TAXONOMIC SCHEMA DISORDER

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

.....What the hell is that?
.....And well you may wonder.
.....It was the ironic label given to a well known and respected literary critic who tried to divide literature into ultimate categories: comedy, irony, tragedy and romance. The term really comes from classifying things in biology – but the compulsion to classify (Taxonomic Schema Disorder) is a very widespread intellectual illness.
.....Jung suffered from it quite badly: there had to be four ego functions, eight psychological types, and four stages of eroticism – not three or five – FOUR !!
.....In the bible there are seven deadly sins – how come there are not eight? By what feat of intellectual perspicacity do we arrive at just that number?
.....In astrology there are four elements – in physics there seem to be quite a few more. Searching the internet I find Stages of Life are quite popular. Two, twelve and three stages are favourites and are each announced by their proponents with magisterial precision and certainty.
.....Descartes said there were two fundamental substances in the universe: mind and matter – and we’ve been stuck with that ever since. The Catholic Church tells us there are three conditions of life after death: Hell, Purgatory and Heaven.
.....All though the Middle Ages they believed that everything above the moon was Godlike, pure, perfect and divine and everything below the moon, including all earthly things, was demonic, foul and corrupt.
.....There is no end to the compulsion to classify.
.....Transactional Analysis tells us we have three internal parts, The Parent, The Adult and The Child... Oh, sorry, we’ve found two more subdivisions. The parent is now either Nurturing or Controlling and The Child either Adapted or Free. Of course, one could probably further classify different types of ‘Free Child’ such as Free Wild and Free Reasonable. And no doubt there are different types of Free Wild.
.....Steven R.Covey found Seven Habits of Highly Successful People and Ken Wilber found four ‘quadrants’ to explain human beings.
.....The Myers-Brigg Type Indicator is based on Jung’s Psychological Types. It tells us there are 16 personality types measured by a person’s preferences, using four basic scales with opposite poles. The four scales are: (1) extraversion/introversion, (2) sensate/intuitive, (3) thinking/feeling, and (4) judging/perceiving. The various combinations of these preferences result in the 16 personality types. It is understood that no matter what your preferences, your behavior will still sometimes indicate the contrasting behavior of the opposite pole. Thus, no behavior can ever be used to falsify the type, and any behavior can be used to verify it.
.....Then there are ways of taxonomically categorising the emotions. Did you know there are 22 negative emotions on self-worth; 14 negative emotions on control; 24 negative emotions on love; 17 negative emotions regarding justice; 14 negative emotions on safety; and 6 negative emotions on trust?
.....And now we come to the Granddaddy of them all: the DSM IV (The Psychiatric Bible). The rationale is based on imaginary classifications. If you can describe a set of symptoms, then you can name a disease. There are always a certain arbitrary NUMBER of symptoms that make up a disease or disorder. The exact number of symptoms required to constitute a disorder is decided by a majority decision of the DSM committee – (a procedure unique in the annals of science). So, for example, the so-called ‘Factitious Disorder’ DSM-IV-TR specifies THREE criteria for factitious disorder:
1. The patient is intentionally producing or pretending to have physical or psychological symptoms or signs of illness.
2 The patient's motivation is to assume the role of a sick person.
3 There are no external motives (as in malingering) that explain the
behaviour.
The patient has to have all three symptoms – not two of them or one – to be diagnosed as suffering from Factitious Disorder.
.....There actually should be one further criterion; only this one should be about the psychiatrist not the patient:
4 That the psychiatrist really knows the patient is
‘pretending’ and that he really does know what the patient’s
motivation is.
.....Now, once we have named and established the disease, we can then claim it exists as a distinct ‘entity’ and that the patient has it. Where we go from there is anybody’s guess.
But I guarantee that Taxonomic Schema Disorder will never be on the DSM list because that is precisely what it suffers from.

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Note: I am indebted to William Deresiewicz who described the famous literary critic Northop Frye as having an ‘excessive attachment to taxonomic schemas’.

