Theoretical postulates

I just received this ancient biology book with a symposium article in it by Paul D. MacLean. Obviously, he writes on R-complex and the triune brain. Among other things, he defines R-complex behaviour as "nonverbal" communication.

Initially I had been wondering whether or not Lacan belongs in my thesis, since I was not sure whether his paradigm has been overly culturally influenced by mid 20th Century European cultural formulations. Similarly, I had some (lesser) concerns about Bataille, since he involves some strongly cultural elements in this construction of his shamanistic paradigm -- the French Catholic notions of human sacrifice, as implicitly (culturally) linked to spirituality, for instance.

In the case of Bataille, his reversal (in some senses) of Nietzsche's metaphor of transcendence (going up) with immanence (going down), parallels the actual neurological structure of shamanism better than Nietzsche's approach does. (For, in shamanism we return to our neurological roots, in terms of the kind of consciousness and 'thinking' that we access during shamanistic "journeying".)

In terms of Nietzsche's views, we "transcend" our current consciousness..  At the same time, Nietzsche's wants us to come to understand the unconscious as the source of a fully integrative "will to power", working in us beneath the level of consciousness. To view this in relation to actual brain structure, one would logically have to go "downwards" {towards the archaic parts of the mind}.

To get back to Lacan:   he makes a great deal of verbal versus nonverbal levels of psychical development. He also perceives a fundamental leap of consciousness (which, if I am to understand him right, radically and irreversibly alters us) as we move from a level of development that is nonverbal, towards one that is verbal. To my mind, the nature of this transition that Lacan detects suggests a movement from one system of brain processing to another -- that is from an infantile reliance on R-complex mental processing, towards a state of being where the higher levels of the brain take over executive functioning. So Lacan's emphasis on a transition from nonverbal to verbal reasoning may be precisely right, in terms of the neurological structures under-girding human development.

Even the Lacanian formulation that this process of development implies "castration" makes sense, if we juxtapose it with Nietzsche's own equation of the unconscious with "will to power" (and of course, using MacLean's formulation of the triune brain to forge a conceptual link between the Nietzschean " unconscious" and the part of the brain -- R-complex -- that is, according to MacLean, concerned with posturing in terms of "power".) So, rereading Lacan in this light, "castration" is the loss of a direct subjectivity when the executive powers of the brain become centred in a higher part of the mind.

Shamanism, of course, restores this broken link between the higher and lower parts of the mind. It is clear in Nietzsche's formulation that Zarathustra's “going under” is a “going over” or transition, übergehen, from human to superhuman. Creativity requires a downward movement (“going under”, towards the lower part of the mind).  This is not to say that one regresses.  Not at all, rather one links up two parts of  consciousness as a bridge.  The ancient part of the brain and the higher mind become no longer separated.  The communication channels are opened up. This outcome of uniting the two parts of the brain is the “going over” towards the "superman".