THE GIFT

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

............Much of my life I have waited for someone to give me the gift of myself. That’s what I was always waiting for. In every relationship I looked into the eyes of the other hoping that she will see me for what I knew I almost was. I wanted that special kind of approval that would let me ‘come out’, as they say. It made me a kind of waiting, hopeful child, but over the years I have gradually learned to be more maturely dependant. Less ashamed, that is, of my lifelong infantilism.
...........Realising, too, that this is what therapy is about. Not about finding formulas of the mind or archetypes beyond the mind, not about psychological management, not about curing disorders and dysfunctions. It’s about giving another the gift of themselves, being with them, looking into their struggles with empathy and with pride at what they are edging painfully towards, knowing that they are relying on someone to give them the gift they can’t give themselves.
...........For it is so hard to do it for yourself alone. To give life a kick start it seems as though something essential has to be given. It was true in the beginning of one’s life and, in some sense, it is always true; the audience gives me my role in the play.
..........It’s a strange paradox that the hardest thing to give to myself…is myself!
..........The other person is part of me and if they withhold on me I’m stuck; but we will face anything except the truth of this kind of dependency.
..........Dependency is so terrifying that many people go into what you could call creative overdrive, determined to fashion themselves, to not be reliant, to give to themselves what they need – what they now believe can never, ever be given by anyone else. Thus their primal need and dependency goes underground, still in its infantile form. But being adults they now seek what they need from others surreptitiously. They often become very giving people – generosity with a hidden agenda.
..........It is almost an axiom of pop-psychology that, as an individual, you have to be the source. It’s no good looking to others to give you the gift. Life will only give you what you put into it. The ‘law of attraction’ they call it. This keeps one obsessively trying to create oneself as a worthy attractor. But a gift earned is not a gift.
..........The doctrine that one can make oneself worthy assumes that one has the power to do it. That one has the wherewithal is a puffed-up fiction to bolster the illusion of omnipotence. Nothing is more terrifying than one’s weakness, need and fragility. That’s the place where I know the terrible, terrible truth: I can never provide what I need. I am not enough – that by myself I am simply not enough.
..........That’s the way I started life – and that’s where, in a sense, I always am.
..................................*
..........Sigmund Freud was the innovator of the Psychological Age we live in. He invented it. But what has become of psychoanalysis, almost drowned out by the thousands of offshoots it produced? Well, over the last year I have been finding out. Psychoanalysis has evolved quite a bit. Working within Freud’s framework of ideas people like Fairbairn, Kohut, Leowald and others have produced new and valuable ideas. I propose a series a TAAP seminars to examine and discuss all this new material. Dates and times will follow.

A LITTLE FLIGHT RELIEF.

............................from Stanley

.....After a year working with really serious issues I think my unconscious has needed a break. Several times during the holidays I have had early morning dreams of composing the most unusual letters. Here is one:

..........To Air New Zealand
..........Dear Sir
..........My name is Stanley Richards and I am a gorilla. My wife Gladys is also a gorilla. We wish to book a flight from Christchurch to Queenstown on January 29, 2008. Early morning if you can.
..........Would it be possible for you to arrange a seat near a window for my wife, since she is prone to air sickness, a condition which is exacerbated by the fact that she is six weeks pregnant? A window seat would undoubtedly help.
.........Could you also arrange for a wheelchair at the airport, not for my wife, but for me as I suffer from motor neurone disease? While I am mostly quite able, I am prone to episodes where I revert to earlier forms of phylogenic development.
.........I feel obliged to mention that my wife and I will be suitably dressed for the trip since this question has previously arisen when making application for oversea flights on other occasions.
.........May I extend to all Air New Zealand staff the appropriate season’s facilitations. .........In anticipation of a reply at your earliest convenience,
.......................I remain,
.........................Your Most Obedient Servant
...................................Stanley Richards
.
......................................................*

Interpret that !

ALLURE OF THE OBSCURE

.............................. 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.
.
.
.

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.

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.

