Procrastinology

I'm still kind of hooked on this 2-motivational-systems idea... I am trying to figure out the conditions that will help me be motivated to reach short-term, mundane goals. Noodling around online, I bumped into descriptions of Lacan's model of the psyche. It's a tripartite model like Freud's psychodynamic model. The three parts are the Real, the Imaginary and the Symbolic.

The Real is inexpressible in language, and since the human subject is made in language, it is lost to us. Think of Helen Keller before she had words. It is a state of being driven by primal needs. In the Imaginary register, we no longer have raw needs, but rather a demand - the demand for wholeness, and thus the demand that the other be incorporated into the self. Think of Nietzsche's master-slave dynamic, where the powerful do not even realize that they are powerful because being powerful means you get your own (ego) goals met, and you never have to think to much about why. Those in a subservient position, however, are aware (and resentful) of the actions of the powerful, and they are able to counteract that by making the powerful self-conscious of their power and its enabling conditions. I think that Lacan's demand is like this bid from the less powerful to be like the more powerful. A bid for externally-supported narcissism.

The imaginary stage is all about image, identitifications, self-image, narcissism, ego-ideals, heros and idols, etc. Romantic attraction is heavily played out in the imaginary register.

The symbolic register is all about linguistically-constructed social entities. You are who it is said that you are, in all of the recording devices of linguistic society (including the brains of other people). Extramarital affairs are good examples of a conflict involving the real and the imaginary at war with the symbolic. According to names, to laws, to the explicit social understanding of roles, and so on, person A is married to person B. Person A has no business getting sexual with person C.

It seems to me that Lacan's insights could map nicely onto MacLean's triune brain hypothesis: that the Real could involve the lower "reptilian" brain and its role in controlling motivational systems, the Imaginary could involve the intermediate "mammalian" brain - the limbic system and its richer associational control over motivation, and the Symbolic could involve the highest brain - the isocortex in its specifically human configuration.

This point of contact might let someone interested in Lacanian psychoanalysis from a neurobiological point of view begin to cross-correlate the two literatures. The results might be interesting. New findings in neuroscience will be relevant for psychoanalysis, but mappings between the two discourses are needed.

I should mention in passing that Ichak Adizes, the inventor of a business intervention methodology that I have worked with in developing online management courses for Management Vitality, also uses a tripartite scheme that could be mapped to this triune structure. This is the distinction between what is, what we want, and what should be. Management teams can get into trouble when they confuse these three evaluations, believing that what they wish were true really is true (even though it is not). This can mislead decision-making processes.

So many ways to scratch at this itch. I wonder how to understand it all...

All of this flows from my curiosity around my own procrastination, hence the title of this post. "Procrastinology" was a coinage for me, but I'm not the first. Googling this term gives me four pages of hits as of the date of writing this post (17 Aug 2006).