The Internal Maps We Construct

The Map Is Not the Territory^[1]

In July 1797, Admiral Horatio Nelson led a doomed assault on the Spanish island Tenerife in the Canary Islands. Shortly after stepping ashore, he was hit in the right arm by a musket ball. His stepson Josiah Nesbitt stemmed the hemorrhage with a tourniquet and returned him to the HMS Theseus, where the injured limb was amputated without an anesthetic. The ship’s surgeon, James Farquhar, wrote in his journal, “Compound fracture of the right arm by a musket ball passing thro a little above the elbow; an artery divided; the arm was immediately amputated.”^[2]

Nelson’s arm is the most famous example of a phantom limb, a common occurrence among amputees that usually fades within day, but can remain for a lifetime, as was the case with Nelson. In a sense, he never lost his arm; for the rest of his life, he sensed it, as though the appendage was present, extending invisibly from the stump.

The reason for a phantom limb is that each of us has an internal map of our body, what neuroscientists call a “body schema,” a map we use to control our movements. As we age, the map changes; however, the occurrence of phantom limb demonstrates that the body scheme can report what is not there. There is a pain map within each one of us that reports the intensity of pain, and it, too, as in the case of chronic pain, can report pain in the absence of tissue damage. Like many internal maps, the body and pain maps are nonverbal. I drive ten miles from my home to Trader Joe’s twice a week. When my younger daughter visited from Vermont several years ago, I struggled to give her verbal instructions to Trader Joe’s.

Within us are maps of who we are and what the world is, and these maps are often faulty, like the phantom limb map. Consider Marilyn, a patient of Bessel van der Kolk, a psychiatrist and leading trauma researcher. Marilyn, a thirty-two-year-old emergency room nurse, sought help from Kolk for her inability to enjoy physical intimacy with a man. The week before, in the dead of the night, when her boyfriend’s naked leg aroused her from sleep, she exploded, pounding him with her fists, screaming, “You bastard. You bastard.” Her boyfriend, startled awake, grabbed his clothes, fled, never to return.^[3]

When Kolk asked Marilyn if she had a happy childhood, she replied, “I guess I did,” though she remembered not much of her family life before twelve. The family portrait she drew for Kolk showed “a wild and terrified child, trapped in some kind of cage and threatened not only by three nightmarish figures — one with no eyes — but also by a huge erect penis protruding into her space.”

Marilyn joined an established therapy group directed by Kolk. After three months, she revealed her map of social relationships. Men didn’t give a damn about other people’s feelings and that they got away with whatever they wanted. Women couldn’t be trusted either. They were too weak to stand up for themselves, and they’d sell their bodies to get men to take care of them. If you were in trouble, they wouldn’t lift a finger to help you. This worldview manifested itself in the way Marilyn approached her colleagues at work: She was suspicious of the motives of anyone who was kind to her and called them on the slightest deviation from the nursing regulations. Kolk concluded but didn’t tell Marilyn that “she was a bad seed, a fundamentally toxic person who made bad things happen to those around her.”

A year later, Marilyn heard Mary, another woman in her therapy group, confess that her brother and a gang of his buddies raped her; she became pregnant, and her mother performed an abortion on the kitchen table. Everyone in the group sobbed and comforted Mary, probably in the way they wished they had been comforted after their traumas.

Marilyn then told the group, “Hearing that story, I wonder if I may have been sexually abused myself.” Kolk said his jaw must have dropped, for based on her family drawing, he “had always assumed that she was aware, at least on some level, that this was the case. . . . she had drawn a girl who was being sexually molested; she — or at least her cognitive, verbal self — had no idea what had actually happened to her.”

The sexual molestation happened when she was eight years old and scared her beyond her capacity to endure the emotional trauma. Her father, who was supposed to take care of her, to protect her from bad things, violated her; the eight-year-old concluded that no one could be trusted. The powerless child repressed the memory of her father raping her, although a residue of terror and panic remained in her body. For twenty-five years, “she chronically behaved as if the world was a terrifying place.”

