WHO OWNS YOUR BODY?

 .............................  by Stanley

......Whist still alive a person can abandon their body; and can do so for all kinds of reasons. Perhaps it is too painful, or is the repository of too many painful memories; or perhaps they have been seduced by an otherworld spirituality; or maybe they just detest the look of it. But I have become interested in another situation: when a person has given their body away and now someone else owns it.

......Why on earth would anyone do that – give away their own living body? Why would a person say to someone: ‘OK, you can have it’ – and forever after go on living a normal life – except that their body doesn’t belong to them.

......That’s right. Nobody would do this without some powerful reason. But perhaps it was the best thing to do if you’d lived in a poisonous family. It works like this: ‘nobody actually sees me. I am invisible. They really don’t know I’m here. They see me only as a physical presence in the family. I’m forced to behave and take part in their crazy games – I pretend, but it’s not me. The object they criticize and boss around is a ‘thing’ I inhabit.  I am angry with my body because they control it. It belongs to them It’s the symbol of my capitulation, of everything I despise. They hate it and I hate it too.  No one in my world talks about themselves, only about things. My body is just another object. It belongs to the world of them. A thing – well, I want nothing to do with it. It’s not me !

......The family knows ‘somebody’ is there, or rather they know a ‘body’ is in their space, but that’s all. It’s hard to believe that there are people to whom the existence of other subjectivities is quite unreal. Shocking I know, but they have no grasp that other persons exist in the way they themselves do. 

......But there’s a worse scenario – another nasty twist. When my body becomes the hated object, I switch over and adopt the family’s viewpoint and hate the ‘thing-body’, my ex-self, as much as, sometimes more, than they do. I am thoroughly on their side. Put graphically, I become part of the family that owns my despised body. I agree with them. I view it and hate it through their eyes. In such a family I tell myself: ‘everyone is beating me up, so I may as well beat myself up. Join the club. Let’s have a nice gang rape.’

 ......Years later the psychic situation remains the same. I may even insist that my family was always quite OK. But I find it strangely hard to take care of myself. I have this curious sadomasochistic attitude toward myself, particularly my physical being. I don’t even hate my body now, I just neglect it, use it with disregard. But my real dislike comes out whenever I look in the mirror.

......Childhood sexual abuse is another very strong reason a person will abandon their body.  I have seen some awful cases where, for a child, the physical and emotional pain of sexual abuse is so unbearable that they have simply given their body over to the abuser. It belongs to them; but it’s a body that is now disgusting. This is the psychic situation for the child – and can remain so for the rest of life.

......A consequence of any kind of evacuation of the body is a shortage of sensation. The body is the medium of communication with the world and we are hard wired to have all channels of perception wide open. Simply as an organism we need this to survive; as a human being we need it to enjoy the world. When the ‘doors of perception’ are wide open the grass looks greener and the sky looks bluer and the world comes alive.

......People who have experienced sensory deprivation in lightless, soundless floatation tanks will normally start hallucinating after a time. The mind makes up its own stimuli when the normal channels are shut down. 

......When I don’t own my body it has an anesthetizing effect so that I become sensation starved. I start to invent sensation. Self-harming is one way to satisfy this hunger. Pain is then somehow desirable. When you are deprived of sensation, any sensation is better than none. 

......Of course, since my real body belongs to the enemy, I can always have a substitute body like a shiny automobile that I make love to and masturbate in the garage every Saturday morning. But my real body is my primary home. If am a refugee from it, I can’t get back into it without help. Trying to do so by myself confirms that I can trust no one. And I will react badly to any manipulative therapy, simply because manipulation is why I left home in the first place. 

......If I am sensation starved there are all kinds of ways I can create some high powered input. I can always pick a fight with the wife or get paranoid about the neighbours. There is a thirst for excitement, the shot of adrenalin, the hit of drugs – anything that will open the doors of perception, if only for a moment.

......What do I really need?

......Some would call it human love. But it has to be of that rare kind that lets me be, that lets me own myself; the kind of connection with someone who doesn’t want to possess me or change me or make me a better person. As Carl Rogers said, I need that kind of regard for me as a person that is unconditional. I need someone who has an insatiable appetite to know who I really am, someone who doesn’t see me as reprehensible or ugly or deficient; above all, someone who doesn’t covertly try to manipulate me. And it will be someone who doesn’t even have to forgive me because there is nothing to forgive. But even then, it’s a long haul to trust again.

BEING UNDERSTOOD.

............a true fiction by Stanley

.....Being an understanding person can make you feel like the least understood person in the world, all relationships as a one-way flow – doing all the listening whilst seldom being listened to. Specialists in understanding people know its value because they have had so little of it from others. Scarcity teaches value. So, me, I’m very good at it.
.....As one of these ‘understanders’ I don’t really expect to be understood or for anyone to take the time and trouble to listen to me. There are compensations, though. I can assure myself I don’t need people to empathise with me. Not as much as most people do. I guess I’m different. In any case, people think they’re listening to you when they are really hanging their agendas on you. I try never to do that myself. I’m a very non-invasive person. At least, I think I am.
.....As a specialist in understanding people you’d think I’d know all about it. I do, but I’m learning a lot on the focusing workshop. Being on the receiving end of a focusing session came as quite a shock. Here I am talking about a personal problem, not a huge one, but still a problem; and there is this person sitting over there, not only listening to me, but who seems to be devoted to getting exactly what I’m saying. This is not easy to get used to. At first I think she’s doing it because she’s supposed to. After all, she’s a student like me. But the further we go the more I realise she’s not just putting it on – each moment she is seriously trying her best to understand exactly where I’m at. That’s all.
.....That’s it.
.....This has a strange effect on me. Every time she makes the effort to simply understand what I’m saying I find out what I am saying. Sounds absurd, doesn’t it? Seriously, no kidding. I hear myself. I actually hear what I’m saying. Weird! Not only that, I find out what I’m not saying, what is on the tip of my tongue. Things I normally wouldn’t say. When she gets what I mean, I seem to go on to get what I really mean. Meanings I didn’t know I meant until that moment.
.....Amazing! There is this person sitting over there not telling me anything, not suggesting anything, not implying anything. Not doing anything really. How come the effect on me is so powerful? What’s going on? I think I know what’s going on – it’s me that’s going on. I’m going on in a way I don’t usually do.
.....She’s very precise though. She won’t let anything go until she’s got exactly what I’m saying. That’s all she does. And once she’s really got what I mean … nothing! She does nothing with it! Just waits. No advice, no subtle suggestions. Nothing. I am back with myself. Strange how I’m half afraid of this – being with myself. And being myself with someone else too – daring to say what I really think. It’s like I have no alternative but to be honest with her and myself. The next thing I say I will have to tell the truth as far as I can. Daring to look inside myself and actually speak out. Hearing my voice talk about me. That’s how the session goes, leading me from one surprise to the next.
.....What would I normally do? I’d ask her a question about herself. Get her talking. Slip into my understanding role, escape and disappear.
.....Funny though, I like not escaping.
......It’s really nice to have someone.

DEAD BODIES WITH THINKING HEADS.

