Trafford Publishing: Cognitive-Behavioral Cybernetics of Symptoms, Dreams, Lateralization: Theory, Interpretation, Therapy

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Cognitive-Behavioral Cybernetics of Symptoms, Dreams, Lateralization: Theory, Interpretation, Therapy

by Altan Loker

300 pages; quality trade paperback (softcover); catalogue #02-0518; ISBN 1-55369-705-7; US$29.50, C$37.00, EUR24.05, £17.50

It is shown in this book that dreams and the symptoms of primary mental disorders are automatic responses that seek to protect physical and especially mental health on the basis of the cerebral lateralization of functions. This understanding of the symptoms and dreams and the therapist's consequent cooperation with the patient's unconscious makes very fast and effective psychotherapy possible, which is self-applicable in many disorders such as migraine and tension headaches, for example. Many other psychological phenomena besides mental disorders and dreams become understandable in this perspective.

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about the book about the author Table of Contents and sample excerpts catalogue info

About the Book

This book deals with automatic responses such as pain, fear, anxiety, the symptoms of primary mental disorders, dreams, repression, hypnosis, laughter, tears, response to stage and screen plays, structural responses such as cerebral lateralization, and so forth. The reason why all those phenomena are studied together is that, according to the theory presented in this book, all such automatic responses have adaptive, self-protective functions that contribute to the realization of survival, and that most of them seek to protect not only all sorts of interests and the physical health of the person but also, and primarily, his or her mental health. In reality, this statement about the general function of automatic responses is almost a tautology, because they all are created by evolution, and evolution is directed to realize adaptation, success, and survival; moreover, proper mental functioning is necessary for realizing survival. Therefore the real problem is to understand the particular self-protective functions of particular automatisms and how they discharge those functions, not that they have such functions. Despite this fact, for example, the symptoms of primary mental disorders are considered by the authors of the DSM and by everyone else as harmful manifestations of unknown dysfunctions, and their self-protective functions are totally ignored. It is shown in this book that the harmfulness of symptoms is due to their side effects.
Mental disorders, dreams, and other automatic responses are insufficiently, or even not at all, understood, because (1) mental processes cannot be observed and are even unconscious to a great extent, (2) the experimental causation of mental disorders is ethically unfeasible, and (3) psychologists do not try to construct theories because they do not know how to do it and are also discouraged by the fact that Freud's theories turned out to be unscientific.
Newton explained the method that he used in constructing his theory of mechanics thus: "Propositions [that constitute the basic principles of theories] are deduced from the phenomena and made general through induction." He integrated such "propositions" with empirical and semi-empirical knowledge to explain and predict many mechanical phenomena and thus proved that his propositions were correct. This is the method used in this book to construct a theory of automatic responses and to test it.
A theory is empirically proved to be correct, or viable, by its usefulness in explaining, predicting, and controlling the phenomena in its field of validity. In this book, (a) the functions of several automatisms that are either discovered through research or are considered normal components of everyday behavior are explained on the basis of the theory, (b) the meanings and functions of about 500 symptoms and 200 dreams are likewise explained in detail, (c) the life experiences of those who produced them are predicted in general terms, (d) the particulars of those experiences are exposed, (e) the causal relations between those experiences and the resulting automatisms are explained, and (f) many examples of eliminating the symptoms and their harmful side consequences are presented, which constitute successful cases of psychotherapy. All these detailed explanations, predictions, and controls of particular phenomena constitute more than 2000 empirical proofs of the theory about the general function of automatisms. No other theory in the history of science has been put forth with so many empirical proofs. Future generations will have difficulty in understanding why the functions of automatic responses have not been understood earlier.