When I imagined Marilyn leaving her apartment outside of Boston to enter a hostile world where no one could be trusted, I thought of Oliver, the cat my children adopted when we lived in a New England village. Every morning, I opened the front door to let Oliver out. He always hesitated in front of the door, poked his nose out, then his head to look in all directions, and once he assessed the outside world as safe, he cautiously exited the house. In our neighborhood, there were no unleased dogs, no wolves, no large predators, but Oliver had an internal map of a hostile world, a map drawn by centuries of evolution where his incautious ancestors perished.

I pictured Marilyn leaving her apartment, her safe zone, venturing into a hostile world that threatened her physical and emotional well-being. Her personal map had intensified a map we all share. Supposedly, our ancestors, like Oliver’s ancestors, were on the constant lookout for threats; the easygoing, carefree dudes were eaten by saber tooth tigers, while the uptight, nervous nellies on constant alert to threats survived.

Whether this story of evolution is true or not, few can deny that our negative memories predominate over positive ones. The amygdala, whose primary role is processing emotional reactions, responds much faster to threats than to allurements. We remember insults and injuries best. A quick glance at the New York Times or the Washington Post shows that positive stories do not sell newspapers. David Leonhardt confessed, “We journalists tend to be comfortable delivering bad news straight up but uncomfortable reporting good news without extensive caveats.”^[4] We expect the negative and worry too much about too much, even though the saber tooth tigers are gone.

The internal maps we draw in childhood persist throughout our life. Often the maps are contradictory; for instance, many children in America have maps constructed from Christianity and capitalism. On Sunday, in church school and in sermons, children hear that God is Love and that they should love others as Jesus loves them. Five days a week, beginning in grade school, children learn to thrust others aside, to ignore the pain and humiliation they cause others as they reach for gold stars, papers marked 100 and tacked to the wall, and A’s on report cards, for the baubles of success. The dominant ethic of our society is success, not love your neighbor; yet for many adults, their internal map has two contradictory directives — love one another and succeed at any cost.

The Territory

We Are Born Radically Incomplete

You and me and every person in every culture in every era were born radically incomplete and were completed by culture, not by nature, as the other animals are.^[5]

Without others, we could not acquire language, and without language, our mental life would not be much higher than that of a chimpanzee or a bonobo. In the history of science, the only event remotely akin to the philosophical concept of a person living in a state of nature, untainted by civilization was the discovery, in 1801, of the feral boy of Aveyron, an eleven-year-old found running naked and wild in a forest.^[6] Jean Marc Gaspard Itard, a French surgeon, thought the wild boy of Aveyron was the Rosetta stone for deciphering human nature. He spent five years trying to train and educate the boy, before concluding that the boy’s prolonged isolation from humanity rendered him incapable of language and consequently incapable of living a genuine human life. Itard’s answer to “What makes us human?” is language and thus social living.

We become human beings through other people. Without language, without others to learn language from, the mental capacities that you, and I were born with would have not developed, and our lives would not have been much higher than that of an animal. Through language, humans bring out the full potentiality hidden in matter, advance the building of bird nests and beaver dams to architecture and engineering, the gathering of nuts to farming, squawks and barks to music, sexual reproduction to love and compassion, and limited animal perception to the intellectual jewels of modern Western culture, Newtonian physics, Maxwell’s electrodynamics, special and general relativity, quantum physics, and the biology of the physical basis of life, including the deciphering of the genetic code. 

We Need Unconditional Love

The first experience in any baby’s life is connecting himself to another person. Within days, he can distinguish between his mother and others by her looks, voice, and smell. The mother, on her part, desires to cradle her infant, to soothe him when he cries, to keep him warm and protected. The infant shares an interior life with the mother. If she becomes startled or anxious, the baby becomes frightened and cries. If she coos, the infant coos back. A mother and her infant often play the cooing game, each taking pleasure in sharing emotion.

