An Elephant Crackup By Charles Siebert Essay

Human beings have full control over their identities after they have received knowledge and have become shaped from external stimuli. These stimuli include the teaching process of humans which comes through tradition, schooling, and the actions of other humans and the influence of the organisms around them. Andrew Solomon, through “Son,” was able to use his experience of growing up and labeling himself as a gay dyslexic to show how his environment and knowledge had shaped his identity and how it was viewed by others with different identities. In “An Elephant Crackup,” Charles Siebert was able to explain how the other organisms or humans are able to form new identities for elephants over time by shaping them a new environment and having the elephants process it. In “Mind’s Eye,” Oliver Sacks had different case studies of blindness from different people and was able to show how each one experienced their blindness help shape and express their individual identities. The stimuli that becomes processed by a person in the situations, accounts, and studies of these works assist in the role of explaining the formulation of an identity.

Description: August is Marlena’s husband and the head animal trainer. He is alternately charming and brutal, both to the humans and animals aboard the Benzini Brothers train. Later in the book, it is explained that he is a paranoid schizophrenic.

Conclusion In Educated: A Memoir, Tara recounts her experience of escaping her native family. Based on Herman’s theory of trauma and recovery, this paper analyzes Tara’s trauma symptoms, including hyperarousal, intrusion, and constriction. The causes of Tara’s trauma are analyzed from the aspects of dysfunctional family and living environment. Finally, according to Herman’s recovery theory, this paper talks about Tara’s three ways to recover from trauma, which is regaining the sense of security, remembrance and mourning, and reconnecting with ordinary life.

When analyzing social patterns and behaviors, is there a significant difference between the psychology of an individual and groups? Collective and individual behavior is surprisingly similar, and depending on the circumstances, identical. In Charles Siebert essay “An Elephant Crackup,” he validates to readers, through social elephant narratives and herd mentality theory, that similarly to an individual elephant all elephants behave in similar ways. Furthermore, Sherry Turkle in selections from her work Alone Together accounts

Historical trauma is a concept that refers to the wounding of generations due to traumatic experiences such as boarding schools, forced displacement, and genocide. Responses to this distress manifest in a number of social issues. For example, alcoholism and substance abuse could be recognized as attempts to numb unresolved grief. Other manifestations of emotional responses to this trauma include abuse, depression, domestic violence, and suicide. A framework for understanding the effects of historical trauma on communities is provided by Evans-Campbell (2008) in her article, “Historical Trauma in American Indian and Native American Communities”. These three levels include individual-level impacts, family-level impacts, and community-level impacts.

If you’re not paying attention, the mind can be a tricky labyrinth. The less you know about it, the more inexplicable and frightening it becomes. For example, why do seemingly benign elephants wreak havoc upon villages? In “An Elephant Crackup,” Charles Siebert explores the aberrant nature of these elephants and correlates them to their traumatizing upbringing, deprived of community and kinship. The biochemistry of the human mind, analyzed in “Love2.0” by Barbara Frederickson, serves as a worthy addendum to Siebert’s conjecture. “Love2.0” explains that the brain, hormones, and nerves work in unison to build emotional fortitude, stimulate oneself, and express positivity resonance. Siebert’s ideas of elephant culture and trans-species psyche can put Frederickson’s theory of emotions into practice. The absence of certain hormones within elephants, provided their fragmented community, can explain their volatile outbreaks. Alternatively, the reinstitution of human parental roles into elephant culture can help reconstruct their broken emotional states of elephants and rebuild their resilience; this healing process can also extend to humans.

Elephant has long been known as one of man’s best friends, who have peacefully coexisted along with humanity for thousands of years. However, the relationship between the two is no longer in the equilibrium state. In “An Elephant Crackup?”, Charles Siebert discusses the downfall of the elephants. He gives a depiction of the recent raging and violent acts of the elephants among themselves and toward other species, including humans, and presents an educated and almost unexpected explanation to their behaviors. He says elephants are just like us; they have feelings and now are “suffering from a form of chronic stress, a kind of species-wide trauma”(Siebert 354). The similarity that should be something fascinating is now slowly turning them into the immensely savage beasts before wiping them out of existence. Even when the appearance of the words “stress” and “trauma” looks like a serious case of “anthropocentric conjecture”, it provides a totally new vision, a fresh way of looking at the boiling issue of the disappearance and sadistic acts of elephants specifically and wild animals at large. With the help of two powerful essays: “Great to Watch” by Maggie Nelson and “The Power of Context” of Malcolm Gladwell, the issue of the unusual behaviors of the elephants is thoroughly illuminated and its solution no longer seems to be out of human’s reach.

