Hello from the the beginning stages of PhDing!
Just to clarify, I just completed my first semester as a PhD student at CIIS where I am working on a degree in Human Sexuality. My dissertation aspirations are currently evolving in that space where sexuality, psychedelics, and integrity meet.
Below you will find my first final paper on repressed sexual trauma memories-- a common and challenging phenomenon in psychedelic work. I want my work in this program to be of service. Also, I personally feel like this is a sexy piece of thinking and I am frankly too into immediate gratification to let my work at CIIS to go unseen until 6+ years from now. So here you go...
Repressed Sexual Trauma Memories?
This Wicked Problem Needs a Complex Theory
My Research Interest
A 1998 article by Jurich and Myers-Bowman presented an overview of system theory’s application to human sexuality research. They asserted that while systems theory was widely used in the social sciences, amongst sexuality researchers, its application was more limited. One of the exceptions to this observation was around the issue of incest, a problem where the family system is more overtly implicated (p.73). Twenty-one years later, Baker and Turner argued that general systems theory (GST) was too linear for today’s complex problems and that researchers should explore the application of complexity theory to address today’s “wicked problems” (2019, p. 1, 15). They cited Churchman to define “wicked problems” as “that class of problems which are ill-formulated, where the information is confusing, where there are many decision makers and clients with conflicting values, and where the ramifications in the whole system are confusing” (Baker and Turner, 2019, p. 15).
My research interest is arguably a wicked problem: the confusing and conflicting space that surrounds the possibility of repressed sexual trauma memories. The book The Violence and the Cultural Politics of Trauma (2007) by Jane Kirby analyzes the discourse on this issue, transporting the issue out of the therapeutic space and into a cultural and political level of analysis. My goal in this essay is to explore the material of her analysis with some of the tenets of complexity theory to demonstrate the potential of applying this theory to the analysis of the problem of repressed sexual trauma memories.
I’ve also decided to extend beyond Baker and Turner’s call and incorporate Dan Siegel’s (2020) understanding of Interpersonal Neurobiology (IPNB), a social constructionist orientation to neurobiology that rests on an identification of the mind as a complex system that is subject to the tenets of complexity theory. In the following pages I will present a fair amount of conceptual groundwork to orient the reader to some of the relevant tenets of systems theory, complexity theory, and IPNB’s definition of the mind as a complex system. This will germinate an analysis of a couple of the issues that Kirby articulates. I will also touch upon some of the more familiar sexuality theories (e.g., Foucault’s power/knowledge, sexual scripts theory, abjection) to help the average critical sexuality studies reader orient to how I perceive how complexity theory exists in relationship to some more well-known theoretic landmarks (Foucault, 1978; Simon and Gagnon, 1986; Kristeva, 1982). For economy’s sake, I’ll focus on a limited number of tenets and issues.
Origins, Genealogy, and Contributors
In the 1920s, Ludwig von Bertalanffy, considered by most researchers the ‘founder’ of systems theory, started to cultivate his theoretical approach due to his interest in the holistic nature of biological systems. He began writing about it in the late 1930s and held aspirations to unify the sciences. World War II impacted this work when it put pressure on scientists to focus on technological issues, such as creating guidance systems for weapons. This fostered interdisciplinary coordination (e.g., information flows and guidance systems). Bertalanffy’s writings were not published until after WWII (Jurich and Myers-Bowman, 1998, p. 72-73).
The Society for General Systems Research was created in 1954. This organization included several social scientists, such as Margaret Mead and anthropologist Gregory Bateson. In 1958, Bateson joined forces with a psychiatrist, an anthropologist, and a communications scholar to create the Mental Research Institute with the intent of applying systems theory to the social sciences (Jurich and Myers-Bowman, 1998, p. 73).
Emergence of Complexity Theory
Complexity theory emerged from GST in the 1970s. It is a subfield of systems theory. It focuses on open, non-linear, adaptive, self-organizing systems that display emergent behavior. This multidisciplinary approach draws from information theory, nonlinear dynamics, meteorology, computer sciences, anthropology, economics, biology, psychology, and more (Baker and Turner, 2019).
Complexity theory is integral to Dan Siegel’s orientation to Interpersonal Neurobiology (IPNB). His book The Developing Mind (2020) presents a definition of the mind as a complex system whose properties can be understood with the tenets of complexity theory. He offers an understanding of the mind that is not bound by individual brains but rather includes collectivist understandings of the mind in dynamic relationality (e.g., group consciousness) (p. 507). In the following section on major tenets, I will work backwards and start with IPNB’s definition of the mind as a complex system and then complexity theory and general systems theory’s (GST) major concepts.
