.............................. by Stanley
...........There is a common misconception that stubborn personal problems can be solved by a better understanding of them. And so intelligent people can be attracted to and hooked by doctrines they don’t understand. This is because, they think, the secret must lie in something that’s beyond them, in something they don’t yet understand.
...........Let me explain. Suppose John has a difficult personal problem like recurrent depression or repetitive bad relationships or overeating or drinking too much. He asks himself, ‘why do I do this? There is something wrong and I don’t know what it is.’ Now begins his search to find out what is wrong with him. So he reads books or listens to taped talks by those who claim to know what is wrong with people and who also claim they know the answer.
.......... If you understand what is wrong you should be able to put it right. Right?
...........Right! So it’s obvious that John’s present understanding of himself is faulty otherwise he would be OK. His understanding must be lacking. That’s the key: ‘my present understanding is faulty’. It’s the key to his search which, by this very assumption, is doomed to fail.
...........It is doomed because all one ever has is one’s present understanding.
...........It follows logically that whatever John does understand can’t be the solution because he still gets depressed, eats or drinks too much or whatever. His present understanding is faulty. That’s his conclusion. But one always only ever has one’s present understanding. Deadlock!
..........Now he will have the tendency to read books or listen to tapes that he can’t understand. These hook him because the answer must lie in something he doesn’t yet understand. Thus the allure of the obscure.
..........Mystical or esoteric doctrines play into this unfortunate misconception. For example: ‘I really don’t understand Jung. He’s very profound and confusing. I’m attracted because he promises the answer. But I don’t really understand him. I’ll have to read him more and try harder to find the secret.’
..........But assuming there is a secret to be found, which is doubtful, he would never recognise it because it would be a present understanding – which, by definition, he always thinks is wrong.
..........Remember, when John tries hard to understand it means he overlooks what he does see or grasp because of the assumption that it must be faulty. He overlooks small insights. He misses the small steps because he wants the big step – the total disappearance of the problem.
..........This is a sign of real desperation and of prolonged deprivation. The only hope he sees is the magic of occult enlightenment or mystic understanding, the flash of light – fulfillment at last. It is a humungous longing for something he missed long ago. Something life-supporting that was out of reach.
..........He has only known deprivation; and an attachment to a mystical doctrine will guarantee the deprivation will persist. What he wants is always just beyond, like it always has been. The Search then becomes the leitmotif of his life – the search for the answer, the love, the touch, maybe the smile he missed when he first woke up in the world.
..........Failing the gift of life he longs for, failing that, whatever immediately gives itself to him, the wee present insight, can’t be important – simply because he has it right now, it isn’t what he is reaching for. He is still reaching for what was unreachable. He always never gets what he really wants. That’s the template for all his experience; but maybe secret is in the folds of the guru’s robe or hidden in his profound utterances or in his next book. The lifelong search continues.
...........A similar guarantee of continued deprivation affects many followers of New Age Panaceas. It goes like this:
..........‘I understand THE OCCULT LAW OF ATTRACTION, but I haven’t yet been able to fully put it into practice. When I do I know I’ll feel great.’
.......... A variation of this is:
‘I understand POSITIVE AFFIRMATION and I put it into practice every day. My life is now wonderful. If I could get my husband to understand me things would be perfect. I’m working on it. As it is, he’s just too pig-headed and stubborn! Otherwise, everything is just great!
.............Yet another version:
‘CHANNELLING with my spiritual guide makes me feel so good when he helps me understand my life. I feel confident that I will be able to get off Prozac in the very near future.’
............Yet again:
When my therapist INTERPRETS MY DREAMS I’m amazed how he sees things I would never have thought of. He’s absolutely marvelous – I hope one day he’ll ask me about me.
.
.
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Monday, November 26, 2007
Monday, November 19, 2007
THE BODY NEVER FORGETS
by Stanley
...........................and see Lanara's comment
...........................below
.......A few posts ago I wrote a little piece on near-death and out-of-the-body experiences. But did you know it is not uncommon for a person to spend a lifetime not quite in their body? In the trade it’s called ‘dissociation’, a very clinically cold term for a very real – and I won’t say ‘painful’ – lifestyle, because pain is what the condition is designed to avoid.
......When it is full-blown it is supposed to be a BPD (Borderline Personality Disorder), when it is less noticeable it is like a partial anesthetization, a condition the person may just accept because that’s always been their relation to their body.
.......A common response to very early physical trauma is to actually leave the body. Babies and very young children are quite capable of doing this. It is one way to escape unbearable pain. In a recovered memory one person described how they literally ‘went up the wall’. Recovered memories of hospital operations often yield vivid experiences of looking down on one’s own body on the operating table and watching what’s going on – but, and here’s the thing, not feeling it.
........Another common reason for abandoning the body is because it carries all one’s unwanted emotions.
........There are people who are so immune to pain that they can have minor operations or have their teeth drilled without anesthetics. Some are just brave and stoic, but there are those who can do it because they are shut off from the body; they just don’t feel physical sensations like other people.