About the Author

The origin of my ideas
When I was a high school student, first my grandmother and then my elder brother were hospitalized at the Bakirköy Mental Hospital in Istanbul, the largest in Turkey. My uncle was working there as a psychiatrist together with Mazhar Osman who was a legendary figure. I went to the hospital several times and observed the behaviors of many mental patients. I also listened to the explanations of my uncle but did not believe them, because especially my brother's symptoms looked to me like they were understandable defensive responses to some old events that had hurt him much. I did not dare to mention such petit events to my uncle who was expressing very clever views, which were mostly psychoanalytic as I later understood. Today I know that a response that looks inadequate in the current situation is most probably a response to an old event that had hurt the person very much, and that such responses serve, or at least seek, to prevent the harm that might be caused by the repetition of that old event. Freud too noticed this phenomenon and talked about it in his lecture The Etiology of Hysteria, which he delivered before he switched to the fantasy theory. He said that the symptoms of hysterical patients, who were sexually abused in childhood according to him, become "understandable" (meaning defensive and more or less rational) when the circumstances in which they were initially produced were discovered. Freud abandoned this line of thought after he switched to the fantasy theory.
Being motivated probably by the above-mentioned experiences, I read in the high school (Lycée de Galatasaray) books by Descartes, Kant, Pascal, Bergson, Rousseau, James, Dirac, Poincaré, and others. I studied Freud, Jung and Adler much later because their books were not to be found in the school library. I later found time also to study Shakespeare and Hitchcock and wrote and produced films, because I consider the theater a psychology laboratory where the most instructive and expensive experiments of certain types can be performed. I found out that the processes that Freud described as taking place in the minds of neurotics occur in reality in some measure in the minds of healthy persons under certain conditions, and that this is especially true concerning the drama spectators.
I studied electrical engineering and received an MS degree because I wished an occupation that produced concrete, useful results and was also close to theory. I later studied physics in USA and received a second MS degree, because my theoretical curiosity was not satisfied. I learned automatic controls from electrical engineering and had much professional experience in this field working as engineer, project manager, and contractor. As a consequence of this work, I acquired the habit of seeing cybernetic systems everywhere. This helped me to understand the automatic self-protection responses of mental patients, which are called symptoms, having also in view the behaviors of my brother, grandmother, and film spectators and the ideas of Freud and Jung. From physics, I learned theory construction and the part it plays in the progress of science. The most recent result of all these chance occurrences has been my book Cognitive-Behavioral Cybernetics of Symptoms, Dreams, Lateralization, which contains The CBC Theory and a very effective and fast method of psychotherapy based on it. I cured more than 100 migraine and tension headache patients, some of whom presented also symptoms of other types of mental disorder.

Table of Contents and Sample Excerpts

Text On the Front Cover
When we honestly and modestly observe ourselves keeping in mind that we are created by a power and wisdom incomparably superior to ours, we realize that we are not entrusted solely to the free will and consciousness with which we are endowed, but that we are additionally equipped with several automatic self-protection and survival mechanisms, or processes, such as:
REFLEXES, VARIOUS OTHER AUTOMATISMS, PAIN, FEAR, ANXIETY, etc.,

which warn us about actual and possible harms and losses, force us to terminate and prevent them, punish us for not doing that, and try to terminate them whenever we fail to do it consciously and willfully for any reason such as the lack of sufficient knowledge, shortage of time, considerations of precedence, low self-confidence, etc..

COGNITIVE-BEHAVIORAL CYBERNETICS, or THE CBC THEORY,

which is derived from research and clinical findings and is presented in this book together with its numerous applications, revealed that:

THE SYMPTOMS OF PRIMARY MENTAL DISORDERS, DREAMS, REPRESSION, EXTERNAL ATTRIBUTION, CEREBRAL LATERALIZATION, etc.,
are parts of this automatic survival system which protects not only physical health but also mental health even with precedence over physical health. The main facts exposed by this theory in relation to the topics mentioned above are presented at the end of this book under the heading Synthetic Summary in a synthetic order which is different from the order in which those facts were discovered by scanning empirical findings analytically, as explained in this book. A theory is proved to be correct, or viable, by its usefulness in explaining, predicting, and controlling the phenomena in its field of validity.

