In a way, these "Concepts of Determinsim" and related "Coping Strategies" are 'reality,' and express a form of 'realism.'
Best,
Scott
Concepts of Determinism
In order to circumvent the platitudes of nature versus nurture, I needed a concept that would not only encompass both, but also transcend both. I formulated this concept as irreducible exigencies of being human that apply universally, transculturally, and transhistorically. They are not causal in either the teleological or mechanistic sense of causality. They are, instead, phenomenological verities of existence to be taken into account by any and every theory of the causality of what human beings do, sexologically or otherwise. There are five universal exigencies of being human, named and briefly characterized, as follows.
Pairbondage
Pairbondage means being bonded together in pairs, as in the parent-child pairbond, or the pairbond of those who are lovers or breeding partners. In everyday usage, bondage implies servitude or enforced submission. Although pairbondage is defined so as not to exclude this restrictive connotation, it has a larger meaning that encompasses also mutual dependency and cooperation, and affectional attachment. Pairbondage has a twofold phyletic origin in mammals. One is mutual attachment between a nursing mother and her feeding baby, without which the young fail to survive. The other is mutual attraction between males and females, and their accommodation to one another in mating, without which a diecious species fails to reproduce itself.
Male - female pairbonding is species specific and individually variable with respect to its duration and the proximity of the pair. In human beings, the two extremes are represented by anonymous donor fertilization versus lifelong allegiance and copulatory fidelity.
Troopbondage
Troopbondage means bondedness among individuals so that they become members of a family or troop that continues its long-term existence despite the loss or departure of any one member. Human troopbondage has its primate phyletic origin in the fact that members of the troop breed not in unison but asynchronously, with transgenerational overlap, and with age-related interdependency. In newborn mammals, the troopbonding of a baby begins with its pairbonding with its mother as the phyletically ordained minimum unit for its survival and health. After weaning, it is also phyletically ordained for herding and troopbonding species that isolation and deprivation of the company of other members of the species or their surrogate replacements is incompatible with health and survival. Nonhuman primate species are, in the majority of instances, troopbonders like ourselves.
Abidance
Abidance means continuing to remain, be sustained, or survive in the same condition or circumstances of living or dwelling. It is a noun formed from the verb, to abide (from the Anglo-Saxon root, bidan, to bide). There are three forms of the past participle, abode, abided, and abidden.
In its present usage, abidance means, like its synonym, sustentation, to be sustained in one's ecological niche or dwelling place in inanimate nature in cooperation or competition with others or one's own species, among other species of fauna and flora. Abidance has its phyletic origin in the fact that human primates are mammalian omnivores ecologically dependent on air, water, earth, and fire, and on the products of these four, particularly in the form of nourishment, shelter, and clothing, for survival. Human troops or individuals with an impoverished ecological niche that fails to provide sufficient food, water, shelter, and clothing do not survive.
Ycleptance
Yclept is an Elizabethan word, one form of the past participle of to clepe, meaning to name, to call, or to style. Ycleped and cleped are two alternative past participles. Ycleptance means the condition or experience of being classified, branded, labeled, or typecast. It has its phyletic basis in likeness and unlikeness between individual and group attributes. Human beings have named and typecast one another since before recorded time. The terms range from the haphazard informality of nicknames that recognize personal idiosyncrasies, to the highly organized formality of scientific classifications or medical diagnoses that prognosticate our futures. The categories of ycleptance are many and diverse: sex, age, family, clan, language, race, region, religion, politics, wealth, occupation, health, physique, looks, temperament, and so on. We all live typecast under the imprimatur of our fellow human beings. We are either stigmatized or idolized by the brand names or lables [sic] under which we are yclept. They shape our destinies.
Foredoomance
Doom, in Anglo-Saxon and middle English usage meant what is laid down, a judgment, or decree. In today's usage it also means destiny or fate, especially if the predicted outcome is adverse, as in being doomed to suffer harm, sickness, or death. A foredoom is a doom ordained beforehand. Foredoomance is the collective noun that, as here defined, denotes the condition of being preordained to die, and to being vulnerable to injury, defect, and disease. Foredoomance has its phyletic origins in the principles of infirmity and the mortality of all life forms. Some individuals are at greater risk than others because of imperfections or errors in their genetic code. Some are at greater risk by reason of exposure to more dangerous places or things. All, however, are exposed to the risk, phyletically ordained, that all life forms, from viruses and bacteria to insects and vertebrates, are subject to being displaced by, and preyed upon, by other life forms. Foredoomance applies to each one of us at first hand, in a primary way, and also in a derivative way insofar as it applies also to those we know. Their suffering grieves us; their dying is our bereavement.
