by Stanley
IN THE BEGINNING it is not even like living in an ocean – one is the ocean. There is not even a mother and child; the difference has not even been thought of. There is no inside or outside, no past or future. There is not even a ‘myself ’. Though there is sentience, I am nowhere near human … yet!
This is all before I even know there is anyone else. So that the first meetings with the intimate stranger (not yet even named) comes as quite a shock – exciting and frightening, carrying with it the fist hint that there is a ‘me’ too, the beginning of my psychological birth.
Ever since that time, whenever I meet you, the boundaries between us are always blurry – at best a pleasant nonchalance about who I am. Where I can happily say: I don’t think I am quite myself. Or, paradoxically, I feel more myself than I have ever been.
There is an incredible agitation at finding ‘another’ as I emerge from what Freud called ‘primary narcissism’: the first schism of being. It is the momentous discovery that ‘another’ actually exists – a feeling I revisit over and over in life every time I fall in love, every time I rediscover a wave of affection for whoever, whatever – close to that undivided, unbounded place.
Every renewal in life is a revisiting of that beginning before it all went wrong; before enchantment became disappointment; before finding became losing; affection, resentment. The vicissitudes of relationships are life’s cycles of loving and leaving. Forever repeating all that has gone before, again and again, with only slight variations on the same theme. With help though, I come back to the beginning, perhaps with a little more wisdom – who knows? But always more from chance than good management. The tragedy in many a life is where it has gone so wrong that the door to the beginning is shut. Luck run out. Locked in where ‘I have to do it all for myself’.
What I require to find the beginning all over again, one more time, is what they call, a ‘significant other’, one who can be for me, with me. Alone, it is impossible. There are those who insist that the only person who can provide what I need is myself; no one is going to do it for me, they say. True in a sense. Especially true for those who have given up that there ever can be the intimate stranger who can kick-start what it was like in the beginning.
This is the perennial longing to start over, to move to another place, another country, another life – to be born again, don’t they say? To act out such fantasies misses a vital factor. It isn’t about places, it’s about living and loving connections.
To recover the sense of one’s beginning one has to discern that the intimate stranger has retuned in whatever shape or form, someone with just that certain smell or something: a mate, a dog, a presence of some sort. Then the flow of life can start to move down the track, onwards once again. One more time with feeling! With luck, maybe even a bit more feeling.
Even though I encounter once again where it all went wrong I will…
..........… Drive my dead thoughts over the universe
...............Like wither'd leaves to quicken a new birth!...
The Association for Analytical Psychology Inc.
Box 32121 Christchurch
email: taap@paradise.net.nz
We may not be big – but we’re small
Thursday, September 20, 2007
Tuesday, September 11, 2007
NEAR DEATH EXPERIENCES (NDE)
........................................................by Stanley
People come to the subject of near death experiences (NDE) with pre-set attitudes: either for or against. The subject excites people who, for obvious emotional reasons, want to believe, opposed by those who try to defend rationality against the rising tide of New Age religiosity – these are the sceptics who would rather dismiss NDE along with alien abduction, tarot cards, creationism and channeling dead Himalayan gurus.
But near death experience is a real phenomenon. It is not confined to those who have religious or spiritual beliefs, or to the mentally disturbed. It isn’t the result of indoctrination. It occurs cross culturally and is often brought on by heart failure when a person is, for a short time, clinically dead.
Time magazine’s recent article on NDE comments: “Of the thousands of NDEs reported, none has done more to convince some researchers that the phenomenon's explanation must lie outside the square than the case of Pam Reynolds, an American who underwent brain surgery for an aneurysm in 199I. Preparation for Reynolds' operation included taping her eyes shut, blocking her ears and monitoring her EEG to ensure her brain was functioning at only the most basic level. Yet, after coming around, Reynolds described not only a full-blown NDE but the bone saw that had been used to cut her skull.”
Then there was the convincing case, reported by Dr. Bruce Greyson, of an elderly woman in intensive care who had a heart attack followed by a NDE in which she saw some red tennis shoes on the roof of the hospital. A maintenance worker and some medical people later went on to the roof where they found the shoes exactly as described.
Dr. Pim van Lommel, a Dutch cardiologist, published an impressive study in the British medical journal Lancet in which 144 Dutch patients were resuscitated from clinical death, of which 12% reported NDEs. The paper is full of medical and scientific details but his conclusion was that we must consider the possibility that, “consciousness can be experienced independently from the normal body-linked waking consciousness.”