.......................................by Stanley


......La petite mort, the French call the human sexual orgasm, the little death.
But it is not the body that dies in this moment. It’s the thinking head that passes out. It has been said that we go unconscious at the moment of orgasm. But it’s the thinking head that switches off, not the body. For once, it’s the body’s life that takes over; when nature, you might say, has its way with us.
......There are many people whose bodies are so suppressed that they cannot have a sexual orgasm, or they struggle to get a little jerk, a frustrating hint of ‘poor man’s nirvana’ as they call it in India. For many, working themselves up to get a little ‘pop’ can be quite hard work. They battle the supremacy of the ego, where the body’s nature has been anaesthetised. Sexual foreplay – whether self administered or with another – is painful instead of pleasurable. And when the big moment is about to come they grit their teeth as though it is being wrenched out of them in spite of themselves; or worst still, it’s completely genital and localised, raising almost no emotion. Hardly more than a sneeze.
......For those lucky enough to be more connected, the lead up to an orgasm is not a struggle, but profoundly pleasurable; and the orgasm when it does come is like a seizure, shaking the very foundation of their being, knocking the ego off its throne. For a moment the thinking head gives up and is possessed by something utterly and profoundly bigger than itself. And the relief that follows is the smile of trust that one can allow oneself to be overtaken and taken over instead of always being uptight, in control and on guard. A moment that is highly desired yet feared.
......There are practices where foreplay by itself provides the transcendent experience. In any case, what is sought is a relief from responsibility, a wholesome connection where one gives over to nature.
......Have you ever tried living in your body instead of your head – shifting the centre of where you live? It’s not easy, even for a couple of minutes. There are meditation techniques that are helpful. Vipassana and Yoga are two disciplines encourage this shift. But the thinking head is too anxious to give up easily. It fights any relinquishment of its hegemony, its need for control and certainty, knowledge and answers to shore up its insecurity. All of which has distinct disadvantages.
......How often have you seen this with a friend: after wrestling with a personal problem for the umpteenth time, they say with a sigh of defeat:
.....‘Ohhh, I don’t know. I really don’t know’.
......It’s like they come up against a wall where they can go no further – only back to the beginning to repeat the same old story, the same old frustration, all seen in the same old way. There’s no answer. They have reached the boundary between the thinking head and their dead body, their deceased but most immediate friend who could have helped. They can only stare into the black hole inside themselves from which no help comes.
......But the very moment when the thinking head reaches such a deadlock, just where it gives up, is a moment of great opportunity. It is then maybe, just maybe, the head can let something else in. In Zen it can happen after the practice of long mediation on a deliberately impossible problem, the Koan, where the ego finally gives up. In focusing we call that place the ‘unclear edge’.
......The body’s not dead. It never has been; it’s just been shut out – losing the closest contact you have with nature’s life-force. And incidentally, your body knows more than just how to have an orgasm.
......It knew how to form you long before you developed a thinking head; it devised a way of dealing with your difficult family long before you could consciously work out a strategy; and your way of doing that may have saved your life. I’ve seen this many times. It knew exactly what you needed at each stage of your development from the moment you were conceived. Even when you didn’t get what you needed, your whole organism knew exactly what it was that was missing. And surprise! It still knows, right now. Exactly what you need. It knows things your thinking head can easily deny. It knows what nourishment you need; what subtle shift of ideas will move you forwards. It knows a place to look where you have never thought of looking. It holds the dead-end and frozen feelings that want to move on – and will do so given the chance.
......Freud signaled the end of the Victorian hypocrisy about the body and the instincts, dragging sex out into the open, exposing what lay beneath manners of polite society. The Victorian era has long gone, but today we have been hijacked by another kind of moralistic puritanism. The psychological revolution that promised a relief from repression has been hijacked by another form of obsessional hygiene. In Freud’s time you couldn’t pause in case you thought a naughty thought; today you can’t pause in case you think a negative thought.
......Positive psychology, spiritual positivism, positive therapists, positive outcomes, are all aspects of the new religion, the new hypocrisy, infecting every area of mental welfare and methods of professional help. The new ministers of this religion are the clinical psychologists, social welfare workers, cognitive behavioral therapists, self-help gurus and teachers in our counselling training institutes – all of those who pander to the illusion that the thinking head can provide a limitless spiritual credit card. All you have to do is think the right thoughts!
......Try our local Polytechnic courses on counselling and you will find them teaching NLP, Neuro-Linguistic Programming, training a new generation of counsellors who are ‘solution focused’, intolerant of any depth, but who are experts in putting people back into their thinking heads, making them preoccupied with cognitive hygiene, creating undernourished people whose only physical relief will be the occasional sneeze.
...
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NO EXIT

................................by Stanley

....I’m in a crowded bus going to town. I’m going to meet my girlfriend to buy her some underwear for her birthday. The bus is jammed packed with people. I think we must be getting near town so I start to work myself towards the exit. People are standing in the aisle. I push my way through. It’s a struggle. Near the exit I’m jammed in even tighter. The crush of people around me is unbearable and I begin to feel claustrophobic. Suddenly I wonder if I’m on the right bus and maybe it’s not going to stop to let me get out. My anxiety turns to panic. I wake up with a sense of recognition.
....How many times have I dreamed variations of this! Always it’s being confined in some sort of small space and unable to get out. As a boy I remember terrifying dreams of being shut up in a coffin and buried alive. Later of being locked in the boot of a car where I go screaming mad. It was always more or less the same scenario.
....I know what this is all about, so it doesn’t scare me so much now. I discovered what it was some years ago when I read about Stanilav Grof’s work with patients – regressing them into the birth trauma in full reality using Lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD-25). Dozens of patients testified to the same terrifying experience: the last stage in the birth canal where you are being crushed by massive forces and there’s no exit. I didn’t know about the felt-sense at that time – but reading this made an impact and connection so strong that I knew for sure. Thank heavens my claustrophobia has always been confined to the imagination and to a very occasional dream. The Germans have a colourful word for this experience: torschlusspanik. It means, literally, ‘gate-shut panic’. Like the ‘have-to-get-out’ scare that swept through East Germany when they built the Berlin Wall to keep them all in. It was a mass stampede to escape to the West.
....Although I have never had any fear of being in lifts or crowded places, like many people who suffer from claustrophobia, I have great sympathy for those who have.
....The birth experience is universal; for some it is highly traumatic. Some get over it, some don’t; and people can re-experience it in different ways during their lifetime.
....The interesting variation in my dream is that I am going to town to by a birthday present of underwear for my girlfriend. Very curious! Whose birthday are we dreaming about? The day of my birth, no doubt. And when I get out I will have a girlfriend. Not a Mum, but a girlfriend – which is even better with its promise of intimacy and underwear.
....The past is factual enough, but nothing in one’s history has a fixed meaning. Dreams reflect how meanings have endless possibilities. So far as meaning goes, my history is always being rewritten – not according to my whim, but to the way my life needs to go.

MASLOW’S PEAKS

.................................... by Stanley

.......Abraham Maslow (1908-1970) was one of the founders of humanistic psychology. He coined the term ‘peak experience’ to describe the non-religious, mystical-type experience of happiness. He was an empirical scientist who wanted to examine the realities of wellbeing rather than the pathologies of sickness. He was not selling positivism, but trying to find some further truths about human nature.
....... Critics of humanistic psychology regard the notion of ‘peak experiences’ as a hedonistic philosophy - a morality based on pleasure. Psychologist James Hillman observed that peaks and highs say nothing of the worth of the person having them, for they can occur among psychopaths and criminals, inferring that a serial killer can have a high for each victim he strangles. Transcendence by means of a high on drugs, he said, is a psychopathological state in disguise.
.......Such overall criticism is too hopelessly pessimistic. In seeking criteria for what is worthwhile, if we want to know what is valuable in life, where else can we look but to the experience of happiness?
.......But an arsonist’s thrill, a sadistic bully’s arousal, an evangelist’s mania, an abuser’s titillation, a glue-sniffer’ high, a shoplifter’s adrenalin buzz, can hardly be called states of happiness. Perhaps they do give a distant glimmer of the real thing, but they are twisted, divisive and manic, burdened and convoluted with repression. They only give only a slither of sensation when sensibility is all but suppressed, where the true experience of happiness is no longer possible. Such highs are cut off and out of touch; they are certainly not the ‘peak experiences’ that Maslow describes.
.......Maslow was interested in creative people who were, as he said, ‘self-actualising’ and more liable to have ‘peak experiences’. But he knew that ‘self actualisation’ was not limited to ‘especially creative people’, to artists, poets, writers and so on. He did not wish to exclude the creativity of ordinary people. He maintained that ‘a first rate soup is better than a second rate painting’.
..
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THE MAD WILL TO BELIEVE.

