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At the end of Thursday’s class, Professor Grobstein said, in conclusion to our discussion, “Behavior happens unless it is inhibited.” This really struck me because it seems since the age of Freudian psychoanalysis, which long-reigned as the pinnacle of behavioral understanding, there is an impetus, socially, medically, culturally, to describe behavior based upon cause and effect. Why do things happen? What “drives” people to behave in certain ways? Freudian theory would have it that there are two “causes” of behavior, sexual impulses and aggressive impulses ( http://www.rpi.edu/~verwyc/FREUDOH.html ). There must be more to behavior than two driving impulses. But, if behavior is rooted in passive current flow and the random movement of ions, there is something that impels us all to “be” and to “do” that is altered by our inhibition of that behavior. In such a paradigm, behaviors we consider aberrant are so much more easily reconciled given that perhaps certain dysfunctional neuronal mechanisms do not allow certain aspects of behavior to be inhibited by certain people. Superficially, one might think that “meaning” is stripped from behavior if viewed as random and the product of passive current flow. However, behavior (and anything else, really) has only the meaning or significance that we ascribe to it.

As Erich Fromm wrote in Man for Himself, “Man must accept the responsibility for himself and the fact that only by using his own powers can he give meaning to his life. But meaning does not imply certainty; indeed, the quest for certainty blocks the search for meaning Uncertainty is the very condition to impel man to unfold his powers. If he faces the truth without panic he will recognize that there is no meaning to life except the meaning man gives to life by the unfolding of his powers…”