The Adding Machine: Selected Essays

  In terms of human sexuality what could it mean? Apparently there is no limit. A partner evoked by sophisticated electric brain stimulation could be as real and much more satisfying than the boy or girl next door. The machine can provide you with anything or anybody you want. All the stars in Hollywood living or dead are there for your pleasure. Sated with superstars, you can lay Cleopatra, Helen of Troy, Isis, Madame Pompadour, or Aphrodite. You can get fucked by Pan, Jesus Christ, Apollo or the Devil himself. Anything you like likes you when you press the buttons. Boys, girls, gods, angels, devils. The appropriate sets can also be plugged in. Sex in an Egyptian palace? A Greek glade? A 1910 outhouse? Roman baths? Space capsule? 1920 rumble seat? Pirate ship? Log cabin? Mongol tent? And none of the sweat that goes with log cabins, tents, and pirate ships. It’s ready built, waiting for you, and you can leave any time you want.

  Could real partners compete? Well, maybe. Experiments in autonomic shaping have demonstrated that subjects can learn to control these responses and reproduce them at will once they learn where the neutral buttons are located. Just decide what you want, and your local sex adjustment center will match your brain waves and provide you with a suitable mate of whatever sex, real or imaginary, while you wait. It is now possible to provide every man and woman with the best sex tricks he or she can tolerate without blowing a fuse. And any candidate running on that ticket should poll a lot of votes and bring a lot of issues right out into the open:

  ‘I promise you that I will disband the Army and the Navy and channel the entire defense budget into setting up sexual adjustment centers throughout the United States. And I promise you further that the psychic energy generated in these centers will turn any and all prospective enemies into friends, into intimate friends, as other nations follow our shining example.’

  ‘Control buttons to the People.’

  On Freud and the Unconscious

  Freud, who was one of the early researchers to point out the heavy toll in mental illness exacted by 19th century materialistic capitalism, never questioned the underlying ethic. He felt that we have paid a high price for what he calls civilization, and the price has been worth it. It did not occur to him to ask if the price was necessary. There is no reason why we could not enjoy the advantages of so called civilization without crippling conflicts. Freud uncovered the extent of marginal, unconscious thinking, but failed to realize that such thinking may be highly useful and advantageous. Where Id and Super Ego was, there shall Ego be, is certainly an outmoded objective. In fact the conscious ego is in many activities a liability as anyone knows who has set out to master a physical skill like shooting, fencing, boxing, driving, flying. Only when your responses become automatic and operative without conscious volition can you perform effectively.

  The Buddhists have always regarded the ego as a spiritual hindrance. I recall a heckler who asked Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche why people stand up when he comes into the room. Trungpa replied ‘From respect’ ‘Respect for what?’ the heckler demanded. ‘Egolessness,’ his Holiness replied. Buddhism, and a number of other spiritual disciplines, are precisely designed to break down the ego. And I can testify from my own experience that the ego is an artistic liability. The best writing and painting is only accomplished when the ego is superseded or refuted. An artist is in fact transcribing from the unconscious.

  Freud’s concept of the unconscious derived from his clinical experience. He observed a number of crippling symptoms that he traced to unconscious conflicts. So he tended to regard the unconscious as destructive or at least as a repository of irrational and atavistic urges. How then can a disadvantageous factor existing in the human psyche be explained biologically? Freud says that restraints on unconscious urges are necessary to hold a civilization together, but this explanation is altogether too rational, presupposing a consciously agreed upon social contract to suppress the irrational He must have seen the flaws in this argument and went on to develop his highly dubious concept of a Death Instinct and a Life Instinct in eternal conflict Here he is getting close to the Manichean position of postulating a battle between the forces of Good and Evil Though Freud criticized Jung for aspiring to be a philosopher and prophet rather than a simple clinician, he is certainly open to the same criticism. Ego, Super Ego and Id, floating about in a vacuum without any reference to the human nervous system, strike me as highly dubious metaphysical concepts.