Some suggest that NDEs are hallucinations activated by brain activity when the electroencephalogram (EEG) line goes flat. van Lommel likens the brain in this state to a "computer with its power source unplugged and its circuits detached. It couldn't hallucinate. It couldn't do anything at all… A flat electroencephalogram recording doesn’t suggest mere impairment. It points to the brain having shut down.” Yet this is when NDEs are most likely to occur.
At last year's first International Medical Conference on Near-Death Experience, held in Martigues, France, eight participants describing themselves as “a group of dedicated physicians and researchers working in different scientific fields” released a statement. They said that while the NDE is mediated by chemical changes in the brain, “its extremely rich and complex content cannot be reduced to a mere illusion.” It is of the "utmost importance,” they argued, “that scientists wishing to understand the nature of human consciousness conduct research without prejudice.”
van Lommel advances one possibility – the same idea as Rupert Sheldrake’s – that the brain is more like a radio or television receiver. There is a continuous flow of electromagnetic waves around us in the form of radio and television transmissions. We are unaware of this until we switch on our radio, TV, mobile telephone, or laptop computer. “We do not realize”, he says, “ the thousands of telephone calls, the hundreds of radio and TV transmissions, as well as the internet, coded as electromagnetic fields, that exist around us and through us.”
But the TV show is not part of the television set, it does not come from inside the set. What is transmitted is not part of the electronic circuitry of these devises. Could our brain be compared to such receiving sets? It would be the receiver of consciousness, not the originator of it. van Lommel asks us to keep an open mind, entertaining the possibility that: “people can experience their consciousness outside their body, with the possibility of perception out and above their body, with identity, and with heightened awareness, attention, well-structured thought processes, memories and emotions.”
“There are, he says, “still a lot of mysteries to solve, but one has not to talk about paranormal, supernatural or pseudoscience to look for scientific answers on the intriguing relation between consciousness and memories with the brain.
However, my feeling is that we are not simply up against a scientific difficulty. I would say the problem is more profound: it is the philosophical problem of consciousness itself, as we discussed in our last TAAP seminar. The brain-correlates of consciousness can be studied objectively, but consciousness itself, by its very nature, cannot be. Right here we may be up against the absolute limits of empirical science. Your consciousness and experience cannot be experienced by anyone else but you. You can tell people about it, and even elicit similar a experience in them, but there is no third agency that can compare them to say how similar or different they are.
You can study people’s brain activities with objective scientific methodology, but you cannot study consciousness in the same way. Consciousness is, as the philosophers say, sui generis, a unique class of its own in the natural world.
So near death and out of the body experiences must be taken as valid for those who describe them. There are no external criteria by which we are permitted to judge otherwise.
If you wish to glance at a few of the hundreds of accounts of NDEs go to http://www.nderf.org/NDERF_NDEs.htm
The Association for Analytical Psychology Inc.
Box 32121 Christchurch
email: taap@paradise.net.nz
We may not be big – but we’re small
Monday, September 10, 2007
A MAN OF HONOUR
I have my principles...
.....AND IF YOU DON'T LIKE IT
.......I have others !
...............................................Groucho Marx
.....AND IF YOU DON'T LIKE IT
.......I have others !
...............................................Groucho Marx
Tuesday, September 4, 2007
ON FINDING AND BEING FOUND
. ..............................................................by Stanley
One of the unique experiences in therapy and good counselling is that of discovery – of finding oneself, as they say. When it happens it is nearly always a finding something unexpected and surprising. Well, perhaps not totally unexpected because the appearance of a hidden aspect of oneself is usually preceded by a vague penumbra, a foreshadowing. When it comes, it has the quality of recollection, of remembering something you always knew, but didn’t.
Some people in therapy are full of surprises. Different aspects of themselves continually come into view; it’s like riding the rapids. For others, the unexpected appears more like a ripple in a gently flowing stream. It’s all highly relative; how great or small the turbulence is relative to who you are and what you are used to.
But what I want to emphasize is the aspect of finding, of self discovery in therapy. This is not the same as imagining. People tend to worry about this, particularly when some vague image occurs that could be a memory or not: ‘Am I remembering something or just imagining it!’ The person is really not sure whether they are manufacturing what occurs to them or whether they are discovering something. ‘Is this vague image of a woman my mother of long ago; or do I just want it to be? Is it a memory, or am I just imagining?’Such questions and doubts do not have that quality of finding.
When you find something – a forgotten memory for example – there is the sense of opening, of something being revealed. It can be a jolt, making irrelevant any idea that you are making it up. There is recognition. The question of whether it is literally the image of my mother of long ago seems less pressing. Destructive questions lose their power. It feels like I am looking out at her from my cot before my actual memory began. The possibility that this was how my mother seemed to me is exciting. I don’t have to make a decision about it. The effect is felt physically. I have found something – not merely found an image, but an emotion, as though I have found a part of myself. More importantly, the discovery calls me further down an unknown path.
