Collective Trauma, The Triune Brain, & the Need for a Global Therapeutics
“Only the liberation of the natural capacity for love in human beings can master their sadistic destructiveness.” ― Wilhelm Reich
“Need Therapy? In West Africa, Hairdressers Can Help—Sunday, November 26, New York Times
Adama Adaku attending to a customer at her salon. She is one of the hairdressers who have been trained in Lomé as mental health ambassadors.Credit...Yagazie Emezi for The New York Times
Key Texts: I am starting to keep a bibliography of key texts, with links to Amazon. Scroll below to see what I am compiling.
These days, after having returned from Israel before the devastating massacres, the taking of hostages on October 7, and the ensuing death of innocent Palestinians, I have had the opportunity of having and witnessing very challenging conversations with clients about their desperate and disparate feelings on the matter. In some cases, I am talking to couples in which one member claims Jewish identification (whether they have been to Israel or not) and the other has roots in Palestine (whether they have been to Palestine or not). It’s hard for people to listen; let me tell you. Not to their partners but to themselves, to the messages sent via the gooey emotional viscera of the “Mammalian” Brain underneath the “Cortical” Thinking cap not yet disturbed by the Reptile’s “Fight/Flight” Brain. My brain hurts but my heartbreaks.
““I am worried that you can’t understand me, where I am at
”You always so that, you don’t see what I do do”
I feel sad and, in my activist way, frustrated for these good people who look entirely like each other and who have loved each other in the past for years, and I can still see that they love each other. Each possesses, however, transgenerational trauma, which is a bit like “collective trauma.” In other words, people NOT impacted by the violence against humanity, may be just as impacted, and is, in fact, carried on as part of the group’s collectuve memory and shared sense of identity. When that collective memory impacts subsequent generations, that is called “transgenerational trauma.” I do think it should be seen as me taking sides that Jews suffer collective trauma and so do Palestinians. It can be very difficult, if next to impossible, to over the trauma that is heaped on an entire group of people. What is the “cure” for an entire group of people? For an excellent book on how to re-represent, theorize, and reconfigure the concept of transgenerational haunting inside the unconscious psyche to facilitate healing in terms of BIG HISTORY, please consider reading “Trans-generational Trauma and the Other,” edited by Sue Grand and Jill Salberg (Routledge, 2017).
Also, I was very heartened to read this in today’s New York Times: “Need Therapy? In West Africa, Hairdressers Can Help.” The article is about an “initiative to train hairdressers in mental health counseling is providing relief to hundreds of clients in a region with the world’s least access to therapy.” Yes, to this: “To contend with what the World Health Organization has described as a “mental health gap” in developing countries, local nonprofits and international organizations operating in Africa are training nurses, general practitioners, even grandmothers, in spotting mental health troubles, from early signs of depression to post-traumatic stress disorder.”
It’s also worth reading Wilhelm Reich again, “The Function of the Orgasm: The Discovery of the Organ,” and “The Mass Psychology of Fascism,” to understand how our failure to undo our body armor so as to connect with our vital life force, what Reich calls “orgone,” makes us suscptible to the Big Grand Narratives of modernity that are not actually native necessarily to the self.
But the problem with those academic books is that they are way too technical, they are written more for people like me, who care about “depth psychology,” or the study of the unconscious, so much so that we went and got a postdoc training on the emerging Talmud. The problem is that smart, intelligent, and even X-rated news about the psyche and the soul remains inaccessible to the people who really need it.
These days, I am seeing how important it is for me to take a step out from the classroom and to the consulting room and WRITE TO YOU because the problems are so severe in mental life, not because we are necessarily fucked up. The issue, it seems to me, that we are members of an early society, and psychology, the queen of all sciences is the most recent to have been discovered, and the study of the shit below the surface of consciousness has not reached many, although there are some attractive signs.
There are some signs that the Iron Curtain between conscious and unconscious mind is breaking.
Currently, the work of C.G. Jung, which is most involved in dialogue with part selves, called “Active Imagination,” is going viral on Tik Tok. People are talking about a book that has been self-published by Felix R. Buchwald, “Shadow Work Journal & Workbook Based on Carl Jung: Reclaim Your True Self, Deepen Self Love & Track & Heal Past Triggers & Trauma—Shadow Work Guidebook with Questions for Self Insight & In Therapy,” published in September 2023. Mr. Buchwald is not an academic or a therapist, but he has many good insights about the world beneath the conscious mind; such works are a breakthrough for the human race.
Another example, at the time of this book's writing, is just being published by the publishing house Routledge, “Active Imagination in Theory, Practice, and Training: The Special Legacy of C.G. Jung.” While this beautiful work is being written for clinicians, and I was forced to break from such an Institution (that story will be told), it is good that I am a free agent now, so I am not tied to a single school or ideology that can put my ideas in a straight-jacket and can share the elements of this book as soon as it is released.
