A Woodrat’s Nest Model of the Mind

Posted on April 23, 2007 in Creatures Thinking

Read enough psychology and your head will be full of diagrams purporting to represent the mind. First, you have the classic [[right brain|right brain-left brain]] lateralization. Just slice it down the middle and put the pictures on the right and the words on the left. Nice and simple. Just a line bisecting a circle.

Then you’ve got [[/Id%2C_ego%2C_and_super-ego|Freud’s skyscraper]] with the [[ego]] occupying the ground floor, the [[id]] skulking around in the basement and the [[superego]] enjoying the winds that sweep over the penthouse. Few people know that [[Freud]] didn’t use these terms in the original German; he called them the “me”, the “it”, and the “above me”. His American translator, [[A._A._Brill|A.A. Brill]] was embarassed by Freud’s simplicity, so he latinized the terms.

We come now to [[Jung|Jung’s]] typologies. Taken one way, you get a sprawling mess of [[anima_(Jung)|anima’s]], animuses, shadows, egoes, and various other beasties of the [[Subconscious]]. Jung also sired the types encoded in the Myers-Brigg, a lot of left or right, black versus white that will cause an epileptic to go into episode.

When I consider my own mind, I abandon the obsessive-compulsive need to make it neat enough to draw with a pencil. If my mind resembles anything — and I think this is true of everyone — it is a woodrat’s nest.

A [[woodrat]] or [[packrat]] is a native California creature that likes to collect and trade objects. Their nests are not so hard to identify: they’re huge, a pile of sticks and other detritus that generations of woodrats have layered. Deep inside the nest, in the heart of the woodrat’s domain, you are bound to find various objects which the woodrat finds especially precious: pretty pebbles, bits of strings, small toys, buttons, and other loot it has found in the course of its peregrinations.

The nest resists destruction. You can pull a stick out and the rest of the structure remains standing. At worst there is a small local slide. To change the character of the nest you must destroy it.

And isn’t that the nature of the mind? We live in our brains, hoarding unto ourselves memories and insights. These become part of the structure of our idiosyncratic minds. Nothing nice and neat, of course, but a helter-skelter armature. You cannot change the mind except by demolishing it. And with that there is no mind.

This analogy works for me right now. I live inside a hole padded with rhinoceros hide and in that cavern I keep my things. This place is a concretion of memories, experiences, and instincts, a mess of sticks carefully intersticed with others. You have to burn me or bulldoze me or root me out to change me.

Perhaps what is needed is just more precious things or a few sticks raised where they obstruct the more awful recurrences of the cries of the mind that were once cries in the world.

[tags]psychology, thinking, mind, nature[/tags]