4 Dominant and Repressed Modes

Within the Framework, solve analysis rests on three pillars, three premises which must be understood in order for the remainder of the system to be derived. The first of these is the duality of Eros and Thanatos. The second is the Ladder of Sublimation. We have now arrived at the third and final premise— the dominant and repressed modes.

In one view, what a pathology actually consists of is the division of the mind into dominant and repressed modes within a particular sublimation level. When a person is inculcated with a pathological disposition in childhood (we’ll discuss how precisely that happens in the following chapter), their conscious and subconscious minds become divided, the one against the other. All of the thinking they do on that sublimation level— all of the problem solving they do to fulfill their needs at that timescale— is controlled either entirely by the upper, conscious mind, or the lower, subconscious mind.

Your dominant mode is the state of mind that you occupy the majority of the time. In it, you carry out the conditioning— towards Eros or Thanatos— which your pathology consists of. Conversely, the opposite impulse (towards Eros or Thanatos) will be forbidden to you, at least on the sublimation level of your pathology.

Your dominant mode is the mode of thought in which you feel like your usual self. It’s the comfortable, familiar day-to-day, the range of thoughts and feelings which you grow to rely on and build your life around. When you are at work, or with your friends, or with your family, this is your state of mind.

Your repressed mode is a more unusual state of mind. It can only be accessed via two methods (which we’ll examine shortly), and in it, you are inclined to the opposite impulse of your pathology. If in normal conditions you were bound to Eros, in your repressed mode you would be bound to Thanatos, or vice-versa. Often, this is the mode of thought in which you feel like your real self. It comes out in periods of great intensity— late at night, during bouts of intoxication or stress, and with romantic partners.

You may have noted that, despite the fact that the modes represent a division of self, I’ve indicated that you still feel like yourself in both situations. This is because what the self really “is” is a perspective bound to a body of material. The perspective is the ineffable entity that perceives your thoughts, and the body of material is your mind. When you cross from your dominant mode into your repressed mode, that perspective, that sense of self, crosses from the upper echelons of your mind to the lower ones. You might think of it as your lower mind “gaining control” of you, and for many applications, that’s a helpful frame to employ; but what’s actually happening is just that the spotlight of your perspective is moving to examine material which is usually forbidden to it. You experience inclinations and hopes which are normally invisible to you, and while the spotlight is down there, you act on them; but these inclinations and hopes are actually always there, just inaccessible.

This experience— of wanting and doing things you’d normally never want or do, but still feeling like yourself the entire time— will inevitably be processed in one of two ways.

If you’re uncracked, and don’t understand yourself to be irrational, you will rationalize the experience away, generally by making reference to the special circumstances that sent you into your repressed mode to begin with; “I was just drunk,” you’ll say to yourself, not bothering to ask why drunkenness would make you want, e.g. to call that person, in the first place.

If you’re cracked, and have as a consequence begun solve, you will resist these rationalizations. As solve continues, your behavior during your repressed mode will begin to feel more and more foreign to you after the fact. That is, you’ll still feel like yourself  the entire time you’re in your repressed mode, because the spotlight of self you check in on is still shining onto your mind. But afterwards, these periods of time will increasingly feel like you are being possessed by a foreign entity.

Either way, though, periods in which you occupy your repressed mode are difficult to remember. They’re times in which you act on thoughts and feelings which you normally keep locked away down in the “no go zone” where the spotlight of your self isn’t normally allowed to shine, and it takes a lot of work to bring the facts of what happened to mind once the experience is over. Your lower mind will keep you away from the memories of that night— usually, it’s a night— first with a series of rationalizations, and then with the biting shame which is its only real means of self-defense.

There are only two ways of moving from the dominant mode into the repressed mode. The first is the mechanical loosening of the executive control functions. The second is bargaining.

Executive control functions (ECFs) are the part of your mind-self-soul thing which tells the spotlight of your self what to shine on. They can be weakened by intoxication or stress; in such situations, your lower mind can grab control, and you will enter your repressed mode. This doesn’t always happen when you are intoxicated or stressed, and it should be emphasized that the dominant and repressed modes are binary and mutually exclusive. You’re either in one, or you’re in the other; it’s not a question of getting closer to the repressed mode, you just suddenly cross the threshold and find yourself in it. Here’s a non-exhaustive list of things which affect the ECFs.

Things which can weaken the ECFs:

• Alcohol
• Lack of sleep
• Physical pain
• Marijuana
• LSD
• Emotional distress

Things which can strengthen the ECFs

• Stimulants
• Adrenaline
• Antidepressants
• Novel situations
• Being around strangers

It should be noted that some prescription drugs like Adderall or SSRIs can strengthen your ECFs. If these drugs are taken very consistently over long periods of time, the pressure to slip into your repressed mode will increase gradually, and the shock of slipping into it, when it happens, will grow more violent. The fact that your lower mind has generally been boxed out of control over your actions by the drugs will also send it into considerable distress; the combination of these factors can result in some fairly extreme behavior. This is discussed at further length in the chapter Drugs and the Process of Becoming Whole.

The second means of accessing the repressed mode, bargaining, represents a process in which the upper mind establishes the circumstances under which it is acceptable for the lower mind to be in control, and when these conditions are satisfied, cedes control temporarily to the lower mind. Generally, these conditions are established by your upper mind in your childhood, when you are inculcated with your pathological disposition.

The most common circumstance which satisfies the conditions of the bargain is to be with a romantic partner. Sexual contact is an arena in which people are almost always thrown into their repressed mode. This can also occur when you are particularly comfortable (specifically, pathologically compatible) with a romantic partner and are merely alone with them.

Other circumstances which send you into your repressed mode are more dependent on which pathology you bear, and which targets you’ve set for yourself in childhood. One individual might feel entitled to ask their parents for attention when they are sick, but at no other time; another might feel that being granted an official position by an organization has given them license to assert themselves over their underlings without question.

The specifics of which circumstances allow you to access your repressed mode may vary based on your disposition, but they will share this quality— such situations will be very rare, and are bound to be coveted. The repressed mode contains a whole spectrum of possibilities which you normally forbid yourself in the course of the day to day. If you fall into the repressed mode through intoxication, you will be greeted in looking back on these instances with horrible shame, the shame which arises to fill the gulf between your upper and lower selves. On the other hand, if you’ve accessed your repressed mode “legitimately” through the fulfillment of your “bargain”, you might very well look on such moments with pride. Your lower mind will elevate them to your attention, exhorting you to savor every detail. You have, in childhood, set quite onerous limitations upon yourself— and, in this limited case, you’ve succeeded in meeting them.

The final thing to be understood about dominant and repressed modes is this: they only apply on the sublimation levels wherein a person bears a pathology. Where there is no pathology, there is no division of self, and there is no repression. The spotlight of your perspective bobs freely back and forth between the upper mind and the lower, and the operations of thought embodied in both Eros and Thanatos are available to you at all times. This is obvious when one takes a broader view of Eros and Thanatos— a person dominated by Eros on their second level can still perform the Thannatic operation involved in, say, critiquing a novel, because this operation doesn’t relate to problems on a timescale of weeks to months. A person dominated by Thanatos on their second level can likewise still learn math. The division relates only to those areas of life touched by your pathology, as broad or narrow as those areas are— and a person with no pathology is not divided at all.

With that, we’ve concluded our chapter on dominant and repressed modes, and so have set up all three of the pillars of the Framework. In the next chapter, we’ll combine these three pillars together to explain how pathology is inculcated in childhood, concluding this first, most theoretical section of the book.