We react to serious mishaps, life altering setbacks, disasters, abuse, and death by going through phases of grieving. Traumas are complex outcomes of psychodynamic and biochemical processes. But particulars of traumas depend heavily on interaction between victim and his social milieu.

It would seem that while victim progresses from denial to helplessness, rage, depression and thence to acceptance of traumatizing events - society demonstrates a diametrically opposed progression. This incompatibility, this mismatch of psychological phases is what leads to formation and crystallization of trauma.

PHASE I

Victim phase I - DENIAL

The magnitude of such unfortunate events is often so overwhelming, their nature so alien, and their message so menacing - that denial sets in as a defence mechanism aimed at self preservation. The victim denies that event occurred, that he or she is being abused, that a loved one passed away.

Society phase I - ACCEPTANCE, MOVING ON

The victim's nearest ("Society") - his colleagues, his employees, his clients, even his spouse, children, and friends - rarely experience events with same shattering intensity. They are likely to accept bad news and move on. Even at their most considerate and empathic, they are likely to lose patience with victim's state of mind. They tend to ignore victim, or chastise him, to mock, or to deride his feelings or behaviour, to collude to repress painful memories, or to trivialize them.

Summary Phase I

The mismatch between victim's reactive patterns and emotional needs and society's matter-of-fact attitude hinders growth and healing. The victim requires society's help in avoiding a head-on confrontation with a reality he cannot digest. Instead, society serves as a constant and mentally destabilizing reminder of root of victim's unbearable agony (the Job syndrome).

PHASE II

Victim phase II - HELPLESSNESS

Denial gradually gives way to a sense of all-pervasive and humiliating helplessness, often accompanied by debilitating fatigue and mental disintegration. These are among classic symptoms of PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder). These are bitter results of internalization and integration of harsh realization that there is nothing one can do to alter outcomes of a natural, or man-made, catastrophe. The horror in confronting one's finiteness, meaninglessness, negligibility, and powerlessness - is overpowering.

Society phase II - DEPRESSION

The more members of society come to grips with magnitude of loss, or evil, or threat represented by grief inducing events - sadder they become. Depression is often little more than suppressed or self-directed anger. The anger, in this case, is belatedly induced by an identified or diffuse source of threat, or of evil, or loss. It is a higher level variant of "fight or flight" reaction, tampered by rational understanding that "source" is often too abstract to tackle directly.

Summary Phase II

Thus, when victim is most in need, terrified by his helplessness and adrift - society is immersed in depression and unable to provide a holding and supporting environment. Growth and healing is again retarded by social interaction. The victim's innate sense of annulment is enhanced by self-addressed anger (=depression) of those around him.

PHASE III

Both victim and society react with RAGE to their predicaments. In an effort to narcissistically reassert himself, victim develops a grandiose sense of anger directed at paranoidally selected, unreal, diffuse, and abstract targets (=frustration sources). By expressing aggression, victim re-acquires mastery of world and of himself.

Confucius talked about fulfilling and seeking one's "human nature" (or "ren") as "the Way". This nature is not result of learning or deliberation. It is innate. It is intuitive and, in turn, produces additional, clear intuitions ("yong") as to right and wrong, productive and destructive, good and evil. The "operation of natural law" requires that there be no rigid codex, but only constant change guided by central and harmonious intuition of life.

II. Philosophers on Intuition - An Overview

IIA. Locke

But are intuitions really a-priori - or do they develop in response to a relatively stable reality and in interaction with it? Would we have had intuitions in a chaotic, capricious, and utterly unpredictable and disordered universe? Do intuitions emerge to counter-balance surprises?

Locke thought that intuition is a learned and cumulative response to sensation. The assumption of innate ideas is unnecessary. The mind is like a blank sheet of paper, filled gradually by experience - by sum total of observations of external objects and of internal "reflections" (i.e., operations of mind). Ideas (i.e., what mind perceives in itself or in immediate objects) are triggered by qualities of objects.

But, despite himself, Locke was also reduced to ideal (innate) intuitions. According to Locke, a colour, for instance, can be either an idea in mind (i.e., ideal intuition) - or quality of an object that causes this idea in mind (i.e., that evokes ideal intuition). Moreover, his "primary qualities" (qualities shared by all objects) come close to being eidetic intuitions.

Locke himself admits that there is no resemblance or correlation between idea in mind and (secondary) qualities that provoked it. Berkeley demolished Locke's preposterous claim that there is such resemblance (or mapping) between PRIMARY qualities and ideas that they provoke in mind. It would seem therefore that Locke's "ideas in mind" are in mind irrespective and independent of qualities that produce them. In other words, they are a-priori. Locke resorts to abstraction in order to repudiate it.

Locke himself talks about "intuitive knowledge". It is when mind "perceives agreement or disagreement of two ideas immediately by themselves, without intervention of any other... knowledge of our own being we have by intuition... mind is presently filled with clear light of it. It is on this intuition that depends all certainty and evidence of all our knowledge... (Knowledge is the) perception of connection of and agreement, or disagreement and repugnancy, of any of our ideas."

Knowledge is intuitive intellectual perception. Even when demonstrated (and few things, mainly ideas, can be intuited and demonstrated - relations within physical realm cannot be grasped intuitively), each step in demonstration is observed intuitionally. Locke's "sensitive knowledge" is also a form of intuition (known as "intuitive cognition" in Middle Ages). It is perceived certainty that there exist finite objects outside us. The knowledge of one's existence is an intuition as well. But both these intuitions are judgmental and rely on probabilities.

IIB. Hume