Indian psychoanalyst Sudhir Kakar reports that “well up to the fifth year, if not longer, it is customary for Indian children to sleep by their mother’s side at night. . . . Constantly held, cuddled, crooned, and talked to . . . the young child has come to experience his core self as lovable: ‘I am lovable, for I am loved.’ Infancy has provided him with a secure base from which to explore his environment with confidence.”^[7]

As Kakar points out, unconditional love is the foundation that supports the further growth and development of the child. For the young child, everything pivots around the mother or continuous caregiver; she is the entire world. John Bowlby, a psychiatrist and the recognized authority on the emotional attachment of children to their caregivers, gives the example of “a healthy child whose mother is resting on a garden seat will make a series of excursions away from her, each time returning to her before making the next excursion.”^[8] The little excursions the child makes beyond her are rooted in the confidence that she will always be there for protection and comfort. The mother’s love provides the child with a secure base to explore the world.

Psychoanalyst Erich Fromm observes that “unconditional love corresponds to one of the deepest longings, not only of the child but of every human being.”^[9] Billy Joel captures the adult desire for unconditional love in his Just the Way You Are.

Patterns set in childhood generally persist throughout a person’s life. The child who never doubts that she is loved unconditionally later in life can safely explore the world and can repeatedly fail at sports, the arts, or career advancement, yet not doubt her worth, unlike the child who never secured a base of unconditional love, for whom failure is devastating, instilling personal worthlessness.

We Are Spiritual Beings

The great discovery of ethology is that animals do not perceive what things really are; an animal’s perception is limited to a few key elements that will cause it to act. Jacob von Uexküll summarizes the scientific study of animal perception with a powerful metaphor: An animal’s world is not the world we see at all but more closely resembles “a small, poorly furnished room.”^[10]  

The narrowness of animal perception can produce astounding results. Here is one of the hundreds of examples discovered by ethologists. A deaf turkey hen will peck her own chicks to death as soon as they are hatched. The distressed cheeping of the chicks is the only stimulus that inhibits the hen’s natural aggression in defense of the nest. The cheeping alone evokes a maternal reaction in the hen. Without the cheeping, a chick is judged by instinct to be an enemy and is attacked. A hen with normal hearing will attack a realistic stuffed chick if it emits no sound and is pulled toward the nest by a string. Conversely, she will respond maternally to a stuffed weasel (the turkey’s natural enemy) if it has a built-in speaker that produces the cheeping of a turkey chick.^[11]  The mother turkey cannot see her offspring!

Of all the natural creatures, only human beings can grasp a whole. The study of animal perception re-discovered the spiritual nature of Homo sapiens — the capacity to be connected to all that is, a fundamental principle of every wisdom tradition.^[12]

We Are Not Our Personal, Internal Map

Most of us take our personal, internal map to be the territory; we glimpse the territory on those rare occasions when our “I” disappears — dies in a sense — as happens in the performance of an activity at an optimal level, characterized by intense focus on the present. Being totally absorbed in an activity is called “in the zone” by athletes and “flow” by psychologists. Rock climbers, surgeons, dancers, musicians, writers, chess players, mathematicians, indeed, actors in any field can lose the self, become the activity, and thereby experience flow.

Musician Barry Green observes that soloists, orchestral players, young students, and seasoned sessions players, alike, have experienced that “unique suspended moment when you actually become the emotional or sensory quality of the music — the colors, the water, the love.”^[13] An expert rock climber describes the same experience: “You are so involved in what you are doing [that] you aren’t thinking of yourself as separate from the immediate activity. . . . You don’t see yourself as separate from what you are doing.”^[14] A dancer says at times she becomes the dance: “Your concentration is very complete. Your mind isn’t wandering, you are not thinking of something else; you are totally involved in what you are doing.”^[15]

When a person is completely in the present, not reflecting upon the past or worrying about the future, the senses are heightened. The great rock climber Yvon Chouinard describes how on ascent up El Capitan’s Muir Wall he saw as if for the first time: “Each individual crystal in the granite stood out in bold relief. The varied shapes of the clouds never ceased to attract our attention. For the first time, we noticed tiny bugs that were all over the walls, so tiny that they were barely noticeable. While belaying, I stared at one for fifteen minutes, watching him move and admiring his brilliant red color.”^[16] Unlike our habitual looking without seeing, looking with real vision reveals the overwhelming beauty of mundane objects — clouds, snow, and granite.