........................................................by Stanley

.....An ideology is how we would like to believe things are; good sense is letting experience tell us how they really are. Sometimes the will to believe an idea is so strong that it overwhelms what experience would otherwise tell us. It’s a kind of madness.
.....A wonderful example of this was Josef Stalin’s hatred of genetics. He hated it because the idea of genes as physical structures passed down through the generations meant that human nature wasn't changeable just by training and indoctrination. The Russian dictator wanted to believe that he could change humanity and create the perfect socialist society where everyone was a perfectly satisfied communist. He would create a new breed of humans: homo sovieticus ! [1]
......He favoured a wily biologist named Lysenko who fed him a phony biological theory that Stalin wanted to hear and who promised that with it he could turn Russian agriculture into a land of plenty. To western biologists Lysenko was a joke; his theory was ignoring the fundamental biological principle that acquired characteristics are not inheritable. Never mind that - the Kremlin embarked on a massive nation-wide revolutionary program of agricultural ‘reform’ based on Lysenko’s theories. Josef Stalin unveiled a "great breakthrough," the first ambitious five-year plan to modernize the Soviet Union. Agriculture was to be collectivised and Lysenko theories were to be put into practice. Several dissenting Soviet biologists who disagreed with Lysenko were whisked off to the Gulag Archipelago and the Russian Academy of Science meekly towed the line. The result was a nationwide collapse of agriculture and a disastrous famine in which millions of peasants died of starvation. It was a catastrophe from which Russia never recovered and finally contributed to the breakup of the Soviet Union.
......This lethal combination of pseudo-science and ideology we see again today in the modern so-called ‘creationists’ who insist that the bible can teach us about evolution. They have to inject the Bible myths into science at any cost, and insist that it be taught in school science classes as an ‘alternative to Darwinism’.
......Although the outcome of such educational corruption may not be as dramatic as the Stalin/Lysenko debacle, the damage is none the less serious, modeling a mindset of intellectual dishonesty for young people – training them to skew facts to fit belief, schooling them in religious bigotry. Hanging on to the belief that the earth is only six thousand years old in spite of all evidence to the contrary is part of modern ‘creationist science’.
...... If John McCain kicks bucket – he is 71 – the president of the U.S., the most influential and powerful nation on the planet, may well be an ignorant bimbo who actually believes this nonsense. She also believes the U.S. invasion Iraq was the will of God. She believes, too, that in her lifetime the Son of Man will come in all His glory, and all the angels with Him…and He will separate people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats. This same Sarah Palin could be Commander-in-Chief of the U.S. armed forces. That is simply not safe.
..............................*
......The opposite of the mad will to believe is an openness to experience, allowing facts to influence the way we think, often to show us we are wrong. A colleague was once upset when a theory of Carl Rogers did not measure up to empirical tests. Rogers replied: ‘Facts are never unfriendly’.
......I’m not pushing science – it’s an attitude I am talking about. I’m sure psychotherapy can never be an exact science, but it must have the essential attitude that belief is junior to experience. We must be modest in our claims. What is important is letting life and nature teach and allow them to contradict our cherished ideas. It’s a matter of attitude.
......The human will to believe that disregards experiential evidence is always potentially dangerous. Some things in life we have to believe without evidence: like the sun will rise in the morning. But there are no guarantees – tomorrow my sun may rise, but yours may not.

[1] The story of the Lysenko/Stalin affair you can read in a review of a new book at: http://www.themoscowtimes.com/arts/2008/09/05/370710.htm

THE BODY AND THE EGO.

....................by Stanley

.....Let’s imagine an organisation that has to deal with the world of people, say a typical community mental health service. At the top is the CEO and board of directors; below that are the various levels of management. Under these, are the helpers who go out into the field to deal with people and their problems in the jungle of life, these are the support workers who cope with real people in the real world.
..... It is true to say that the CEO does not experience the world in the same way as do the workers in the field. This is not a judgemental statement in any way. I am trying to isolate a very definite difference: a difference in experience – noting the difference just as neutrally as one would say: eating an orange is a different experience from eating spaghetti. The CEO may hold regular meetings of the staff to share work problems, but it is still true to say that the worker’s have their own experiences. They see of the world in the raw. The CEO has a different perspective. He has other things on his mind, on paper work, on government funding and inspections – as well as his own personal issues as a boss. I am simply saying that the body of field workers’ experience the world in a way that top management does not – and cannot.
.....I have used this story as an analogy or metaphor for the way the physical body is related to the ego or conscious ‘I’. I am suggesting that the body experiences the world in a way that the conscious ego does not – and cannot.
.....I’m skipping the intricacies of neurophysiology and the mind/brain problem. I want to draw a simple distinction between the way the body experiences the world and the way the conscious ego does. Firstly, we must grasp the fact that the body does experience the world for itself, in its own way – like the field workers in our analogy. I’m asking you to suppose that the body interacts with the environment directly, immediately and holistically, without conscious analysis, language, systems of ideas or our kind of understanding. It has an implicit feel for the way forward in ways that the self-absorbed ego often misses. The body’s way of interacting and dealing with its environment is immediate, precise and decisive and without analytic thinking. It can also interact cooperatively with the thinking level of conscious ego, if the ego can allow it.
.....Part of the body’s environment is the ego itself. One of the things the body has to cope with is an ego that gives little status to the body’s own experience; an ego that assumes control without consultation. I don’t usually think of my body as having a problem with me. That way round never occurs to us because we think of the body as an intricate but passive mechanism, a vehicle with the ego as the driver.
.....Those of you who attended two of our previous seminar series (the one on phenomenology and the last series on the Freudian tradition) will remember the discussion on ‘primal experiencing’ and also Loewald’s ‘primal density of experience’. And now, Dr. Brian Broom tells us in his ‘Meaningful Disease’ (Broom 2007) that “…it may follow that not just the brain but the whole body is capable of ‘experience’ at some level, because the body is not just dead matter organised to give the appearance of life… the brain may only be more an organiser and developer of experience, a generator of more sophisticated experience.”
.....We don’t doubt that animals are capable of experience; that, in their own way, they have intelligence, can feel pain and suffering. And there is now some proof that dogs have telepathic abilities (Sheldrake 1999).
.....There are some very alien ways of experiencing the world. We don’t know what it is like to be a bat (Nagel 1974) but we can be sure that there is something it is like to be a bat – in the sense that only a bat knows what it is like to be a bat. We simply have to grant that there are modes of experiencing that we know nothing about.
.....But there is a kind of alien experiencing quite different from the ego, and one that is very close – so close that we can feel it. So close that we are in it. It is the very flesh we seem to inhabit. This is where we have found a whole undiscovered territory of the body’s experiencing that we can tap into, an area that turns out to be so intricate and complex as to leave us astounded.
.....In experiential psychotherapy and focusing this area has given us invaluable insights. Before focusing no one had really worked experimentally on what we now call ‘the felt-sense’. It could only have been discovered in the strict Rogerian ethos, the original idea of counselling.
.....Here for the first time the therapist was, as far as possible, simply an emphatic mirror who deliberately did as little as possible to contaminate the client with his own data, keeping interference at an absolute minimum. We must remember that every method in psychotherapy prior Rogers was skewed and hugely influence by the therapist’s own ideas, attitudes and expectations. The placebo effect was just not considered – remembering that the etymology of the word ‘placebo’ means ‘to please’.
.....The early innovators in psychotherapy never got pure phenomena because the therapist’s own expectations contaminated his observations. Put very simply: they never just listened ! Looked at in this way it was bad science. But then, many valuable disciplines begin like this, where observers contaminate their observations without knowing it.
.....So for the first time it was possible to observe how people related to their body’s experience – and to find out that some people did and some people didn’t; and to discover that this was the crucial factor that determined whether or not the client made any progress.
.....When clients are in touch with the felt body, the interaction between the ego and the body spontaneously tracks them forward, step by step, moving them through their own unique solutions to life. Mapping the exactness of the way this happens and the exact function of the felt-sense, in case after case – formulating hypotheses based upon observation, keeping oneself out of the picture – was quite a new achievement. It became possible to see the pure phenomena, as it were, in a receptive, but otherwise neutral culture.
.....This approach produced two very important discoveries: (a) the implicit complexity of the body intelligence and (b) a way of relating to it for the benefit of both it and oneself. The implications are enormous. It requires us to considerably upgrade our idea of the body’s function and status; it also requires us to deeply review our practice and revise our ways of helping people.