Therapy is not a question of finding yourself as a final act of self discovery, or even some final truth about you. Therapy sessions merely provide the conditions in which the process can happen. In calling this a ‘process’ we simply mean that it is finding a way. As though you had been in a dense forest and had come unexpectedly on a path. You follow it and suddenly there is a clearing that lets in the light – showing, too, where the path leads on.
Of course, what you find in therapy is by no means always recovered memories, but more often a sudden stumbling over an emotion, a mood, an attitude you may have been familiar with, but had no idea was so definite and strong; maybe something you had always dismissed as trivial and unimportant. But the whole thing has this same characteristic of finding. It can be a sudden flash, wherein what had been confusion suddenly organises itself into clarity; not by the usual means of trying to work the confusion out, but a finding of clarity that instantly rearranges everything. It is a clarity you didn’t produce: you found it.
And incidentally, don’t worry about changing your attitudes in life; find the ones you have.
All these ways of finding are each one, also a being found. Each time one has the sensation that the person sitting listening to you has found you. Not only have you found yourself, but you have been found.
You know, babies that used to be abandoned, swaddled on church doorsteps, were called ‘foundlings’.
I too am waiting to be found, waiting for someone to find me, but find me with kindness.
Because if there is no kindness, I’d rather not be found, thank you very much!
I’ll stay in hiding
The Association for Analytical Psychology Inc.
Box 32121 Christchurch
email: taap@paradise.net.nz
We may not be big – but we’re small
One of the unique experiences in therapy and good counselling is that of discovery – of finding oneself, as they say. When it happens it is nearly always a finding something unexpected and surprising. Well, perhaps not totally unexpected because the appearance of a hidden aspect of oneself is usually preceded by a vague penumbra, a foreshadowing. When it comes, it has the quality of recollection, of remembering something you always knew, but didn’t.
Some people in therapy are full of surprises. Different aspects of themselves continually come into view; it’s like riding the rapids. For others, the unexpected appears more like a ripple in a gently flowing stream. It’s all highly relative; how great or small the turbulence is relative to who you are and what you are used to.
But what I want to emphasize is the aspect of finding, of self discovery in therapy. This is not the same as imagining. People tend to worry about this, particularly when some vague image occurs that could be a memory or not: ‘Am I remembering something or just imagining it!’ The person is really not sure whether they are manufacturing what occurs to them or whether they are discovering something. ‘Is this vague image of a woman my mother of long ago; or do I just want it to be? Is it a memory, or am I just imagining?’Such questions and doubts do not have that quality of finding.
When you find something – a forgotten memory for example – there is the sense of opening, of something being revealed. It can be a jolt, making irrelevant any idea that you are making it up. There is recognition. The question of whether it is literally the image of my mother of long ago seems less pressing. Destructive questions lose their power. It feels like I am looking out at her from my cot before my actual memory began. The possibility that this was how my mother seemed to me is exciting. I don’t have to make a decision about it. The effect is felt physically. I have found something – not merely found an image, but an emotion, as though I have found a part of myself. More importantly, the discovery calls me further down an unknown path.
Therapy is not a question of finding yourself as a final act of self discovery, or even some final truth about you. Therapy sessions merely provide the conditions in which the process can happen. In calling this a ‘process’ we simply mean that it is finding a way. As though you had been in a dense forest and had come unexpectedly on a path. You follow it and suddenly there is a clearing that lets in the light – showing, too, where the path leads on.
Of course, what you find in therapy is by no means always recovered memories, but more often a sudden stumbling over an emotion, a mood, an attitude you may have been familiar with, but had no idea was so definite and strong; maybe something you had always dismissed as trivial and unimportant. But the whole thing has this same characteristic of finding. It can be a sudden flash, wherein what had been confusion suddenly organises itself into clarity; not by the usual means of trying to work the confusion out, but a finding of clarity that instantly rearranges everything. It is a clarity you didn’t produce: you found it.
And incidentally, don’t worry about changing your attitudes in life; find the ones you have.
All these ways of finding are each one, also a being found. Each time one has the sensation that the person sitting listening to you has found you. Not only have you found yourself, but you have been found.
You know, babies that used to be abandoned, swaddled on church doorsteps, were called ‘foundlings’.
I too am waiting to be found, waiting for someone to find me, but find me with kindness.
Because if there is no kindness, I’d rather not be found, thank you very much!
I’ll stay in hiding
The Association for Analytical Psychology Inc.