  In his later years Freud grudgingly accepted telepathy since he had encountered so many instances of telepathic exchange in his clinical practice.

  I recall when I was in analysis with Doctor Federn, a number of telepathic exchanges turned up. For example I saw him in a dream giving out candy to children and told him to be careful or he would get a reputation as a child molester. When I related this dream he told me that he had actually given out candy on a vacation at Cape Cod and then realized, in his own words, ‘that people might think it is a sexy old man.’ And he told me of an analyst of his acquaintance who had collected twelve hundred instances of telepathy from his practise. But Doctor Federn refused to admit implications of telepathy. When I suggested that the curse of a malignant person might be effective he categorically denied that such a thing was possible. ‘Witches,’ he said ‘are hysterics and their victims are paranoid.’ However, if we admit telepathic contact we must logically admit that such contact can be as damaging as face to face contact.

  Freud, while admitting the occurrence of telepathy, thought of it as an atavistic and undesirable vestige going back to the protoplasmic antiquity. It did not occur to him that this faculty could be useful or that it is used every day by ordinary people. The most hard-bitten police officer plays his hunches. He knows when a suspect is lying. Observe two horse traders and you will see telepathy in action. This one won’t go above a certain figure. The other won’t come down below a certain figure. You can see the closing figure taking shape in their minds. I will return later to the practical uses of ESP abilities. It is to be remembered that the unconscious was much more unconscious in Freud’s day than in ours. Sexual taboos were much more rigid and sexual behaviour was literally unmentionable. Four letter words could not appear on a printed page and the soft core porn sold now at any newstand would have been unthinkable in the 19th century. Hysteria, the classical example of unconsciously motivated symptoms, was quite common in clinical practice and is, I understand, quite rare at this present time.

  So the unconscious is not a stable factor, but varies greatly from one individual to another and from one culture to another. I recall an analyst practising in Morocco who told me that the super ego seemed to be lacking or at least different in his Arab patients. In the west we seem to be at a stage which could be called the semi or marginally conscious. And perhaps we can look forward to a time when the unconscious will merge with the conscious.

  Freud thought that the ego, super ego and id must eventually be placed onto a physiological basis and modem brain area. Research is coming close to accomplishing this. Professor Delgado, author of a book entitled Physical Control of the Mind, has demonstrated that irrational fear, aggression, anxiety, can be produced by the electrical stimulation of certain brain areas. All the symptoms of unconscious conflict can be turned off and on by the flick of a switch. Biofeedback has demonstrated that such autonomic reactions as sweating, increased heart beat rate and blood pressure, which are symptoms of unconscious conflict, can be brought under conscious control.

  I do not think of myself as a materialist but I do insist that anything that effects the human nervous system must have a point of reference that is a definite location in the human nervous system. Julian Jaynes in his book The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind puts forward a thesis that would tend to locate the unconscious in the non-dominant brain hemisphere. His theory postulates that the unconscious ego, the Id, is a comparatively recent development that occurred in the period from about 1000 to 800 B.C. Before that man obeyed the Voice of God which emanated from the non-dominant brain hemis
phere, without question. There was no questioning entity. They literally had no ego but were governed by what Freud calls the super ego and their instinctual drives, the Id. He bolsters his thesis with ample clinical evidence gleaned from accident cases where part of the brain has been damaged or destroyed, and by experiments involving electrical stimulation of the non-dominant brain hemisphere which causes normal subjects to hear voices. However, the non-dominant hemisphere is not simply a source of irrational symptoms but performs a number of useful and in fact essential services. For example, the simplest spatial problems become extremely difficult to solve if the non-dominant brain hemisphere is damaged.

  So Freud’s objective, where Id and Super Ego were, there shall Ego be, would be highly damaging if it were achieved. A more viable goal would be to bring about a harmonious coexistence of the two brain hemispheres rather than attempting to gain a precarious territorial advantage for the so-called rational hemisphere.