Synthetic Summary: The Main Facts Exposed by
Cognitive-Behavioral Cybernetics
1. The basic cognitive functions of the right and the left cerebral hemispheres (the RH and the LH) are to find causes and to find consequences, respectively, in accordance with the fact that knowing any entity consists of knowing the causes and consequences, or the origin and effects, of that entity. The lateralization of functions is compatible with this basic division of work, which is determined by evolution as explained below.
2. Consciousness is in the LH because consciousness is inseparable from making choices, or exercising free will, by foreseeing the possible consequences of the available alternatives. This is why the LH normally makes the final decisions and is considered the dominant brain. Perception is conscious for choosing what to attend to.
3. The LH makes the final choices not only in relation to actions but also in relation to distant and indirect goals because it is capable of foreseeing consequences in chain.
4. The RH finds the means of attaining the goals and relays them to the LH for approval because the means of attaining a goal is the cause of the desired situation.
5. The RH learns the distant goals from the LH which chooses them, but is more effective than the LH in perceiving close dangers and determining immediate goals by evaluating environmental sounds, perceiving the expressions of emotions on people's faces and in their voices, grasping whole situations, etc.. The RH is also an expert in coping with close dangers, which it can perceive, because it is capable of processing space and rapidly producing simple, holistic responses that are readily executable.
6. The LH is capable of pursuing several goals in a coordinated way because it is capable of seeing and foreseeing consequences. Therefore the conscious LH seeks to secure the maximum total amount of success and gain in all areas of activity.
7. Each goal-oriented output of the RH deals with one of the most urgent goals, which it either learned from the LH or determined itself by perceiving a close danger. The RH seeks to attain these urgent goals rapidly and definitively and therefore operates automatically and deterministically.
8. Because of their above-mentioned functions (6) and (7), there can be an incompatibility between the goal hierarchies of the LH and the RH, but they share all goals and do not experience the type of perpetual conflict described by Freud as taking place between consciousness and the unconscious.
9. Because the LH sees chains of consequence in its quest of multiple successes and gains, it can work sequentially and can afford being slow, can process time, can work logically to see logical consequences, can deal with detail by seeing causal/logical relations between parts, and can use abstractions and speech in order to use logic.
10. Because the RH has to cope with close dangers, which are of spatial type, it is an expert in using space and realizing fast, simultaneous, or analog, processing instead of sequential-logical processing like the LH. This is facilitated by the fact that the RH works on past events to find causes, and all past is given simultaneously like space.
11. To repeat, the LH is endowed with free will and consciousness and can choose between alternatives, whereas the RH is deterministic and finds automatically, i.e. unconsciously, and rapidly effective means of terminating the most harmful failures and attain the most urgent goals by treating each one separately, these goals being determined by the LH in relation to distant events or by the RH in relation to close dangers. The RH acquired all these functions because it is the earlier developing hemisphere and the organism needs automatic and fast self-protection against close dangers at that time.
12. Harmful failures can easily hurt LH cognition by causing thoughts like the following: "Since I failed in the past, I can fail in the future too;" and, "since I am capable of making such a mistake, all my future decisions will be unreliable." Foreseeing such consequences can cause the loss of self-confidence and the emergence of the judgment of mental insufficiency which will prevent healthy decision making.
13. Because the RH cannot see consequences, it cannot draw harmful conclusions from failures and is therefore not hurt by failures as much as the LH is. This is why failures are repressed into the unconscious RH. The judgment of mental insufficiency is repressed most effectively and does not hurt the RH as it hurts the LH.
14. The RH operates healthily despite failures as long as it finds in its past a sufficient amount of success on which it can base its analogic search for success.
15. The RH processes the repressed failures for terminating them realistically and rationally, but because normal interhemispheric communication is restricted by repression, it produces dreams and "symptoms" to relay its realistic and rational thoughts to the LH in analogic language or to influence the events directly outside LH control. The result is a relatively mild "mental disorder," such as neurosis.
16. When failures and harms cannot be prevented realistically for a long time and affect RH cognition, the RH produces unrealistic and irrational symptoms to preserve its necessary minimum level of success. The result is a severe mental disorder such as schizophrenia, paranoia, etc.. Traumas cause unrealistic expectations of harm.
17. Thus, mental disorders are caused by unbearably harmful failures, and the basic function of dreams and of the symptoms that are not directly due to organic defects is to preserve mental health by terminating the failures and also by protecting self-confidence otherwise. This scheme of self-protection is in fact a part of a larger system of automatic self-protection and survival created by evolution, which contains also reflexes, pain, fear, etc., and is activated selectively whenever consciousness and free will fail to terminate or prevent failures and harms for any reason.
18. Symptoms are uncontrollable actions, thoughts, emotions, somatic processes, etc.. They do their job either by directly interfering with the events escaping conscious control or by carrying analogic, or metaphoric, messages addressed to the patient's consciousness and/or to other persons involved in the failures.
19. Dreams too carry analogic messages addressed to consciousness, which are more complex than those carried by symptoms and contain thoughts that seek to terminate the failures and to protect self-confidence and mental health using also other means.
20. A complete dream contains three types of thought: (1) the presentation of the failure treated by the dream, (2) the explanation of its causes, and (3) a proposed means of terminating the failure. The latent dream obeys the same rules as the manifest dream.
21. Each one of the three types of thought is usually located in a different part of the complete manifest dream, but if the implicit and latent thoughts are considered, all three types of thought may be located in any part of the manifest dream.
22. The solution of the problem is almost always at the end of the dream and is recognized by the positive affect that it carries. The two other parts of the manifest dream are also recognized by their locations and the affects that they carry.
23. A dream that contains only the presentation of the problem, i.e., the failure, is an anxiety dream and carries an analogic message of warning. A nightmare serves also as a punishment for not attending to the problem consciously and adequately.
24. An analogy contained in a dream acquires meaning in the context created by the dreamer's life experiences and the function of the part of the dream in which it is located. Everything contained in a dream is only a means of expression.
25. All these assertions are substantiated in this book by research results, clinical observations, and a very fast and effective method of psychotherapy, which cures even many disorders hitherto considered incurable, such as migraine and tension headaches, facial neuralgia, etc.. Therapy is based on the interpretation of the patient's symptoms and dreams and cooperation with his/her unconscious to help him/her to terminate consciously his/her failures and the ensuing physical and mental harms in order to make the symptoms unneeded in doing these things for realizing survival.

Catalogue Information