ONE MORE TIME…. with feeling !

by stanley

.....Have you ever thought how your life consists of repeat performances? If you are lucky you make the same mistake twice in a lifetime, but if you are like me you make the same mistake over and over.
.....I never learn!
......Well, maybe that’s not altogether true. I do learn, but very slowly. Take my relationships for instance. It’s only now, when many people would say it’s too late, something seems to have changed for me. I seem to have advanced from infantile dependency to mature dependency. Really quite good. But for most of my life I have repeated the same cycle, the same excitement of hope followed by the same dénouement of disappointment.
......After making a mistake – I mean an important emotional investment that goes wrong – it would seem you are a more sensible person if you carefully avoid the same mistake again. Unfortunately, if you are sensible enough to do this, your life becomes an avoidance strategy, where very little happens. The alternative seems to be intolerable repeat performances, same drama over and over. The archetypal image of this is the wife whose drunken husband repeatedly beats her up and from whom she retreats to a safe house – only to return to him again for the umpteenth time – with feeling!
......The hope for a better future is part of the deadly cycle of pointless repetition. Hope always comes before the first act of the drama begins. In fact, without hope the cycle would never start up again. At my age, having a limited future is a forced advantage. But for younger people who do have a future the problem is much more difficult. It tends to stimulate the infantile state, where no matter how bad life is, it most definitely won’t go on like that. One day my Prince will come. The future has everything.
......The philosopher Santayana said: ‘He who cannot remember the past is doomed to repeat it.’ Mostly we repeat it without remembering it in the right way. But therapy is more than just remembering. In therapy life’s repetitions are condensed. That’s why in therapy, without prompting, you return to the same problem area over and over, each time slightly differently.
......Freud worried about what he called 'The Repetition Compulsion'. But there has to be repetition because real change is slow.
.....One more time with only slightly different feelings – that’s realistic movement. There has to be repeat performances to gain any depth in life. Real change is not leaping out of your skin into a different lifestyle with the past just a thing of the past. Real change is slow and it carries the past with it; you gradually discover the past enriches you as it accompanies you on your journey, sometimes a very long journey. That’s why you can’t duck in for a few counselling sessions and fix things. The old psychoanalysts knew this. That’s why they thought in terms of years rather than weeks. And this is especially true now that we have a better understanding of the how the process works, the way things move forward in their own way, at their own speed, step by step, each step having its own emotional logic.

THE POWER OF THOUGHT

by Stanley

It is fashionable to blame your thoughts for the way you feel. But not to blame your feelings for the way you think.
Interesting
Why is that ?
Perhaps it’s because when something is wrong people don’t get the feel of it first. Their first warning is the way they are thinking. Even then they may not get the way they are feeling – or perhaps only much later. Quite natural then to assume that what come first causes what comes second. Post hoc ergo propter hoc, (the logical fallacy of ‘after this, therefore because of this’).
It is more useful to think of thoughts, everyday thoughts that carouse through one’s head, as epiphenomena – particles floating on the surface of consciousness that often have only an oblique connection with what is really going on. But this does not explain the illusionary transference of power into one’s thoughts.
In thinking about sympathetic magic, the belief that one’s thoughts and actions can effect both physical and spiritual actions in the world, Freud said that this was due to an archaic belief in what he called the ‘omnipotence of thought’ (die Allmacht des Gedankens).
Children seem naturally to believe in the omnipotence of thought: ‘close your eyes, throw a penny into the fountain, and wish’; and the utter seriousness with which children believe that a wish will convey itself through the air to Father Christmas.
This, Freud said, is a phase of infantile narcissistic development and also seen in adult regression in obsessional neurosis, where the same kind of magical thinking occurs as a very serious symptom.
Freud also pointed out that the feature of magical thinking and the omnipotence of thought in primitive magic was taken over by religion: ‘And God said: Let there be light, and there was light’.
Prayer and positive thinking are the most widespread practises of magic. Whether prayer actually works is a debateable. But there is an amusing story told by Richard Dawkins about an experiment in ‘intercessional prayer in a medical setting’ conducted by a certain Dr. Benson who was inclined to believe it could be beneficial.
‘Dr Benson and his team monitored 1,802 patients at six hospitals, all of whom received coronary bypass surgery. The patients were divided into three groups. Group 1 received prayers and didn't know it. Group 2 (the control group) received no prayers and didn't know it. Group 3 received prayers and did know it... Prayers were delivered by the congregations of three churches, one in Minnesota, one in Massachusetts and one in Missouri, all distant from the three hospitals. The praying individuals were given only the first name and initial letter of the surname of each patient for whom they were to pray. It is good experimental practice to standardize as far as possible, and they were all, accordingly, told to include in their prayers the phrase 'for a successful surgery with a quick, healthy recovery and no complications'.’
The results show no difference in the recovery of groups 1 and 2.
Group 3, those who knew they were being prayed for, ‘suffered significantly more complications than those who did not.’ The experimenters wondered whether they had suffered from ‘performance anxiety’.

Dawkins, Richard. The God Delusion. NY, Houton Mifflin, 2006

KNOTTED

I'm used to living a life where there is always something I have to do and where I look forward to a time where there is nothing I have to do. When that time comes I miss not having something I have to do !
Stanley