By Dr. Charlie Palmgren
“I wouldn’t give a fig for the simplicity this side of complexity, but I would give my life for the simplicity on the other side of complexity.” – Justice Oliver Wendall Holmes, Jr.
Overview2
Wieman and Fitz quotes in this series will be from the proposed book Henry, Fitz and I were going to write. Some of this material will have been produced prior to the publication of Religious Inquiry (RI). We were writing this when Henry was doing the final editing of RI. Some of the ideas presented by Fitz and myself could go back as far back as 1963. Some of the material I use from neuroscience will include material Henry was using as far back as his Havard Doctoral Dissertation in 1917.
As I said at the close of the first paper in this new series, “I will move closer to issues like PTSD, the birthing process and early childhood development. I’ll look at the process that shapes awareness into consciousness, while repressing and relegating our innate, integral and instinctual preconscious awareness into our collective unconscious and personal sub- conscious. Plus, all of you should have the unedited prologue Henry wrote for our book. There is a great deal of overlap between the prologue and what Henry wrote in RI.
Henry wrote in the prologue;
“The reality of first importance is always that creative interchange whereby individuals communicate to one another new values which are integrated into the consciousness of each, thus expanding the range of what one can value. …this creativity links to lower levels ‘AND/OR’ rises to higher, depending on physical, biological, psychological, AND social, cultural, conditions. Therefore, it requires the services of all the sciences to provide these conditions [‘AND’] requires the right kind of ethics and religion.”
In true Wieman style there is a lot packed into 3 sentences. An important observation is that CI psychodynamics are a whole lot more than what is usually meant by the term psychology. Henry’s commitment to the expansion of valuing consciousness places CI in a more holistic, integral AND instinctual context. When Wieman writes; “this creativity links to lower levels ‘AND/OR’ rises to higher, depending on physical, biological, psychological, AND social, cultural, conditions” I would add historical and destiny issues to the list. We talked about destiny in the previous series.
What Henry referred to as “lower levels” only included in those days two major sciences, physics and chemistry. Things like biology and psychology were not considered sciences in those early days. They were part of the arts and humanities. When I was studying biology in 1952 my biology teacher was the first biologist asked to present a paper at a gathering of international scientists meeting in Paris. He presented a paper on “super bugs” in which he predicted we were on a course of someday in the future that what it would take to kill the bug would kill the patient first. He said the bug would become immune to the penicillin and other new compounds that would come into use to kill the bug. While he didn’t have all the details precise, we have now evolved the superbugs he predicted were on the way.
Of course, biology today is secure as a science. At that time psychology was considered one of the arts and humanities, not a science. When psychology did become one of the sciences, psychologists were resistant to letting sociology become a science. The thing to note is how groups guard their boundaries and judge others as to who’s in who’s out. Such an attitude is not creative interchange thinking AND valuing.
Science, like religion, can suffer from hubris. CI psychodynamics includes “physical, biological, psychological AND social, cultural, [historical] conditions”. That is why Henry concluded CI dynamics “requires the services of all the sciences in order to provide the conditions AND requires the right kind of ethics and religion.” Try telling some scientists that truth requires ethics and religion in its quest for facts and reality. Henry continues;
“During the past 20 years, scientific discovery and scientific technology have transformed our industry, our agriculture, and nutrition, our health, our transportation, our communication, our education, and our leisure more extensively than ever before in human history in such a short time. The enormous increase in man’s power and in man’s knowledge of himself and his world is indicated by the use of nuclear power on the one hand AND on the other by the discovery of the genetic code and the chemistry of life and reproduction.”
Humankind has managed to control atomic and nuclear weapons through a strategy of “Mutually Assured Destruction. The proliferation of nations gaining access to nuclear weapons in recent years has raised new questions as to the continuing success of the MAD strategy. The probabilities of using such weapons are escalating thanks to current oligarchs’ efforts to develop self-programming and learning drones capable of delivering nuclear weapons to very precise locations on a battlefield. This means those who have an insatiable appetite for ever more wealth and power can invest in more dangerous war games.
Even more challenging and dangerous wars became possible with the “discovery of the genetic code AND the chemistry of life”. Discovery of the human genome introduced an ever-deeper risk to human survival. Francis Collins and his team at the National Institutes of Health identified the human genome. In his book, The Road to Wisdom Francis says;
“I found that my scientific and medical interest converged around the astoundingly elegant and beautiful molecule that encodes biological information – DNA. A finite human DNA instruction book, just three billion letters of a code with four letters in its alphabet, provides all the biological information necessary to build you and me from a single initial cell. That fact continues to leave me in complete awe.”
