Instinct

by Norman Weeks

We read the texts of modern scientific psychology, but we still can't explain the human being and human behavior. Perhaps we should return to ancient insights about ourselves, that is, to classical myth and art.

In the National Roman Museum, there is a naked idol, the Sleeping Hermaphrodite, an incarnation in marble of the total biological beauty and complete gender identity of the two sexes fused into one form. Hermaphrodite presents us with a mystery, namely, the sex instinct.

We speculate about the evolution of life out of the primordial cell, which was to become differentiated into male and female. Instinct is the dynamic of Life Itself. Then, from biology to history. When Mediterranean paganism succumbed to Christianity, the sex instinct was attacked and replaced by an ideology of celibacy and self-suppression. Science too, through modern psychoanalysis, has attempted control and suppression of instinct.

Indeed, things are not well with our instinct. Our very child-rearing starts us out all wrong. Aberrations of instinct include perversion, promiscuity, prostitution, and feminism. Hostility toward the female is expressed in obscenity and pornography. Our art and entertainment have become pornographic, nihilistic. Worst of all is the fusion of the erotic to cruelty. Our warp of instinct incapacitates us for love and marriage.

Both religion and science look upon the human animal with a malicious eye. What are we but sinners and monkeys?

Let's consider ourselves, instead, with a bit of tolerant humor. We enjoy a few laughs,--at prudery, at fashion, at shame and exhibitionism, at misunderstandings between the sexes, at our hypocritical morality.

Culture is the enemy of instinct, but we can still experience the flow of instinct within us under the stimuli of Nature. There is a natural tendency toward health. That is eros. Ministering to our need and longing, eros draws us on, to the touch, to intimacy, to human fulfillment.

Instinct is volume two of ROMAN RUMINATIONS, "the Psychology of the Human as Enculturated Animal".

258 pages, Kindle Edition

First published May 19, 2013

About the author

Norman Weeks is an autobiographical and experiential writer.

An Autobiographical Letter is the straight-through narrative of a half-century of the author’s life, relating the experiences that fed into the writings. Its companion volume, Autobioscenes & Necrographies, extracts and expands some episodes from that life. The first book is the panorama, the second some snapshots.

Also derived from personal experiences are several books of travel narratives: Nature Norm’s North Woods, excursions into the natural world. Tropical Ecstasy, a nostalgia trip back to Brazil, to the town where the author lived as a Peace Corps Volunteer. And Two Weeks in Eternal Egypt, as a member of a tour group exploring the antiquity and sociology of that country.

Out of the author’s deep experience of Rome came the trilogy, Roman Ruminations, “The Psychology of the Human as Enculturated Animal”. Its three volumes are: Loneliness, Instinct, and Love. (The three volumes of the series also available separately.)

Matters of Life and Death contains further excursions into human psychology.

Culture-versus-Nature is a principal theme of Walden Contemporaneous, bringing the values of Thoreau’s book from 1845 Concord, Massachusetts to 2020 United States.

The author’s one major work of fiction, Symphony of Stories presents its characters in the cultural contexts of art, music, literature, and our technoculture.

Throughout his varied writings, Norman Weeks expresses a cosmopolitan appreciation of our world and the wide range of experiences possible in one human life.

Author website: www.independentauthornetwork.com/norm...

Norman Weeks may be reached at "Ask the Author" here on goodreads.