The Game of the Brain

We cannot break from our brain. This is a starting point.

We experience through the conduit of our brain. Even if there is a soul, it must operate through the confines of our nervous system. We must obey the laws of physics, it can't be otherwise, yet we do not feel as if we're restricted to them. But we are... These are the facts.

Any exploration of subjectivity must then understand the brain, its game, so we can figure out why we are compelled to perform our lives the way we do, and why we value certain things and not others.

Here, I start at the bedrock of my thinking about the BrainMind: the 7 emotional affects as discovered by Jaak Panksepp (1998). It is posited that consciousness itself arises owing to frustrations to survival or reproduction, and these frustrations give rise to mental life as the means of attempting to generate good-enough solutions for them. This was established by Freud (1895) many years ago, and I - nor eminent psychologists - cannot argue against this. Here, the activation of mental life, as discussed by Mark Solms and our buddy Panksepp, is through no other vehicle than emotion. Core consciousness itself is emotion. Without emotion, there would be no such thing as subjectivity. And the further beauty of Panksepp's work is the categorisation of the 'different flavours' of our emotions, these hardwired neurological pathways, which innervate and permeate through all of our psychic life. They are as follows:

1) SEEKING: initiating appetitive feelings and foraging behaviours

2) FEAR: initiating scared feelings and freeze/flee behaviours

3) RAGE: initiating angry feelings and attack behaviours

4) LUST: initiating horny feelings and mating behaviours

5) PANIC/GRIEF (SADNESS): initiating separation-distress feelings and reuniting behaviours (we will discuss this more in future blogposts)

6) CARE: initiating affectionate feelings and nurturing behaviours

7) PLAY: initiating fun + excited feelings and rough-and-tumble-play-like behaviours

I come back to the point I started with: we cannot break from our brain. If we are to experience something, it is through the lens of these emotional affects above. It cannot be otherwise. We are embodied, but also 'em-brained,' and should consistently remind ourselves of our condition. It may not sit right with you for whatever reason. You may not want to be limited, restricted, to these psychical + physical rules. But they are your existence and essence, in one. They are your hardware. You operate through them regardless of if you want to. There, of course, is variation to these subcortical structures which generate your emotional life, your mental life - you might be more prone to RAGE than me, but you'll never know what it's like to be me. Only you get to experience you. But you are confined to your material structure, again, even if you have a soul.

It's up for you to decide how to receive this information. You can try and distance yourself from my blog (what does a psychoanalyst-in-training know anyway?) or you can fall into a pit of despair because you are reminded, yet again, of how you have less control than you typically think. Or, and I challenge you to do so, you can get acquainted with the manner in which your BrainMind operates, appreciate it, and learn the rules of its game. Learn to PLAY within the bounds of your neurological structure. This, I feel, is the fundamental goal of any psychotherapy worth its salt. You cannot sever yourself from your BrainMind - although people try - so we must make friends with it and learn why we feel/act as we do.

If you are suffering from addiction, there is a reason why. There is an emotional NEED it is satisfying, no matter how much you suffer from it. If something consisted of 100% suffering to the person, that person would simply not do it. The complicated thing is that the suffering itself is satisfying for certain people, in certain instances, owing to certain experiences where punishment, for some reason, was learned to be desirable (socially; satisfying PANIC/GRIEF). This gets into the problem of masochism, which I will leave for another time. But anything we do, no matter how trivial or damning, is because it satisfies an emotional (survival) need for us. Yet, there is variation in how we satisfy these needs - there are a multiplicity of manners in which our survival and reproductive desires can find their 'fix'. This is sublimation.

This is why - and I come back to the point again - it is so important to understand the game of the brain. If you are going about your days in such a manner where you feel you are suffering, it is important to know that 1) your current behaviours are satisfying some emotional need and you cannot, in your current state, do without it... If you could persist without it, you would have... and 2) your emotional needs can be satisfied in numerous ways, which means you are not inherently doomed to repeat things in the same manner forever and ever. You have the possibility to discover the manner in which you can go about things where you can satisfy your emotional needs and also alleviate degrees of your suffering. It's a hard task, to be sure. My ultimate goal in learning psychotherapy is to help people discover the areas of life where they feel they suffer, understand the emotional needs being satisfied in this manner, and figure out how to transition and transform their current way of life into a new way of life, that feels more complete, authentic, and less limited. More freedom to explore the different ways of being - being creative and open to trying out new ways of satisfying our desires.

We cannot break from these desires, but we can learn new ways of meeting them and respecting them.

This is the game of the brain: emotional needs. That's the fundamental rule of the mind. And, in my blogposts, we'll learn just how difficult it is to meet these needs - and the lengths to which people go in attempting to distance and sever themselves from their organic structure. A futile endeavour indeed.