So, is that good OR is that BAD? Of course, the answer I always give is, yes. Let me begin with Dr. Collins’ statement, “That fact continues to leave me in complete awe”. Remember the Einstein quote at the beginning of each of The Final Frontier series? It was, “The most beautiful and most profound experience is the sensation of the mystical. It is the sower of all true science. Einstein continued, “to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer wonder and stand rapt in awe is as good as dead”. According to Dr. Einstein’s criteria Francis Collins was/is very much alive.
According to Collins, DNA encodes biological information. For Wieman the expanding valuing consciousness of the created self through creative interchange is biologically based, i.e. DNA based. It is an instinctual process. In short creative interchange is genetic, instinctual, integral and innate in all of us at birth. It is our birthright so to speak. It is part of the human survival instinct. Healthy newborns have an instinct for creative interchange. It is not a learned behavior; we come into the world equipped with it. It defines some of the uniqueness of the human species.
In Wieman’s terms DNA awareness precedes sense-based consciousness. Henry made a distinction between awareness AND consciousness. Unfortunately, in Western Civilization most children ages 4 to 6 are taught to focus primarily on developing their individual consciousness and supressing awareness to the un/sub or pre-conscious level. This helps explain why nearly 98% of healthy infants manifest creative behavior and by 4 to 6 years of age that creativeness drops to 2% for the vast majority. It is not eliminated, only repressed. While that statistic is tragic; it made it possible for me to feed my family for a many years’ conducting a variety of workshops on Creative Problem-Solving, High-Performance Teaming and Creating Transformational CI Cultures.
Most of my own research over the last 6 to 7 years has focused on neuroscience and its relationship and correlations with the personal, team and cultural creative interchange. In this series we’ll be using Wieman’s lens to look at a deeper appreciative understanding of CI psychodynamics. Since this series is about Henry, Fitz and myself, it’s time to get better acquainted with Dr. Fitz who was Chief of Psychiatry at the College of Osteopathic Medicine and Surgery in Des Moines, IA. I mentioned in The Final Frontier that Henry was a wanna bee psychiatrist, Fitz was a psychiatrist and I was Asst. Professor of Psychiatry.
All of us were interested in Existentialism, which was becoming popular in the U.S. at the time. The big names in psychoanalysis were Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, Fritz Perles, Alfred Adler, Otto Rank, Frieda Fromm-Reichmann, Carl Rogers, William and Carl Menninger and Abe Maslow, to name a few. Rogers, Carl Menninger and Maslow were all familiar with Wieman’s work and held him high esteem. I mentioned earlier that CI Psychodynamics is rooted in working through PTSD issues. That’s where Dr. Fitz’s work becomes prominent. The following is from his obituary.
“[Fitz] left his position as Head of the Dept. of Psychiatry at the College of Osteopathic Medicine and Surgery to become Chief of Psychiatry at the VA Hospital in Knoxville, Iowa. This job launched the most rewarding phase of his career as he found a real passion in working with Vietnam veterans. Between the Knoxville VA, the Des Moines Veterans Center, West Side Clinical Associates (a private practice), consultancies and significant pro bono work, Fitz spent the final 33 years of his life dedicated to veterans diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder.”
In WWI it was called Shell shock; in WWII it was battle fatigue. Both were thought to relate to experiences on the battlefield. Battlefields were then and remain places where our survival instinct is tested in life-threatening situations. During the North Korean and Vietnam wars, the battlefield experience was being reevaluated and compared with similar non-combatant, but nonetheless traumatic, situations and evolved into what we now call Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome.
This larger context prompted me to focus on the similarities between other types of battlefields that weren’t necessarily life threatening. There were parallels in the of work of Otto Rank. He suggested the birth process was also a source of trauma. In my work in the mid 1950’ s, I was working with hypnosis to support mothers wanting natural child birth so they could avoid relying on spinal blocks and other forms of anesthesia to control potential pain. In the next edition of this series, we’ll go deeper into the trauma associated with childbirth and early childhood development and their relationship to discovering CI is an instinct rooted in the survival instinct.
Creative interchange: Wieman Living Legacy 