  As soon as Jaynes puts forward his thesis that consciousness as we know it did not exist prior to 1000 B.C., the question of defining consciousness arises. Well definitions are usually not necessary and frequently confusing. We do not need to define electricity, to arrive at any formulation as to what electricity essentially is, to know how electricity operates and to use it effectively. I don’t have to define something in order to use it or describe its properties. Common sense formulations will suffice. We don’t need to define consciousness in order to map the areas of consciousness and to locate it tentatively in the cerebral cortex, the verbal centers and the dominant brain hemisphere. We can say further that consciousness is that instance that would attempt to define consciousness presenting the paradox of a ruler measuring itself. And we can tentatively locate the unconscious in the back brain and the non-dominant brain hemisphere. And however we derive consciousness it is obvious that certain activities require more of it than others. We need more consciousness crossing a city street than walking down a country lane. Bicameral man didn’t need much consciousness. His environment was vastly more uniform and predictable and he was, acording to Jaynes’s thesis, getting his orders straight from the voice of God in the non-dominant brain hemisphere. He was all Id and Super Ego with little or no Ego. Introspection was simply impossible.

  According to Jaynes the awe in which the priest king was held derived from his ability to produce his voice in the brains of his loyal subjects. To hear on this level is to obey and there is no room for arguments or alternative courses of action. So consciousness, which decides between one course of action and another, had no function. The bicameral mind broke down in a period of social unrest, war, natural disasters and migrations. This period of chaos led to conflicting voices and eventually to the conscious ego as we know it today. A symptom of the bicameral breakdown was the use of oracles and divination. Divination, which puts the seeker in touch with his own consciousness, had no place in the bicameral mind since man was already merged with his unconsciousness. Now he had to go to oracles for the voice of God and the ego, in eternal conflict with itself and with other egos, slowly emerged.

  But the voice of God was not dead People continued to hear and obey voices and they still do. New York Post, Friday January 18, 1980: ‘Escaped mental patient tells police that voices commanded him to bash in the head of elderly passerby.’ Why are the voices obeyed? If bicameral man obeyed the voices willingly and without question, modem man seems compelled to obey because the voice is there. The voice has taken over motor centers by its presence. Julian Jaynes cites the case of a man who was ordered by a voice to drown himself. Rescued by a lifeguard the recovered patient gives this account of his experience. ‘The deep voices, loud and clear, pounded in as though all parts of me had become ears with my fingers and my legs and my head hearing the words. There is the ocean. Drown yourself. Just walk in and keep walking. I knew by its cold command I had to obey it.’

  What was the origin of the voices in the first place? Jaynes does not venture to speculate. If we can produce voices by electrical stimulation of the non-dominant brain hemisphere, perhaps the voices were originally produced by electrical stimulation coming from without. We approach the realms of science fiction which is rapidly becoming science fact. Fifteen years ago experiments in Norway indicated that voices can be produced directly in the brain by an electromagnetic field. Progress along these lines is probably classified material.

  The difference between a normal and a pathological manifestation is quantitative, a question of degree. When you think of someone you may hear his voice distinctly just as you may see his image. You will observe that some people are more audible than others. I have but to think of a certain English lady of my acquaintance and hear her voice as if she were sitting next to me. Other friends of hers report the same experience. So what is the line between memory and hallucination?

  Psychiatrists tend to assume that any voices anyone hears in his head originate there, and that they do not and can not have an extraneous origin. The whole psychiatric dogma that voices are the imaginings of a sick mind has been called in question by voices which are of extraneous origin and are objectively and demonstrably there on tape, Freud says that errors and slips of the tongue are unconsciously motivated. And I agree that errors and accidents are motivated. For example dropping or spilling things. It may not be easy to remember what you were thinking about when this happened. In my case it usually happens when I am thinking about someone I dislike or with whom I am quarrelling. It is a demonstration then of hostility but the hostility may be quite unconscious. Other errors may have a more complex etiology and often seem quite inexplicable,