Darlene Navarro SOC 2 Fall 2017 Lanthier Through the Conflict Theory I will relate how changes in Indian Country are bringing stability and increased healing to tribal communities despite the intergenerational trauma that is still prevalent on reservation and near reservation native communities. The trauma suffered generations ago impacts tribal youth today, beginning with multiple generations, American Indian communities have endured repeated traumatic events that has a lasting impact on individuals, families, and communities. The critical connection between historically traumatic events and current day mental health/drug abuse issues and life stressors are an important part of the story of our people. Origins of substance use and disorder cut across individual characteristics like genetics or experiences of exposure to trauma, to social contexts as in family disruption, and to cultural factors including historical trauma.

In Martha Stout’s essay “When I Woke Up Tuesday Morning, It Was Friday”, she discusses how a person who has suffered a traumatic experience is most likely to dissociate their individual self from that situation and block it from their mind completely. This form of a solution allows the person to forget the experience and not feel the pain. In “Immune to Reality” Daniel Gilbert describes how every human being contains a psychological immune system, which works to shield us from horrible experiences that threaten our happiness. When experiencing a traumatic event, the psychological immune system responds by “cooking up the facts”, meaning taking the facts of the situation and turning the negative aspects of it into positive views. At first

It is common for humans to develop coping mechanisms by building a defense mechanism to deal and surpass traumatic events. These mechanisms tend to manipulate specific actions to satisfy and please our needs in order to make us happy. Martha Stout’s essay, “When I Woke Up Tuesday Morning, It Was Friday”, and Daniel Gilbert’s essay “Immune to Reality”, describes how one augments a defense mechanism; however in their respective essays each one of them discusses the affects it has upon human behavior. Often times, culture and one’s environment such biological and interpretative elements can affect the daily life of an individual as they think, percept and act.

A worldview is defined as a set of rules or principles that a person lives by. James Sire, author of Naming the Elephant, defines a worldview as “a set of presuppositions (assumptions which may be true, partially true or entirely false) which we hold (consciously or subconsciously, consistently or inconsistently) about the basic makeup of our world.” (*) Worldviews are fundamental to our living, as worldviews determine values and our corresponding actions to those values. a.

And those who have never experienced anything beyond these mild forms of fear usually fail to consider people who have gone through extreme situations. What about those where the trauma’s prolonged and the victim believes there’s no way out, such as the Native American children discussed in Andrea Smith’s Conquest: Sexual Violence and American Indian Genocide? For them, their fight or flight response remains disorganized, even after their returned to a safe environment, affecting the way their mind and body coincide in devastating ways. Dr. Herman goes on to outline the three

and disrupting the little bit of peace that they have. So in that instant he

“We are experiencing what is likely to be the greatest percentage loss of elephants in history,” said Richard G. Ruggiero, an official with the United States Fish and Wildlife Service (Ney York Times; December 3, 2012). The poaching of elephants started in the late 1800’s and is still happening today. People are slaughtering these majestic animals for their ivory tusks. Ivory has been sold on the black market for millions of dollars. Before the start of ivory poaching there were millions of elephants in the world in both Africa and India, but today because of the hunting for ivory, there are barely any of these giants left in the wild. Throughout history Europeans have been moving in on central African states to make

After living a certain lifestyle for an extended period of time, a sudden change in lifestyle abnormally envelops not only a society as a whole, but the individuals who live in that society. The psychological state of the indigenous people worsens due to the forced ideas of the colonizers mixing with their own, which can cause a rift in their thinking. A decision has to be made eventually; however, the colonizer typically tries his hardest to prevent them from making what he believes is the “wrong” decision. Although the colonizer appears to be helping the indigenous people, his true intentions are all but innocent. Due to their technological disadvantages, the colonizers have an advantage over the indigenous people, causing the previous existing people to feel undermined. Even after the colonizers leave, the colonized people continue to bear the scars left behind by the colonizers, as stated by Hayes who argues that, “Post Colonial Theory recognizes the trauma resulting from the alienation of indigenous people from their own land, even after achieving independence” (Hayes). Colonization leaves behind permanent psychological damage, even long after independence has been obtained.