Those who picked up the demand for Cool Hand Luke sound bytes in another thread will recognize the source of my apologetic reference: "Whyat we have hyar is a faylyoor to camyewnicate". It is clear that I attributed to your prior post certain implications you didn't intend to put into it. So I think we are less at cross purposes than we might have been.

And don't take my frustrated remarks about "sinking in" personally. They were not meant to be personal, just venting and ranting.

Re Freudian theory versus psychopharmacology: Itis true that thousands of hours of Freudian analysis can be spent to little or no benefit, which indicates there is serious dissonance between real function and predicted function.

It is true as well that a very limited set of depressive or other extreme conditions can be offset, dampened or made tractable by psychopharm answers. But there is a reasonable argument to be made that these are essentially the equivalent of putting sawdust in the crankcase of a used car to make it sound better.

By Freudian abuses I did not mean unethical conduct by practitioners but the kind of abuse that comes from enforcing a failed model or an unworking process.

I believe that psychiatry of the class that depends on free association, Jungian archetypal intepretations, and physical systemic approaches including dependency on pharmacologicals, insulin shock, thermal shock, electroconvulsive therapy, and enforced models and imposed explanations are complete profound failures, and that some of them are worse than failures but are themselves psychotic devices produced by degenerates. But that's just my opinion.

There is no question that chemicals have physical effects on a fairly predictable basis. But they can have highly destructive effects on the intricate system that is a human being, including numbing his cogntive abilities in an effort to suppress his unwanted thoughts, which is pretty hamfisted to myway of thinking, inducing tardive dyskinesia, reducing the individual will to live, or act, and others -- almost like watching television!

All I meant about Freud is that he was doing groundbreaking work, and he came up with a rough approximation of what he thought was happening. I don't know for sure but I believe the big push to "be scientific" was not born with him. I believe it occurred in the organizational efforts to found the APA in New York State but don't quote me on that. That was where the first law requiring that practitioners hold medical degrees, which was not part of Freud's vision of his work, I think. I think it was an effort to gain scientistic respectability.

What he contributed was the interesting notion that the guided attention of the individual could serve as a tool to undo neurosis and possibly even psychosis. This is a big step. That it did not get built in his framework into a routinely successful methodology is a good reason to overhaul the methodology and the model, but I would be wary of rejecting the whole paradigm.

I've seen a lot of counseling session reports, and one thing that seems to come out of them in a repeating pattern is that the best results (by personal assessment and by observation) come when the individual retains the sovereign authority to say for himself what he sees, what he thinks, and how he thinks things are. Different schools of therapy undermine this by suggesting, imposing belief systems and labels, or explaining to the individual what he "needs to realize". These are, I think, attributes of therapy in the hands of Prussian cavalry officers.

As for "alternative beliefs" I submit that Wonder bread, lawn flamingoes and the Boy Scouts are as much alternative beliefs as proposing a spiritual facet to human nature. Or at least proposing that there are aspects of human nature that are apparently major elements in the core -- abilities like perceiving, awareness, and so on -- that there is no ready explanation for in physical terms except to say "oh its the complexity that explains it", which is kind of silly. Here's a quote from an online discussion of the mechanisms of aural perception, for example:

"The Organ of Corti is a gelatinous mass about 4 cm long and is composed of some 7500 interrelated parts.The Organ of Corti is enclosed in the cochlea which is deeply imbedded in the temporal bone (the hardest in the body) is one of the best protected parts of the body. It is related to a series of tiny sensing bumps in fishes that are located along the body in rows just under the skin. These tiny bumps are used by fish to sense slight movements of water. The Organ of Corti operates in a similar way. It is filled with fluid, surrounded by other fluid and responds to movements in these fluids - those movements induced by sound waves.

The fluids filling and surrounding it act as shock absorbers, and so do the springy membranes which support it. It is even isolated from the normal body supply lines, for the faint pulsing of blood through capillary vessels would be detected as background noise.

The capillaries nearest to the organ of Corti end at the wall of the cochlea; nutrients on their way out are carried to and from the capillaries by the endolymph fluid that bathes the organ.

The organ of Corti is shaped like the jam in a jam roll. It spirals around within the cochlea. The basilar membrane supports the organ which contains a mass of cells almost touching the branch endings of the auditory nerve. From these cells sprout fine hairs, (23,500 of them) rising in orderly rows like the bristles of a very soft brush. The hairs stick through the dome of the organ, their ends embedded in a thick overhanging sheet, the tectorial membrane.

These hairs are transducers. As the basilar membrane bellies in and out, it pushes and pulls the complex of tissues above it. The hairs' cells of the organ of Corti ride with the basilar membrane. The hairs have their tops embedded in the tectorial membrane and their roots fixed in the hair cells, so the motion of the basilar membrane bends and twists and pulls and pushes the hairs. Under these physical stresses the hairs generate electrical signals which stimulate the auditory nerve (also known as the acoustic nerve and the eighth cranial nerve) - a bundle of about 30,000 individual fibres.

Eventually, in a way still not fully understood, the electrical signals running through the auditory nerve stimulate the hearing centres of the brain. In the cells of the auditory cortex lies the mystery of the sensation of hearing."

Somewhere this process jumps in quality from a chain of stimuli=>responses to a perception. This jump is not just "more of the same stuff" (quantitative), it is qualitative. Your carefully chosen sound waves penetrate your lover's pearl-studded ears and go through the conniptions described and, at some point along this track of electro-mechanical translations, Lo! Understanding Is. Perception is. Wow. Every instant in which someone participates in this process is alnost as amazing as a new baby, from some perspectives. And to think all this is "a mystery deeply embedded in the cells of the cortex". I don't think so.

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