23 January 2023 Thesis Notes

Feast of the Dancing Dragons

Preliminary

Been writing about the Mind Virus.

Writer’s Iceblock. Frozen. A destroying laser. Like the vampire folktale: a laser charged to look everywhere for darkness, but wherever it looks, there is light, so it concludes darkness does not exist, there is only light. [Blindsight, Peter Watts]

Feeling rushed. Feeling stressed. Feeling guilt. Feeling scared. 

Freewrite

Following the second world war up to current neurochemical psychiatry, there’s been a shared assumption, sometimes implicit othertimes central and stated outright, to the effect that human behavior tends towards the preservation of the self, that we act in our own self-interest, that is, in ways that will, given imperfect knowledge, tend to maintain our physical and mental wellbeing. This concept is a bedrock of classical economics and liberal political theroy, which pressumes rational actors making choices according to certain naturally selfish agendas. We can learn a great deal about this general way of framing human behavior at the point where it begins to break down, at the point where it begins to resemble something like Carl Schmitt’s “borderline concept” [Political Theology]. For the self-interested, self-preserving subject, this point is found at the phenomena of self harm.

According to Chris Millard’s History of Self Harm in Britain, the categories and archetypes used to designate, explain, and treat self harm used by general medical and psychiatric care providers in Britain and the anglosphere more generally went through a complex series of changes over the course of the twentieth century. Following World War II, when the traumatic effects of battle on both soldiers and civilians were particularly salient and the Atlee government’s introduction of the NHS re-organized the relationship between patients, medical staff, and society, a decidedly social democratic model of self harm begins to coalesce, with leaders in the field concentrating in the Edinburough at Ward 3 and in London. 

This social democratic model posits that self harm is outward facing. It is a response to an inadequate social context and aimed at influencing those around the one who practices it. Two of the models, which inform each other over time, differ as to whether this goals of such influence (or manipulation) is of concoius awareness on the part of the practitioner, whether the social situation it seeks to address is best understood in terms of childhood neglect and abuse, to domestic conflict between adult partners, or more socio-economic concerns, such as housing and food insecurity. In each of the cases, the treatment of self harm must also intervene at the social level—the NHS responds with psychiatric social workers to intervene in the home lives of children considered at risk, spouses (especially husbands) are encouraged to treat their wives more kindly and address their emotional needs more seriously, political solutions such as affordable housing, job access, and social enfranchisement are pointed to as resolutions to the causes of the distress. 

Later, begining with studies on inpatients in the mid 1970s and accelerating in the 1980s, psychiatric theories of self harm swung from a socially or relationally orientated framework to the newer neurochemical models, with their claims to greater objectivity, able to bypass the problematic and endlessly nuanced of patient’s particular case history and context in favor of a hard science orientation towards chemistry. The insights regarding self harm during this period are likewise insular. Individuals who self harm do so, goes this notion of thinking, with an eye to the neuropathological chemical reactions which occur following damage to the body. the release of serotonin and other chemical actors following laceration, for example, provides a break with a previous, more troubling emotional state. The watchword of this era is “stress,” or “distress”, an all pervading designation for negative affective states: 

which must be regulated by the body’s internal economy 

Notes