Major tenets
Interpersonal Neurobiology’s Definition of the ‘Mind’
Siegel gathered a multidisciplinary team of 40 anthropologists, sociologists, psychologists, linguists, physicists, and more to explore the following working definition: The mind is an emergent, self-organizing, embodied, and relational process that regulates the flow of energy and information (2020, p. 5). This definition of the mind is grounded in his position that the mind is a complex system subject to the tenets of complexity theory.
Complexity Theory Tenets
Baker and Turner identify seven tenets of complexity theory: non-linear dynamics, chaos theory, adaptation/evolution, emergence, self-organization, feedback, and chaos. (2019, p. 11) I will introduce properties that I feel are the most relevant to this paper and Siegel’s definition.
Emergence. The concept of emergence in complexity theory states that novel properties, behaviors, and structures emerge from the relationships and interactions of the parts of a system (Siegel, 2020; Baker and Turner, 2019). This quality of emergence exists in contrast to modernity’s tendency towards reductionism and linearity. Siegel proposes that the following qualities of the mind 1) subjectivity 2) consciousness, 3) information processing, and 4) regulatory functions are properties that can’t simply be reduced to neural networks firing but rather emerge from the relationality of systems and bodies across space and time (2020, p. 2-4).
Self-Organization. Self-organization is a key concept in complexity theory that describes the process by which complex systems structure themselves without external direction, based on local interactions and feedback mechanisms. This notion of self-organization presents an understanding of the mind that paradoxically exists both within and between. “One process of the mind can appear in what seems linguistically to be in “two places-- within the body and its head, and between us, in our relationships with other people and the planet on which we live” (Siegel, 2020, p. 5).
The structured, fractal patterns of a growing seed crystal expansively organizing itself offers an accessible example of self-organization. Local interactions and feedback loops generate the order and structure of the system. In my assessment, this self-organizing property is consilient with Foucault’s theory of power/knowledge reiterating itself through localized interactions resulting in the ordered regulation of bodies and sexuality (1976). Both Foucault’s theory and the property of self-organization describe localized interactions that regulate patterns (both internally and relationally).
On Edge of Chaos, Integrating Regulation Complexity theory focuses on self-organizing, open systems capable of chaos. All biological systems are open systems that require the regulation of energy and information lest the system devolves into an entropic mess. Siegel states that well-regulated, open, self-organizing complex systems are marked by integration. He clarifies what he means by integration: the linkage of differentiated parts of a system. Integration is measured by a balance of connection (aka linkage) and differentiation (aka specialization). He points to the brain as a structural example of an integrated system. The left brain and the right brain are differentiated in that they display unique and specialized properties, and they are also connected via the corpus callosum (a neural bridge that connects the two hemispheres). Another example of a well-integrated complex system is a securely attached, interdependent relationship; one that has a balance between differentiation (e.g., autonomy) and connection (e.g., shared values). Siegle holds that well-integrated complex systems are flexible, adaptable, coherent, energized, and stable (2020, pp. 14-17).
His understanding offers a heuristic device that can be utilized to assess complex systems. Siegel’s framework is that complex systems that lack integration will result in dysregulated states that have qualities of rigidity and/or chaos. A nervous system (or a relationship) that is not well integrated will display either too much differentiation (e.g., disassociation) or too much linkage (e.g., emotional flooding). He points out that the DSM-V is full of diagnoses that can be characterized by either rigidity and/or chaos. (2020, p. 101) To help move a complex system towards greater regulation and integration, interventions that either increase connection (e.g., empathy) or increase differentiation (e.g., boundary setting) or vice versa can accordingly be employed. This assessment and intervention couplet (differentiation/connection) can be utilized in multiple levels of system(s) analysis.
General Systems Theory (GST) Tenets
To help prime this discussion on repressed/false sexual trauma memories, I will now share some of the key tenets of general systems theory (GST) with illustrative examples.
Systems within Systems. GST theorists work with a conceptual awareness of nested systems (Jurich and Bowman-Myers, 1998, p. 75). For example, one person’s individual nervous system is nested within a family nervous system and that dynamic family system exists within a fluctuating cultural system. None of these systems are static; they exist in dynamic, interdependent relationships with each other as they share energy and information through inputs, outputs, and feedback loops. Within GST, researchers identify the level of a system they are analyzing while also acknowledging the relationships between them.