Box 32121 Christchurch
email: taap@paradise.net.nz
We may not be big – but we’re small
Saturday, September 1, 2007
THE SACRIFICE OF REASON
By Sam Harris
Reposted from the Washington Post
Humanity has had a long fascination with blood sacrifice. In fact, it has been by no means uncommon for a child to be born into this world only to be patiently and lovingly reared by religious maniacs who believe that the best way to keep the sun on its course or to ensure a rich harvest is to lead him by tender hand into a field or to a mountaintop and bury, butcher, or burn him alive as offering to an invisible (and almost certainly fictional) God.
In many ancient cultures whenever a nobleman died, other men and women allowed themselves to be buried alive so as to serve as his retainers in the next world. In ancient Rome, children were sometimes slaughtered so that the future could be read in their entrails. The Dyak women of Borneo would not even look at a suitor unless he came bearing a net full of human heads as a love offering. Some Fijian prodigy devised a powerful sacrament called “Vakatoga” which required that a victim’s limbs be cut off and eaten while he watched. Among the Iroquois, captives from other tribes were often permitted to live for many years, and even to marry, all the while being doomed to be flayed alive as an oblation to the God of War; whatever children they produced while in captivity were disposed of in the same ritual. African tribes too numerous to name have a long history of murdering people to send as couriers in a one-way dialogue with their ancestors or to convert their body parts into magical charms. Ritual murders of this sort continue in many African societies to this day.
It is essential to realize that such impossibly stupid misuses of human life have always been explicitly religious. They are the product of what certain human beings think they know about invisible gods and goddesses, and of what they manifestly do not know about biology, meteorology, medicine, physics, and a dozen other specific sciences that have more than a little to say about the events in the world that concern them.
And it is astride this contemptible history of religious atrocity and scientific ignorance that Christianity now stands as an absurdly unselfconscious apotheosis. As John the Baptist is rumored to have said upon seeing Jesus for the first time, “Behold the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world” (John 1:29). For most Christians, this bizarre opinion still stands, and it remains the core of their faith. Christianity amounts to the claim that we must love and be loved by a God who approves of the scapegoating, torture, and murder of one man—his son, incidentally—in compensation for the misbehaviour and thought-crimes of all others.
Let the good news go forth: we live in a cosmos, the vastness of which we can scarcely even indicate in our thoughts, on a planet teeming with creatures we have only begun to understand, but the whole project was actually brought to a glorious fulfilment over twenty centuries ago, after one species of primate (our own) climbed down out of the trees, invented agriculture and iron tools, glimpsed (as through a glass, darkly) the possibility of keeping its excrement out of its food, and then singled out one among its number to be viciously flogged and nailed to a cross.
The notion that Jesus Christ died for our sins and that his death constitutes a successful propitiation of a “loving” God is a direct and undisguised inheritance of the scapegoating barbarism that has plagued bewildered people throughout history. Viewed in a modern context, it is an idea at once so depraved and fantastical that it is hard to know where to begin to criticize it. Add to the abject mythology surrounding one man’s death by torture—Christ’s passion—the symbolic cannibalism of the Eucharist. Did I say “symbolic”? Sorry, according to the Vatican it is most assuredly not symbolic. In fact, the opinion of the Council of Trent still stands:
"I likewise profess that in the Mass a true, proper and propitiatory sacrifice is offered to God on behalf of the living and the dead, and that the body and blood together with the soul and divinity of our Lord Jesus Christ is truly, really, and substantially present in the most holy sacrament of the Eucharist, and that there is a change of the whole substance of the bread into the body, and of the whole substance of the wine into blood; and this change the Catholic Church calls transubstantiation. I also profess that the whole and entire Christ and a true sacrament is received under each separate species."
Of course, Catholics have done some very strenuous and unconvincing theology in this area, in an effort to make sense of how they can really eat the body of Jesus, not mere crackers enrobed in metaphor, and really drink his blood without, in fact, being a cult of crazy cannibals. Suffice it to say, however, that a world view in which “propitiatory sacrifices on behalf of the living and the dead” figure prominently is rather difficult to defend in the year 2007. But this has not stopped otherwise intelligent and well-intentioned people from defending it.
