Although my philosophical model regarding sensory distortion deals with the emotional problems that people may have from it and also acts to try and determine the causes of these problems from an environmental perspective, I have, nevertheless, made no significant attempt to translate any of these theories into a model for actually treating these emotional problems. Probably, it is because I see myself as more of a social philosopher and not so much in any way as a psychotherapist. However, I think it would be appropriate to at least take a few sample clinical terms that appear as descriptive words in practically every psychological model that I have encountered and attempt to explain them within the context of my philosophical model.
Anxiety is a term that denotes an abrasive nervous concern with oneself, with the people around one and with larger situations in which one finds oneself. It is like things are never quite right in one’s life narrative. It is like one lacks a sense of flowing blendable continual organic grounding in one’s living environment and one is floating in an experiential vacuum, lacking control in one’s life narrative and knocking up against all sorts of other free-floating figures and generating all sorts of irritating friction as a result. And this, in turn, makes one feel very vulnerable to potentially aggressive dangerous forces that are conceived and then perceived from without. Anxiety is basically an ongoing form of overstimulation. In addition to being caused by feeling vulnerable to all sorts of abrasive tension-pockets in one’s living environment, it is also seemingly paradoxically caused by the numbing understimulation from the patches of vacuum in one’s living environment. In other words, the abrasive overstimulation generated by the anxiety acts to pull one out of the numbing understimulation that is to be found in the experiential vacuum, the living environment in which all of us modern humans find ourselves in one way or another.
Depression, as a psychological symptom, is sort of like the mirror image to anxiety. Depression is like a numbing lack of awareness of oneself and one’s surroundings. Whereas anxiety leads to a state of hyperconsciousness where everything is sharply defined and filled with static, depression leads to a state of hypoconsciousness, where everything is blurry and people feel like they are living in a bad dream. In depression, one is floating in an experiential vacuum by himself, socially isolated, without other free-floating figures to knock up against. Without any of these free-floating figures to knock up against, a depressed person has nothing in the external world to help him to build up his personal boundaries. Instead, he just sinks deeper and deeper into numbness and falls apart as a result of entropic dissolution.
Again, depression can also be caused by a counterintuitive experiential state: namely the state of overstimulation caused by a person free-floating in a vacuum filled with lots of figures against which to knock up. This abrasive overstimulation, which threatens a person with the possibility of crumbling apart, can lead a person to want to protect himself by withdrawing into a numbing depression. It is as if, without the stabilizing influence of a strong organic grounding, a person finds it necessary to bounce back and forth between understimulation and overstimulation in order to achieve an average intensity of stimulation that approximates that of a traditional natural environment with its pervasive flowing blendable continual organic stimulation. On a psychological level, people bounce back and forth between anxiety and depression, in order to attempt to achieve a healthy psychological state of mind.
Hoarding symptoms usually refer to people who like to cluster together a lot of free-floating figures and turn them into a kind of unwieldy surrogate grounding. This is particularly true of collections of things that have some traits in common and therefore can be denominated a category of things. Unfortunately, a cluster of things is an entity that is only bonded together in the mind and that lacks the floating blendable continual organic stimuli that are needed to merge an entity together into an organic whole. That bonding is not enough to hold the cluster of figures together forever, and so the person perversely tries to increase the bonding by continually adding more and more figures to the cluster until eventually there is no more room to move around in the person’s home. The surrogate grounding that the person was looking for by creating the cluster ends up becoming a surrogate coffin where the person can’t move around and really feel alive in what is supposed to be a kind of template for him and other free-floating figures.
Substitute food for things and we get eating disorders. In eating disorders, the cluster of phenomena that people accumulate are foods. Except that the accumulation occurs in a person’s stomach rather than the external world. The surrogate grounding occurs within a person rather than outside of him. There are three different approaches to using food as grounding. One is binge eating, which is equivalent to stuffing one’s home with possessions until there is no longer room to move. Then there is anorexia nervosa, being afraid of eating and getting fat and therefore losing so much weight that the person becomes too thin and therefore can even die from it. This is equivalent to being deathly afraid of surrounding oneself with a coffin of things so one gets rid of all the entities in one’s stomach. Finally, there is bulimia which is binge eating followed by enforced vomiting, to get rid of the coffin of food that one has accumulated inside of his stomach.
All of the disorders described in this column can be explained through the terminology developed for my philosophical model. The explanations are not meant to be sufficient for explaining everything relevant to understanding them. Nevertheless, they do provide a unique perspective for getting a feel for these disorders and for emphasizing the importance of developing good treatments for them related to sensory distortion from our modern technological living environment.
© 2023 Laurence Mesirow
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