BIOLOGY PRECEDES PSYCHOLOGY
This morning I took a long two hours walk, one hour to and one hour back. As I was walking, I noticed that sometimes I felt like I was falling and had to quickly try to regain a sense of balance. It happened several times. So, I thought about it.
I recognized that it is not a new phenomenon, that it has been with me all my life. When I was a kid and learning how to ride bicycle, I was always falling from sense of not been balanced on the bicycle; even today when I ride my bicycle, I have a sense that I could fall and sometimes stop riding and walk my bicycle.
Sitting on the bicycle’s seat generates intense pain on my buttocks that sometimes to stop that pain I must stop riding and walk the bicycle.
More reflection shows me that I tend to feel dizzy around smell and fragrances (newly painted houses make me feel dizzy and fainty, fragrance from women’s perfumes make me feel dizzy and assorted other smells make me dizzy; when my television went kaput and stopped it unleashed an odor that made me to literally leave the house because I could not stand the smell; thereafter, electronic equipment’s like televisions, computers and cell phones elicit noxious smell in my mouth and nose).
When I am driving long distances, I feel electricity moving from the car’s pedal into my leg and the leg feels pained and numb so that I must stop and stamp my feet on the ground to regain life in it. If I do not stop occasionally, I feel disoriented from driving.
Sitting for several hours in a moving bus or train, say, overnight, ends up with my legs feeling wobbly and I must hold things to stand up and may not be able to walk for a while.
When I was a child, after a long-distance ride in cars or buses, I would hear the sound of the car ‘s motor in my head for a couple of days.
My body responds to all sorts of things in a manner that most people’s bodies do not respond so they do not know what I am talking about.
These responses are due to my biological inheritance. I am not sure what it is, but I suspect that it has something to do with my nervous system and the centers in my brain’s cerebellum that regulate smell, pain and sense of balance (see further reading).
BIOLOGY PLAYS A DECISIVE ROLE IN THE ETIOLOGY OF PERSONALITY
What is apparent to me is that my bodily problems played a decisive role in the formation of my personality, my individual psychology.
In Alfred Adler’s terms, in childhood I felt biologically inadequate and inferior and compensated with desire for superiority and power. All these took place from my birth to age six because by age six I was aware that I felt inferior and was seeking compensatory superiority (see Alfred Adler, the Neurotic Constitution, 1921).
I knew that I had no power but still the desire for power was there. If I had power, I would know it because I would not feel biologically inadequate; I did not have power.
I would be deluded (delusion disorder, grandiose type) if I thought that I have power when, in fact, I do not have power. My wish for power is a mere wish not a reality. Nevertheless, that wish for power tended to make me feel angry when other people did not treat me as if I have power. Karen Horney, called this phenomenon neurotic pride and anger (see Horney, Neurosis and Human Growth, 1951).
In some persons the wish to seem powerful is believed by them; such persons proceed to develop mental disorders, such as delusion disorder, paranoia, mania and or even schizophrenia.
Whatever people’s individual psychologies are, they are preceded by their biological constitutions.
But instead of psychiatry and psychology trying to understand the biological antecedents that dispose people to form problematic psychologies they focus only on their psychological processes and give them cute diagnoses and give them medications that do not cure them but merely mask the underlying biological problems that led them to form their overlaying personal psychologies.
If Western psychology had ignored the fables of Sigmund Freud and paid attention to Alfred Adler, accepted his hypothesis that inherited organic deficits dispose people to feel inferior and then they try to adapt to their world by pretending to be powerful, western psychology would have gone farther than it has done.
Right now, Western psychology takes the tree for the forest. All personality types, normal or abnormal, are adaptations to underlying biological and medical issues and those biological issues are not what psychiatry treats people with mental disorders for, and that is the reason no psychiatric medication heals anyone.
We must start from ground zero and study people’s individual biological constitutions and understand the disorders in them that cause them to adapt with psychological postures that are problematic.
Biology precedes psychology.
We went from religion that posits nonexistent gods causing our problems to nonexistent psychological demons causing our problems; now, we must return to where the problem lies, in our bodies and truly study our bodies.
CEREBELLUM PLAYS A ROLE IN MY PROBLEMS
The part of the brain where the issues I have are regulated is the cerebellum; that part is also involved in fear response; as a child I was prone to extreme fearfulness and anxiety, fear from experiencing any of my problems in a fatal manner.
When we have understood the biological genesis of human psychological processes then we can look at the idea of spirit. At present, talk about spiritual roles in our lives are poetic and metaphorical; metaphors are not what they represent.
There may be a spiritual underpinning to our behaviors, but that spirit operates through our bodies and our bodies affect it and, therefore, we must first understand how our inherited biological issues affect our mental processes and behavior before we can return to talking about spiritual matters.
THE PROBLEM OF NOT KNOWING AND UNCERTAINTY
The saddest aspect of being human is that we objectively do not know who we are. Furthermore, we cannot predict what is going to happen to us in the next second, minute, hour, day, week, month or year; we have no clue what the future holds for us. Not knowing these things, we fill our minds with speculations about the cause of what in our lives.
Things happen in our lives; when they have already happened, we then think that we know why they happened, but before they happened, we could not predict their happening. We have hindsight but not foresight. We cannot predict what is going to happen to us in the future, this is the saddest part of our existence.
Our causal explanations are mostly false; therefore, our unconscious or subconscious minds, in our dreams keep giving us messages that if properly interpreted help us to understand ourselves.
We do not know many things and even where we know a bit, the dynamics of society tell us not to think or do certain things so we repress them into our unconscious minds and from there they try to give us messages in our dreams, but if we could understand those things at the conscious level and behave in a fearless manner, be authentic and spontaneous, we would not have to be using dreams to retrieve messages on how to live our lives.
DECISION NOT TO STUDY PSYCHOLOGY
A certain young woman with similar biological issues that I have talked to me, and I asked her to study psychology to be more able to understand herself and she said that she did not believe in psychology but believes in biology. I then asked her to go study biology, chemistry and physics and use information from those to understand her body and she decided against those and dropped out of school.
How is dropping out of school and consequent ignorance going to help her solve her problems? And how is she going to support herself financially if she did not develop job skills, be on public assistance, until mean spirited Republicans cut it off?
She needs to study human physiology and anatomy and from it understand how her body works and not be on the sidelines of life doing nothing and merely indulging in thinking in a delusional and grandiose manner to the effect that she knows more than other people.
However, she is correct in one respect, psychology responds to biology not the other way around, so we must study human biology to understand our secondary psychological issues.
Note:
I had to remove the numerous online citations I had in the section for further reading because most of them had their online addresses on them making it impossible for my essay to be shared, for those web addresses would appear and not my essay, so I had to remove them. You can google the topics of brain centers regulating sense of balance and smell. There are hundreds of online materials on the two issues. Of course, you can also consult books. The essay posted on my website, centers for spiritual science, has some citations for further reading.
Ozodi Osuji
April 9, 2022
ozodiosuji@gmail.com
(907) 310- 8176
