Digital Personae

The abnormal psychology of the digital age

This piece has three main sections and an introduction. Part one is “Neurosis,” on late modernity, part two is “Schizophrenia,” on Post Modernity, and part three is “Autism,” on the Digital Age. The central argument is that digitization hastens and exacerbates changes in the collective western psyche that leaves us in a whole new psychic paradigm. This was intended to be one essay, but I’m only halfway through part one at several thousand words, so I’m going to release it as several smaller essays. Here I present to you the introduction and the first half of part one.

This piece is the follow up to my first piece in a series I’m entitling “Digital Paradigms,” called “Digital Horizons.”

INTRODUCTION

The collective cultural psyche of a given civilization matures over time in much the same way the individual psyche progresses through stages of development. A culture will not relate to itself and the world around it in one epoch the same as it had in an earlier era, just as an adult will not see himself or his peers the same as he did in childhood or adolescence.  This self-perception derives from a culture or individuals' experience with their social milieu and their own self-reflection upon the way they fit in with the world around them.  As one progresses through these stages, one experiences a dissociation from a younger self and way of being and coalesces into something new as one integrates oneself into the context of the present. The individual or cultural psyche then, is a sort of epiphenomenon that results from the sum total of all experience and conscientious assessment of those experiences to determine behavior as one persists through time. One may pass seamlessly from one stage to the next, honed to act on new opportunities and overcome new challenges, or fail to adapt and remain trapped in one stage, or even experience a regression. Individuation is the process of integrating all individual phases phases into a cumulative, stable psyche, while psychosis is an unstable state induced by a failure to synthesize one's psyche with one's circumstances. Neurosis, on the other hand, is the inability to progress beyond one phase of psychic development into the next.

The collective psyche in one era, as distinguished from that of a previous era, may be thought of as a cultural persona. As the cultural persona morphs over time and develops into something new, the process of transition fails to integrate a certain number of people, who either remain trapped in an earlier persona or never reformulate themselves collectively into the new one, remaining in a dissociative state between personaes. This condition creates another epiphenomenon, a collective psychosis, that exists concurrent with the cultural identity. Cultural individuation involves an entire culture both integrating itself into the new era as well as the aspect of itself that has failed to individuate. As cultural personae change over time, so too do cultural psychoses, and with every novel form of collective mental illness comes a new threat to the psyche of the culture as a whole. Personae are determined by a confluence of a number of conditions and circumstances, including the economy, the strength of the state, and the dominant medium of communication in a given era. Transitions in personae are associated with transitions in these and other cultural conditions. 

The epoch of Modernity, which began roughly with the Enlightenment, can be broken into at least two distinct phases, the first and second, which we know as modernity and postmodernity. Postmodernity must be understood as a transitory phase as western civilization passes from Modernism to whatever comes next, a vestigial epoch in which the cultural psyche has disintegrated, leaving a residual film while new modes of being are coalescing into the next distinct cultural persona. We can then break the last hundred years down into late-modernity, post modernity, and the digital era. Make no mistake, the digital medium is scrambling the collective psyche and reforming it into something completely new and unprecedented, and this epoch will come to be seen as one wholly distinct from the one which came before, as much or more as Modernity is distinct from the middle ages. The precipitating factor initiating the transition from the Medieval period to the modern was the printing press: all other factors flow from this. The internet is a technology of historical significance on par with the printing press, and it is currently reorienting the consciousness of the West in as radical a fashion as the printing press did to the people of the middle ages. 

Every time there is a reorientation of the collective psyche, a new mental illness is generated. While these are not completely novel to the era in question, they are exacerbated by the shift in medium and or other material factors, and an epidemic breaks out, these oddities become common and the entire culture suddenly has to find a way to deal with them. In the medieval era, they were fully integrated into the church through sequestration in nunneries and monasteries, or completely ejected from the body politic (often by the church) through exile, excommunication, or outright execution. In modernity, however, they’ve become a focus of study, and psychologists and psychiatrists have identified a prevalent epidemic mental disorder in and for each of the three ages in question: neurosis for late-modernity, schizophrenia for post-modernity, and autism for the digital age. Examining some of the symptoms of these illness, as well as the way they were understood and depicted in their own times, may give us better insight into the way material conditions shape the psyche that defines a way of being specific to certain ages, and also helps understand why certain problems arise at certain times.

