The Reenchantment of the World (53 page)

, p. 207. The discussion that follows is taken
from pp. 60, 77-78, 120-24.

 

 

21 What type of men were Watson and Holt? According to a description
provided by one of his colleagues and one of his assistants, Holt was
the stereotype of Reich's armored individual. "His manner," they wrote,
"was more than serious, it was earnest. There was nothing about him which
could be called impressive, due perhaps to the absence of any outstanding
feature; rather he appeared a highly efficient, perfectly coordinated
human machine. He seemed to us austere and unapproachable." (Quoted in
Montagu,
Touching
, p. 121). As for Watson, it is instructive to learn
that not long after the publication of his
Psychology from the Standpoint
of the Behaviorist
(1919) he accepted a job with the J. Walter Thompson
advertising agency in New York, where "he applied his principles for
controlling rats to the manipulation of consumers" (Philip J. Pauly,
"Psychology at Hopkins,"
Johns Hopkins Magazine
30 [December 1979], 40).

 

 

22. Although I have tended to talk in causal terms in this discussion,
I do not believe that the impact of child-rearing practices on adult
life and culture is particularly more significant than the reverse. As
indicated, I believe that the two form a historical gestalt, but the
implications that follow are not fully clear. As Milton Singer shows in
his "Survey of Culture and Personality," in Bert Kaplan, ed.,
Studying
Personality Cross-Culturally
(New York: Harper & Row, 1961), pp. 9-90,
anthropology has had a difficult time trying to extricate itself from
causal arguments while continuing to say something meaningful. Thus both
Montagu and deMause talk as though this or that child-rearing practice
results in this or that adult characteristic, but proof remains elusive
and, in any event, theirs is a mechanical approach to very complex
problems.

 

 

Some progress has been made by Gregory Batson (see Chapter 7), whose
analyses have tended to show that different kinds of interpersonal
relations can assume functional patterns that differ from culture to
culture. In this view, parent-child relations are part of the culturally
patterned themes, and thus the child's relationship to its parents is
mutually interactive, or holistic. Children are thus seen as active in
stimulating parents into a certain pattern, a thesis supported by several
of the studies in the volume by Evelyn Thoman cited in note 14. Margot
Witty and T.B. Brazelton made a similar argument in "The Child's Mind,"
Harper's
, April 1978, pp. 46-47. The structure is seen to operate like
a circuit rather than a line.

 

 

23. Marshall H. Klaus and John H. Kennell,
Maternal-Infant Bonding
(St. Louis: The C. V. Mosby Company, 1976), esp. pp. 58ff., and Louis
W. Sander, et al; "Change in Infant and Caregiver variables over the
First Two Months of Life: Integration of Action in Early Development,"
in Evelyn Thoman, ed.;
Origins of the Infant's Social Responsiveness
,
pp. 368-75. Popular coverage of the Klaus-Kennell work was provided by the
New York Times
, 16 August 1977, p. 30, under the title "Closeness in the
First Minutes of Life May Have a Lasting Effect." Cf. Aidan Macfarlane,
The Psychology of Childbirth
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
1977), pp. 52-54, 100-101.

 

 

24. Montagu,
Touching
, pp. 256-58.

 

 

25. See Richard Poirier's interesting analysis of the lyrics, "Learning
from the Beatles," in his book
The Performing Self
(New York: Oxford
University Press, 1971), pp. 112-40.

 

 

26. From
The Child
, by Erich Neumann, p. 33. English translation
copyright 1973 by the C.G. Jung Foundation for Analytical Psychology, Inc.

 

 

27. N. O. Brown,
Life Against Death
(Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan
University Press, 1970; first publ. 1959), p. 31.

 

 

28. There "may be another, less systematized, kind of memory [than the
cognitive kind]," writes the pediatrician John Davies, "and it does not
mean that the [preconscious] experience has been lost, or is not having an
influence." Quoted in Macfarlane,
The Psychology of Childbirth
, p. 31.

 

 

29. C. G. Jung, "In Memory of Sigmund Freud," in
The Spirit in Man, Art,
and Literature
, trans. R. F. C. Hull (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1971), p. 48. This was Jung's obituary of Freud, originally
published in 1939.