How does this apply to sexual trauma memories? A sexual trauma victim’s nervous system capacity for recollection was shaped by their experience within a family system. That family system was nested within a particular cultural and political system. When this person’s system comes into relationship with a mental health profession, a unique client-therapist dyadic system is created. This dyadic system is now under the influence of a therapeutic cultural suprasystem that inputs information (e.g., theoretical cultural scripts shared through texts and trainings) that have the potential to reshape a client’s individual nervous system through relational feedback loops and the property of neuroplasticity. Here systems within systems regulate the flow of energy and information around the story of sexual trauma memories.
Simon and Gagnon’s Sexual Scripts Theory (SST) is a construct that is congruent with the practice of identifying the information and scripts operant within nested systems. In the case of SST, intrapsychic, interpersonal, and cultural scripts are analyzed (Simon and Gagnon, 1986). In a later section I will also present another nested system that isn’t typically found in most social constructionist articulations—the functional materiality of the human nervous system. It is my opinion that including material subsystems that involve memory, and the generation of subjectivities provides a more precise and layered analysis.
Feedback Loops. Feedback loops are regulating influences that can be classified as positive or negative. Positive feedback loops reinforce and amplify behaviors and patterns. If, for example, a therapist has a strong attachment to the idea that a host of symptoms is due to the existence of repressed sexual trauma memories, such a bias may show up as leading questions and not-so-subtle signals that encourage clients to generate false sexual trauma stories to gain the approval of the therapist. A negative feedback loop suppresses behavior. One example would be a mother who is too wracked with shame to respond in an empathetic way to distressing signals coming from her sexually abused child. Instead, she reacts aggressively towards any communication that is perceived as a horrific abjection (Kristeva, 1982). This negative feedback loop could shut down exchanges of information that reveal unintelligible and disgusting acts of sexual abuse and thus regulate the truth of violence into the shadows and silence the child.
Isomorphism. Isomorphism is a concept within GST that references how similar patterns exist within and between systems. "To say that two systems are isomorphic means that the elements and relationships of one system can be placed in one-to-one correspondence with the elements and relationships with the other” (citing Whitchurch and Constantine, 1993, Jurich, 1998, p. 77). In Chapter 1 of Trauma and Recovery (1997), author Herman presents a Foucauldian genealogical analysis of the term “hysteria.” According to Herman, the silencing and dismissal of the sexually abused women within the family system isomorphically maps to the collective social silencing of women’s sexual abuse with the dismissing term “hysterical” (1997, pp. 7-32).
Memory Concepts to Remember
The following attributes of memory are described in Chapter 3: Memory and Narrative in The Developing Mind (Siegel, 2020). In the field of memory research, there are two common ways of categorizing memories: “explicit” memories and “implicit” (aka “nondeclarative”) memories. Explicit memories feel like memories in that it feels like one is sliding back in time to retrieve them. They are amenable to being captured in words. Explicit memories utilize the hippocampus to place these memories in long-term storage. In contrast, implicit memories do not feel like memories; they feel like they are happening here and now. War veterans in the throes of a flashback feel like they are experiencing the past here and now. Implicit memories are encoded through emotions, sensations, body impulses, anticipations, and core beliefs. An infant in the first 18 months of their life can only encode implicit memories because their hippocampus has yet to come online. These memories are not amenable to being verbally or consciously recollected, and yet they are somatically imprinted. During times of extreme stress and trauma, the body will release high levels of cortisol. This neurochemical event will impact the hippocampus's capacity to encode explicit memories. Simultaneously, the nervous system is primed to encode implicit memories (Siegel, 2020, pp. 120-166).
Given the above attributes of implicit and explicit memories, it's my understanding and professional experience that while the trauma of sexual abuse can overwhelm the brain’s capacity to encode explicit/declarative memories that elude verbal recollection, the emotional weight of them will prime them to be stored as implicit memories. The titles of Bessel Van der Kolk’s book The Body Keeps the Score (2015) and Peter Levine’s book In an Unspoken Voice (2010) reference how traumatic memories are encoded: somatically and nonverbally. In my understanding, these dynamic memory encoding mechanisms can explain how sexual trauma memories might resist declarative recollection and yet still communicate their presence in embodied, implicit ways.
The Politics of Violence and Trauma
My analysis will focus on the book Violence and the Cultural Politics of Trauma by Jane Kirby (2007). The author analyzes the challenges of situating the testimonials of childhood sexual abuse in a cultural and political context when the nature of trauma is ‘unspeakable’ and defies ‘representation.’ She seeks to “supplement the feminist understanding of social censorship by stressing the psychological consequences of violence” (p. 3). She aims to progress the conversation beyond the psychotherapeutic tendency to hyperfocus on liberal individualism and neglect the power of the social, cultural, and political contexts in which the trauma is situated. With this book she hopes to integrate trauma theory into a reconfigured political and cultural understanding of violence and victimization that doesn’t reproduce the harms of liberal individualism.