........Along with this can go a very dismissive attitude to the body – often quite punishing. They don’t seem to notice when they are overtired or when they hurt themselves. They prefer grueling exercise or hard work. They almost seem to enjoy treating the body harshly. Outright hatred of the body is not uncommon; some even go so far as to play rugby or deprive it of food. They inadvertently notice a bad bruise, but have no idea how they got it.
........A social milieu like school sports or gung-ho male friends can induce this attitude, but for some people it is a more deeply psychological problem. A shutdown of that order makes the experience of physical pleasure difficult too. Eating is like filling up at the petrol station; and sex is restricted to a momentary genital orgasm – more like a sneeze! Pleasure can be so scarce that it has to be stolen.
........Desperate to escape the deficiency of sensation a person can get to a point where any sensation is better than none. Cutting and self-harm can be a frantic response to physical numbness.
........It goes without saying that there are illnesses which have nothing to do with the body’s memory or the defences we set up against it. But one thing you learn in psychotherapy is that the body never forgets. Pain and tension that is not experienced is pain and tension that is stored. Sooner or later the repressed will return. Aging makes it increasingly difficult to keep the body and physical sensations at bay. But more especially, gradually getting in touch with one’s emotional life will bring the body back to life – and with it the repressed pain and emotion it has carried for years. The body needs something, is trying to complete something, so that life can move forward.
........Sometimes when a person is working at an emotional level there are physical consequences that follow: the body will move through the associated pain hours later. Even a release of happiness can liberate a painful physical upheaval. Sometimes an emotional release is preceded by physical tension holding the emotion in, like a pressure cooker.
........Fighting the body is counterproductive. Best is to use these kinds of pains or tensions to move into the felt-sense of them. This may revive memories, associations or images. The felt-sense of physical pain is different from the actual pain itself – it’s the way the pain makes you feel. I don’t mean feelings as big emotions, but more subtle feelings that are located physically – often around the heart or the centre of the body – but sometimes very diffused, almost a bodily mood that reminds of something in the past, something vaguely familiar.
.........One’s own super-ego that hates the body can intervene, harassing and trying to make nonsense of this procedure. But with kindness and empathy for the body this process can revive your very closest friend, the one that’s been with you all your life; and knows many things about you better than you do.
Thursday, November 8, 2007
FREUD AND JUNG.
by Stanley
........It’s surprising how a men of enormous talent, foundational geniuses, can have a side that seems disappointingly insincere; an almost flamboyant disregard for their own principles; surprising how men such of influence and intelligence can be seduce by their own genius into believing the myth of infallibility that has grown up around them. It’s quite a thing! How easy it must be to get swallowed up by the deification of followers.
.......In some, it becomes a pathological illness as it did with L. Ron Hubbard, the founder of scientology. He turned into a paranoid bully and dictator of the worst kind. Yet, in listening to some of his lectures on how to conduct therapy, what comes across is his profound sense of humanity and kindness. That’s what hooks people in. Part of the scientology code was to never evaluate a client’s data and never invalidate his person. Sounds like Carl Rogers, doesn’t it? Yet anyone who disagreed with scientology was labeled by Hubbard ‘a suppressive person’ and was hammered with a ruthless and deliberate campaign of persecution. The offender would be declared officially ‘fair game’ and subjected to numberless court proceedings – not to win a case, but to harass the offender into silence.
......Hubbard was a small fish (contrary to his own opinion). But Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung are not. They are respected and influential. Yet they both seem to have a streak of insincerity – or to be more generous – let’s say, inconsistency. And it bodes well for us to be aware of it. Freud more than Jung was captive to the myth he himself engendered.
.......One of Freud’s great contributions was the idea of the analyst listening to the patient’s free associations, setting aside all judgment, listening with open attention in what Freud called ‘evenly suspended attention’ carefully listening to hints of what was going inside the patient.
.......Freud’s stated principal was that an analyst should abandon an interpretation when nothing from the patient’s unconscious corroborated it. Yet in one of his famous cases, known simply as The Wolf Man, he tells us that he gave up his interpretation after nine months of analysis. Nine months! Remember that during that time Freud would have been insisting on his own view of what was wrong with the patient and would regard any demurring as ‘resistance’.
......And Jung said, ‘I have no theory about dreams; I do not know how dreams arise. And I am not at all sure that my way of handling dreams even deserves the name of a ‘method’. I share all your prejudices against dream-interpretation as the quintessence of uncertainty and arbitrariness’.
......A wonderfully unpretentious statement that gives an assurance of Jung’s modesty.
.......Yet, again and again, one reads his own account where, with the utmost certainty, he announces to the patient some interpretation based on an ancient myth that bears no connection with what the patient has presented. He announces this fictional diagnosis with a complete sense of certainly, so obviously based on his pet theories; and unbelievably tells us that with this single master stroke he solved the case. Here he seems to me more involved in his own world than with his patient’s.
.......In another place Jung tells us, ‘I may allow myself only one criterion for the result of my labours: does it work?
.......‘Working’ in this case could simply mean that the patient was so impressed by the famous man’s certainty that it acted as a whacking great suggestion, a powerful placebo. No one has an instant conversion like that unless they are bowled over by a massive input.