NEUROSIS

“Neurosis” is a broad term that generalizes all mental disorders, however it will be important to distinguish neurosis from schizophrenia and autism because during the age of late modernity, a different  set of circumstances were affecting people en masse than those of post modernity and the digital age, when schizophrenia and autism rose in epidemic proportions relative to other forms of neurosis. Therefore, when we speak of neurosis in relation to late modernity, we mean any mental state that stymies psychological development or sabotages one's ability to participate in society. To be clear, schizophrenia and autism have this effect on the afflicted individual, however they both bring in a whole range of symptoms absent from those who suffer from what I’m calling simply “neurosis.” One easy way to distinguish the three is to say neurosis can be characterized by a “nervous disorder,” while that phrase is inefficient to the point of gross mischaracterization in schizophrenia and autism. To better enunciate this distinction, it would help to consider several characters from the novels of Dostoyevsky, as well as the patients and their disorders seen by Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, in a general sense. 

Late modernity for our purposes ranges from roughly 1865-1945, a period of bringing people from the hinter-regions of modernity into the “modern” mode of being. All over the West and in Russia, many people were living in pre-modern, pre-enlightenment conditions, and this period is considered “late” because these were the last groups of people brought into modernity, usually under great stress and accompanied by one form of calamity, great and small, or another. In many regions, people still lived as serfs or subjects of either lords, aristocrats, or other nations. The serfs were only freed in Russia in 1861, and the slaves were freed in America two years later. In both instances, slaves and serfs were used to operate agrarian estates that still functioned in a feudal or quasi-feudal manner, a distinctly pre-modern economic mode of production made obsolete by industrialization. Along with this reform came many others in Russia, like the modernization of the military and the educational system. Russia had just lost the Crimean War to Britain, and it was understood by the government in Russia that if they did not have an army of conscripts to field, they would continue to lose confrontations with the fully modernized west. The educational reforms were intended to create the educated class necessary for running Modern social institutions. As this “liberal” education became accessible to an increasing number of people it brought in enlightenment ideas to Russia and other places, and herein lies one major cause for the epidemic of neurosis or nervous disorders in the West. 

Raskolnikov, Ivan, and the Underground Man are examples of someone suffering from neurosis under the new conditions of urban Russian life, and all three of them are gripped with such crippling neurosis they end up invalids lying in bed. And all three are crippled by these “new ideas” coming into Russia. Dostoyevsky says these ideas are “floating in the air,” referring to them as a spreading virus in the epilogue of Crime and Punishment and, in the Brothers Karamazov, Dostoyevsky puts into the mouth of one of the monks the concept that ideas become disembodied from individual consciousness and exist in a free state for anyone to take up and use for their own purposes. These ideas, of course, fly in the face of traditional morality and church teaching, the very things that ordered pre-modern societies, such as in pre-modern Russia. These new ideas, most of which came from the Enlightenment and particularly the socialist movements in Europe that followed Rousseau and Marx, were filtered to Russians through Russian thinkers who took them up and disseminated them through the intelligentsia, and these caught on so rapidly that Dostoyevsky criticized them as being only “half-formed.” The Underground Man and Raskolnikov are caricatures of such men, but also the victims of such ideas, as is Ivan Karamazov. 

The foundation of all Enlightenment thinking is the scientific method which is, at base, a step by step rational process for working through a problem or testing a hypothesis. This process was applied to society and adopted as a way to solve social problems as well, with the invention of the concept of “the individual” who has to make rational choices within the institutional matrix of society in order to navigate his way through the social order. This was the concept of the “social contract,” that individuals were expected to adopt and abide by, as opposed to the moral laws handed down by God and Christ, enforced by the church, with the promise of heaven or the threat of hell as motivation. This socially contracted, rationalistic world of the individual is a radical change from the previous structure in which one is fully integrated into a cosmic order that dictates the behavior and morals of a cultural and familial network, rather than a set of individuals. The three characters in question represent what goes wrong when one man is unable to individuate out of the old spiritual order and into the new social order, and they can be thought of as representative of a malady that gripped all of the west and brought Modernity down in the two world wars and the Russian revolutions, ushering in the next epoch.

Raskolnikov, for example, decides that he is a “great man” of history, and uses his new methods of rationalism to reason that just as all great men of the past had to spill blood to establish imperial order, he too may have to spill blood to go on and do great things. He decides to murder a pawn broker and use her money to finish his education and go on to become a great thinker who ushers in a new age of prosperity, like Napoleon or Solon, thus negating or superseding the evil he committed in murdering the old woman. He’s not up to the task however, and this cold-blooded murder is not in his nature, so he spends the majority of the novel in a state of nervous terror and guilt, to the point of physical illness. He’s constantly fretting that he’s burning up with a fever, suffering from a headache, paleness, sweating, and uncontrollable shaking, and is forced to lie down often. He never uses the money for anything, doesn’t even effectively pilfer the woman's apartment for all its valuables, and even returns to the scene of the crime in his obsession over it. Raskolnikov is stuck for the majority of the novel in a neurotic fugue state, completely unable to move beyond the murder until he is absolves himself of guilt and confesses to the crime. It is not until he eschews rationality and embraces faith that he is able to become “himself” again and break the neurosis. However, his final vision is one of a world brought to its knees by an entire civilization of men gripped by such neurosis.

