How does 'The Central Ego' work?
That is the question we posit here.
In different words, I posited the same question back in 1979 as I began to put together my Honours Thesis in Psychology.
My advisor - and marker -- was a pretty well-known 'Cognitive-Behavior Therapist' by the name of Dr. Donald Meichenbaum. He wrote a book called 'Cognitive-Behavior Modification' written in 1977, two years before I wrote my Honours Thesis that was mainly on the inter-relationship between General Semantics and Cognitive Therapy. However, at the same time, it was also an essay on 'The Relationship Between Language, Meaning, Epistemology, Ethics, and Behavioral Action' -- and what today I would call 'Central Ego Functioning'. In effect, 1979 was my first attempt at 'Hegel's Hotel' -- before I knew who Hegel was and what 'dialectical philosophy' (thesis, anti-thesis, synthesis) was.
As I have previously mentioned in several of my other essays, this essay was/is called 'Evaluation and Health' 1979, and I have been flip-flopping back and forth about whether to copy the essay in its originality, modify it, or completely re-write it.
This morning I spent about 3 or 4 hours digging through all my old books, completely re-organizing my library that was in organizational chaos, pulling out the ones that I might need again to write what appears below vs. those that I won't...Going back into my intellectual history to start to bring all those old ideas alive again, and the ideas of the writers who influenced me.
One thing I promise to do here. This section will be written without further distraction or wandering into different philosophical and/or psychological areas.
We are going to call it a day for today. But when I come back at 'The Central Ego' tomorrow, we will just keep going til we are finished.
No more meanderings.
-- dgb, Jan. 3rd, 2008.
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The value judgments we make determine our actions, and upon their validity rests our mental health and happiness. -- Erich Fromm ...
There are two ways to slide easily through life; to believe everything or to doubt everything. Both ways save us from thinking. -- Alfred Korzybski
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Preface
Here we are again. Thirty years later what do I think about my essay 'Evaluation and Health' written in 1979? And do I want to re-write it in its originality? Or completely revise, modify, update it based on 30 more years of psychological and philosophical knowledge -- and a difference in perspective -- a multi-dialectic (Hegel-Nietzsche-Freud-Jung-Ader-Perls-Korzybski-Hayakawa-Branden-Rand-Fromm-Plato-Aristotle...) perspective as opposed to a more one dimensional 'Cognitive-Humanistic-Enlightenment (Hayakawa-Korzybski-Nataniel Branden-Ayn Rand-Erich Fromm)' perspective.
The intellectual roots of 1979 are still there. But 1979 was before I studied Perls, Adler, Freud, Hegel, Jung, Nietzsche at least in any kind of depth...which made a huge difference in the way I intellectually, philosophically, and psychologically perceived and experienced things, processes, structures...and then wrote about them....
This brings us to Conclusion Number 1:
The 'box in our head' -- meaning our 'mind-brain', and what's in it -- complete with however many different 'compartments' and/or 'sub-compartments' we want to divide it into, classification-wise, for teaching and learning purposes as to how the mind-brain works -- makes a huge, huge difference in terms of how we see and perceive the world we live in, experience it, interpret it, judge it -- and react to it. Meaning our 'either/or' choices. And our 'integrative' choices.
If you are taking an introductory psychology course -- and assuming introductory psychology is still being taught today like it mainly was in the 1970s, with a huge righteous-narcissistic bias towards 'scientific psychology' and 'behaviorial psychology' which basically states the following:
We don't care what is in the 'box in our heads'. We can develop a scientific study of behavior and psychology without investigating what goes on inside our head, simply by adhering to the:
'Stimulus-Response (S-R) Model'.
We provide the 'stimulus'. (Like 'shocking' a rat.)
And we can generally start to predict the rat's -- or your - behavior (like running, or pissing, or flipping in the air...)
In contrast, both 30 years ago, and still today, I meaning DGBN Philosophy today, adheres to a:
'Stimulus-Perception-Interpretation-Evaluation-Response (SPIER) Model'
...
Where what occurs inside the 'black box' of our mind-brain is absolutely critical to understanding our own behavior on our own personal level, and human behavior on a more general level.
What follows below (or above in this context) is a study of the 'black box' of our mind-brain, starting with The Central Ego, and then moving on to all secondary, subsidiary, and supportive 'special interest' ego-states and functions...
That is enough for today.
-- dgbn, January 4th, 2008.
-- David Gordon Bain
