Is Pointsman based on Dr. William Sargant?

[Monte Davis]

MK> Doesn't he want to use Pavlov's beliefs as part of the overarching
crushing control theme?

Blicero believes that launching Gottfried will transcend the Nazis' defeat
and bring about our Perfect Polythene S&M Home in the Sky. How'd that work
out?

MK>  ...'the idea of the opposite' seems to be based on fact, or a real
world fantasy, so to speak...

Fact = fantasy, or maybe not = but so to speak, as it were, in a sense,
both/and. There's really no difference worth thinking about between the
*desire* for control and actual control, is there?

I'm just a cranky blinkered old dualist, I guess, and really don't know how
to engage with this sort of thing. Roll on.

On Tue, May 31, 2016 at 6:42 AM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:

> Monte writes: "there's an enormous gap between the "fire/not fire" duality
> of single cortical cells, or the observation that one cell's activity can
> inhibit its near neighbors... and global, whole-organism phenomena ("belief
> system," "stress," "breakdown" etc.)"
>
> yes, but does Pynchon overleap that gap in the set up of meanings for
> Pavlov-Pointsman in GR? Doesn't he want to use Pavlov's beliefs as part of
> the overarching crushing control theme? See Pirate's accurate paranoia that
> They now all about him.
>
>  Monte writes: " Pointsman has nothing but handwaving phrases like "the
> idea of the opposite" to fill that gap. Just because he wears a lab coat
> and has a budget line doesn't make him less of a fantasist than Blicero...
>
> yes, Pointsman is also a fantasist but in the guise of a controlling
> scientist. We might know this, but those in the novel do not, do they? and
> I think this read of Pynchon's genius unseen, half-felt,  before: 'the idea
> of the opposite seems to be based on fact, or a real world fantasy, so to
> speak: p. 49 Pavlov writing to Pierre Janet. About the *untraparadoxical
> phase "*which is the base of the weakening of the idea of the opposite in
> our patients." Fowler sources this to fact; Pavlov writing
> to Janet when he ran a research facility at a hospital for insane women.
> Janet pioneered hypnosis for hysteria, which he believed rooted in the
> emotions and not somatic in origin.
> He sez Pynchon is setting up an aternative to John B. Watson's
> "Behavorism" and its Iron Cage [Weber] of Cause and Effect, heredity, and
> conditioning which will reappear @p. 85.
>
> Pynchon found a perfect real world metaphor for a possible escape, a
> possible viable 'counterforce' for the deterministic control of
> Pavlov--Pointsman's psychological system.
>
>
> On Sun, May 29, 2016 at 5:14 PM, Monte Davis <montedavis49 at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>> I agree, with the caveat that "mechanistic" has a very loosey-goosey
>> sense here. As I cautioned earlier w/r/t Pavlov->Pointsman: there's an
>> enormous gap between the "fire/not fire" duality of single cortical cells,
>> or the observation that one cell's activity can inhibit its near
>> neighbors... and global, whole-organism phenomena ("belief system,"
>> "stress," "breakdown" etc.)
>>
>> Pointsman has nothing but handwaving phrases like "the idea of the
>> opposite" to fill that gap. Just because he wears a lab coat and has a
>> budget line doesn't make him less of a fantasist than Blicero...
>>
>>
>> On Sun, May 29, 2016 at 4:44 PM, Thomas Eckhardt <
>> thomas.eckhardt at uni-bonn.de> wrote:
>>
>>>
>>> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._H._R._Rivers#The_Great_War
>>>>
>>>
>>> Very interesting. Again, Robert Graves turns up (along with Siegfried
>>> Sassoon).
>>>
>>> As opposed to Rivers, Sargant detested psychotherapy. The full title of
>>> his autobiography is "The unquiet mind: the autobiography of a physician in
>>> psychological medicine." A physician. One article cited by Wiki is
>>> "Psychiatric treatment in general teaching hospitals: A plea for a
>>> mechanistic approach."
>>>
>>> Wiki also provides:
>>>
>>> "Sargant connected Pavlov's findings to the ways people learned and
>>> internalised belief systems. Conditioned behaviour patterns could be
>>> changed by stimulated stresses beyond a dog's capacity for response, in
>>> essence causing a breakdown. This could also be caused by intense signals,
>>> longer than normal waiting periods, rotating positive and negative signals
>>> and changing a dog’s physical condition, as through illness. Depending on
>>> the dog's initial personality, this could possibly cause a new belief
>>> system to be held tenaciously. Sargant also connected Pavlov’s findings to
>>> the mechanisms of brain-washing in religion and politics."
>>>
>>> Internalise belief systems, i.e. put the control inside...
>>>
>>> All of this helps to answer an earlier question of mine:
>>> Pointsman's/Sargant's abreaction is not Jung's abreaction.
>>>
>>> The verb linked to "abreaction" or "Abreaktion" has, by the way, entered
>>> German everyday language: "abreagieren" means "to let off steam".
>>>
>>> We may, perhaps, see a renaissance of the mechanistic approach in
>>> so-called evidence-based medicine or education -- although there is of
>>> course nothing wrong with evidence per se...
>>>
>>>
>>> http://www.theguardian.com/teacher-network/2013/mar/26/teachers-research-evidence-based-education
>>>
>>
>>
>
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