The Underground Man is similarly affected by these ideas, and in a way he is a precursor to Raskolnikov, though he takes a different perspective. He spends his time lambasting his fellow Russians for enjoying their suffering, obsessing over the working of his own body, and the mistreatment he feels he's been subjected to in his life by friends and strangers alike. He is the “underground” man because he no longer leaves his house, even refusing to go to the doctor despite believing his liver is diseased. We never find out if his liver really is, but one gets the impression this is a hypochondriac symptom of his neurosis, and that he is himself suffering from the same pathological solipsism he accuses his countrymen of. He says they enjoy their toothaches because it gives them something to complain about, and here he is doing exactly that over his supposedly diseased liver. This is a character study of a man totally enfeebled by his own neurosis, given to his obsessive thoughts at the expense of living any kind of life. And Dostoyevsky's commentary on rationalism and new ideas is expressed here for the first time, in fact Notes From Underground serves as the first book that defines the rest of his career critiquing the modernization process as it played out in Russia. 

In Notes From Underground, the underground man remarks “I agree that two and two make four is an excellent thing; but to give everything its due, two and two make five is also a very fine thing.” The Underground Man is remarking here that rationalism is not sufficient for making one happy, for alleviating one's suffering, and that in the face of his neurosis, it does not matter either way. It does nothing to alleviate the suffering of society in general, in fact, and that even if it could, they (and he) would choose to suffer because it gives them something to complain about. This is neurosis incarnate, the minute and obsessive fixation with one's own bodily processes and ideas, to the extent where one becomes trapped in perseverating on them and “goes underground,” to remove oneself from the world in favor of these proclivities. In fact, this practice takes up a not insubstantial portion of the narrative in Crime and Punishment, with the narrator focusing on Raskolnikov's obsessive thoughts and his focus on the workings of his body. At one point, someone takes his temperature and he is not actually febrile, again evoking the neurotic condition of hypochondria brought about by obsessive thinking. 

Finally, we have Ivan, a third Dostoyevksy character who ends up an invalid on the couch being tended to by others. More so even than Raskolnikov or the Underground Man, Ivan has a nervous breakdown that causes him to hallucinate that he is speaking with the devil, in fact we may even view this as a prototype for a schizophrenic breakdown, as we shall review in the next section on postmodernity. But for our purposes now, Ivan finds himself doubting whether or not there is a God when earlier in the novel he convinced himself there was not. Ivan, like Raskolnikov, fancied himself an intellectual, and wrote about the non-existence of God, a conclusion he reasoned himself into - just like Raskolinkov reasoned himself into the murder of the old woman.

Perhaps the underground man expresses the conflict within these three men most succinctly and clearly when he speaks of a cruelty he perpetrates on an unsuspecting prostitute. He states “although I committed this cruelty deliberately, it came from my wicked head, not from my heart. It was so artificial, so intellectual, so contrived, so bookish.” This statement can also be applied to Raskolnikov's crime and Ivans atheism. These men are not living in the traditions of Russia and the Orthodox church, according to the old order of the old world, but attempting to become the new men of modernity by superficially adopting the ideas and the rational process of the European Enlightenment. 

Raskolnikov is perhaps the best exemplar of this process of the three, for he is a provincial man sent to the rapidly modernizing city of St. Petersburg as the reforms are being implemented in Russia and a new civilization is coming into being. He represents someone marooned from the old order being swept up in the modernization process, as are many of the people he meets along the way. These people, note, are often gripped by alcoholism, reduced to prostitution, insanity, preyed upon by others, and even suicidal. Raskolnikov is witnessing the externalities of modernization, the people who were thrown out of or uprooted from the old order but are unable to matriculate their consciousness and their being into the new order, and while he himself descends further into neurosis, a sort of neurosis infects the entire world around him. These three characters go a long way to exemplify the malady that gripped the entire western and Russian world, with the death of the old order in the face of the rise of the new. And as the real life counterparts to these characters proliferate throughout Russia, they sow havoc, attacking the Czar, eventually killing one and then, in 1917 with the Bolsheviks, doing away with the old order in one violent act that unleashed, as WB Yeats put it, a “blood-dimmed tide.” 

           Another cause of the outbreak of neurosis was the breakdown of the familial structure that thrived under both the feudal system but also the village and urban ghetto or shtetl life of late modernity….

EDITORS NOTE: the second half of part one will review, to an extent, the process of acculturation in late modernity and how it came to exacerbate “neurosis” and nervous disorders, and the concept of “deterritorialization” and how it contributes to the archetypical abnormal psychology I’m examining.