If we accede to the obvious truth that life is activity, then the highest human activity is the flow that results from making art, doing science, playing sports, educating the young, or caring for the old and disabled, from losing the self in an activity, when the person and the activity are the territory.

The Emotions Power the Internal Maps

To understand our internal maps better we first must distinguish emotion from sense perception. Every emotion is caused by a sense perception or by something imagined or remembered. Anger, for example, may be provoked by the perception of an insult, fear by an imagined future evil, sorrow by the memory of a past suffering. Although often aroused by some sensation, an emotion is not a sense perception. Fear does not designate the mere perception of an object but a response to that object. An emotion inclines us toward an object or moves us away from it.

The intuitive appraisal of the object that arouses an emotion is not deliberate or the result of reflection but is immediate, as is seen in a boy who suffers from an intense fear of dogs. Any time he sees a dog, he immediately experiences a paralyzing fear. The boy, clearly, does not will this fear in himself, and most likely, he wishes to be rid of his phobia.

To demonstrate that the emotions and the will are not the same, Charles Darwin performed an experiment with a snake: “I put my face close to the thick glass‑plate in front of a puff‑adder in the Zoological Gardens, with the firm determination of not starting back if the snake struck at me; but, as soon as the blow was struck, my resolution went for nothing, and I jumped a yard or two backwards with astonishing rapidity. My will and reason were powerless against the imagination of a danger which had never been experienced.”^[17]

Every emotion is a psychophysical phenomenon that possesses an undivided wholeness that unites the feeling of the emotion and its bodily expression. Anger is accompanied by tightness in the chest, by the tensing of the muscles, and by a clenched jaw; fear causes the heart to beat rapidly, the hands to sweat, the face to burn, the knees to knock, and sometimes the fingers to tingle. Many emotions have characteristic facial expressions: When embarrassed, we blush; when fearful, we pale. Changes in respiration, heart rate, temperature, or other bodily states always accompany the various emotions. These physiological changes are not mere aftereffects but constitute the physical component of the emotion.

We share the emotions with the higher animals. Suppose my neighbor Viktor shows a bone to his dog Sassy and then teases her by almost, but not quite, letting her have it. After a short time, Sassy will become angry, and if Viktor continues to provoke his pet, she will turn on him; Sassy’s anger will displace her desire for the bone. A sheep experiences fear when seeing a wolf, and a wolf feels hope when seeing a sheep.

In terms of evolution, emotions appeared in animals before language and reason. Our best insight into how the world is experienced in the absence of language is through Helen Keller. When she was 19 months old, an acute disease, possibly scarlet fever or meningitis, left her blind and deaf. She soon “felt the need of some communication with others and began to make crude signs. A shake of the head meant ‘No’ and a nod, ‘Yes,’ a pull meant ‘Come’ and a push ‘Go.’ Was it bread [she] wanted? Then [she] would imitate the acts of cutting the slices and buttering them.”^[18]

Without language, Helen’s interior life was limited to sense perception, motor skills, tactile memory, and associations. She exercised neither will nor intellect and was “carried along to objects and acts by a certain blind natural impetus.” She felt anger, desire, and satisfaction; however, she never “loved or cared for anything.” She describes her inner life then as “a blank without past, present, or future, without hope or anticipation, without wonder or joy.”^[19]

Ms. Keller recounted that the sign language she learned from Anne Sullivan “made me conscious of love, joy, and all the emotions. I was eager to know, then to understand, afterward to reflect on what I knew and understood, and the blind impetus, which had before driven me hither and thither at the dictates of my sensations, vanished forever.”^[20] She no longer lived an animal life; language freed her to be human.

