Prof. Dean Rickles

Title

The World Keeps the Score: A Dual-Aspect Perspective on the Psychoid Concept.

Abstract

Bessel van der Kolk famously coined the expression “the body keeps the score” to describe how verbally unexpressed trauma is still expressed in various bodily conditions - a psyche-soma link any others have suggested, and part and parcel of the idea of the psychoid archetype, in which something possesses both material and psychic elements, yet lies somehow beyond both. I argue that given the nature of the psychoid archetype, the broader world also keeps the score, as do even broader features of our conceptual landscape (including worldviews). This can be seen as tracing Jung’s spectrum of psychic “infra-red” and “ultra-violet” analogy for the psyche into even lower and higher frequencies respectively. I provide a dual-aspect monist analysis of this spectral expansion, showing how trauma finds itself etched into both the built environment and our fundamental weltanshaung.…