More than theory, we need communities working together to do a kind of “Cease Fire” where we can work together to address the chaos that takes place when all the different parts of the brain get jumbled up, and then what comes out of our mouths bears no resemblance to “thinking,” or “reason.” I think that a lot of people confuse “thinking” with ideology, ideology being the capitalist structure with which we were raised. How can we think for ourselves and, in so doing, hear the “other” and, in so doing, love?
To add to the complexity is that we humans possess more than one brain, and the different brains are not taught how to work well together.
I am referring to the triune brain concept; neuroscientist Paul D. MacLean proposed that idea in the 1960s. The triune brain theory suggests that the human brain can be divided into three major parts, each corresponding to a different stage in evolutionary development. These three parts are:
Reptilian Complex (R-Complex):
This is the oldest part of the brain, often associated with essential survival functions. It includes the brainstem and parts of the midbrain. The reptilian complex involves instinctual behaviors such as fight-or-flight responses, territoriality, and specific aspects of aggression.
(What happens when you shut down, freak out, or just leave the room during a painful conversation–one way I like to think of this process is when, instead of feeling “healthy shame,” we believe in “toxic shame.” For a good primer on this, see John Bradshaw’s “Healing the Shame that Binds You” and bell hooks “All About Love.”)
Paleomammalian Complex (Limbic System):
The limbic system is considered the second evolutionary stage associated with emotions and specific aspects of memory. It includes structures like the amygdala, hippocampus, and hypothalamus. The limbic system is shared by mammals and involves emotional responses and social behaviors.
(This is where enough safety exists in you from your childhood and maturation process and whereby you can self-soothe your reptilian complex and instead let the feelings run through your body, even if they are painful feelings, such as hurt, rage, and shame. For a fascinating book about how humans and other animals share the same brain centers for emotions, see “The Archaeology of Mind: Neurevolutionary Origins of Human Emotions,” by Jaak Panksepp and Lucy Biven( Norton, 2012) in which the authors show how we have “The Seeking System,” “The Ancestral Roots of Rage,” “The Ancestral Roots of Fear, “Lustfu Passions of the Mind,” “Nurturing Love/the Care System,” “The Pain/Grief System,” “The Play System,” and a “Core SELF and Soul System”).
Neomammalian Complex (Neocortex):
The neocortex is the most recently evolved part of the brain, mainly developed in humans. It is associated with higher cognitive functions like language, reasoning, and problem-solving. The neocortex is often responsible for the most advanced aspects of human behavior and intelligence.
(The problem as I see it is that signals that first are translated by the Mammalian brain as hurt, fear, and rage and deemed unbearable because we humans haven’t had much experience naming, labeling, containing, and personifying these feelings as a not-I about the conscious “I.” As a result, the feeling gets shoved underground, where they enter into the fight-or-flight system of the Reptilian brain and then get shot up to the Neo-Cortex, where the person is being reasonable but instead is speaking the language of trauma about ideas, which is a form of character-defamation, reattribution of blame, You-Statements and a closed off, armored stance that is not thinking but retaliation).
Maybe the simplest technique for starters, before wondering how to address the world and the quandray of geopolitics is to get oneself grounded first. I ofen tell my patients, and myself,when getting overwhelmed, to take a walk and focus on setting a limit on one’s wild thinking and try to keep this one thought in mind: “I am with my body, I am with my breathe.” If one starts to panic, bring in the good-enough mother to help self-soothe and start all over again. Keep this one thought in mind: “I am with my body, I am with my breathe.” That helps to tie the three brains together. I am going for a walk right now with this one thought and feeling in mind.
“Trans-generational Trauma and the Other,” edited by Sue Grand and Jill Salberg https://amzn.to/49UKGNb
“The Function of the Orgasm” by Wilhelm Reich https://amzn.to/47wJpu7
“The Mass Psychology of Fascism” by Wilhelm Reich https://amzn.to/3uvDOps
“Healing the Shame that Binds You” by John Bradshaw https://amzn.to/3sTHGQM
“The Racial Complex” by Fanny Brewster https://amzn.to/3RgPR2Q
“All Abougt Love” by bell hooks https://amzn.to/46vF0GD
“Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma” by Peter A. Levine https://amzn.to/46vF0GD
“The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma” by Sean Pratt, Bessel A. van der Kol https://amzn.to/46vF0GD
“Shadow Work Journal & Workbook Based on Carl Jung: Reclaim Your True Self, Deepen Self Love & Track & Heal Past Triggers & Traumas”
by Felix Buchwald https://amzn.to/3N0oYha
“Rock My Soul: Black People and Self-Esteem” by bell hooks https://amzn.to/3QUpNcA
“Ties That Bind: Familial Homophobia and Its Consequences” by Sarah Schulman https://amzn.to/3Gi8DRa
”Sex Between Men: The Intimate History of the Sex Lives of Gay Men, Postwar to Present” by Douglas Sadownick https://amzn.to/49RylJL