Theory of Psychogenesis
In the previous post I enumerated three degrees of freedom at which the soul can vibrate: Hyperborean, Transcendental and Haelegenic. Here I’ll talk about psychogenesis, the formation of the soul prior to its capacity for either freedom or slavery. This process, which is equal parts social and biological, determines the unique way a person will be born into the human world, the vectors of their freedom and enslavement. It has five distinct phases and ends at around age twelve. I draw my theory of psychogenesis mostly from psychoanalysis and materialist philosophy - Freud’s Three Essays, his “On Narcissism”, Karen Horney, Merle Fossum, the account of psychogenesis in chapter 2 of Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition, Dan Siegel’s The Developing Mind and Ernest Becker’s The Denial of Death. I mention these texts and authors just as a general orientation. While they all take it as given that the soul has not lived before and will not live on after death, none is incompatible with more theistic metaphysical orientations.
I would argue that it isn’t really possible to be free or awake without understanding the basic idea of these phases, and having a conception of how each has played out in one’s own life. This is a universal dimension of human experience which religion and psychoanalysis approach from different directions. That said, this topic is inherently cloudy and unscientific, so any theory of psychogenesis is ultimately speculative, at least for now.
THE FIVE STAGES OF PSYCHOGENESIS
The five stages are: attachment, achievement, gender, sexuality and persona. They’re best envisioned as a series of folds, each representing a new horizon of social awareness, a new circuit for the circulation of LAET. During the attachment stage, the child develops a desire to feel loved, passively. During the achievement phase it develops a desire to be loved for something it has actively done or learned to do.
Then we pass from the passive stages to the active ones. During the gender stage it recognizes the reality of gender and unconsciously chooses an orientation1, an unconscious decision about whether to keep its narcissistic libido directed towards its own body (woman, ‘being the Phallus’ for Lacan) or whether to renounce this autophilia and direct it towards others, replaced with an autophilia linked to achievement love received from them. Then it does the same for its sexual orientation. Finally during the persona stage it synthesizes the preceding stages into a life task and develops a sense of the distinction between private interiority and public exteriority.
The first phase, attachment, takes place during the first few years of life, before a child can understand verbal language, but it can give and receive emotional communication. It involves the first glimmer of interpersonal awareness, a mostly unconscious sense of whether or not one is loved and valued. If it has an object, the object is the mother’s breast, and if it has a subject, an erotic center, it is the child’s mouth - but in my view more essential than subject or object is the process of rhythmic emotional attunement. Lacan describes this as a dialectic between ‘need’ and ‘demand’ which plays out as the child’s cry to be fed or soothed. Need is a raw biological hunger or other discomfort, to which caregivers will respond with greater or lesser attunement, depending on their own degree of trauma and availability. With repeated instances of need and response or lack thereof, the child begins to register a sense of love-in-itself detached from biological need. It wants not the milk but the breast, the response, the availability.
It may be that the religious theme of reliance on God and receptivity to God’s love is related fundamentally to this phase. While the religious attitude towards attachment perhaps goes deepest, it lacks some of the nuance offered by modern psychology and psychoanalysis. These two similar and overlapping yet very different disciplines offer contrasting 4-element schema, a normative one which I associate with Ainsworth and a non-normative one I associate with Lacan.
ATTACHMENT THEORY
The four elements of attachment theory are secure, dissociative, insecure and chaotic. It is normative because ‘secure’ is posited as healthy, and the other three as pathological.
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