.......Some of Jung’s more obscure and esoteric writings lend themselves to our New Age Earth Worship and White Occultism. And for some they can inspire an endless search for the secret. Mysticism and mystification can provoke a search powered by a permanent unconscious conviction that ‘what I need is out of reach’.
......The scenario goes something like this:
...... “I am unhappy; therefore there is something I need to learn. What I already know is obviously not ‘it’, because if it were I wouldn’t be unhappy. Therefore I need to understand something I don’t yet understand. There is a lot in Jung’s writing I don’t get – so maybe here is something I don’t know that I need to know.”
.......But these searchers for enlightenment never get out of the trap because whatever they do understand isn’t ‘it’, because what they need to know is something they don’t know.
......The search for the answer simply validates the basic unconscious premise: ‘what I need is out of reach.’
CODA
.......But for all their weaknesses both Freud and Jung have produced intelligently critical offspring. Thinkers like Lacan and Kohut are not fools. Their refinements take off from Freud’s work and think psychoanalysis further. The same must be said for those of the post-Jungian school like Hillman who, however much he differs from the master, still stands in the light of the great man. But lets not forget that the light of great men casts long shadows.
........It’s surprising how a men of enormous talent, foundational geniuses, can have a side that seems disappointingly insincere; an almost flamboyant disregard for their own principles; surprising how men such of influence and intelligence can be seduce by their own genius into believing the myth of infallibility that has grown up around them. It’s quite a thing! How easy it must be to get swallowed up by the deification of followers.
.......In some, it becomes a pathological illness as it did with L. Ron Hubbard, the founder of scientology. He turned into a paranoid bully and dictator of the worst kind. Yet, in listening to some of his lectures on how to conduct therapy, what comes across is his profound sense of humanity and kindness. That’s what hooks people in. Part of the scientology code was to never evaluate a client’s data and never invalidate his person. Sounds like Carl Rogers, doesn’t it? Yet anyone who disagreed with scientology was labeled by Hubbard ‘a suppressive person’ and was hammered with a ruthless and deliberate campaign of persecution. The offender would be declared officially ‘fair game’ and subjected to numberless court proceedings – not to win a case, but to harass the offender into silence.
......Hubbard was a small fish (contrary to his own opinion). But Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung are not. They are respected and influential. Yet they both seem to have a streak of insincerity – or to be more generous – let’s say, inconsistency. And it bodes well for us to be aware of it. Freud more than Jung was captive to the myth he himself engendered.
.......One of Freud’s great contributions was the idea of the analyst listening to the patient’s free associations, setting aside all judgment, listening with open attention in what Freud called ‘evenly suspended attention’ carefully listening to hints of what was going inside the patient.
.......Freud’s stated principal was that an analyst should abandon an interpretation when nothing from the patient’s unconscious corroborated it. Yet in one of his famous cases, known simply as The Wolf Man, he tells us that he gave up his interpretation after nine months of analysis. Nine months! Remember that during that time Freud would have been insisting on his own view of what was wrong with the patient and would regard any demurring as ‘resistance’.
......And Jung said, ‘I have no theory about dreams; I do not know how dreams arise. And I am not at all sure that my way of handling dreams even deserves the name of a ‘method’. I share all your prejudices against dream-interpretation as the quintessence of uncertainty and arbitrariness’.
......A wonderfully unpretentious statement that gives an assurance of Jung’s modesty.
.......Yet, again and again, one reads his own account where, with the utmost certainty, he announces to the patient some interpretation based on an ancient myth that bears no connection with what the patient has presented. He announces this fictional diagnosis with a complete sense of certainly, so obviously based on his pet theories; and unbelievably tells us that with this single master stroke he solved the case. Here he seems to me more involved in his own world than with his patient’s.
.......In another place Jung tells us, ‘I may allow myself only one criterion for the result of my labours: does it work?
.......‘Working’ in this case could simply mean that the patient was so impressed by the famous man’s certainty that it acted as a whacking great suggestion, a powerful placebo. No one has an instant conversion like that unless they are bowled over by a massive input.
.......Some of Jung’s more obscure and esoteric writings lend themselves to our New Age Earth Worship and White Occultism. And for some they can inspire an endless search for the secret. Mysticism and mystification can provoke a search powered by a permanent unconscious conviction that ‘what I need is out of reach’.
......The scenario goes something like this:
...... “I am unhappy; therefore there is something I need to learn. What I already know is obviously not ‘it’, because if it were I wouldn’t be unhappy. Therefore I need to understand something I don’t yet understand. There is a lot in Jung’s writing I don’t get – so maybe here is something I don’t know that I need to know.”
.......But these searchers for enlightenment never get out of the trap because whatever they do understand isn’t ‘it’, because what they need to know is something they don’t know.
......The search for the answer simply validates the basic unconscious premise: ‘what I need is out of reach.’
CODA
.......But for all their weaknesses both Freud and Jung have produced intelligently critical offspring. Thinkers like Lacan and Kohut are not fools. Their refinements take off from Freud’s work and think psychoanalysis further. The same must be said for those of the post-Jungian school like Hillman who, however much he differs from the master, still stands in the light of the great man. But lets not forget that the light of great men casts long shadows.
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