Freud set us on the right track with his engineering of the Superself, a higher mediating construct of the ego verses Id conflict based mind. This system has its limitations, due to the fact that it still rests in the manifestations of the Ego driven by the primitive instinctual desires of the Id in a systematical, if this than that theorems of delineated thought.
The problems with a person who has been stricken with PTSD, their minds have become deeply entrenched and compartmentalized. Wherein the psychic energy becomes channeled through the rails of the heavily imprinted synapses feeding the body with responsive synergy for explosive reactions needed for survival. These encoded processes have subsumed the rationale of analytical considerations to forge a frontier of force.
To disallow the primitive mind to reign supreme one needs to form a more than Freudian superself to a Maslowian self-actualization, akin to the Buddhist transcendence of self.
In my post on Dissociative Spectrum, I spoke of a feeling that "...I was more alive than I had ever been, except that there was no conscious processing of information and a total lack of emotion, absolute detachment. Time had suspended itself for me, I was eternal, I had accessed a part of me that was omnipresent."
This feeling of becoming one with the universe I have only been able to achieve briefly and never as completely as I did for 100 hours of the ground war in the first Gulf War.
I think it's possible to access this larger self (the strength of it, not the dissociated aspect of it) whenever we wish to. If the commitment is made, I believe this self can be called up.
ReplyDeleteIf we have the strength within us to survive and transcend trauma in the moment, then we must be able to honor and use that strength other times, for other survival issues. Like, say, overcoming PTSD.