I will respond to the contents of the introduction and the first chapter. The introduction takes stock of relevant theorists and their positions, the political and cultural challenges that feminism faces in consideration of the impact of trauma on representation, amnesia, and memory, and orients the reader to her intentions and arguments. Chapter 1 offers an analysis of a close reading of the false memory syndrome debates of the 1990s. She looks at the discourse in response to The Courage to Heal, a successful self-help book for women survivors of incest (Bass and Davis, 1998). She also explores how the issue of radical amnesia presented in this book activated anxieties within the cultural and political discourse. This author forwards an approach to the challenge of reading testimonials when the trauma, by its nature, eludes representation.
“The Unspeakable” and Regulating Information Flows
Sexual Scripts Theory articulates that codes of conduct are operant within three different interrelated layers of analysis: intra-psychic, interpersonal, and cultural. Systems theorists hold no limits to nested suprasystems and subsystems. In Kirby’s analysis of repressed memories, she includes a discussion of the cultural and political suprasystems that interact with repressed sexual trauma memory stories. I am choosing to include an awareness of the subsystem that is a part of the emergent experience of subjectivity: the nervous system. IPNB defines the mind as a complex system that regulates information flows. It is within this nested analytical framework that acknowledges the multiple layers in which a flow of information is regulated that I am drawn to bring in Kirby’s focus on the unspeakable and unrepresentable nature of trauma.
Kirby begins her introduction by articulating Judith Herman’s position in Trauma and Recovery, a book dedicated to the politics of witnessing and “truth telling” and giving “voice to the disempowered” (Herman, 1992, p.1,9). According to Herman, “the active process of bearing witness inevitably gives way to the active process of forgetting. Repression, disassociation, and denial are phenomena of social as well as individual consciousness” (1992, p. 9). Kirby cites Culbertson to describe the impact of trauma on meaning-making: “‘contextual analysis' and meaning is fundamentally altered not only because it is incomprehensible to the degree that it cannot be ‘recalled in any way that admits of context and understanding; it simply has no narrative frame’” (citing Culbertson 1995, p. 177, Kirby, p. 6). This failure of words and representation is a challenge for the feminist project of amplifying and empowering silenced voices for political and cultural change. How might a feminist understanding organize itself around testimonials that are rendered so ‘unreal’ that their informational flow into the political consciousness fails to make sense? Kirby argues that the best intervention is to critically read into the silence and to use our imagination. I both agree and disagree.
As I situate myself within the analytical framework of complexity theory, the following question comes to my mind: What are the localized constraints within these nested systems that regulate the flow of information? Within the individual nervous system layer, sensations, emotions, core beliefs, body impulses, anticipations, and perceptions (the encoding language of trauma) speak volumes and motivate behaviors. This is the information flow of implicit memories. I would argue that most of the Western world is enculturated (aka scripted) to not pay attention to what their bodies are saying. As a result, the somatic information flows are constrained by disconnecting (and thus dysregulating) scripts gathered from the cultural layer that the individual nervous system and family is nested within.
In my assessment, intrapsychic regulation involves mindful integration of the information flow from trauma’s implicit encoding language. Within a trauma-informed, somatic, therapeutic, cultural context (a new suprasystem layer) interpersonal therapeutic scripts (i.e., information flows) circulate, which offer an alternative script to dissociative Western mainstream scripts. The somatic languages in which implicit memories announce themselves are often devalued in America. It is hard to imagine the average American family, court system, talk show panel, or lobbyist working against false memory syndromes offering unconstrained somatic information flows: “When you said that, I felt a clench in my jaw and a tightening of my butt.”
Kirby’s essential prescription for the issue of ineffability is for critical readers to use their imagination to read into and beyond the silence (2007, p.34). I believe that if sub- and supra-systems renegotiated their scripted constraints on the regulation of information that privilege the “rational” language of explicit memories and instead actively expand their capacities to integrate the information contained within the encoding language of implicit memories, attentive listeners will ‘hear’ a lot more ‘truth’ within the supposed silence. Critical readers and clinicians need not use our imaginations to read into the silence as Kirby asserts. I believe that we need to expand our understanding of what information speaks truths.
