A reformist approach to emotions?
Thinking about 'nervous system regulation' and what Freud made of such things.
Like many of you, I would guess, I learned about ‘nervous system (dys)regulation’ some years ago on the famously relaxing platform, Instagram. We know well now, how these platforms shape our subjectivity - and that’s about language, too; shared language among algorithmically-oriented (anti-)social groups arises, and eventually we speak differently. It is a kind of learning, a strange kind, kind of thwarted.
The neuropsychological language of ‘nervous system (dys)regulation’ is not a part of my psychoanalytic training, but saturates online mental health discourse; it is a learning I have absorbed passively, from random influencers of various stripes. It is a strange epistemology, a quasi-knowledge with vague origins, often overly deterministic. Self-taught, democratised, perhaps - but always potentially phony.
People cite Polyvagal Theory and The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk. People talk about trauma and ‘triggers’ and how they show up in particularly intense, automatic emotional reactions, and otherwise inexplicable physical ailments. People say it’s a matter of fight, flight, freeze, fawn. People warn that some relationships will ‘dysregulate’ you, advise in favour of relationships that ‘regulate the nervous system’.
The language - the ideas it communicates - evidently speaks to people, as evidenced by the social likes and shares. We want to minimise personal suffering, to foster an internal sense of safety in a tumultuous world. We want to be ‘regulated’; to be calm and basically content. Occasionally, the online discourse will go full circle: what does ‘nervous system regulation’ mean when we are witnessing a live-streamed genocide, let alone living through one?Is it even ethical - let alone possible - to be ‘regulated’ in this world, some ask?
The idea of blissing-out, stress-free forever, is surely horrific - a lifeless life, of low stakes, low investment, detachment from all that is. Certainly, our personal histories engender states that we might seek to understand and ameliorate, even transform - but it is true that being alive means surviving extreme distress. Maybe then, it is more about what survives in us, what we can tolerate surviving in us and how - and then, what we survive for.
There are personal traumas (that are never, of course, exactly personal) whose sway we might want to affect, if never quite eliminate; the kinds of life events that Freud realised, from the beginning of his work, could live on in the unconscious and result in often seemingly-unrelated somatic symptoms - such as coughs, seizures, pain or eating disorders. Indeed, doctors today have called the vagus nerve (which ‘nervous system regulation’ refers to), the body’s “unconscious inner brain.”
“Hysterics suffer mainly from reminiscences,” write Josef Breuer and Freud in Studies on Hysteria. Such ‘reminiscences’, Freud emphasises, might well be beyond (or below) conscious recollection, in need of digging up, if we are to work with them.
Freud’s founding theories about the links between historic trauma and ongoing suffering do not map perfectly onto modern notions of the nervous system - but, I think, there is much to be gained from enriching the latter with the psychoanalytic insight that preceded it. The way that ‘nervous system regulation’ is commonly leveraged, for example, is resonant of Freud’s pleasure principle - the idea that humans are governed by the seeking of pleasure and the avoidance of pain (or ‘excitation’).
Where popular notions can stop short, is in giving the impression that we can - if we choose the right relationships and employ the correct ‘tools’ and therapies - ultimately achieve long-term ‘regulation’. We might not want that, deep down. After the pleasure principle, Freud proposed the accompanying death drive - the idea that humans also have an innate drive towards something like self-destruction. We are, psychoanalysis would have it, always going to repeat painful things - more so if we cannot locate the origins of our present suffering.
We may attempt to minimise trauma’s most acute symptoms with some ‘success’, but our personal and collective traumas live on inside of us, one way or another. As the psychoanalyst Avgi Saketopoulou writes in Sexuality Beyond Consent:
“Much as we would want to think otherwise, the impact of traumatic experiences cannot be eliminated or repaired: at best, we live in their aftermath on different terms than when they were inflicted on us. Relinquishing the idea that trauma can be repaired opens paths to thinking about what subjects do with their trauma.”
The question of what we do with our trauma, is related to the ones I posed above: what survives in us, what can we tolerate surviving in us - and then, what do we survive for?
If we are going to suffer, what must we, do we want to, suffer for? Where a mainstream ‘wellness’ discourse on ‘nervous system (dys)regulation’ often advises cutting out ‘triggering’ or ‘activating’ stimuli (a friend who stresses us out, distressing news cycles, a co-worker who talks a lot about their distress, a disruptive neighbour, an ‘avoidant’ partner), from a psychoanalytic perspective, things are muddier. We might ask if and why we are drawn to particular kinds of suffering, what our role is, and what these experiences might be doing for us - rather than simply doing to us.
Are there some things that we have an ethical duty to be ‘triggered’ by? Are there some things that are worth getting ‘triggered’ for? And when is it really about ‘protecting our peace’?
(None of this precludes attempting to relax. My search for a breathwork workshop inspired this post.)