Broom, Brian (2007). Meaning-ful Disease: how personal experience and meanings cause and maintain physical illness. Karnac, 2007
Nagel, Thomas (1974). What is it like to be a bat? [From the Philosophical Review LXXIII, 4 (October 1974) : 435-50].
Sheldrake, Rupert (1999). Dogs that know when their owners are coming home. Hutchinson, London, 1999.

MEANING-ful DISEASE; a book review

.................by Stanley

.....The idea that physical diseases can be an expression of problems in a person’s psychological life is not new. It was an essential part of Georg Groddeck’s thinking at the time of Freud. Medical thinking has never really caught up; the idea of ‘psychosomatic’ is very vague and limited. It doesn’t really embrace the notion of ‘meaningful disease’. But more recently the idea has gained popularity from writers like Louise Hay, who has a huge following, particularly among Americans who have difficultly thinking. Hay pushes a simplistic view that each psychological condition has a symbolic and fixed one-to-one physical symptom, like corns on the feet mean ‘a hardening of one’s thought’; or an infestation of tapeworm means a ‘strong belief in being a victim’!!
.....Brian Broom, the author of Meaning-full Disease calls the Louse Hay’s style of reductionism ‘meaning fundamentalism’. The truth is much more complex and much more interesting. A physical disease, if it has a psychological meaning and at the same time is an expression of it, can only be uncovered by the most careful enquiry into the person’s specific life story. And, just as no two stories are alike, no two physical symptomatic correlates are alike.
.....Brian Broom’s book has plenty of examples – mercifully short and succinct case studies – of physical symptoms whose meaning becomes clear as he listens carefully to the person telling their story. The correlation between the physical symptom of which patients complain and certain phrases and descriptions they use to tell their story is remarkable. Often the connection is obvious and jumps out perfectly clearly without any suspiciously clever interpretation. As Broom says, ‘at times the matching of meaning and disease is so vivid that the disease appears to be communicating the meaning’. A case in point was the patient who suffered from a thickening of the skin…..

.....Eunice has generalized thickening of the skin, and tissues under the skin, causing uncomfortable splinting of the chest, and tightness of the arms and upper legs... She startled me by saying that it began when she fell over in the local garden nursery, sustaining injuries to her face and legs ...She described the fall as "shattering." ...I asked what effect this event had had on her. She replied: "I went into my shell for a while." I was immediately struck by the fact she was presenting to me with a thickened shell of skin and here she was using language to match. I invited further comment, and within the next 3 to 4 minutes she used the words "I went into my shell" three times. She was taken back to her home by a friendly gentleman: "I went inside the four walls of my house, and closed the door, and sat and sat and sat." In the few weeks following the injury skin thickening developed first in the legs and then became more generalized... She had actually started to improve by the time I saw her... She said that she improved again as she started to "come out of my shell."
......A somatic metaphor (Broom’s term) like this is relatively straightforward - although very difficult for the medical fraternity to grasp, or even consider, because of the fixed idea that the mind is one thing and the body as a living mechanism is another. Broom examines in detail why there is such resistance to the idea of meaningful disease both in the medical profession and even with patients themselves. He shows us the clear need for a revision of our philosophical and common sense assumptions that will permit us to conceive mind and body as simply two aspects of the same thing, a holistic unity. In every chapter of the book Broom hammers home this same message from many angles.
.....He makes use of the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty who brought the centrality of the body back into philosophy where it has long laid neglected, sidelined by the emphasis on the non-materiality of the soul, leaving the body as a mechanism to be dealt with by materialistic medicine. Broom gives a good example of the medical dilemma.
....."The old physico-materialistic views of matter would argue that meaning-full disease cannot occur because they imply causation in the wrong direction. The idea was that the general direction of biology is bottom up. Genes (at the bottom) give rise to everything else. At a higher level of organization this means that brain gives rise to mind, and mind gives rise to meaning. The traffic does not go the other way. Interpreted simply, this means that meaning-full diseases cannot occur because they appear to be the result of a top down influence, involving a direction from meaning and mind to brain, and from there to body…In short, the direction is wrong and the transmission of meaning cannot happen anyway because of the mind/body problem. We clearly need different models to explain meaning-full disease.
.....Of course the whole discussion of whether causation goes from ‘from top to bottom or from bottom to top’ is still based on the dualism that mind is one thing and the body is another. This is the very fallacy that generates the problem.
.....Dr. Broom writes with great clarity and gives plenty of examples where the meaning of a disease is clear; and also of where there is a sort of complicity of circumstantial evidence that helps a patient uncover the depth of his difficulties and so find a path back to health. This thoughtful book is thoroughly recommended reading. It’s easy to understand without being over simplistic.

.....Brian Broom is adjunct professor at the Auckland University of Technology, Auckland, New Zealand, and leads the post-graduate programme in MindBody Healthcare. He works as consultant physician (allergy and clinical immunology), psychotherapist, and mindbody specialist, at the Arahura Health Centre, Christchurch, New Zealand.

Meaning-ful Disease: how personal experience and meanings cause and maintain physical illness
is available at the Christchurch Public Library 616.0019 BRO

His other previous book:
Somatic Illness and the Patient's Other Story. A Practical Integrative Mind/Body Approach to Disease for Doctors and Psychotherapists.
also available at the Christchurch Public Library 616.08 BRO

A very short and readable page by Dr Broom:
What is mindbody healing
Is available at the NZ Mindbody Network
http://www.mindbody.org.nz/what_is_mindbody.html

