong with me but not knowing what. The full catatonic state is reached when the person has no more ability to protect himself against the hardships of life.

I summarise these ideas so far

When a parent has strong moral values (whether social or religious ones) then a dominant will goes hand-in-hand with them. However, this also means that a dominant feature of the parent's subconscious mind is hatred. If the parent has a sensitive child, then the child introjects that hatred and turns it onto himself, thereby becoming engulfed in the experience of trauma.

When the child has become an adult, his self-pity will sooner or later produce one of two effects. Either he will descend into apathy and indecision, or the self-pity will propel him into a search for faith. For the types of sensitive personalities who as adults seek solitude or mysticism or a monastic life, the single unifying characteristic of their lives is the subconscious feeling of parental rejection and exclusion. [There are other responses to trauma [8], but here I am focusing on the response of self-pity].

Unconscious Ideas of Trauma

Why does a person seek meaning from life ? . One evening I reflected on an old issue, my affinity with tramps and beggars. Like them I have nearly always been an outcast. (When I am not being an outcast, I am usually being an outsider). From this reflection I derived the unconscious ideas (fixed beliefs about some important aspects of life) that create and maintain infancy trauma. [9]. The feelings of rejection and exclusion take the following forms :

Infancy trauma	implies I am an outcast (exclusion), or
	implies I am a beggar (rejection).

Upon these unconscious ideas
the whole quest for meaning in life originates.

Anyone may like to intellectually explore concepts of meaning. But infancy trauma alone gives dynamism to this exploration ; it is always infancy trauma that drives the seeker on his quest.

The traumatised infant feels that he has become an outcast and/or a pauper. A person can be an outcast without being a beggar, but a beggar gets the worst of all worlds. A beggar is bringing into full consciousness in the most public way possible the subconscious childhood experience of rejection and exclusion.

Philosophical Meanings

1). Infancy trauma

I have considered the psychological reasons for this.
Now I consider some philosophical reasons for it.

Trauma is not primarily the fault of the parents. It results from the way that human evolution is designed. The spiritual purpose of having the birth process the way that it is, is to ensure that the new-born infant does not have a conscious mind, and hence does not have an existing ego. The lack of an existing ego ensures that the ego, in the process of its creation, has to depend on the parents for emotional support. This requirement facilitates bonding to the parents. Hence the child is influenced by other people ; its attachments ensure that it will absorb the parents' moral boundaries. [10]

If the infant were born with a ready-made ego, then it would not need to form attachments to other people. Without any attachments, then the child would be, and forever remain, a self-sufficient monad. And a self-sufficient monad has no need for moral boundaries, or morality of any kind. In some Eastern views of spirituality, the idea that each person is a monad is a popular one. But such ideas fail to solve the problems of determinism and confusion and immorality.

In my view, the primary purpose of human evolution on Earth is to develop suitable moral and ethical codes of practice. Everything else is of secondary importance – everything that a person wants to achieve in life needs to be encased within moral and ethical boundaries. In order to achieve this, the incarnating person is prevented from being a monad by the conditions of childhood (the infant is not born with a conscious ego, but has to create it). Then childhood trauma creates suffering, and suffering seems to be necessary for the adoption of moral codes, or for the questioning of outdated codes.

2). Catatonia

I have dealt with the psychological meaning of catatonia.
What is the philosophical meaning of it ?

Prior to adult psychosis, meaning is usually embedded in social utility (or social utilitarianism or the search for a source of happiness that is outside of oneself ). This search is centred on attaining goals that are determined externally and socially, such as those of wealth, fame, social position, etc. There is little or no reference to the person's existential needs. Utility is a very shallow understanding of life and is no lifebelt to someone who is sinking into insidious guilt.

Out-dated social institutions produce alienation in the individual and so increase the potency of the process of disintegration. For the alienated individual, social morality is viewed simply as a variety of social conditioning. [11]. When a person rejects all commitments to a life built on utility then catatonia is likely to become the terminal condition of his deteriorating psychological state. That is, catatonia is the non-cognitive (the person cannot explain what is happening to him) total rejection of social utility as a basis for ethics.

