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| ISBN-13: | 9781456795375 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | AuthorHouse |
| Publication date: | 09/20/2011 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| File size: | 136 KB |
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PERSONALITY & PRIORITIES
A TypologyBy Nira Kfir
AuthorHouse
Copyright © 2011 Nira KfirAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4567-9536-8
Chapter One
EARLY LEARNING
Since the rule of priorities deals with imprinting in early life, this course will begin with an introduction to early learning theories, especially those developed in the twentieth century. In early life, learning is direct, free of normative adaptation, and imprinted immediately in the brain. Our reactions to various vital events are formed and determined in these early years.
Learning can be defined as the process whereby new information becomes assimilated with pre-existing knowledge and becomes an ongoing long term feature.
I have constructed the theory of Priorities on the assumption that in early life we have certain experiences that become imprinted or fixed in our brains. These originate from negative first learnings, that create a construct over time or Impasse. An impasse, signals a blocked route ahead of us. An absolute avoidance strategy is formed from society-dependent situations in which there are memories of negative, harmful and paralyzing experiences.
In the twentieth century, many scientists devoted themselves to understanding the learning process. Besides the research, disputes and the thick tomes that were published, only a few researchers such as Pavlov and Skinner succeeded in becoming renowned. The question how we learn intrigued behavioral researchers, brain scientists, physicists, philosophers and many others. The theoreticians of learning, headed by Watson and Thorndike, Hale and Lindsay among others, whose works were published in the first half of the twentieth century, hypothesized that in the early stage of the infant's development, the first imprinted behavioral learning is actually negative. As is typical of theoreticians, violent arguments broke out over these basic questions. Watson and Thorndike, who were active during the first three decades of the twentieth century, were divided on the issue of the relationship between learning, reward and punishment. Many years of animal experimentation left the field open for speculation, which in part was clarified only at the end of the 20th century by brain researchers. In 1950 Hilgard summed it up by saying; "there are no rules of learning that can be taught with confidence."
What is negative learning? All spontaneous behavior of an infant that is rewarded with a consistent negative response constitutes learning, an infant's brain learns to link and connect its behavior to punishment. A negative response can be a face screwing up with anger, raising the voice, raising a threatening hand, aggression in the form of taking a toy from the infant, slamming a door, allowing continuous crying with no response, and thousands more parental responses that are or aren't intended to educate or teach, or are just an angry response on the part of the parent. There are also responses that the infant, like adults throughout history, link to his behavior, even if there is no link whatever. The threat itself is interpreted as a cause of events even if there is no connection between them. A similar situation is the offering of sacrifices in a war waged on drought, or many social and religious rituals linking natural phenomena and man's behavior.
The logic behind the thesis that negative experiences actually constitute the first strong imprint is that they are consistent. Positive behavior of the baby, like drinking all the milk in the bottle receives a positive response for only a short time: "Lovely; Good boy!" As time passes the parents assume that the child's adaptation to what is required of him is expected and there's no need to praise him for it, whereas negative behavior like making a noise, aggression, clumsiness, or breaking objects invariably gets a negative reaction. When we say that "learning" has occurred, we are expected to explain in greater detail how first learning takes place. We are still talking about "personality," which is only beginning to be formed — in the brain's mechanical machine. The human brain has two main functions: Reception and processing of data, and producing energy for reaction and action.
I will briefly discuss recent explanations of how the infant's brain recognizes the outside world, and translates the information into energy-directed behavior.
Right Brain — Left Brain
How do people communicate with each other? How does one brain read the signs emanating from the other? How does the brain translate words, signs, voice, and facial expressions? Where does the brain carry out the information processing? The left hemisphere of the brain presents an analytic construct rather than an intuitive one, or a concept of detail rather than one of completeness. While the right hemisphere processes from the whole to its parts this is constructive and original thinking that is not necessarily dependent on logic. This is the division and the link between the two brains that are imprinted within us, and in all mammals, throughout evolution. Information processing is interpreted differently by the two brains, and our impression of a particular person is made up by processing a host of items visible and invisible to the eye.
In creating a link between people, and particularly when we are discussing a significant link, we "feel felt" — that we have been acknowledged and understood — by the person. In other words, our brain receives information and processes it to sensitize or personalize us vis-à-vis the data that was received. All this processing is actually constituted and takes place in different neurons in our brain. Avoiding contact is linked for the most part to this activity, and abstract ideas such as freedom or justice are the product of a physiological event which is highly convoluted.