EMBODIMENT

............................ by Stanley


.....Descartes said: ‘I think, therefore I am’, seeking to reach the certainty of existence from the fact that he could think; he could doubt everything except the fact that he could doubt.
.....Let’s take on the great philosopher and try another tack. Let’s look for a basic certainty in:
......‘I am embodied, therefore I am’.
.......I know my existence from the fact that I have a body. It is possible to imagine, to dream or hallucinate myself without a body; but, in fact, I never concretely experience myself as myself without my body. What I call ‘myself’ is very much my physical existence. This is not a super-individualistic idea. Quite the reverse. As a physical being I am in constant interaction with other things and people; and in special moments, as in love-making, I experience myself as two bodies, not just one.
..... But essentially,
.....To be is to be embodied.
.....OK, so what?
.....So a great deal. It sounds simple enough, but it undermines many of our presuppositions about life that are based on the idea that ‘I am not my body; I am a mind, a thinker, a soul, an unconscious, a spirit. With our religious inheritance, we have imagined ourselves as any number of things – but not as essentially embodied.
.....Just think for a moment what this does to our whole idea of knowledge. Much of what we know, we know sensately without analytical thinking. The body doesn’t just know how to run the body-machine. Embodied knowledge means more than how to pump blood, make bones and babies and manage a system of defense against viruses. It means that the body also, in its own way, helps us in many areas of knowledge, including psychology, situational psychology particularly. We understand sensately and implicitly how to navigate difficult family and social situations, how to play tennis and chess and how to ride a bicycle. It also explains why mums are among the best therapist. This is because their knowledge comes from direct physical engagement, rather than from clinical text books. The physical act of mothering puts them in touch in a unique way. And this empathic ability stays with them.
.....What is now being discovered in brain research is not at all surprising – it does not contradict what we are saying here at all. A new neurological discovery is that we have what are called ‘mirror neurons’ that enable us to directly, physically mimic and have the feelings that we watch other people having – this is at a basic neurological level.
Our embodied self knows a whole host of things we are used to crediting to something called ‘unconscious intuition’, without knowing where or what it is, or how to cultivate and take care of it.
.....But we’ve always known how to destroy it, how to ruin a person’s bodily knowledge. For instance: the golf stroke – just make the golfer bring to mind how he does it. As he is about to play his stroke ask him to describe exactly how he holds his left leg and right elbow. We know, too, how to ruin a person’s natural ability to learn – simply make them apply their mind to learning. Or how ruin a person’s organic memory – just insist that they memorise. All these efforts separate something called ‘the mind’ from the body. The mind, by itself, has no idea how to function holistically. The so-called ‘mind’ without the body is a helpless cripple, like many highly trained clinical psychologists.
.....One of the greatest discoveries of late 20th century psychotherapy is the felt-sense – the direct access to the body’s implicit knowledge, moving us through the next best step in any situation or context. How to use this felt-sense is what we learn in the technique called ‘focusing’.
.....It reminds me of what it really means to be ‘sensible’.
.....In most plays about the time of Oscar Wilde some upper class mother is bound to say to her wayward son. ‘Oh, Francis do try to be more sensible.’ She is, in fact, telling the boy to be more mindful, not more sensible. He is wayward precisely because he is already too sensible in the delights of gambling, drinking and loose women – mostly as a reaction against his excessively mindful parents. This young man’s kind of abandonment to the senses is what our Christian culture is utterly terrified of.
.....So unless we are lucky the body becomes suspect and we live without sense or sensibility, unable to trust the body’s grasp of what is important – and to trust its ability to carry us forward; instead, we imperiously rule it like some out of touch despot. We over articulate and drown out what the body is feeling. Like bad therapists, we seldom ask and never listen to what the body would want us to know.
.....Psychology’s job is to show us how to be good therapists to ourselves.

SAVING NOTHING.

............................. by Stanley

.....I am obsessional about backing-up my work on the computer. In the early days I had some nasty experiences where, at the touch of a wrong key, I lost some magnum opus I had been working on - a terrible sinking feeling when a whole thing just disappeared into cyberspace – gone! The loss was particularly appalling when I had written a passage or a turn of phrase that was just right. I knew that it having vanished I would never, never be able to produce it again. It was a sickening sensation of loss.
....Of course, I have no doubt that this was an entirely hubristic fantasy brought on solely by the vanishing, making the job I had lost more perfect than it really was. The fact of its disappearance magnified its impeccable aptness. Never before was such a wonderful turn of phrase ever written – and now it is lost for all time. Very much like a funeral eulogy heaped upon a deceased relative who was, after all, not all that great.
....I am sure that the last day of my life – assuming that I know it is the last and that I am still in reasonable shape – will be the most perfect day of my life. At least, that’s the way I’m imagining it. Why would I picture it like this? Because I know that the absolutely valuable is always on the verge of loss. It’s why we cry at something overwhelmingly beautiful. The exquisite always has the taste of nostalgia because we imagine ourselves looking back on it when it is gone.
....Or the darker side told by Macbeth that life is a tale “told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing’. The romantic agony is that things must pass away, the flower must fade, beauty must turn to dust and all those poetic conceits.
....But deeper than the thief of time is something more philosophical, metaphysical, existential or something. I’m sure the mystics were right in saying that in the heart of being is nothingness. The ‘plenum’, the empty fullness, they called it - that out of which all creation arose.
....I don’t want to get all spiritual and start pontificating about things that can’t be talked about, but there is a very practical sense in which all this touches our lives. It’s interesting that a person who is depressed will say in a few simple words the way they feel: ‘There’s nothing, absolutely nothing’, they will say – meaning there is nothing in life. And, in a sense, this is absolutely true. And it is a truth that cannot be avoided. In fact, if you run away from it, it will bite you in the bum – like when the stuff on my computer vanished down the gurgler; or when you wake up in the morning sick with dread at the meaninglessness of another day.
.....Whenever you hit the blues you will find yourself being terribly ‘negative’ – the greatest sin in popular culture. But more we try to be ‘positive’ the more the Great Nothingness threatens to swallow us in unguarded moments.
.....No, we have to do the exact opposite – we have to save nothing.
.....There is a very precise felt-sense, like a physical sensation, at the heart of a bluesy mood. Elusive, because one is so used to avoiding it or trying to chase it away. But if you concentrate you’ll find it there. Sit down with it for a while, tune into it, get in touch and have it. Don’t think or get distracted, just tune in to the felt-sense of it, stay with it for a while without doing anything about it, and you will find the mood will shift. Save the nothing and, amazingly enough, something creative will come out of it.
.....Many times I’ve caught myself at a loose end looking around for something to do. On the face of it, that’s quite OK. But there was a sort of background tension behind it; and when I looked a bit closer there was a vague feeling of fear, noticeable enough to make me sit down and focus on it. What came out was a memory of childhood, of being utterly, desperately, frantically bored.
.....I’m the only child. It’s Sunday afternoon and all the grown ups have had a big Sunday roast dinner. Now everybody is having a sleep for Gods sake and I am suppose to be quite. I am utterly and frantically bored because there is nothing to do. But ‘bored’ isn’t quite right because it’s such a frantic feeling. It’s as though I am faced with immanent death – The Big Nothing. And I will do anything, anything, not to experience that – even now!
.....That’s a little bit of me I’ve rescued from oblivion, paradoxically by saving nothing.

WORLD ENOUGH, AND TIME.

....................by Stanley

......I remember vividly – something Somerset Maugham said: “Now that I am 90 I have more time than I have ever had”. Being young then myself it seemed an amazing thing to say. Being young, as the young are, I was always in a hurry. A hurry in life and a hurry in love. That must have been why Andrew Marvel’s poem To His Coy Mistress appealed to me so much. You remember how it goes:

Had we but world enough, and time,
This coyness, lady, were no crime.
We would sit down and think which way
To walk, and pass our long love's day…
But at my back I always hear
Time's winged chariot hurrying near;
And yonder all before us lieDeserts of vast eternity.
Thy beauty shall no more be found,
Nor, in thy marble vault, shall sound
My echoing song; then worms shall try
That long preserv'd virginity,
And your quaint honour turn to dust,
And into ashes all my lust.

.....It is as though time has always been my enemy. If I had been born into another family or another culture I could have been a mad Christian sure that the end of the world was nigh. It’s why I can’t wait in queues for anything; it’s why I can’t waste time and have to keep busy; it’s why I am obsessively on time for appointments – I hate to waste other people’s time; it’s why the goal has been more important than the journey; it’s why I have a clock in every room; and why when asked if I am hungry I look at my watch.
......It’s not all my fault though. My training for time wasn’t good. I was breast fed on schedule – brought up on time’s rack, you might say. When the great moment did come it was so valuable that I guzzled and was sick. Then there was the incredible drag of waiting and the ache for the next time. Not a terribly good mindset for the future.
......Maybe that was why, like Andrew Marvell in that poem, I was always in a hurry for love. I seemed to have an ongoing feeling that I would miss out. Lovemaking was always a bit of a gallop too. But like time, the scarcity of love, is endemic in our culture. That’s why we talk so much about sex.
......Even the Pope is now talking about sex. He goes all the way to Australia to apologise for the fact that over 100 catholic priests have been sentence in Australian courts for sexual offences. That’s only in Australia, never mind Ireland or the rest of the world where they have covered up their juicy sins more successfully. What he doesn’t apologise for is the reason Catholic Priests – and really the rest of Christendom – is so obsessed with sex. Why doesn’t he get up say:
“Look fellars, I’ve just had an Infallible Idea – this is really ridiculous – its time we caught up with the 20th century. Why don’t you priests all go out and get married. After all, Paul said, ‘Its better to marry than to burn with passion’ – and you priests Down Under seem to be burning with quite a of lot of passion !”
......But he won’t say this will he? In the religious area of life time has really stood still. It is as though we are still in the Middle Ages. The body is still the enemy. Part of our culture is frozen in time, much as part of an individual can be frozen in the past. Just like my love life was frozen when my mother was afraid of feeling sexual when she was breast feeding me. Love and sex are part of the melody of life that sing together.
.......Some women even have a full blown orgasm when they are breast feeding – its nature’s reward for doing her work properly. But in the religious, archaic corner of our culture its God’s work that’s supposed to be done – not Nature’s. And we pay for it dearly. Each one of us – we pay for it because we can’t help embodying the neurosis deep within us, whether we are Christians or not. We are not quite as bad as the Pontiff, but inside we each carry a little frozen, archetypal Jesus, stuck back in time, throwing his shadow across our lives – while we hurry forward, knowing somehow we are missing out on something.