By following the search for happiness the person stifles and neglects his genuine needs. When he intuitively realises his internal barrenness, when he judges everything that he has done to be worthless, when he judges himself to be worthless too, then meaning disintegrates. Ultimately, a person's judgement on himself is always more important than the judgement of other people on him.

The person's judgement on himself helps to determine his destiny.

Meaning is always prior to happiness.
Happiness is dependent on meaning.
When meaning disintegrates, so does happiness.

This philosophical understanding has implications for psycho-therapy. Because the person is rejecting the contemporary state of social morality it is poor practice in psycho-therapy to try to force the potential, or actual, catatonic patient to return to being socially normal. The patient involved in psycho-therapy needs to seek a new morality and a new destiny.

This condition of therapy applies to all forms of mental disorder. When a person successfully surmounts his disorder he will be a different person from when the disorder first manifested itself.

Mental disorder indicates the dominating influence of confusion. To effect a cure means to eliminate confusion in a sufficient degree. Drug treatments cannot do this for the person, hence drug treatments never successfully cure madness ; drugs can only help to control madness.

Only a suitable psycho-therapy can remove confusion.

The number in brackets at the end of each reference takes you back to the paragraph that featured it. The addresses of my websites are on the Links page.

[¹]. The issues of rejection and exclusion give rise to the experience of trauma in infancy. This distress occurs when the stresses and negative states of mind of the parents’ own lives are transmitted to the fledgling ego of the infant. This is one of the origins of violence.
An article on Bonding focuses on some problems of a sensitive child and explains an unintentional source of infancy trauma. This is on my websites The Strange World of Emotion, or The Subconscious Mind, or Discover Your Mind.

In more detail, see the article Vulnerability of the Ego. This article also describes the process of ego creation. Or, a shortened version is Infancy Trauma, on my website The Subconscious Mind. [1]

[²]. The problems with sensitivity are described in the article Sensitivity and Effects of Fear, on my website Discover Your Mind. [2]

[³]. For Nietzsche's criticisms of morality, read
Nietzsche, Freidrich. On the Genealogy of Morals. Translated by Walter Kaufmann. Vintage Books, USA, 1969.

I have an article on Morality, on my websites The Strange World of Emotion, and Discover Your Mind. [3]

[4]. A summary of the factors of some important emotions is :
Guilt = self-pity + self-hate.
Pride = vanity + hatred of other people.
Narcissism = love + vanity.
Jealousy = love + self-pity.
Anxiety = fear + vanity

My definitions, descriptions, and analysis of emotions are given in the three articles on Emotion. See home page. [4]

[5]. The relationship between will power and identification is given in the article Bonding, on my websites The Strange World of Emotion, and Discover Your Mind, and The Subconscious Mind. [5]

[6]. The relationship between catatonia and power is described in the article Prediction. [6]

[7]. The problem of rejection is analysed in the three articles on Conflict within Idealism, on my website Patterns of Spirituality. Another approach is in the article Levels of Suffering, on the same website or on Discover Your Mind. [7]

[8]. Another response to infancy trauma is to centre on masochism and sadism. See the article Sadism, Masochism and Phantasy, on my website The Strange World of Emotion. [8]

[9]. I introduce the term "unconscious idea" in the first article on Emotion, section Unconscious Ideas. See also glossary for Emotional Dynamics. [9]

[10]. There is an article on Bonding, on my websites The Strange World of Emotion, and Discover Your Mind, and The Subconscious Mind. [10]

[11]. There is an article on Alienation, on my websites The Strange World of Emotion, and Discover Your Mind. See Links page. [11]

The articles in this section are :

Guilt & Meaning - part 1, catatonia and faith

Guilt & Meaning - part 2, trauma and slow-onset catatonia

Narcissism & Schizophrenia

Narcissism - Mania & Manic Depression

 

Jealousy & Kundalini Psychosis

Pride & Paranoia

Depression & Autism & other states of despair

Mind Loops

Copyright © 2003 Ian Heath
All Rights Reserved

The copyright is mine, and the article is free to use. It can be reproduced anywhere, so long as the source is acknowledged.

 

Ian Heath
London, UK

www.confusion.discover-your-mind.co.uk/index.htm

e-mail address:
iheath.cfn<at>discover-your-mind.co.uk

If you want to contact me, use the address above but replace the <at> by @

It may be a few days before I can respond to correspondence.