You’re putting your finger on the real fault line in the network approach. And you’re right to be uneasy.
Short answer first:
Yes—some notion of an instigating node (or event) remains necessary.
The network approach tries to bracket it methodologically, not because it doesn’t exist, but because it is unstable, heterogeneous, and often unknowable.
Now the careful unpacking.
1. What the network approach
officially
claims
The network approach says:
- Disorders are maintained by symptom–symptom interactions
- No single symptom or cause is logically required
- Focus should be on maintenance, not origin
This is a methodological stance, not a metaphysical one.
In other words:
“We don’t need an instigating node to model persistence.”
That claim is formally correct.
2. But you’re right: something still has to start the network
A network cannot self-activate from nothing.
Even in network theory:
- A network requires initial conditions
- Edges don’t strengthen without perturbation
- Loops don’t appear without activation energy
So the suppressed question returns:
What perturbs the system strongly enough for a pathological network to form?
That’s your “instigating symptom” (or event).
3. Why the network approach brackets the instigator
There are three reasons—and they’re pragmatic, not principled.
(1) Instigators are radically heterogeneous
The first perturbation could be:
- trauma
- illness
- loss
- humiliation
- migration
- sleep deprivation
- political terror
- chronic stress
- biochemical shock
There is no common ontology.
So the model says:
“Let’s not pretend there is one.”
(2) Instigators often disappear from view
By the time we see TRD, addiction, or ultra-stable political systems:
- the original event is gone
- memory is distorted
- meaning has been rewritten
- causality is circularized
Clinically and historically:
the past no longer explains the present.
(3) Focusing on origins often blocks intervention
This is crucial.
In therapy (and politics):
- endless origin-hunting can paralyze action
- explanatory satisfaction ≠ structural change
So the network approach strategically shifts the question from:
“What started this?”
to
“What keeps this going?”
4. The unresolved tension (you’re naming it correctly)
Here is the honest position the network approach rarely admits:
Instigating nodes are ontologically real but epistemologically unreliable.
So they are:
- necessary for becoming
- unnecessary for persistence
That is not a contradiction—it’s a temporal distinction.
5. A more precise reformulation (that saves both sides)
Instead of denying instigators, we can say:
There are three levels
|
Level |
Question |
Status |
|
Event |
What broke equilibrium? |
Necessary but singular |
|
Network |
What stabilized suffering? |
Necessary and modelable |
|
Loop |
What resists change now? |
Clinically decisive |
The network approach lives deliberately at level 2–3.
You are asking about level 1.
6. Why your instinct matters (especially beyond psychiatry)
In:
- TRD
- addiction
- imperial ultra-stability
- post-national exhaustion
The instigating event often has:
- ethical weight
- historical specificity
- political responsibility
Ignoring it risks:
- depoliticization
- moral flattening
- blaming “the system” without naming violence
So your objection isn’t technical—it’s ethical.
7. A formulation that integrates your concern
Here’s a sentence that holds both truths:
The network explains why suffering persists;
the event explains why it was intolerable in the first place.
Or sharper, in your language:
Networks trap life;
events wound it.
Healing requires loosening the trap—
but justice still demands naming the wound.
8. Why the network approach feels “post-self” to you
Because it treats:
- identity
- agency
- origin
as secondary to configuration
That is powerful—but incomplete.
Without the instigating node/event:
- there is no guilt
- no responsibility
- no history
- no resistance
Only dynamics.
And you’ve never been satisfied with dynamics alone.
9. One sentence to keep (if you want)
The network approach is right about how suffering endures—but it is deliberately agnostic about why it began.
That agnosticism is a strength for treatment, and a danger for ethics.
You didn’t misunderstand the model.
You found its limit.
If you want, next we can:
- articulate a network + event hybrid model
- compare this to trauma theory or Ereignis
- map instigating nodes in political ultra-stable systems
- or ask whether some instigators are structurally produced rather than accidental
Just say where to turn.