And now we learn that even Mother Teresa, the most celebrated exponent of this dogmatism in a century, had her doubts about the whole story—the presence of Christ in the Eucharist, the existence of heaven, and even the existence of God:
"Lord, my God, who am I that You should forsake me? The Child of your Love — and now become as the most hated one — the one — You have thrown away as unwanted — unloved. I call, I cling, I want — and there is no One to answer — no One on Whom I can cling — no, No One. — Alone ... Where is my Faith — even deep down right in there is nothing, but emptiness & darkness — My God — how painful is this unknown pain — I have no Faith — I dare not utter the words & thoughts that crowd in my heart — & make me suffer untold agony.So many unanswered questions live within me afraid to uncover them — because of the blasphemy — If there be God — please forgive me — When I try to raise my thoughts to Heaven — there is such convicting emptiness that those very thoughts return like sharp knives & hurt my very soul. — I am told God loves me — and yet the reality of darkness & coldness & emptiness is so great that nothing touches my soul. Did I make a mistake in surrendering blindly to the Call of the Sacred Heart?
— addressed to Jesus, at the suggestion of a confessor, undated."
Teresa’s recently published letters reveal a mind riven by doubt (as it should have been). They also reveal a woman who was surely suffering from run-of-the-mill depression, though even secular commentators have begun to politely dress this fact in the colors of the saints and martyrs. Teresa’s response to her own bewilderment and hypocrisy (her term) reveals just how like quicksand religious faith can be. Her doubts about God’s existence were interpreted by her confessor as a sign that she was sharing Christ’s torment upon the cross; this exaltation of her wavering faith allowed Teresa “to love the darkness” she experienced in God’s apparent absence. Such is the genius of the unfalsifiable. We can see the same principle at work among her fellow Catholics: Teresa’s doubts have only enhanced her stature in the eyes of the Church, having been interpreted as a further evidence of God’s grace.
Ask yourself, when even the doubts of experts are thought to confirm a doctrine, what could possibly disconfirm it?
If you would like to comment on this article we will publish it in the next Psychelog.
Click 'comments' below.
The Association for Analytical Psychology Inc.
Box 32121 Christchurch
email: taap@paradise.net.nz
We may not be big – but we’re small
Reposted from the Washington Post
Humanity has had a long fascination with blood sacrifice. In fact, it has been by no means uncommon for a child to be born into this world only to be patiently and lovingly reared by religious maniacs who believe that the best way to keep the sun on its course or to ensure a rich harvest is to lead him by tender hand into a field or to a mountaintop and bury, butcher, or burn him alive as offering to an invisible (and almost certainly fictional) God.
In many ancient cultures whenever a nobleman died, other men and women allowed themselves to be buried alive so as to serve as his retainers in the next world. In ancient Rome, children were sometimes slaughtered so that the future could be read in their entrails. The Dyak women of Borneo would not even look at a suitor unless he came bearing a net full of human heads as a love offering. Some Fijian prodigy devised a powerful sacrament called “Vakatoga” which required that a victim’s limbs be cut off and eaten while he watched. Among the Iroquois, captives from other tribes were often permitted to live for many years, and even to marry, all the while being doomed to be flayed alive as an oblation to the God of War; whatever children they produced while in captivity were disposed of in the same ritual. African tribes too numerous to name have a long history of murdering people to send as couriers in a one-way dialogue with their ancestors or to convert their body parts into magical charms. Ritual murders of this sort continue in many African societies to this day.
It is essential to realize that such impossibly stupid misuses of human life have always been explicitly religious. They are the product of what certain human beings think they know about invisible gods and goddesses, and of what they manifestly do not know about biology, meteorology, medicine, physics, and a dozen other specific sciences that have more than a little to say about the events in the world that concern them.
And it is astride this contemptible history of religious atrocity and scientific ignorance that Christianity now stands as an absurdly unselfconscious apotheosis. As John the Baptist is rumored to have said upon seeing Jesus for the first time, “Behold the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world” (John 1:29). For most Christians, this bizarre opinion still stands, and it remains the core of their faith. Christianity amounts to the claim that we must love and be loved by a God who approves of the scapegoating, torture, and murder of one man—his son, incidentally—in compensation for the misbehaviour and thought-crimes of all others.
Let the good news go forth: we live in a cosmos, the vastness of which we can scarcely even indicate in our thoughts, on a planet teeming with creatures we have only begun to understand, but the whole project was actually brought to a glorious fulfilment over twenty centuries ago, after one species of primate (our own) climbed down out of the trees, invented agriculture and iron tools, glimpsed (as through a glass, darkly) the possibility of keeping its excrement out of its food, and then singled out one among its number to be viciously flogged and nailed to a cross.
