Leviathan

Written by Thomas Hobbes (1651)

"For by art is created that great LEVIATHAN called a COMMONWEALTH or STATE---in Latin CIITAS---which is but an artificial man, though of greater stature and strength than the natural, for whose protection and defense it it was intended; and in which the sovereignty is an artificial soul, as giving life and motion to the whole body; the magistrates and other officers of judicature and execution, artificial joints; reward and punishment, by which, fastened to the seat of the sovereignty, every joint and member is moved to perform his duty, are the nerves, that do the same in the body natural; the wealth and riches of all the particular members are the strength; salus populi, the people;s safety, its business; counselors, by whom all things needful for it to know are suggested unto it, are the memory; equity and laws, an artificial reason and will; concord, health; sedition, sickness; and civil war, death. Lastly, the pacts and covenants by which the parts of this body politic were at first made, set together, and united resemble that fiat, or the let us make man, pronounced by God in the creation" (Hobbes, 1651/1958: 23).

Implications for PTSD

Hobbes declared "nature works by motion" (ibid, p. 6). Hobbes does not separate the body from the spirit, the corporeal from the incorporeal. Hobbes' materialism is therefore not a Cartesian split of mind and body, spirit and material. Rather, materialism is the "entire universe ... that is, the whole mass of all things that are ... is corporeal --- that is, to say, body --- and has the dimensions of magnitude, namely, length, breadth, and depth" and "that which is no part of it is nothing, and consequently nowhere" (ibid, p. 9).

Hobbes continues by saying "nor does it follow from hence that spirits are nothing, for they have dimensions and are therefore really bodies, though that name in common speech be given to such bodies only as they are visible or palpable--- that is, that have some degree of opacity" (ibid, p. 9).

The implication is that the body is human spirit, and can be haunted by the spirit called PTSD. PTSD is a spirit haunting the bodies of veterans, police officers, students in public schools, workers in corporations, family members, and people in many other institutions experiencing violence, abuse, bullying, disaster, assault, stalking, and so forth.

What becomes of the PTSD spirit living in the body? For Hobbes its "living body" that the haunting spirit inhabits.

Problem with Conventional Conceptions of PTSD

The problem with the conventional conceptions of PTSD is they are disembodied. We suffer ourselves to be cut off from our bodies by the absurd doctrine of Cartesian split which separates body form spirit. For Hobbes body and spirit are inseparable. Only the body in death can be separated from the body "and be seen by night among the graves" (ibid, p. 11).

Hobbes thought it absurd to believe the existence of the living body separated from the spirit. The fallacy of PTSD is dividing body into parts, and assigning fewer parts (brain & memory-neurology) to be the site of PTSD. The Hobbes materialism is that PTSD is embodied, a haunting of the human spirit.

Conventional treatment of PTSDE treats the recurring memory as separate from the body. The result is errant memory becomes the agent producing acts of flight and fight. they say PTSD is faulty memory, an obsession with a memory of the past that causes actions in the present, fits of rage, aggressive driving, withdrawal from the social, and so forth.

Hobbes alternative is the veteran's body is haunted by an unwelcome spirit. His recommendation is to test the spirits to see from whence they come, from good or evil.

PTSD and Sensemaking

The five senses (taste, touch, seeing, hearing, & smelling) are embodied, and a resistance the the materiality around the body. The several motions of matter pressing on the body and its senses produce nothing but motion (ibid, p. 26). When things are in motion, including the living things (& living body), there are waves. For example, "we see in the water, though the wind cease, the waves give not over rolling for a long time after, so also it happens in that motion which is made in the internal parts of a man then when he sees, dreams, etc. For after the object is removed or the eye shut, we will retain an image of the thing seen, though more obscure than when we see it" (ibid, p. 27).

In other words, when we experience the materiality of trauma events (or live in a family repeated retelling those events), then the motion of that storytelling, its several motion continue to press upon the senses, the images, sounds, smells, tasted, and touches linger, long after the originary event ceases.

PTSD therefore has material movement, and its motion slowly decays. For a long while (months, years) the image or impression made on us by a material event of trauma (or its repeated retelling) remains. Over time "the imagination of the past is obscured and made weak, as the voice of a man is in the noise of the day. For whence it follows that the longer the time is after the sight or sense of any object, the weaker is the imagination" (ibid, p. 28).

Therefore, as one relives the event, as part of contemporary therapy, according to Hobbes, the image or impression may be the material event of trauma, will be extended, more pronounced. The distance of places and times, with repetition of the storytelling, the imagination of the past, becomes a compound experience. The sensory memory that would fade combines with the storytelling imagination, that pieces together a whole event, in compound memory, rendered into "compound imagination" and part of that compound is a waking dream, a fantasy of the mind (ibid, p. 29). It is then "possessed with fearful tales" that the veteran sees "a fearful apparition" including "dead men's ghosts walking" ibid, (p. 30).

Hobbes is against the charlatans, the ambitious exorcists that trade on the fear of the simple folk (ibid, p. 31).