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SERENDIPITY

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

.....Delightful word, isn’t it? It dances off the tongue as though it enjoys life. And rightly so – ‘serendipity’ means chance events that have a happy outcome.
.....Wisdom tells us there is a time to plan and a time to let chance have a go. The value of planning and making goals is highly stressed in our action culture; but in some way we know that ‘letting things be’ can produce novel outcomes that are serendipitous in a way that the best laid plans would never even think of. Plans can disrupt serendipity, interfering where we would best let things fall out the way they would. Even in the middle of action there is a mode of letting things be.
.....Our fear is that in doing nothing, nothing will happen – or, that the worst will happen. So life becomes too active lest we will lose out. In Taoist philosophy the term ‘wu-wei’ means literally ‘nonaction’. Chuang-tzu says: ‘Nonaction does not mean doing nothing and keeping silent. Let everything be and allowed to do what it naturally does, so that its nature will be satisfied.’
.....We could note here straight away that one of the main characteristics of person-centred therapy is non-action on the part of the therapist. I always say that any success I have is not in what I do, but in what I don’t do! It’s not about doing nothing and keeping silent, but about allowing things to happen by themselves, about giving nature a chance. If I can give my client’s nature a chance then perhaps they too can learn to trust it.
.....But what is this nature we are giving a chance?
.....One of the main difficulties for many people in understanding Darwinism is the picture it paints of the complete lack of purposeful action in evolution. No one is controlling things or making plans. Organisms evolve by random, chance mutations, some of which are favourable. Over time, as a species gathers and keeps favourable changes, it becomes more complex and more adapted to survive. It moves forward by virtue of its own unintended variables, its heedless creativity, its accidental innovation. One variation may work – only then is it selected and retained. Not selected by the organism, but by the conditions of life it finds itself in. This has been called the principle of ‘blind variation and selective retention’
.....Bernard Shaw expressed a typical revulsion to Darwinism saying that there was a hideous fatalism about it, a ghastly reduction of strength and purpose, of beauty and intelligence, that made his heart ‘sink into a heap of sand’. And yet there is no question that this very process has produced the overwhelming variety of life on our planet, everything from viruses to dinosaurs, from daisies to redwoods, sardines to blue whales, from bacteria to Bach. And with the discovery of DNA, the process of Darwinian natural selection is no longer a theory, but as indisputable a fact as you can get.
.....There is no guiding hand in evolution, no supernatural intervention. Isn’t that a perfect example of ‘letting be’ in the best Taoist tradition? When nature is given the chance it does a spectacular job. It produced us didn’t it !
.....When we give the evolutionary principle a chance in our personal lives by letting something be the outcome can be quite serendipitous, so we call upon strange spiritual mystiques like ‘synchronicity’ or ‘laws of attraction’ that really explain nothing. But there is a very precise way natural selection works. The key idea is ‘piecemeal’ – a little bit at a time. Small steps.
.....In a risky and unpredictable world we ourselves are constantly changing, randomly – one could say we are ‘blindly variable’. So many aspects of our being are constantly shifting: our moods, hormones, digestion, infections, our judgements, needs, impulses, our values, loves and passing obsessions. If we are open to the world, the world seeks out our piecemeal variables and selects those that mesh with the world we live in, enabling us to go on. The world educates us; what it gives back is a validation of our unintended creativity – a reward for ‘letting be’ all our variables and clashing complexes. That’s why we feel serendipity ‘happens’ to us – as indeed it does.
.....Evolution is ‘a little bit at a time’, steps that are so small that I do not notice them. And the world is giving me feedback every moment, shaping me, slapping me when one of my ‘variables’ clash; and giving me a cuddle when I unknowingly get it right. And when I do get it right it tells me loud and clear with that lovely, warm feeling that good luck and fortune are on my side !