The notion that Jesus Christ died for our sins and that his death constitutes a successful propitiation of a “loving” God is a direct and undisguised inheritance of the scapegoating barbarism that has plagued bewildered people throughout history. Viewed in a modern context, it is an idea at once so depraved and fantastical that it is hard to know where to begin to criticize it. Add to the abject mythology surrounding one man’s death by torture—Christ’s passion—the symbolic cannibalism of the Eucharist. Did I say “symbolic”? Sorry, according to the Vatican it is most assuredly not symbolic. In fact, the opinion of the Council of Trent still stands:
"I likewise profess that in the Mass a true, proper and propitiatory sacrifice is offered to God on behalf of the living and the dead, and that the body and blood together with the soul and divinity of our Lord Jesus Christ is truly, really, and substantially present in the most holy sacrament of the Eucharist, and that there is a change of the whole substance of the bread into the body, and of the whole substance of the wine into blood; and this change the Catholic Church calls transubstantiation. I also profess that the whole and entire Christ and a true sacrament is received under each separate species."
Of course, Catholics have done some very strenuous and unconvincing theology in this area, in an effort to make sense of how they can really eat the body of Jesus, not mere crackers enrobed in metaphor, and really drink his blood without, in fact, being a cult of crazy cannibals. Suffice it to say, however, that a world view in which “propitiatory sacrifices on behalf of the living and the dead” figure prominently is rather difficult to defend in the year 2007. But this has not stopped otherwise intelligent and well-intentioned people from defending it.
And now we learn that even Mother Teresa, the most celebrated exponent of this dogmatism in a century, had her doubts about the whole story—the presence of Christ in the Eucharist, the existence of heaven, and even the existence of God:
"Lord, my God, who am I that You should forsake me? The Child of your Love — and now become as the most hated one — the one — You have thrown away as unwanted — unloved. I call, I cling, I want — and there is no One to answer — no One on Whom I can cling — no, No One. — Alone ... Where is my Faith — even deep down right in there is nothing, but emptiness & darkness — My God — how painful is this unknown pain — I have no Faith — I dare not utter the words & thoughts that crowd in my heart — & make me suffer untold agony.So many unanswered questions live within me afraid to uncover them — because of the blasphemy — If there be God — please forgive me — When I try to raise my thoughts to Heaven — there is such convicting emptiness that those very thoughts return like sharp knives & hurt my very soul. — I am told God loves me — and yet the reality of darkness & coldness & emptiness is so great that nothing touches my soul. Did I make a mistake in surrendering blindly to the Call of the Sacred Heart?
— addressed to Jesus, at the suggestion of a confessor, undated."
Teresa’s recently published letters reveal a mind riven by doubt (as it should have been). They also reveal a woman who was surely suffering from run-of-the-mill depression, though even secular commentators have begun to politely dress this fact in the colors of the saints and martyrs. Teresa’s response to her own bewilderment and hypocrisy (her term) reveals just how like quicksand religious faith can be. Her doubts about God’s existence were interpreted by her confessor as a sign that she was sharing Christ’s torment upon the cross; this exaltation of her wavering faith allowed Teresa “to love the darkness” she experienced in God’s apparent absence. Such is the genius of the unfalsifiable. We can see the same principle at work among her fellow Catholics: Teresa’s doubts have only enhanced her stature in the eyes of the Church, having been interpreted as a further evidence of God’s grace.
Ask yourself, when even the doubts of experts are thought to confirm a doctrine, what could possibly disconfirm it?
If you would like to comment on this article we will publish it in the next Psychelog.
Click 'comments' below.
The Association for Analytical Psychology Inc.
Box 32121 Christchurch
email: taap@paradise.net.nz
We may not be big – but we’re small
CRISIS OF CONFIDENCE IN PSYCHOANALYSIS
by Stephen A Mitchell
The passionate conviction with which analysts have traditionally held their own theories makes particularly astonishing the growing revolution in thinking about what the analyst knows that has emerged in the past ten to fifteen years. This shift in thinking has taken place not on the level of theory but on the level of metatheory: theory about theory. It does not concern questions about what motivates the analysand, the structure of mind, the development of emotional life. Rather, it concerns the question of what the analyst can know about any of these things! This realm of current psychoanalytic debate entails a fundamental redefinition of the very nature of psychoanalytic thought and of psycho-analysis as a discipline. Whereas earlier generations of psychoanalysts prided themselves on knowing and being brave enough to know, the current generation of psychoanalytic authors tends increasingly to stress the value of not knowing and the courage that requires. A growing chorus of voices from quite different psychoanalytic traditions stresses the enormous complexity and fundamental ambiguity of experience. Consider the following excerpts from three contemporary psychoanalytic authors with very divergent points of view. One of the few things they have in common is their emphasis on how little the analyst can really know, and how anxiety-provoking that is. The very breakdown of narrative order, the temporary chaos which is provoked, may, in itself, be vital to a creative process: a reorganization of experience into far more complex and flexible patterns.
