Eric: That's great. And I also know that we have these psychoanalytic theories, where folks who think in terms of childhood stages of development, which are very conceptual, but how would the Polyvagal Theory develop alongside those?
Dr. Porges: You can play with it and basically say when you're talking Id, what you're talking about is very primitive physiological systems...I mean, you could play with it and create Polyvagal stages that would map into it, but when you get to this whole notion of the integrated self, then it's going to require the final stage of the Polyvagal Theory. So you can tear it apart. So they used to say, what was the..."The Id was the horse, the ego was the rider, and the super-ego was the path." Is that the way we were taught? I think there's a lot of interest now, a lot of people are talking psychoanalytically again in certain ways, but there is a benefit in this dialogue, because they're trying to talk about a system that's interactive. And this is actually, literally, a second reaction.
So, biological psychiatry was a reaction to psychoanalytic theories. But that started to make it very deterministic in saying, "We need to manipulate a drug and then everything will be fine." Now, there's a reaction to that which says it's a more complicated system. So Polyvagal Theory talks about systems within systems and how the body influences brain systems, and the brain influences body systems. So physiological state, basically colors our perception of the world. And psychoanalytic theory has some of these same features, as it tries to deal with a more complex interactive model.
Eric: And so, I know you and I have been in touch in the past, I was asking you about body workers and what people could do at home, but how does this apply to body workers and how they've used it?
Dr. Porges: The body workers...there's a variety of schools using body psychotherapy. So it's not just body workers. There're people who are utilizing touch and manipulation as an adjunct to psychotherapy. And this has to do a lot with this...actually, it's very well-accepted now, this differentiation between different types of memories. Those that are both implicit or locked within our body which we don't have a good language to describe. Then explicit memories where we can create a narrative and describe it.
Dr. Porges: You can play with it and basically say when you're talking Id, what you're talking about is very primitive physiological systems...I mean, you could play with it and create Polyvagal stages that would map into it, but when you get to this whole notion of the integrated self, then it's going to require the final stage of the Polyvagal Theory. So you can tear it apart. So they used to say, what was the..."The Id was the horse, the ego was the rider, and the super-ego was the path." Is that the way we were taught? I think there's a lot of interest now, a lot of people are talking psychoanalytically again in certain ways, but there is a benefit in this dialogue, because they're trying to talk about a system that's interactive. And this is actually, literally, a second reaction.
So, biological psychiatry was a reaction to psychoanalytic theories. But that started to make it very deterministic in saying, "We need to manipulate a drug and then everything will be fine." Now, there's a reaction to that which says it's a more complicated system. So Polyvagal Theory talks about systems within systems and how the body influences brain systems, and the brain influences body systems. So physiological state, basically colors our perception of the world. And psychoanalytic theory has some of these same features, as it tries to deal with a more complex interactive model.
Eric: And so, I know you and I have been in touch in the past, I was asking you about body workers and what people could do at home, but how does this apply to body workers and how they've used it?
Dr. Porges: The body workers...there's a variety of schools using body psychotherapy. So it's not just body workers. There're people who are utilizing touch and manipulation as an adjunct to psychotherapy. And this has to do a lot with this...actually, it's very well-accepted now, this differentiation between different types of memories. Those that are both implicit or locked within our body which we don't have a good language to describe. Then explicit memories where we can create a narrative and describe it.