 

 

30. For Bowlby, see his book
Separation
(New York: Basic Books,
1973). The quotation from Reich is on page 30 of
The Function of the
Orgasm
, trans. Vincent R. Carfagno (New York: Pocket Books, 1975;
orig. German edition 1942). There is some confusion here, as this
book is vol. 1 of his
Discovery of the Orgone
, which he rewrote
several times under the same title. In the discussion of Reich that
follows, I have drawn on pp. 4-6, 15, 37, 88-96, 128-32, 162-69, 243-44,
269-71, 283 of this work, as well as from his book
Character Analysis
,
trans. Vincent R. Carfagno, 3d ed., enl. (New York: Simon and Schuster,
1972; orig. publ. 1945), pp. 171-89.

 

 

31. I am not certain who coined this term, but it first becomes important
in the anthropological literature in
The People of Alor
, by Cora
DuBois, published in 1944. See Milton Singer,
A Survey of Culture and
Personality
, p. 33.

 

 

32. Actually, Reich said that it existed in all patriarchies, a thesis
much more difficult to establish. On Fromm's study of anal typology
see "Die psychanalytische Charakterologie und ihre Bedeutung für
die Sozialpsychologie,"
Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung
1 (1932),
253-77. The quote from Reich is in "Character Analysis," p. xxvi.

 

 

33. Peter Koestenbaum,
Existential Sexuality
(Englewood Cliffs, N.J.:
Prentice-Hall, 1974), pp. 63, 75.

 

 

34. Yankelovich and Barrett,
Ego and Instinct
, esp. pp. 157, 360-61,
365, 367-68, 371, 396. There is of course an immense specialized
literature on cell development. A recent, somewhat popular article on
cell interconnection is L.A. Staehelin and B.E. Hull, "Junctions between
Living Cells,"
Scientific American
238 (May 1978), 141-52.

 

 

35. Itzhak Bentov,
Stalking the Wild Pendulum
(New York: Dutton,
1977), pp. 85-86. Another way of seeing this is to regard the brain as
an organ like any other, whose function it is to amplify thoughts. What
we call mind, which is identical to the body, goes from the top of the
head to the bottom of the feet. The sensation of the body as an object
of a consciousness localized in the head is a Cartesian illusion. Mircea
Eliade has noted that premodern societies typically locate consciousness
at a point just below the navel, which is also a classical yogic
training exercise. Scientifically, this is probably more accurate than
regarding consciousness as located inside the head. Naturally enough,
modern culture regards it as located there because in a context so
dominated by processing and control, the experience of rationality becomes
overwhelming. In other contexts, it is less impressive. We become easily
convinced that this mental processing is the most important, or even
the only, form of thought. Bentov argues that it is not even thought,
a position more or less taken by don Juan in his discussion with Carlos
Castaneda in
Tales of Power
(see above, Chapter 5, note 19). Don Juan
also maintains, as I have in the text, that
both
"tonal" and
"nagual" are inherent parts of our being, but that the decisions we
make occur in the realm of the nagual. However, he adds (p. 265) that
the view of the tonal must prevail if one is to make use of the nagual --
a point I regard as crucial in this whole business.

 

 

36. Aptly termed "split-brain follies" by Theodore Roszak. See
Unfinished Animal
(New York: Harper & Row, 1975), pp:
52-57. The various experiments that have been performed with the "two
brains" might conceivably be seen as constituting a refutation of my
argument about the body and unconscious knowledge. After all, these
experiments do reveal the right hemisphere as being (in right-handed
people) the locus of nonverbal functions. However, my argument does not
deny that the brain stores images or organizes them. The "two brain"
experiments tell us nothing about where the knowledge originates
from. Thus I believe it can be maintained that intelligence is in the
body, and data processing in the brain. Nor is this to deny that the
brain can be a very sensual thing, amplifying and processing fantasy,
dreams, artistic imagery, and so on.

