baby thoughts...

What I was daydreaming about after reading the latest articles...

The Universe is the totality of everything that exits, it’s physic laws commonly looked at unimaginable and it’s size infinite. But do we really understand what it is? All our vocabulary helps us to understand, but immensely limits and frames its real meanning.

How would be able to compare something which is simply incomparable to us.

I mean, in a way we limit the infinity by titling it "infinity". I guess it calms us down, we master unexplainable in give it a tag, a definition.

The babies unconscious life dreading fears, which in early stages might be the desire of food or a warm motherhood is fascinating. I look it at as pure anxiety. The unexplainable anxieties "nameless dread" mention in joc’s article, which I guess lives in each of us. And likely a baby feels when it in a totally unknown environment. When the baby consciously realizes the unexplainable. I imagine it to be a feeling of helplessness and loneliness. Something similar the soldier feels in a life threatening position. Where conscious communicating does not to make sense. Where all post-experiences, definition, and words do not frame and limit its vast power. No thread to hold on to…

When I lay in my bed…when all my existential desires are satisfied and religion and science seem to be nothing more then entertainment, that's when I believe to feel a little drop of this pure anxiety, while realizing to be nothing more then an accidence of “nature”….

I was just thinking…quite silly though….. What would happen, when the Universe would be fully explained?

Atheism Vs God AKA establishment, Atheism Vs Agnostic.

Interesting. Quite old now but still related. Atheists Vs Religion AKA the establishment and Atheism Vs Agnostic.

He has compelling points and I agree with him that religion and God are a far fetched idea but I don't necessarily agree with him that the 'intelligentsia' are being robbed of power because of their religious or nonreligious view and that they, the 'intelligentsia' are the best placed people to govern. What about wisdom? Does intelligence always appropriate wisdom, look at Heidegger and Nazism (Josch's posts).

Is wisdom and intelligence related?

Neither do I accept that Agnostic is "atheism writ respectable". Maybe it is by some people but I genuinely believe that our existence and our creation and destiny is inconclusive.

But it is curious, this institutionalised abhorrence and fear of disbelief or at the very least a rejection of the acceptance that God could be make believe and science is just as, if not, more believable.

I know I said that I'd finished with this but it's just so fascinating and enraging. It's something that stirs us so if we can stir similar subconscious / conscious thoughts in others it must be worth communicating.

Bion and Beckett.

This is more of a footnote but interesting...

Beckett was Bion's first major case whilst a trainee therapist.

Beckett suffered from depression and physical manifestations of anxiety and came to England to receive treatment, which introduced him to Bion. There's some interesting writing on how this relationship effected the two men.

'Nameless Dread'

A ‘Nameless Dread’

I’ve been reading about a psychoanalytical term described as ‘nameless dread’ and the psychoanalyst who coined the term, Wilfred Bion (a pupil of Klein). The phrase alone is powerful and contains a certain amount of mysterious terror and the concept behind it, I think, is relevant to our work.

Bion’s theory relates to the anxieties of a baby and the mother’s way of dealing with them. He suggests that these anxieties at the most primitive level are associated with death, the infant’s ‘feeling, say, that it is dying’.

“A baby whose distress cannot be contained (by the mother) might experience what Bion calls ‘nameless dread’, a feeling that its anxieties are not only intolerable, but cannot be made sense of. Its anxieties fragment within the psyche, and are then felt to attack it...”

Basically the ‘nameless dread’ as I understand it is the un-understandable fear and anxieties that babies often experience faced with the unknown and without a mother to ‘contain’ and reassure them. In Bion’s case he related this infant experience / state to soldiers in the trenches.


***

Bion was a psychoanalyst during the 1st world war and a lot of his and other psychoanalysts of that time seem to have been informed in their theories by the primitive and raw effects of war on men and their psyche.

Apparently the most feared wound during the war in the trenches was evisceration which is a wound to the stomach or more accurately the effect of your guts being ripped from your belly by a metal gun shell. One account is of this soldier who had developed ‘war neurosis’ after an attack in the trenches...

“The victim had been flung by the force of a shell-blast into the distended stomach of a dead German, and his mouth was filled with the entrails.”

Can you imagine that... It’s horrific and I think the difference between the fear and anxiety that an infant experiences and that of the 1st world war trench soldier is that the baby’s ‘nameless dread’ is usually not real or not as big as it seems where as the soldier’s fear was very real. The baby’s fears can be ‘contained’ but the soldier’s fears can not be protected from being un’contained’ because there is a very real chance that their stomach could be ripped open and their guts may hang inside out.

This relates to another account of a soldier, who after his trench was shelled (bombed) was later found ‘...wandering into the open, taking off his clothes, and explaining that he was going to bed.’

The conclusion from this was made that the mental capacity for containing his anxiety had been destroyed along with the dug-out (trench). I also read in the same essay that babies do not like clothes coming between them and their mother, there is something that they find reassuring in skin contact and I guess you could read that into this situation, where the soldier has regressed to a childlike state, craving the comfort of mother.

So... I think this all relates to our modest (but significant) philosophical and psychological thoughts through our inquiries into the unknown, nothingness, the potential of an empty or un-understandable existence and our behaviour within this context.