0.1 What is subtle about social interaction?  (Page 20/26)

His discussion of the three "modes" of experience is important, it is similar to a discussion on consciousness. The prototaxic mode seems to be awareness of the senses, and this awareness of what you are feeling gives rise to an understanding from these feelings of your environment or whatever it is they are feeling. That is why babies mostly experience the world in this mode, because they are not capable of thought they mostly just feel and that gives rise to their awareness of the world. Saying that the modes are types of 'inner' elaboration of events is just saying that there are different ways of experiencing the world. The prototaxic is the most basic and primitive, which is why it relates to the senses the most, the other modes are probably more thoughtful - derived from knowledge or thought.

Saying that there are absolutes of tension and euphoria is important. It is important to say that in order to help understand that people can be in extremely pleasurable states or extremely painful states. Most of the time for most people they are in the middle somewhere, but it is very useful to note the extremes in order to help recognize and understand that pain and pleasure are there to certain degrees and changing all the time.

He discusses that crying helps the baby avoid "fear-provoking dangers", because it gets tender affection from the mother. He is describing it as a learned process, the child learns to cry because it helps relieve fear and is also positively reinforced by affection from the mother. It is useful to think of social behavior in this kind of way, there are larger more important motives behind social behavior other than what may seem if you just look at the obvious motives. Certain things help relief fear or the "foreseen relief of fear", a lot of social behavior can be seen as avoiding fear and anxiety. Those components are not normally thought about as factors, but it makes sense that they are. Getting a friend, or saying hello could be seen as the foreseen relief of fear if you consider that otherwise you might be in pain without doing those things.

His type of thinking about social interactions, by relating it to anxiety and fear, is obvious is his explanation of the juvenile era as well - he postulates that "In other words, the juvenile has extraordinary opportunity to learn a great deal about security operations, to learn ways of being free from anxiety, in terms of comparatively understandable sanctions and their violations.", he is saying that the juvenile functions like the baby crying gets attention from the mother, the juvenile might feel threatened by authority and the rules they impose on him or her and therefore could learn a lot about how to be free from anxiety by learning how to navigate those rules. That is a deep analysis, usually when someone thinks of a parent imposing rules on a child they don't analyze it in terms of their social development, however it makes sense to think about it that way as well. The rules of the parents become a part of the child's life, it is how a child lives, there are authority figures in children's lives that are probably at least as important for their emotional development as their peers. And an important part of their interaction with these authority figures is the rules that are imposed upon them, it is an important part of how a child lives - the nature of how adults and authority figures interact with them.