TURTLES AND BUTTERFLY WINGS

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

.....William James, (1842 – 1910) who features in our logo above, was the author of the classic Varieties of Religious Experience and was the first psychologist to tackle religion as a naturalistic subject. After one of his public lectures a lady approach him avowing that “the world stood on a turtle”. “Oh”, said James, “and what does the turtle stand on?” “Another turtle”, said the lady. “And what does that turtle stand on”, said James, hoping to show the lady the difficulties in such an infinite regression. “It’s no use, Mr James”, replied the lady, “its turtles all the way down”.
.....Intriguing isn’t it? It’s obvious that this lady was intelligent enough to see what James was getting at, but not smart enough for it to make any difference.
.....Little wonder really because the greatest philosophers have had the same problem. Aristotle was smart. He came up with the ‘Uncaused Cause’: a cause that started the world off, but was itself caused by nothing. Clever lad ! The Christian theologians following Aristotle cashed in on that little trick in a big way. God was a sort of transcendental turtle ! It’s all a question of how things get started, isn’t it? And also, once it gets started is it all meant to be from there on?
.....Our word ‘process’ is a tricky little number. We use it all the time: we talk of the client’s ‘process’, our own ‘process’, our ‘journey’. But it’s never quite clear whether our ‘process’ is the way we are ‘meant’ to go or the way we find ourselves going. For me, how the present has actually turned out is the one thing I never imagined.
.....James Hillman wrote an elegant work on what he called his ‘Acorn Theory’, basically saying that we each have a unique seed we are born with that gives us our life’s purpose. A sort of psychological turtle. It is an immensely attractive idea – the notion that our psychological purpose is to become who we ‘really’ are and who we were meant to be. When we look towards the future it helps to give validation to what we feel is right for us; and looking through a rear-view mirror at the past it is encouraging to feel that we had a destiny.
.....Yehudi Menuhin said that from an early age he knew he would be a violinist. But as someone pointed out to me, what if he’d been born in Ireland when there were only tin whistles?
.....What if there are no turtles propping us up. And it all turns out right, not because it’s our destiny, but because the present it has all led to feels so inevitably factual and difficult to imagine any other way.
.....But back down the track, what if things had been slightly different. If you hadn’t gone to the supermarket that day you wouldn’t have bumped into your old friend Joel whom you thought was still in the UK. Well, then you wouldn’t have gone to his birthday party where you met your present partner. Ah! What then?
.....And where would you be now – and who would you be now – if, instead of marrying your Dad your Mum had married that guy she was keen on who was going to live and work in Hong Kong.
.....On the whole, people don’t like the idea that one’s life is contingent in this way. One feels a little less significant; and it’s all a bit chancy. They prefer turtles, acorns, or angels who write the script; and maybe they have a point. Maybe if you imagine things that way – well, maybe that’s the way they are. Maybe such an encouraging view makes a real difference, whether it’s true or not.
.....According to Chaos Theory in physics a leaf falling in Australia can affect a hurricane in the Bahamas. It’s known as the ‘butterfly effect’. The phrase refers to the idea that a butterfly's wings might create tiny changes in the atmosphere that may ultimately alter the path of a tornado halfway across the world. This kind of interaction means is that everything is connected with, and affects, everything. Another image that describes it is that of a marble balanced atop a hill, two steep downward curves on either side. The tiniest, smallest inclination one way, the breath of a butterfly’s wings, and the marble goes careering off down one slope rather than the other to an entirely different life.
.....Personally, I find some comfort in this idea. For me, the critic can’t get any traction on it – I mean, my raving-mad superego can’t say I’ve failed to live up to my potential. So I can say with a little confidence that I have done my best with what life has handed me.

THE MEANING OF MAP.