Fact or Fiction? Self-Organizing Feedback Loops
In Chapter 1, Kirby examines the heated debates in the 1990s around claims of repressed sexual trauma memories. She focuses her analysis on the discourse that surrounded a popular self-help book for incest survivors called The Courage to Heal (Bass and Davis, 1988). Kirby summarizes that the authors insist “that repression and dissociation are a reality, and while there might be very little concrete evidence to suggest a history of abuse, this alone doesn’t mean that nothing has happened” (2007, p. 18). She includes voices from the other side of the debate; critics mobilized by the anxieties of the possibility of false memories proliferating in the wake of therapists ‘encouraging’ clients to remember stories of sexual abuse, motivated by their attachment to their theories (Crews, 1995, Armstrong, 1994).
Fact or fiction? It is my position that these debates are fueled by a false binary that would benefit from some queering. I think it is entirely possible to hold as true that radical amnesia is a possibility while still acknowledging the possibility that false memories can be created. I hold that the skill of integrated discernment is what practitioners and society need to cultivate to more effectively respond to the challenges of memory’s inherent uncertainty.
The complexity theory tenet of self-organization and negative/positive feedback loops highlights the regulating force of local interactions. In my assessment, Foucault’s power/knowledge (1978) concept is isomorphic to the self-organizing tenet and describes the way that psychotherapeutic community discourse can create subjectivities through the proliferation of culturally bounded identities that get interpellated as new subjectivities. I appreciate that one such superimposed identity can be 'the victim of sexual abuse who suffers from radical amnesia.’ I also know that there are confirmed cases of radical amnesia, such as the tale of the author of My Father’s House (Fraser, 1987), who recovered memories after 40 years of not remembering.
Siegel (2020) offers a balanced, integrated view: the people around us can help us remember facts, and they can also help us generate fictions. Assessing the quality of the relational feedback loops in which the memories are localized can help evaluate their degree of integrity. In this approach it is important to assess for degrees of connection and differentiation within the relational feedback loops. A researcher or a clinician who faces this challenge of assessing the integrity of memory can ask any of the following questions: How attached is the practitioner to the idea that the client is a sexual trauma victim? How much rigidity is there? How much flexibility? Is there a rigid unwillingness to believe that sexual abuse can be forgotten? How can actors in these spheres cultivate more flexibility, adaptability, coherence, energy, and stability in the face of uncertainty?
In Conclusion
As stated earlier, this application of complexity theory on the wicked problem of sexual abuse memories is merely a beginning. I hope that I have succeeded in my goal of demonstrating the value of applying complexity theory to the confusing conflicts that organize themselves around the issue of repressed sexual trauma memories and the threat of false memory syndrome. My hope is that the inclusion of Dan Siegel’s definition of the mind as a complex system (2020) helps infuse the cultural and political understanding of sexual trauma memories in a way that leads towards a more flexible, adaptive, coherent, energized, and stable regulating influence within the systems that nest the vulnerable and fraught navigation of finding ‘truth’ in the complex and dynamic matrix of this wicked problem.
References
Armstrong, L. (1994). Rocking the Cradle of Sexual Politics: What Happened When Women Said Incest. The Women’s Press.
Bass, E. a. L. D. (1988). The Courage to Heal. Mandarin.
Crews. (1995). The Memory Wars: Freud's Legacy in Debate. Granta.
Culbertson, R. (1995). Embodied memory, transcendence, and telling: recounting trauma, re-establishing the self. New Literary History, (26), 169–75.
Foucault, M. (1976). The History of Sexuality Volume 1: An Introduction. Allen Lane.
Gagnon, J., & Simon, W. (2005). The social origins of sexual development. Aldiine.
Herman, J. (2015). Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence from Domestic Abuse to Political Terror. Basic Books.
Jurich, J., & Myers-Bowman, K. S. (1998). Systems Theory and Its Application to Research on Human Sexuality. The Journal of Sex Research, (Vol. 35, No. 1), 72–87.
Kirby, J. (2007). Violence and the Cultural Politics of Trauma. Edinburg University Press Ltd.
Kristeva, J. (1982). Powers of horror: An essay on abjection. Columbia University Press.
Levine, P. (2010). In an Unspoken Voice: How the Body Releases Trauma and Restores Goodness. Random House.
Siegel, D. (2020). Developing mind, 3rd edition: How relationships and the brain interact to shape who we are (3rd ed.). Guilford Publications.
Simon, W., & Gagnon, J. H. (1986). Sexual Scripts: Permanence and Change. Archives of Sexual Behavior, 15(2), , 97–120.
Turner, J. R., & Baker, R. M. (2019). Complexity Theory: An Overview with Potential Applications for the Social Sciences. Systems, 7(1)10.3390/systems7010004
Van der Kolk, B. (2015). The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma. Penguin Books.
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