Coping Strategies
The human organism has three generic strategies for coping with the five universal exigencies: adhibition, inhibition, and explication. These strategies are under the governance of bodymind and should not be attributed to such inferential entities as unconscious motivation, voluntary choice, or willpower.
Adhibition and inhibition derive etymologically from the same Latin root, habere, to have or to hold. The verb, adhibit, means to engage, take, let in, use, or apply. Inhibit means to restrain, hinder, check, or prohibit. Thus adhibition is characterized by actively becoming engaged in doing something, gaining mastery or control of a situation, accomplishment, and fulfillment. Inhibition is characterized by becoming actively disengaged, avoiding or circumventing a situation, yielding, and being thwarted or deprived.
Explication derives from the Latin, explicatus, meaning unfolded. To explicate means to explain, interpret, or attribute meaning to an experience, situation, signal, or stimulus. Thus, explication as a coping strategy is characterized by actively construing, inferring, conceptualizing, formulating, designating, evaluating, confabulating, and in general, trying to make sense of what happens.
The aforesaid three coping strategies are generic insofar as they are inferential abstractions and conceptualizations derived from particular coping strategies, stratagems, or tactics. Any particular example of coping is classified as being primarily adhibitory, inhibitory, or explicatory, but each has the other two strategies represented as either secondary or tertiary, respectively. The ratio of the mix allows each particular strategy, stratagem, or tactic to have a three-way interpretation. Thus a major episode of transvestophilia associated with depression - although it may be primarily inhibitory and incapacitating from the viewpoint of the sufferer - is secondarily adhibitory, insofar as it has a manipulatory, tyrannical effect on the partner. It is tertiarily explicatory insofar as its genesis may be incorrectly attributed by the sufferer, perhaps to the extent of his being quasi-delusionally suspicious of being persecuted by others. The coexistence of these three interpretations constitutes the basis upon which psychodynamic hypotheses are constructed by scholars of sexology as well as other sciences.
With each of the generic categories of coping strategy, there are several recognizable different particular strategies, stratagems, or tactics for coping with the various demands subsumed under the five universal exigencies. A provisional listing of them is adapted from previous writings (Chapters 3-5 in Money, 1957; Chapter 9 in Money, 1986b), as follow.
Adhibitory Strategies. Perseveration; orderliness, hoarding and ritual; constant exertion; risk exploits; protest exploits; mating protests; surrogate displacement; impersonation; addiction.
Inhibitory Strategies. Fixation and regression; disownment; phasic disownment; phobia; sleeping spells; depression; suicide; mutilatory sacrifice of body parts; organs and limb amnesia; visceral amnesias; autonomic dysfunction; gestural and vocal automatisms; seizures and paroxysmal states.
Explicatory Strategies. Causal explanation; mirth and the comic; fantasy; dream; hallucination; depersonalization.
The five universal exigencies of being human, and the strategies of inhibition, adhibition, and explication constitute a conceptual or theoretical system to apply to sexological research in society and culture, as well as in the clinic. The system applies also to sexological diagnosis and prognosis in sex counseling and therapy. In the history of sexology, it is a system of post-Freudian, postmotivational psychodynamics. It is post-Pavlovian and post-Skinnerian as applied to stimulus-response theory. It is not univariate by multivariate. In the clinic it has the special virtue of freedom from the idioms of judgmentalism that haunt motivation theory. It allows the patient and the sexologist to be allies aligned against the syndrome, and not against one another as adversaries. It is a system that protects sexologists from the trap of motivational language that surreptitiously attributes to a patient personal guilt, blame, and responsibility for his or her syndrome. For that, patients are greatly appreciative. They are not helped by being judged and condemned, even covertly, for being deficient in health and well-being.
By John Money. From "Concepts of Determinism," Chapter 3, Section 11, p. 116 in Gay, Straight and In-Between: The Sexology of Erotic Orientation. Oxford University Press. 1988.
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John Money suggests that, like the solar system, these exigencies and coping strategies just happen.
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I wonder how to bring these 'concepts of determinism' together with eliciting loving bliss, naturally and fulsomely {http://worlduniversity.wikia.com/wiki/Loving_Bliss_(eliciting_this_neurophysiology)}.
For example, pairbonding may somehow encode aspects of loving bliss, for example, but adhibiting this neurochemistry in our bodyminds already, may allow us to cultivate it, vis-a-vis ycleptance (yclept means to name, call, typecast, or style) and explication (which includes, for Money, mirth and the comic).
(http://scott-macleod.blogspot.com/2009/09/planets-around-sun-john-moneys-concepts.html - September 1, 2009)
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