 

 

37. Peter Marris,
Loss and Change
(Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday Anchor,
1975).

 

 

38. There are limits to this argument, of course, but it is nevertheless
likely that beyond the common substrate of primary process, Galileo's
body was different from that of Thomas Aquinas, and that both of them were
significantly different from the body of Homer. The human body has changed
over the centuries in a number of important ways: in height, shape,
ability to perceive colors, and especially in physiognomy. Psychoanalyst
Stanley Keleman has developed this theme in some detail, and has argued
that the body of the future will be a further radical departure from
that of the present.

 

 

39. It should be clear that I have not left Descartes behind, largely
because it is presently impossible to think discursively in purely
nonscientific categories, although I have struggled to do so (cf. notes
35 and 36 to this chapter). The discussion in the text continues the
mind/body dichotomy, locating the ego in the head and the unconscious
in the body. It also uses the term "unconscious" in two senses, as
participation, and as knowledge in the body which we somehow cannot get
at. Can such an approach be justified?

 

 

I would answer by saying that this chapter has an inevitable tension built
into it. I am trying to provide a verbal analysis of nonverbal experience,
and there are obvious limits to what can be communicated in this way. As
don Juan noted, the "tonal," by definition, cannot possibly explicate the
"nagual." Thus the two senses of the unconscious which I make use of are
only dual to scientific reasoning. To holistic reasoning,
mimesis
is
"the knowledge present in the body, and is hardly inaccessible." In other
words, the "nagual" is not unknown. It is only unknown to the ego. The
ontological being, the whole person, does know it, but there is no way
of presenting this knowledge to the reader in book form short of having
the text printed on fur or switching to verse. I could, of course,
have invented a new holistic terminology, complete with words such as
"mindbody" and "selfother," but I do not think a scientific
Finnegans
Wake
would be helpful at this point. I suggest, then, that the present
chapter and its Cartesian vocabulary be viewed as a prop helping us to
advance to the point where we shall no longer think in dualistic terms.
We are still stuck in dualism, yet can recognize an approaching change.

 

 

40. E. A. Burtt,
The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Science
, 2d
ed. (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1932), p. 17; Langer,
Philosophy in
a New Key
, pp. xiii, 3, 12-13.

 

 

41. The following discussion is adapted from my essay, "The Ambiguity
of Color," published in 1978 by the Exploratorium in San Francisco;
use of this material by permission of the Director. See also Mike and
Nancy Samuels,
Seeing with the Mind's Eye
(New York: Random House,
1975), p. 93, Land's article, "Experiments in Color Vision," may be
found in the May 1959 issue of
Scientific American
, and the quote from
Lao-tzu appears in Alan Watts,
The Way of Zen
(New York: Vintage Books,
1957), p. 27, Whorf's classic work is
Language, Thought, and Reality
,
ed. John B. Carroll (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1956). There is a large
literature on the human aura; the interested reader might start with
Nicholas M. Regush,
Exploring the Human Aura
(Englewood Cliffs, N.J.:
Prentice-Hall, 1975).

 

 

42. Exposure
beyond
fifteen minutes starts to push the inmate toward a
breakdown. See "No new tortures needed,"
Montreal Gazette
, 17 October
1980, and "Pink power calls raging inmates,"
Montreal Gazette
, 5
January 1981.

 

 

43. This statement may be a bit misleading; I do not mean to suggest that
anthropocentrism is the answer to our epistemological dilemmas. It is
worth asking, for example, what the cetacean or arachnid experience of
light and color is, and Judith and Herbert Kohl explore this approach in
their interesting book
The View from the Oak
(San Francisco: Sierra
Club Books, 1977). Even in these cases, however, the human factor
intrudes; what one is really studying is the human experience of the
cetacean (or arachnid) experience of light and color. But recognizing
the existence of this factor and incorporating it into our sciences does
not necessarily result in anthropocentrism. Donald Griffin discusses
the notion of participant observation in biological research in
The
Question of Animal Awareness
(New York: The Rockefeller University
Press, 1976).

 

 

44. Robert Bly,
Sleepers Joining Hands
(New York: Harper & Row, 1973),
pp. 48-49.

 

 

45. Brown,
Life Against Death