Complex systems like the human brain rely on all their parts functioning, even the minutest. When a signal is received differently, it is able to affect the outcome of the thought process or even the general mind-set. In chaos theory, this is known as the "butterfly effect." The butterfly example posits that if a small butterfly flutters its wings somewhere in the world, at the other end of the earth a typhoon could develop. We can't state that the butterfly caused the typhoon; rather it initiated a chain of events beyond its power and range of intentions. A small change in one of the synapses that translate information could change completely our overall impression. Another example would be the collection of intelligence data: the addition of a single fact can change the way the analyst interprets the overall situation.
Those nerve tracts that can read signs and translate them, are also operational in the relations we form with others. For some people relationship and closeness create much satisfaction and even happiness, while others interpret closeness as "nullifying the ego" and avoid it. The various interpretations stem from translation of the inter-personal experiences, beginning at birth according to the signs and signals that produce in us a negative or positive response.
The development of personality is a process initiated by basic feelings such as pleasure or discomfort, and progresses to the creation of sophisticated categories of emotions identified as fear, anger, disgust, surprise, interest, shame and happiness. Such feelings are complex, and require systematic sophistication in their formation. Nevertheless we should remember that they always begin as basic cerebral responses of good and bad, pleasant and unpleasant.
Does the brain block the mutual effects of processing information and taking a stand, for even an instant? Are we continuously occupied with "thinking about thought?" Daniel Siegel (1999), in his book The Developing Mind, called this development and streaming in our brains, "super-awareness." Super-awareness is constructed by a broadening activity of thousands of signs and signals that act together to form a mind-set. This streaming does not stop for a moment. Our mind-set is the product of two of the central roles of the brain, information and energy — information becomes energy that in turn becomes a mind-set or feeling or behavior. Each and every mind set or emotion involves thousands of cerebral activities. One can say that the "ego" is not subdivided arbitrarily between the conscious and subconscious, rather it is formed by subconscious processes of which we are unaware, and only a small portion of them penetrate our consciousness and become recognized. Simply stated, man is more complex than just his awareness element.
Our consciousness or cognition lets us connect and control, plan and understand, and experience self-consciousness. Consciousness allows us to choose in contrast to most of the complex interconnections in our brain which don't permit a conscious choice.
This concept presented by two outstanding workers in the field — Marian Solomon and Daniel Siegel, is a modern idea, as opposed to the linear model of Pavlov, Thorndike, Watson and Skinner. The modern conception doesn't see a clear link between stimulus and response, but instead, draws upon the connections of thousands of links, each of them interconnected. This resembles quantum physics which is based on Newton's laws of gravity, and determines that A doesn't cause B, rather that all the eventualities, big and small, are items of significance and their composition forms a new situation. When adapted to our field, effects are not formed directly by major force acting on a lesser one, rather they resemble more a "butterfly effect," where each unit, even the smallest, can have an effect.
A brief review of 20th century psychology demonstrates that there is much similarity to the development of physics in that century, with one exception; psychology has created personality theories that are supported by premises, observations, and the genius of a few. By that I mean today's personality theories can be traced back to the seminal genius derived from Freud's causality-based, determined approach and Adler's undetermined, purpose-driven approach for basic insight and understanding of man's motivation and behavior.
In this respect, both Freud and Adler and many others who followed, identified one core factor as the central principle of personality. The same factor was presented by psychologists as external to man himself. Freud viewed the parents, especially the mother, as a basic component in organizing the personality. Frankel in following Adler viewed the search for significance as a universal drive. Maslow presented the basic needs in the form of a pyramid that evolves into a hierarchy of advanced needs. Moreover in constructing the theory of Personality Priorities we should use modern thinking for a comparison. This thinking is affected by two principle sources: modern physics and recent research on brain development. I will present here in brief the tenets that strongly affect modern physics, the transition from the Newtonian concept to quantum physics. The Newtonian viewpoint dominated thinking in the 17th and 18th centuries, only to be called the classical science that claimed that every event is predetermined by pre-existing conditions. In this world, chance has no role, every incoming part must fall into place according to a logical sequence.