I am claiming that the real task in therapy is not so much making sense of the data as it is, but resisting the temptation to make sense of the data! (Levenson, 1992, p. 189)One reason that psychoanalysts cling to rules and heroes is the realization that without them they would be set adrift. ...To suggest that we need neither rules nor heroes nor neurology is perhaps the scariest position of all. ...We walk through life uncertain and unsure and, yes, a little frightened. The fear is of living in the open without the sense of security that comes from closure. (Goldberg, 1990, pp. 68-69)When approaching the unconscious-that is, what we do not know, not what we do know-we, patient and analyst alike, are certain to be disturbed. Anyone who is going to see a patient tomorrow should, at some point, experience fear. In every consulting room there ought to ; be two rather frightened people: the patient and the psycho-analyst. If they are not, one wonders why they are bothering to find out what ': everyone knows. (Bion, 1990, pp. 4-5) :
Donald Spence (1987b, chap. 5) has noted the similarity between the self-portrait of the analyst in Freud's case histories and Sherlock Holmes in Conan Doyle's detective stories. In both, the brilliant and discerning detective/analyst finds the singular solution to a bizarre and totally confusing quagmire of apparently unrelated details. In more recent psycho- analytic literature the analyst (more like the plodding, seemingly confused television detective Columbo than Holmes) is portrayed less as presenting the patient with the Truth about experience than as challenging the false and overly simplistic truths that the patient brought into the analysis. Other authors and practitioners who still believe they know things are often portrayed as fainthearted worshipers of illusions. In a reversal of traditional psychoanalytic machismo, it now sometimes appears that the capacity to contain the dread of not knowing is a measure of analytic virtue; the fewer convictions, the better and the braver!The reasons for this very different attitude about theory can be found both outside of psychoanalysis in the culture at large and also within psychoanalysis and its maturation as a discipline in its own right.
From Hope and Dread in Psychoanalysisby Stephen A. Mitchell
The Association for Analytical Psychology Inc.
Box 32121 Christchurchemail:
taap@paradise.net.nz
We may not be big – but we’re small
The passionate conviction with which analysts have traditionally held their own theories makes particularly astonishing the growing revolution in thinking about what the analyst knows that has emerged in the past ten to fifteen years. This shift in thinking has taken place not on the level of theory but on the level of metatheory: theory about theory. It does not concern questions about what motivates the analysand, the structure of mind, the development of emotional life. Rather, it concerns the question of what the analyst can know about any of these things! This realm of current psychoanalytic debate entails a fundamental redefinition of the very nature of psychoanalytic thought and of psycho-analysis as a discipline. Whereas earlier generations of psychoanalysts prided themselves on knowing and being brave enough to know, the current generation of psychoanalytic authors tends increasingly to stress the value of not knowing and the courage that requires. A growing chorus of voices from quite different psychoanalytic traditions stresses the enormous complexity and fundamental ambiguity of experience. Consider the following excerpts from three contemporary psychoanalytic authors with very divergent points of view. One of the few things they have in common is their emphasis on how little the analyst can really know, and how anxiety-provoking that is. The very breakdown of narrative order, the temporary chaos which is provoked, may, in itself, be vital to a creative process: a reorganization of experience into far more complex and flexible patterns.
I am claiming that the real task in therapy is not so much making sense of the data as it is, but resisting the temptation to make sense of the data! (Levenson, 1992, p. 189)One reason that psychoanalysts cling to rules and heroes is the realization that without them they would be set adrift. ...To suggest that we need neither rules nor heroes nor neurology is perhaps the scariest position of all. ...We walk through life uncertain and unsure and, yes, a little frightened. The fear is of living in the open without the sense of security that comes from closure. (Goldberg, 1990, pp. 68-69)When approaching the unconscious-that is, what we do not know, not what we do know-we, patient and analyst alike, are certain to be disturbed. Anyone who is going to see a patient tomorrow should, at some point, experience fear. In every consulting room there ought to ; be two rather frightened people: the patient and the psycho-analyst. If they are not, one wonders why they are bothering to find out what ': everyone knows. (Bion, 1990, pp. 4-5) :
Donald Spence (1987b, chap. 5) has noted the similarity between the self-portrait of the analyst in Freud's case histories and Sherlock Holmes in Conan Doyle's detective stories. In both, the brilliant and discerning detective/analyst finds the singular solution to a bizarre and totally confusing quagmire of apparently unrelated details. In more recent psycho- analytic literature the analyst (more like the plodding, seemingly confused television detective Columbo than Holmes) is portrayed less as presenting the patient with the Truth about experience than as challenging the false and overly simplistic truths that the patient brought into the analysis. Other authors and practitioners who still believe they know things are often portrayed as fainthearted worshipers of illusions. In a reversal of traditional psychoanalytic machismo, it now sometimes appears that the capacity to contain the dread of not knowing is a measure of analytic virtue; the fewer convictions, the better and the braver!The reasons for this very different attitude about theory can be found both outside of psychoanalysis in the culture at large and also within psychoanalysis and its maturation as a discipline in its own right.