JUST A LITTLE SOMETHING.

.....‘Something’ is the most beautiful word in the language. Well, if not the most beautiful, certainly one of the most useful in something we call psychology. There you are, I just did it. It saved me from having to define psychology and fuss around. We all know there is something called psychology, whatever it is.
.....That’s what’s so wonderful about ‘something’. You can refer to ‘something’ without saying what it is, or even knowing what it is:
.....Quick! Something terrible has happened.
.....I think there’s something wrong.
.....You ought to take something for that cold.
.....I’m not sure what I want to say – but I know I want to say something.
.....I don’t feel anything’ – ‘Oh surely you feel something!
.....There really is something about that man, something
attractive, wouldn’t you say?
.....Or, we could reach into the depths of philosophy and talk about the ‘brain’ v. ‘consciousness’ problem. The neuroscientist tells me I’m a bunch of neurons firing in a most wonderful organic computer, my brain.
.....The philosopher says: ‘yes, but what about my consciousness. It seems a different order of things’.
.....‘Prove it’, says the neuroscientist.
..... 'Well, says the philosopher, ‘there is undeniably something – whatever it is – I call my conscious
............ awareness’.
.....‘'There I have to agree’, says the neuroscientist, ‘we definitely do refer to something we call our consciousness. For you and for me there is definitely something.
.....And back to the land of psychology: ‘something’ is particularly useful when you are working at the edge, where you are feeling your way forward, the meaning of a dream maybe or what is behind an emotion. New thoughts, new feelings, can be barely perceptible – scarcely hint at the back of the mind, an awareness only of something. At that point it is a something that could be anything. It’s vague, but referring to it as something helps you not to dismiss it. I get people to use it all the time in therapy. Very useful to name it without yet knowing what it is – while you work out what it is.

...........................THE KIM HILL PROGRAM

.....There are some really interesting people who interview Kim Hill each Saturday morning on the National Program; the best are those who don’t interrupt her too much.

Stanley

GREAT EXPECTATIONS.

.................................... by Stanley

......I’ve noticed in myself and in others that, as people become more present to themselves, emerging as persons more centred in their own being, relationships can dramatically change, often bringing to an abrupt end friendships that may have endured untroubled for years.
......Friendships have the habit of defining who I am, enclosing me in a network of unspoken expectations. Unspoken and unnoticed, they fashion me into a ‘suitable’ person. A longtime friend easily relates to me because they know who I am and can trust my continued stability as a person. I’m a reliable friend. In fact, being a friend is being reliable. But my friend’s sense of my reliability may not take into account the fact that I have changed. And as I change the old expectations come under increasing strain until at last there is a blowup and they crack. Naturally, relationships crack-up for all sorts of reasons – this is only one of them.
......This scenario, or something like it, is especially true in family relationships. Nowhere is one held more tightly in a network of expectations than as a member of a family. God save us – they know who we are! Do they ever! We are immobilised. Their view of us is like a frozen picture, always the same, unmoving and reliable. There is no shifting it. They know us intimately from long experience. Or they think they do.
......At first, as I grow, I begin to define myself by who and what I am not. As I begin to change from what others think I am into someone more authentic, their projections of me gradually become more intolerable. More accurately: my acting, my pretending, becomes more intolerable. Worst of all, I am pretending for their sakes, trying not to disappoint them. The split between who I know I am and what they expect of me becomes unbearable until I blow – usually on some exaggerated minor issue. The truth is, I can no longer contain myself, pretending to be what I am not – and all just to keep them happy and undisturbed. It feels like I have been made use of all this time, merely a prop to support their fantasies about me that are useful to them.
......The awful thing is: I know there is no way of letting them know what has happened. I know it is impossible for them to actually understand me, the me I now am. They are hurt and disappointed or angry because they have made an investment in me that has suddenly ceased to pay dividends. And because they are hurt and angry by my rejection they cannot possibly see things the way I do. They are locked in their point of view.
......Even in the best and most loving relationships there are investments. The nature of such investments is a huge subject; in fact, it is what psychoanalysis is all about – something beyond the scope of this blog. Suffice it to say that the psychological life is a life of change, a constant and gradual redefining of who we are in relation to our environment, powered by an inner personal necessity to be true to myself.
......Change is of the essence. So, it is important for me to realise just how the flow of life can be locked in a network of expectations that enclose me. I have always seen myself through their unchanging eyes. They have held me in a motionless image, like an old frozen photograph; I do not define myself, am defined by them. I am who they think I am – and I cannot escape. When I begin to realise this I’ve already taken a step towards the exit.
......I can find no justification for the changes that I happen, except to say that they happen by virtue of a mysterious force I can only describe as ‘me’.

AGAINST GOALS

....................by Stanley

.......The entire counselling community has been infected by a misdemeanour contrary to the whole idea of personal growth. Like a virus it has infected the psychological helping professions and compromised the best interests of our clientele. It is the idea that all psychological help must by guided by a plan, a plan that states at the very beginning what a course of therapy is supposed to achieve.The buzzword is ‘outcome’. There must be a proposed ‘outcome’. We need goals, it is said, to able to detect whether therapy is accomplishing the desired ‘outcome’. Counselling has to go somewhere. There has to be an aim. Not only to be able to make regular progress reports, but goals are necessary otherwise sessions stagnate and become a mere indulgence and a waste of time.
......Pushed by social workers, government agencies like ACC, and WINZ and also by profession bodies like NZAC, NZAP, the need for therapeutic goals seems to be implicitly accepted by everyone. Therapists have to write reports on ‘outcomes’ and proposed ‘outcomes’ for future appoinments. Although there are those who privately disagree with all this hoo-hah, it has become the official line. Counselling has been surreptitiously redefined without anyone really challenging it – hi-jacked by institutional requirements taking precedence over the real welfare of individuals.
.......All the work and research done in person centred therapy over the years indicates conclusively that personal growth is spontaneous, yet no one seems to see the contradiction between this and the requirements of therapeutic plans and goals.
......The absolute benchmark of good counselling is surprise – you simply cannot, and should not try, to predict what is going to happen in a session. This is why among the most productive sessions are those where the person comes to it with no notion of what they are going to talk about. The client finds herself saying what she had no idea needed to be said. The unconscious can begin to speak.
......The truth is that having a precise goal actually hampers the course of therapy. And it is easy to see why. It restricts. A goal is set by the conscious ego, what you are at the moment, what you are struggling with. The goal is set by the struggle – but the whole nature of the repetitive struggle, is precisely what must change. But goals hold the status quo in place. By insisting on the goal of therapy we perpetuate the struggle. Whatever the goal is, it issues from the presupposition of having what it is you are trying to banish. The exact nature of the goal is part of the struggle. The goal is the problem.
.......‘I must get over my addiction’ prevents any other slant from emerging. It simply confirms that you are addicted. ‘I must improve myself’ confirms that you need improving. The goal itself is born from your concentration on the problem. So, all the time you work at it, you confirm what you are trying to get rid of. Thus you never find anything new. You are quite conscious your aim and it leads around the same circle of effort and defeat it always has. The goal itself includes trying and failing. Or more precisely, the failing is the implicit shadow of trying.
.......Of course we all have non-neurotic goals, otherwise nothing would ever get done in the world, but those are not the goals people worry about and bring to therapy
Neurotic goals are as much the problem as the problem they focus on. Even vaguely making these a guideline in therapy is to guarantee the illusion of going somewhere whist remaining stuck. Of course, the therapist can make goals for the client without consulting her – that’s even worse !
.......How do you tell the difference between a stuck, neurotic goal from a genuine one? Realistic goals are interactive; they change and develop as reality changes. A neurotic goal never changes – always the same struggle to get there. Always working to make it better, guaranteeing the outcome is more of the same.

