The Process Philosophy of Whitehead (1929) observes that all things within the universe experience the past and imagine the future. In other words, every organism has a decision to make about the future, and that decision is influenced by the past. The result is that although things may look the same, each decision about the future contains a degree of novelty.
To draw on Heraclitus, you can never walk into the same river twice, as although the river may seem unchanging, the water which was originally walked into has passed, never to return or be repeated (Naddaff, 2005). The various particles which make up the river interacted and decided creating something both stable and novel. We experience the continuity of the river because its past and future decisions are integrated.
For human experience, this process plays out from the cellular level (Ferraro et al, 2016) to the collective social level. For each human being at the psychological level, it is possible to argue that living in the past leads to stagnation, and too much novelty, too rapid a deviation from the past, leads to conflict. The past and the future need to be integrated to be as effective as possible.
In Seigel’s (2009) work on trauma, the author focuses on the role of integration. Siegal discusses integration from many different psychological perspectives and one of the perspectives is narrative, the ability to make sense of the past as a coherent story. This allows a person to draw from the past to make reasoned decisions about the future. Without a coherent narrative about the past, where trauma has occurred and disrupted the life story, a person can be left struggling to make sense of the traumatic event and integrate the experience into a narrative which they can understand (ibid).
Trauma would seem to involve an incident which contradicts the past and leads to a lack of integration, the future becomes difficult, even painful, to imagine. Like any autopoietic organism if experience is too rapidly violated by the present (a traumatic event) then the system can become overwhelmed and fights back in all sorts of counterproductive ways which scale from autoimmune to PTSD (Ferraro et al, 2016).
How does this conclude? The past will always affect decisions about the future for all particles within the universe (Segal, 2018). For human beings, the past affects decisions by generating moods when the future is imagined, and the mood then constrains the imagination (Thompson, 2014). Trauma locks imagination of the future into repetitive cycles. Lewis (2016) calls this perceptual closing.
Perceptual closing locks decisions about the future into tightly constrained options. Looked at another way, perceptual closing reduces the degree of novelty which ingresses into the future. The past is repeated in fatiguing cycles of behavior (Whitehead, 1929) If there is not awareness of how the past is constraining the future then the past and the future are not integrated (Siegel, 2009).
Without this integration, the past can intrude on decision making instead of informing it. This can lead to maladapted behaviors continually repeating themselves. If the traumatic event can be integrated into a coherent narrative, it can become part of the past and serve as material which helps a person imagine the future from a place of reasoned contemplation.
Reading
Naddaf, Gerard (2005). The Greek Concept of Nature. SUNY Press
Segal, M (2018) Physics of the World-Soul: Whitehead’s Adventure in Cosmology. Lulu.com.
Siegel, D.J (2009) Mindsight: The New Science of Personal Transformation. Bantam
Whitehead, N. (1929) Process and Reality. Simon and Schuster
Thompson, E (2014) Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind. Harvard University Press.
F. J. Varela, Thompson, E. Rosch, E (2016) The Embodied Mind Cognitive Science and Human Experience. MIT Press.
Lewis, M (2016) The Biology of Desire: why addiction is not a disease (The Addicted Brain). Scribe UK