From Hope and Dread in Psychoanalysisby Stephen A. Mitchell
The Association for Analytical Psychology Inc.
Box 32121 Christchurchemail:
taap@paradise.net.nz
We may not be big – but we’re small
MEANING AND MADNESS
by Stanley
Over the course of the years I have become quite mean about meaning; almost miserly you might say – a bad case, perhaps, of excessive scepticism. I would call it philosophical caution. The ‘meaning of life’ is something people crave if they haven’t got it and are driven mad if they’ve got too much. Not enough meaning is what we call ‘depression’; and too much is what we call ‘manic’.
Depression is easily spotted. People will say there’s no point to life, nothing in it – life has no meaning. But the other end of the scale, the manic end, can be a bit more deceptive. Easy to spot if a person is over the top where even the smallest detail in life is pregnant with significance and burgeoning with meaning, where life is monstrously larger than life, where a bird sitting on the garden fence means something, or spiritualising about the significance of the clock stopping at exactly twelve, or what did the postman mean when he said ‘good morning’ like that.
But the world fraught with meaning comes in all shades from simple faith to the most bizarre superstitious concoctions. The more outlandish beliefs and meanings, separated by the distance of history, are easily recognizable for what they are. The Incas, for example, knew quite well the meaning of life. It was simply that the sun was hungry for blood and human hearts. So, twenty times a year there would be these wonderful festivals. A thousand celebrants, one by one, would ascend the sun-temple steps where a priest would raise the sacrificial knife and surgically gouge out their living hearts and hold it aloft still pulsing with blood – a gift to appease the sun-god.
Nearer to home is the meaning that Catholics endow the little biscuit the priest gives them to eat, a biscuit which is not a biscuit but somehow the actual body of Christ; a nice little bit of sublimated cannibalism that nobody seems to think extraordinary. Not at all over the top, apparently! Neither is the person who has to plant his garlic on exactly the first night of the new moon – not exactly common-garden sense, but not mad! The meaning of the moon in this case is less harmful than the meaning the Aztecs gave to the sun.
Is it the terror of meaningless depression that incites the profusions of significances with which we embellish life? It’s almost as if any meaning is better than none. When the Roman Empire was crumbling astro-religion swept through the population in a wild scramble for security – the stars as a comfort blanket. Every upper-class family had their personal astrologer who would daily announce the complicated conjunctions of the stars and what they meant – and god help the Emperor’s astrologer if he failed come up with something favourable or, if what he did come up with, didn’t happen.
Then there are the deep meanings that the great thinkers have given us. Saint Thomas Aquinas probably wrote the most influential philosophical theology of all time, about nothing less than the meaning of Christ, the Bible and the whole of God’s creation. He wrote the most profound, scholarly, comprehensive, intellectual work of utter drivel you could imagine. The work of Doctor Angelicus, as he was known, has been the bedrock of church thinking for seven hundred years and is so even today. But we never get to the small things: we never get to hear whether St. Thomas was worried about his piles when he went to the toilet.
Recently I was raving on like this about some bizarre idea like ‘channeling the wisdom of a long-dead guru in the Himalayas’ when someone said: ‘why not’. As if to say, why shouldn’t it be true? Exactly. Why not? That’s precisely the point. It could be true. No reason to not to believe it. No reason one way or the other. Why not believe if it makes you feel better.
Believing in the Tooth Fairy can make you feel better, but it doesn’t help in the real world; belief in a spiritual system makes you feel bigger and better, but the price is being slightly out of touch!
I am impatient and sceptical with large-scale meaningful scenarios because they hide the really important issues in psychological life. Perhaps that’s their purpose. They encourage a sort of addictive drunkenness, an unreal, manic largess that covers up the small worries we think we should have grown out of. They inhibit reflection on the close, personal concerns in life that really mean something. Over and over in therapy we find it’s the small, childish things we overlook that really count. Simply acknowledging them can make a world of difference – helping us to be more relaxed about our frail humanity.
The Association for Analytical Psychology Inc.
Box 32121 Christchurch
We may not be big – but we’re small
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