D H LAWRENCE AND THE BODY

.................................... Discovered by Elizabeth Little

.......Elizabeth has found this stunning piece of writing by D H Lawrence that’s the perfect follow-up to my last blog The Ghost in the Machine. Let’s forgive Lawrence his sexist language – it was the style in his day. Really, he is anything but macho. .......................Stanley

............... On Being a Man
................By D H Lawrence

......Man is a thought adventurer,
Which isn’t the same as saying that man has an intellect. In intellect there is skill and tricks. To the intellect the terms are given, as the chessmen and rules are given in the game of chess. Real thought on the other hand is an experience, which begins as a change in the blood, a slow convulsion and revolution in the body itself. It can end as a new piece of awareness a new reality of being.
.....In order to think in this way man must risk himself doubly. First he must go forth and meet life in the body, and only then can he face the result in his mind.
.....The risk is double because man is double. Each of us has two selves. First is this body which is vulnerable and never quite within our control but the self that occupies that body part of me I can never fully finally know. It lets me in for so much irrational suffering, real torment and just occasional frightening delight. That me that is in my body is like a jungle in which dwells an unseen me, like a black panther in the night, whose two eyes glare green through my dreams. Or, if a shadow falls through my waking day.
.....Then there is this other me that is fair faced and reasonable and sensible and complex and full of good intentions. This is the known me which can be seen and appreciated. I say of myself ‘yes I know I’m impatient and rather intolerant in ideas. But in the ordinary way of life I am quite easy and rather kindly. My kindliness sometimes makes me a bit false. But then I don’t believe in mechanical honesty.’
.....This is the known me having a talk with itself. It sees a reason for every thing it does and feels. It has a certain unchanging belief in its own good intentions. It tries to steer a sensible and harmless course among all the other people and personalities around itself.
......To this known me everything exists as KNOWLEDGE. I am what I know I am. Nothing exists beyond what I know except the acquisition of more things to know.
......So this is how we live. We proceed from what we know already to what we know next.
......Take the case of men and women. A man proceeding from his known self likes a woman because she is in sympathy with what he knows. He feels that he and she know one another. They marry and then the fun begins. In so far as they know one another they can proceed from their known selves, they are as right as ninepence. Loving couple etc. But as soon as there is real blood contact a strange discord enters in. She is not what he thought her. He is not what she thought him. It is the other primary or bodily self appearing very often like a black demon out of the fair creature who was erst the beloved.
.....The man who before marriage seemed everything that was delightful, after marriage begins to come out in his true colours a son of the old and rather hateful Adam. And she who was an angel of loveliness and desirability emerges as an almost fiendlike daughter of the snake-frequenting Eve.
......What has happened?
......Marriage is the great puzzle of our day. It is our sphinx riddle. Solve it or be torn to bits is the decree.
......When man and woman actually meet, there is always terrible risk to both of them.
There is always risk, for both him and for her. Take the risk, make the adventure. Suffer but enjoy the change in the blood. And if you are a man, slowly, slowly make that great experience of realizing- fully totally conscious realization. If you are a woman on the other hand make the same great experience of realizing within you the strange slumberous serpentine essence which knows without thinking.

THE GHOST IN THE MACHINE

...........................by Stanley

......In western depth psychology there is an aspect of what we call ‘the self’ that has been missed; it is an omission that runs through the whole gamut of psychoanalysis from Freud to Jung and Hillman. What we’ve missed in our psychology is the physical body – the body as essentially me.
.....We must be very clear what we are saying here. The body stands at the threshold of both the subjective and the objective worlds. Firstly, the body is an objective thing in the world. We can look at it from the outside and examine it just as we can any living organism. It can be studied scientifically and medically. I can have this objective view of my own body, just as I can with anyone else’s.
......When we refer to the physical body there is a lurking ambiguity. We usually mean heart, blood circulation, brain, nervous system, etc etc. The difficulty arises when we imply by this that our subjectivity, our mind, our soul, is not physical. This lands us in a dilemma because it artificially splits our actual experience. Arthur Koestler called it the illusion of the ghost in the machine.
......But the body is not just a machine that I inhabit; it is also my subjective experience of myself. This is the experience of the body as me, the foundation of myself as a subject; and this subjectivity is mine alone. No one else can experience it directly but myself. It cannot be examined medically or scientifically because it is not an object – it is a subject, the sense of myself.
......There are all kinds of arguments, religious and cultural, that might persuade us that there is a difference between the body on the one hand and the soul or mind. But putting these arguments aside, and going on how I actually find myself from moment to moment, there is no question that I experience myself subjectively as a physical being. It is part of my essential nature that I am located in physical space and time and that I experience seeing, hearing, feeling, touching, loving and hating as a physical being.
.....If one imagines oneself as a ghost without a body it is impossible to conceive, for example, that one would have any emotions, because emotions are both subjective and physical. Both. We only experience our emotions through our physicality. Deaden the body with drugs or anaesthesia and there are no emotions.
......But we have a cultural prejudice against thinking this way. It seems to offend our preconceived notions of the soul or mind. But there is no reason we cannot say that the ‘soul’ is just another name for our embodied experience. Certainly there is the body, but there is also the body of me. There is no way we can get away with a philosophy that does without either – the body as an object and as a subject.
......There are all kind of interesting avenues that flow from this idea. In one aspect, it really does turn psychotherapy on its head. We can now credit the body’s powers that we always knew it had, but never admitted.
.......When a person disowns the body they will never let it inform them, they can never trust it. Sometimes the body becomes the enemy. We can see why they lack vital emotional functions; why their intuition of other people and the environment is shot; also because they are disembodied why they can never be certain of themselves. We say they live in their heads – as though the head is the last domain they can occupy. Obviously they can think – and sometimes brilliantly – but that’s all. They lack the body’s imagination and its own kind of complex practicality, its holistic intelligence that can work without thinking. Of course, people in this state of deprivation do go on functioning because the body goes on doing its job on its own, doing its own thing without permission, help or credit, often against the opposition of the head-centred ego.
......Neuroscience is discovering how we can manipulate the brain and produced all kinds of subjective affects; and we know how chemical substances can do the same. But we forget that the body made the body in the first place and that subjective emotional experience can alter the body’s objective structure.
......The body stands at the crossroads. It is the only thing in the world that is also your conscious self. Our value of the mind has had a good go, but we are incomplete unless we can give the body its due. Not locating the mind in the body, but getting the mind as the body.

I’M FINE – how are you ?