Laplace, a leading scientist, expanded on his well known hypothesis. If all the details of a certain state of the system are known — one could predict and retrodict all other states of the system. His original expression was 'to retrodict the past,' in other words, everything depends on collating facts and understanding their inter-connection.
The same mechanistic view of the universe as a simple structure that is accountable, affected not only scientific development but spread to parallel disciplines. In our opinion the founders of modern psychology who in turn were influenced, especially by contemporary medicine and science, constructed a model of man that appears to be dynamic, but in essence, is mechanistic: A leads to B.
The industrial revolution, the railroads, the American Constitution with its three principles, were all conceived as a sophisticated machine with clear and ordered premises - A leads to B. Even Einstein's physics was essentially mechanistic, although he attributed a place for time. In other words, according to this concept, the scientist is part of the experience, and the experimenter affects the experiment.
Man does not observe a world on which he has no effect; his very presence effects what exists. The investigation of the universe and its basic rules are tied to the investigator himself, or as the tenet goes: "what is seen from here is not seen from there," everything depends on the point of view.
Ilya Prigogine (1984), winner of the 1977 Nobel Prize in Physics for his contribution to the field of thermodynamics, asserted in his book, Order Out Of Chaos (1984), that in the mechanistic era following the scientific revolution, certain features were particularly emphasized: stability, order, unity and balance.
Classical science's methodology deals mainly with closed systems and linear relationships which contain small effects that produce minor results.
Conversely, according to the "butterfly effect," the universe is an open system in which small influences can cause revolutionary results. This is the great discovery of the modern era of technology and information compared with mechanistic classical science. Prigogine's research, or what is called The Brussels School, presents an additional breakthrough in this way of thinking. His paradigm draws particular attention to those parts of reality that deal with change, disorder, imbalance, variance, non-linear relationships, (A does not necessarily lead to B) and temporariness. Its essential concern is to understand the connection between order and chaos in the universe and human society.
According to Prigogine, the fact that reversibility is not possible in the universe or for mankind, it becomes the essential basis of change and progress. In other words, the inability to go backwards stimulates our brain always to invent new solutions.
I shall try to translate this in terms of the human brain as it conceives the world. I mentioned above that learning theories assert that the first learning imprinted in us is negative by nature. For our edification it could be asked: How, if this is so, does every small event seem to be a great one when affecting the infant's learning process? We'll begin with negative learning. The first is learning how to avoid pain. With the passage of time all first learning is changed by processing and sophistication, so that avoidance of physical pain becomes avoidance of mental, social, or existential pain. Because a baby's brain is a formidable receptor, many stimuli accumulate that become translated initially, and are used eventually by the brain center — known as "self—management." Of these first painful encounters, initially physical and later psychological/social, are formed the initial aversion or "same strategy" of early avoidance, that I have termed the Impasse.
impasse
We have here a fitting example of Prigogine's claim of irreversibility, in other words, inability to reverse to the former situation and thereby create the brain's need to take a new direction. The original pain, a product of the first imprinting, with the addition of necessity, forms the immediate response of flight. But because reverse movement is barred, we have to guide ourselves into a new direction. Thus when the direction is a new one, it will frequently be imprinted as "a pain memory" and the need is for absolute avoidance.
The main argument in understanding the premise of Impasse formation is that it is due to difficult, embarrassing, paralyzing and painful experiences that occurred early in life, and which are linked to the situation that caused them. Thus, these situations become impossible; situations that we won't ever return to voluntarily.
Since we are dealing with the social position of the individual, we must also refer to the response of others in the group to the individual. Even at a tender age the infant cannot deal with a difficult experience logically or protect himself by explanations. He simply utilizes all the experiences of this first negative early learning, and blocks them. The imprinting of negative learning, as we described it, is critical, and thus difficult feelings are handled generally as avoidance; hence the use of the term, Impasse - NO ENTRY. The grown up adult will even be unaware of having an Impasse.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from PERSONALITY & PRIORITIES by Nira Kfir Copyright © 2011 by Nira Kfir. Excerpted by permission of AuthorHouse. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Introduction....................1Early Learning....................5
The Impasse....................13
Impasse — Psychological Aspects....................19
The Superior....................35
The Pleaser....................45
The Controller....................55
The Avoider....................63
Social Ecology: The Four Types....................71
Case Study - Dani and Yaffa....................73
Conclusion....................93
Tables....................96
References....................101