Helen’s experience accords with Sigmund Freud’s theoretical speculation about the id, present at birth and the source of instincts, emotional impulses, and desires. Nothing in the id “corresponds to the idea of time, no recognition of the passage of time, and (a thing which is very remarkable and awaits adequate attention in philosophic thought) no alteration of mental processes by the passage of time.” Desires and impulses that have never gotten beyond the id through language are “virtually immortal and are preserved for whole decades as though they had only recently occurred.”^[21]

Despite an unsettled language, what Freud discovered is that sometimes our mind, our emotions, or our brain hides from us, represses, or refuses to report terrible realities that may have occurred to us as children, such as beatings by one or both parents, emotional abandonment by the mother, or even rape by the father. The repressed anger and self-loathing resulting from childhood abuse are often alive and equally intense when the person is forty as on the day they occurred. Something deep within us wants to keep us safe; the repressed emotions, should we become aware of them, would be dangerous to normal existence or too emotionally painful to deal with.

 As small children, we needed our parents or caregivers to clothe, feed, and protect us from a threatening world: We could not reject our parents or caregivers, for without them, we could not survive. Children know they must stay as close as possible to the adults who are supposed care for them. A child will deny the reality of being abandoned, beaten, or raped and often tell herself, “I’m being abused because I’m a bad person.” She, then, thinks I’m a fundamentally flawed human being, not worthy of love. If I’d been a good child, people would not have done these horrible things to me. In this case, the body continues to behave as if it is in great danger, while the mind represses the reality of childhood trauma and ignores what the body says. A conflict, then, exists between the body feeling very unsafe and the mind not wanting to accept the reality of what has happened.

[Next episode: Adverse Childhood Experiences and Self-Hatred.]

Main image courtesy of iStock.

Endnotes

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[1] Polish-American scientist and philosopher Alfred Korzybski enunciated, in 1931, the general principle the map is not the territory that applies to all maps. Alfred Korzybski, Science and Sanity; an Introduction to Non-Aristotelian Systems and General Semantics (Lakeville, CT: International Non-Aristotelian Library, 1958), Ch. IV and Supplement III.

[2] Robert Verkaik, “When Nelson lost his arm (and returned to work half an hour later),” Independent (28 October 2009).

[3] Marilyn’s story is taken from Bessel van der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma (New York: Penguin, 2015), pp. 125-135.

[4] David Leonhardt, Omicron Is Milder.

[5] For example, nature furnishes the anteater, the zebra, and the rhino with a fixed occupation, a fitting dress, and an appropriate emotional profile, respectively. See George Stanciu, The Great Transformation: How Contemporary Science Harmonizes with the Spiritual Life, Ch. 14, The Great Givens of Human Life.

[6] See Harlan Lane, The Wild Boy of Aveyron (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979) and François Truffaut, director, Wild Child, Les Artistes Associés, film.

[7] Sudhir Kakar, The Inner World: A Psycho-analytic Study of Childhood and Society in India, rev. ed. (New Delhi, India: Oxford University Press, 1981), pp. 80, 82.

[8] John Bowlby, A Secure Base: Clinical Applications of Attachment Theory (London: Routledge, 1988), p. 61.

[9] Erich Fromm, The Art of Loving (New York:  Harper, 2006 [1956]), p. 39.

[10] Jacob von Uexküll, quoted by Josef Pieper, Leisure: The Basis Culture, trans. Alexander Dru (New York: Mentor, 1963), p. 85.

[11] Konrad Lorenz, On Aggression (New York: Harcourt & World, 1963), pp. 117-118.

[12] See George Stanciu, The Great Transformation: How Contemporary Science Harmonizes with the Spiritual Life, Ch. 16, A Frog Tells Me Who I Am.

[13] Barry Green, The Inner Game of Music (New York: Doubleday, 1986), p. 14.

[14] Quoted by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Beyond Boredom and Anxiety (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1975), p. 39.

[15] Ibid.

[16] Yvon Chouinard, quoted by Doug Robinson, “The Climber as Visionary,” Ascent 1969, vol. 9, p. 6.

[17] Charles Darwin, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998 [1872]), pp. 43-44.

[18] Helen Keller, The Story of My Life (Mineola, New York: Dover, 1996 [1903]).

[19]Helen Keller, The World I Live In (New York: The Century Co., 1904,1908).

[20]Ibid.

[21] Sigmund Freud, New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, trans. W. J. H. Sprott (New York: Carlton House, 1933), p. 104.