  Here is an example. In Boulder, Colorado, I went to a fish market called Pelican Pete’s, They accept American Express cards so I proffered what I thought was my American Express card in payment. However, I had accidentally handed him my Chase Manhattan Bank check cashing card. A simple error is it not? Months later I was on my way to cash a check at the Chase Manhattan Bank at Houston and Broadway. Just across from the bank some one had set up a street stand and was selling fish. I noted the fish stand in passing. So when I got in the bank I accidentally handed the teller my American Express card instead of my Chase Manhattan check cashing card. What is unconscious here? Only the moment in which the error is made, But a whole train of association leads up to this moment. One has the impression of another presence muttering away at all hours of the day and night of which one is only partially or occasionally aware. One rule applies: lightning always strikes twice in the same place. One mistake with cards makes another mistake that much more probable. But the motivation remains obscure.

  Freud states that dreams always express the fulfillment of a wish. The dream content may be frightening or repugnant to the dreamer because the wish expressed is unconscious. Consider the syndrome of combat nightmares. The veteran dreams he is back in a combat situation. In what sense is this wish fulfillment?

  Recent studies of dream and sleep have yielded a wealth of data that was not available in Freud’s day. Perhaps the most important discovery is the fact that dreams are a biologic necessity. Deprived of REM sleep, experimental subjects show all the symptoms of sleeplessness, no matter how much dreamless sleep they are allowed. They become irritable and restless and experience hallucinations. No doubt prolonged deprivation would result in death.

  An interesting discovery by Jouvet is the fact that all warm blooded animals including birds dream, but cold blooded animals do not dream. He attributes this to the fact that the neural tissue of the cold blooded animals renews itself and heals from traumas whereas the neural tissue of the warm blooded animals, once damaged, does not heal. There is however a part of the mammalian brain that does have the ability to heal and this is the pons. If the pons is removed experimentally from cats they act out their dreams lapping imaginary milk and chasing dream mice. The pons then serves to immobilize the body during dreams. Further, research should shed light on the function of dreams, which is far from being understood.

&
nbsp; John Dunne, an English physicist and mathematician, wrote a book called An Experiment With Time that was first published in 1924. Dunne wrote his dreams down and observed that they contained material from the future as well as the past. He gives a number of examples and states that anyone who will take the trouble to keep a pad and pencil by his bed and write his dreams as they occur will, after a period of time, turn up precognitive dreams. He observed that if you dream of a future occurrence say a flood or fire or plane crash.. . you are dreaming not about the occurrence itself but of the time that you learn of the occurrence. . . Usually through a newspaper picture. In other words you are dreaming your own future time track. I have written my dreams down over a period of years. And I have noticed that, if I don’t write the dream down immediately I will in many cases forget it, no matter how many times I go over the dream in my mind. I wake up, too much trouble to turn on the light but I can’t possibly forget it and I do. It would seem the memory traces of dream experience are much fainter than with waking experience. I have experienced a number of precognitive dreams that are often quite trivial and irrelevant. For example I dreamed that a landlady showed me a room with five beds in it and I protested that I didn’t want to sleep in a room with five people. Some weeks later I went to a reading in Amsterdam and the hotel keeper did show me a room with five beds in it. Well the sponsor took me to another hotel. In another dream I saw a wardrobe floating by. The next day I was in the Café de France in Tangier and looked up and there was the wardrobe floating by the window. A man was carrying it on his back with a strap around his forehead so I could not see the bearer just the wardrobe. Precognition is not confined to the dream state. In fact I have the impression it is going on all the time. Nor is the dream state confined to sleep. It is my experience that the dream state goes on all the time, and that we can contact it in a waking state. Years ago I was into gambling. I recall I was standing in line at the race track to make a bet and the tune SMILES was playing over and over in my head. But I didn’t bet on Smiles the winning horse. Anyone who has done any target shooting or archery will tell you that he knows just before he shoots or looses an arrow whether it will or will not hit the target.