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

.....At our first meeting of (MAP) MindBody & Personality Sir Ken Robinson, whose portrait adorns our logo above, spoke in the video on education. Funny and entertaining as he was, he made a serious point. It was that our present system of education is a terrible waste of human potential. Today, it is not enough to train our young people to learn and regurgitate facts. He said, “dancing, for example, should be given equal status to literacy. We all dance, don’t we? We all have bodies – or did I miss something?”
.....That is precisely the point of our new group. We have all missed something – particularly so in psychology. In MAP we are making an emphatic statement. It is that psychology is not just about what we call ‘the mind’ – we include ‘the body’ – or rather, we don’t regard it as separate in the first place. The single word: mindbody says it clearly. It means that the human person is a seamless, whole entity.
.....A person is a mindbody!
.....The problem is that we have missed something. We have been educated out of our instinctive knowing and taught only how to head-trip. And because we have been educated to stay in our heads we now have to begin to consciously pay attention to our body in a new way.
....Focusing is a practical expression of that endeavour.
....But let us be clear what we mean by ‘paying attention to the body’. We don’t just mean noticing it as a diagnostic indicator, the body as giving signals or signs about what is going on in the mind. This is to misunderstand the concept of mindbody. This mistake is still based on the split between mind and body and treating the body as a junior partner or servo-mechanism to the mind. If we treat this ghost called ‘the mind’ as the basic substance, it then has the full responsibility for changing itself – an impossible task.
.....But there can be some misunderstanding in all this. Focusing is not a psychological modality like counselling, gestalt, Jungian dreamwork etc. What we are saying is that any psychological modality must pay attention to the body side of the equation, it must do so either deliberately or implicitly, otherwise it is dealing with only half the person.
.....For about 30 % of people this focusing element of body attention and awareness is quite natural; such people are in touch with a certain depth within themselves. They will not name the body specifically as the source of their insightfulness. They will tell you that feelings, images and new ideas ‘just come to me’. This is because they are all-of-a-piece already. When they say ‘me’ they are referring to mindbody. Simple good communication works on them like a charm. They don’t have to deliberately focus.
.....However, most of us are somewhat effected by the tendency to live in our heads. For us, it is useful to consciously pay attention to the body. This conscious act is focusing proper. There are precise steps that show a person how to do this to begin with. The important thing is to know how to access oneself.
.....By focusing we mean giving the body its full partnership in one’s personality. This means listening respectfully to what, in its own way, it wants, feels, knows and perceives. For some lucky ones this is so natural that they have never considered anything else possible; others will say that their body doesn’t feel anything they don’t already know. Most people are somewhere in the middle: that is, somewhat neglectful of this deeper aspect of themselves.
.....Since its beginning depth psychology has always been fascinated by the so-called ‘unconscious’. It’s as though we’ve always known something was there and some very elaborate theories have been developed about it. What we have been looking for is a direct opening into it. It turns out that it is as close as it can possibly be – so close that we easily neglect it.
.....The meaning and purpose of MAP is to flesh out that neglect for the sake of a better life, no matter what our individual path and however we name it.