...........................by Stanley
......The determination to make things OK when they are not OK begins early in life. The game of pretend is what kids do best; they are wonderfully competent at transforming reality into what they want it to be. Fine, when you are pretending the lounge sofa is a fire engine, but not so good when you are trying to make a miserable home life into a feel-good happy family. No two people are the same, but I’ll tell you a story of the way it can go.
.....There is a limit to how long a kid can keep pretending against all odds. Reality will break though when family quarrels or dysfunctions are too overwhelming, forcing the child to endlessly renew its efforts to make the environment safe and nurturing by sheer wishing and willing. It doesn’t have the power to change reality, but it can fantasise, it can pretend.
......I can pretend that if I am good enough it will make them happy. Trying to make myself good enough for others can turn me into a lifelong people-pleaser.
......Of course, I can pretend I don’t need a family and go off on another tack. There are a thousand clever ways to make it all better: ‘At least I’m good at school’ is one way; or ‘When I grow up I’m going to… – imagined futures overriding the present; adults euphemistically call this ‘having goals’. Or much later I can make like I’m a successful entertainer, amusing everyone; or even getting to be an actor, singer or performer on the stage, actually creating a big approving family – admiration on a big scale.
......Come to think of it, each profession is also a form of pretending. To have a profession is to profess. To make this real to myself is to constantly keep up the fantasy of actually being what I profess.
......All these devises, you might say, are perfectly harmless, even necessary in the game of life. Where they become questionable is when they are used to suppress the bodily felt-sense that something is not-OK. Trying to pretend over the top of anxiety is hard work. But no amount of physical or mental juggling will really help – only a direct address to the bodily felt-sense of something being not-OK, giving up trying to make it OK. Daring to look at a persistent sense of something wrong that’s been with me longer than I can remember.
......Ages ago when I first began to pretend everything was OK I thought that if I wanted something badly enough it would happen – a kind of infantile positive thinking. I suppressed the not-OKness into my body and my body has been carrying it ever since like a low grade illness. It can turn some people into hypochondriacs, imagining that the body is only physical.
......The body can remember what really went wrong, even if I have forgotten; and when I first begin to look at it, it feels like an uncomfortable physical sensation, a feeling I am so used to I no longer notice it. It’s a vague discomfort. Then the work begins of tracking this vague something, unraveling a long, tangled but precise history, going back to my childhood.
......It’s not that I have forgotten the factual events of the past, not a question of ‘recovered memories’. I can remember what happened, but I had forgotten the way it was, the sharp feel of it, the implications, the endless ramifications, and of just how it keeps recurring in my present life.
......My own story surprises me because it is so different to what I had pretended; and yet, in a way, it doesn’t surprise me because I knew it all the time – at least, I could always sort of sense it there.
.......And when it is unraveled there is a relief in being able to give up the constant struggle to make like everything is OK. It’s then I realise this struggle has been far worse than the reality I was trying to suppress – a reality that belonged to the ever present past
.......But for a Great Pretender like me the first step is to admit everything is not-OK.
.......I’m not fine – how are you?

THE CRITIC

...........................by Stanley

.....Many people are aware that they have a troublesome inner critic, realising that they can be, at times, far too harsh and judgemental on themselves. ‘I’m my own worst enemy’, they will say.
.....Over the years this internal critical in the personality has been given different labels. Freud called it the super-ego. Searching to name it, a client of mine came up with ‘The Clobberer’ – very descriptive. Fairbairn called it ‘The Anti-Libidinal Ego’ – good, because it is critical of any form of pleasure; later he called it ‘The Internal Saboteur’ – full marks, because that is exactly what it is.
.....But whatever we call it, it is that part of you that makes you wrong, useless, ugly or stupid. It specialises in accusations that you are – on the whole – a failure; and whatever you do is wrong. Sometimes this internal critic is in the background, sometimes right in your face.
.....The Internal Saboteur makes one very sensitive to other people’s criticisms; then both internal and external attacks join together to make a devastating onslaught.
......There is little one can do directly to change this setup. Strategies, like positive thinking, designed to live over the top of it, are useless. The Internal Saboteur is a real problem and it is not subject to control. It is, as they say, ‘its own person’, with its own agenda. I am not speaking figuratively. It is structurally separate from your own ego. Often it opposes with subtle and ‘reasonable’ criticism. Needs and wants that are already a bit shaky are easy targets. It makes impulsiveness and pleasure suspect.
.....The Internal Saboteur is a split off part of your own psyche you would have given birth to a long time ago. It would very probably have been a time when you were dependant and an essential relationship failed you. You went on trying and failing to get what you needed until eventually you turned against your need. ‘I don’t want it – I don’t want them – they can go to hell’. The whole thing is then repressed and dissociated, but goes on fighting every needy impulse from then on.
......It is a brilliant solution when you are a child. It turns off the pain and you feel independent. The problem is that it is not just a denial of ‘them’, it is a denial of yourself, the most central part of you: the core life impulse that moves you forward every moment, urging what you want, what you need. By this act of self-preservation you have created another centre in your personality – one that essentially denies that it wants what it wants. It splits you off from yourself. It can make you painfully ‘good’, afraid to put a step out of line in case you cop it. The Internal Saboteur will keep you in line.
.......But if you retain a rebellious spark of life in you, you are up against the Internal Saboteur. Everything that is really good for you, this other centre in you sabotages, opposes, criticises, downgrades. It can be unbelievably cruel. This situation can be so bad that it can destroy every impulse in life that’s worthwhile. It can lead to depression and suicide. Or it can continually harass you like a low-grade infection. Or it can lie in the unconscious waiting for you to feel particularly self-satisfied before it attacks.
......I tell you, the Internal Saboteur is no joke; no mere metaphor, but a stubborn fact as real as your body.
.....You have to really get this before you can work on it. You will realise what I mean by ‘getting it’ if you re-read my last post on ‘Notes from a Groundhog’. There it is, not jibbering in the background, but right out in front – a full frontal attack.
......My experience there is an example of how the Internal Saboteur can strike in reaction a personal win, a soulful breakthrough. It simply cannot stand any hint of narcissism or self-satisfaction – and so it bursts out of hiding, revealing itself in all its viciousness. In my case, I can own it, guilty not of what it accuses me, but acknowledging it as a starving, angry and repressed part of myself; acknowledging also that I gave birth to it as a way of surviving when I was in dire straits, long, long ago.

D.H.LAWRENCE ON THE ROLE OF THE FATHER

................................by Elizabeth Hope

........Relating to the first evening of our series of seminars on ‘Siggy and his Successors’, Elizabeth Hope came up with this interesting quotation from D.H.Lawrence, whom most of us know only as a novelist. Apparently, he wrote a remarkable number of essays that remain neglected and generally unknown. Elizabeth says, “These essays by Lawrence have much to add to our discussion of ' psychodynamism’. I thought this quote would have been useful for the father's role when it arose the other night.” Here is the quotation from Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious and Fantasia of the Unconscious by D.H. Lawrence:

............' But if the child thus seeks the mother, does it then know the mother alone? To an infant the mother is the whole universe. Yet the child needs more than the mother. It needs as well the presence of men, vibration from the present, body of the man There may not be any actual palpable connection. But from the great voluntary centre in the man pass unknowable communications and untellable nourishment of the stream of manly blood, rays which we cannot see, and which so far we have refused to know, but none the less the quickening dark rays which pass from the great abdominal life centre in the father to the corresponding life centre in the child. And these rays these vibrations are not like mother vibrations. Far, far, from it. They do not need the actual contact the handling and caressing. On the contrary the true male instinct is to avoid physical contact with the baby. It may not even need actual presence. But present or absent there should be between the baby and the father that strange intangible communication, that strange pull and circuit such as the magnetic pole exercises upon a needle, a vitalistic pull and flow which lays all the life-plasm of the baby into the line of vital quickening , strength , knowing. Any lack of this vital circuit, this vital interchange between father and child, man and child means an inevitable impoverishment to the infant.
..............The child exists in the interplay of the two great ‘l’s, the womanly and the male. In appearance the mother is everything. In truth the father has actively very little part. It does not matter if he hardly sees his child. Yet see it he should and touch it sometimes, and renew with it the connection the life circuit, not allow it to lapse, and vitally starve his child.