More on Beliefs (Part 1/3)

All belief systems have something in common. They are maps, something to help us navigate through life more effectively. And belief systems all respond to an almost universal, hard-wired need. It is not that we need to believe; we believe because we need. The belief itself, whatever it may be, comes later when we have the conceptual apparatus for beliefs. A one-year-old doesn't have that possibility. The need/feeling doesn’t go away; it begins its subterranean life.

My task is to see how, when feelings are blocked and rerouted, they turn into defensive ideas. These ideas have a dual role; to reflect previous experience and at the same time serve to mask the pain of it. The ideas that flow out of feelings remain symbolic derivatives of them; for if one were to feel the real feelings behind them, one would be in great pain. One patient relived suffocating during birth. He wanted to leave his wife because she was "suffocating" him and not giving him any breathing space. Those feelings saved his marriage. Clearly it is not always one-to-one, but I underline it because it offers clues to understanding "les idées fixes." They are handmaidens of feeling.

The first thing to understand about ideas (and here I am always discussing defensive ideas) is that they evolve, just as our brain evolves. We don’t start out life with ideas, and mankind didn’t start out in its journey from reptiles with the ability to think and conceptualize. It all evolved. In the brain this is what happens. We start out with the deepest part of the brain, the brainstem, which houses instincts and basic needs and most survival functions (heart rate, body temperature, blood pressure), which evolve into a limbic, feeling system that offers us the capacity to feel; and then the brain produces the neo-new cortex, especially its front part (prefrontal), which allows us to think in words and ideas. Remember, the brain produces itself. There is no deity that does it, but it enables us now to call upon a deity to quell our pain. And lo and behold! It does. The need for more and more cortex meant that brain cells had to migrate to higher levels to take on new functions. Those functions included beliefs that allowed us to flee danger; only this time the danger was internal. We could flee "into our heads" and away from ourselves; from imprinted feeling/danger.

In our personal evolution we develop ideas out of our previous early experience that dictates who we are and what we believe and think. Ideas and beliefs don’t just stick out there waiting to be corrected and changed. Pain is never set down just as an idea; it is an experience, and it is that experience one must revisit and relive in order to understand the origin of one’s ideas. We must go back to finish the sequence that began with an angry look by the father when the baby cried loudly in the crib — feel that experience again, only this time feel the need that the baby dared not to express at the time. The need never just disappears; it is capped and sequestered under a lid of resignation and despair. Later, it becomes a "need for;" the idea that someone else can fill the bill, which is never true. Someone else can paper over, but not fulfill. The only fulfillment was possible at the time. Thereafter, all fulfillments become symbolic. What better symbols than words — I love you, will watch over you, guide and protect you. They are just sounds but sounds that have a meaning, and that meaning is surcease, relief and soothing. Sounds that now have a physiologic base.