CUMULATIVE EVOLUTION IN FOCUSING

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

......The most important aspect of focusing therapy is what Gendlin has called ‘the murky edge’. This is the feel that every problem has if you look into your vague bodily felt-sense. What you already know and feel about a problem is important, but not nearly so important as what you don’t know. This is why it is vital to patiently address the ‘murky edge’, for it is out of this that something new can arise that moves the problem forward.
......The interesting question that arises from this is: why is it that the organism (the body) is so much better at solving some problems than the ‘thinking mind’? I would like to propose that the organism has its own mode of solving problems that has developed over the long course of evolution and that the felt-sense is the further deliberate use of an evolutionary adaptation; in the same way that Renoir’s rosy nudes uses and elaborates the sexual instinct; or the way writing makes use of the ‘speech’ instinct that is hard wired in a way that writing is not. The felt-sense then is not in itself a Darwinian adaptation but makes use of an adaptation that very definitely is: the problem solving ability that has evolved in living organisms since the beginning of life.
.....This is the hypothesis I’ve been thinking about for a while and I have no idea how useful it will be, but the only way to find out is to throw ourselves into it and see what happens. Here goes !
....The course of a typical focusing session follows a somewhat recognisable pattern. Not the content of the session, but the stages. The person first roughly gets a handle on the problem they wish to address. Then comes looking into the felt-sense of it, the vague murky edge. This is often followed by a state of mild confusion – ie. what really is the problem about? It seems shadowy and indistinct. Then there is the sense that there are a number of ways of looking at it, a number of possible ‘takes’, but it is still not clear what is important and what isn’t. It’s all a bit confusing. Then, perhaps suddenly, something emerges that seems right – a way of looking at it, a different perspective that seems clear. This is what we call ‘a step’. The person might expand on this new ‘take’ until a new sense of uncertainty arises. Now again the murky edge appears along with new possible ways of continuing. That is one complete cycle. A session may consist of many such cycles. Of course, it is not always as tidy as I have described it, but generally it will go something like that.
.....It is important to understand that at each cycle, not only the person changes, but the environment changes. For example he may start out with: ‘George is very helpful – perhaps I am not appreciative enough’. Then he makes a step to: ‘Well, actually he doesn’t help, he’s too pushy.’ The person’s perception of the environment (George) has changed. So now there is a new situation, a different problem.
.....Now let’s see how the organism might be operating and what might be happening from what we know about the process of natural selection.
.....The conscious thinking mind solves problems by forward looking to the end condition it wants to achieve. It makes an end goal and then analyses what steps are necessary to achieve it. The process in which the organism engages is quite different. If we imagine this to be analogous to the algorithmic process of natural selection, then what is being sorted out is which ‘take’ on the problem will move the organism forward – just one step.
.....In the murky edge the organism is already selecting everything that is relevant to the initial problem, call it problem A. The ‘everything that is relevant’ is what Gendlin calls ‘the implicit intricacy’ of the problem. This felt-sense is murky because nothing is as yet differentiated. There are many possibilities. Nothing has as yet been selected which will move the organism forward. It is conceivable that in the murky edge there is competition between the different factors that could be the next step – felt by the person as a sense of doubt or murkiness.
.....From these possibilities the best step is now selected which comes a sense of decisive forward movement. This then created a new circumstance, a new problem or a different aspect of the problem. It is as though the first step ‘breeds’ further possible steps, from which another step is selected.
.....Let’s put it again in another way: out of the implicit intricacy of the murky edge, one factor is eventually selected and is felt explicitly as a new development or ‘take’ on the original problem ‘A’ – (like the example above: ‘Well, actually he’s not helpful, he’s pushy). Now we have something different. It is no longer problem ‘A’ we are dealing with. Something has shifted and we now have problem ‘B’ with different factors. .....Again, there is the implicit intricacy of a number of possible ‘takes’ or steps from this. Out of these one will be selected that will carry the person forward. The person is carried along a line of development that is ‘self-selecting’ at each stage; each stage being a ‘better’ or ‘deeper’ solution. But the ultimate outcome is not predictable – that is exactly its advantage. The outcome is not determined by what you already know or are biased towards.
.....In modern engineering they are using computer generated evolutionary algorithms (EAs) to mimic the processes of natural selection and random mutation by ‘breeding’, selecting and re-breeding possible designs to produce the fittest ones. It is a similar process to natural selection, but not quite.
.....When we look at focusing, one thing is abundantly clear: there is some precise sorting and selecting that goes on out of sight. It is certainly not the way the thinking, planning mind works. The focuser merely gives attention to the edge and to what comes from it.
.....The way I have described this process may sound a bit mechanical, but that’s only because it’s difficult to lay out. In actual operation it’s as smooth and seamless as organic life itself.
.....The cumulative evolution at occurs in focusing is far more accurate and economical than ‘plans’, which are likely to be dominated by fixations. It can arrive at a satisfactory solution very quickly – perhaps in less than 10 ‘generations’ – the space of one session. .....Cumulative evolution adapts very accurately – that is, it harmonises the organism with the environment in a way that promotes and maximises the quality of life.
In focusing one thing is very noticeable. It is that one is always surprised at the enormous amount of detail that emerges from any problem, detail that one never suspected was involved. This can be understood as the multiple perspectives or possible next steps that jostle with each other as they compete, mutate and breed, becoming as they do so subjected to the process of selection, before one ‘take’ becomes a constant, giving one a sense of clarity and understanding.
.....In therapy working with the Darwinian idea of cumulative evolution makes it far more distinctive what we mean by the term ‘process’.
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I thought of a little joke that can make fun of this essay:
“I have an attitude problem – in fact all my attitudes have a problem.
They all want to have babies !”

THE INVISABLE ELEPHANT

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

....In our work we talk about respect – respect for the person. Some of us even practice it. Respect means a non-interfering, careful attention to what is. It means a humble passion to know what is going on, deference and a delicate caring for the structure of reality, a reverence for the facts that are none of our own personal making; the other person is the unfolding reality we respect.
.....David Attenborough was on TY1 last night all excited about Ida, the 4.1 million year old humanoid fossil they’ve found. Scientists say she is the famous missing link in the evolutionary chain of human kind. But will the biblical creationists give up ? Of course they won’t. They’ll go on arguing that God made the world six thousand years ago. This got me thinking about respect for truth, about the love and curiosity to unravel the secrets of how things really are.
.....Ida was found in Germany, but think of those archaeologists with their young students who go into the desert looking for barely visible fossil remains, kneeling under the sweltering Ethiopian sun, carefully brushing away grains of sand around the precious find, buried perhaps for millions of years – helping them reconstruct the true story of our ancient ancestors. I’d call that respect.
.....That attitude is no different! It’s the same quality the good counsellor or therapist has. Those young student archaeologists are lucky being taught so thoroughly how to respect. We have more in common them than we do with some in our helping profession who have only been taught to pay lip-service to respect, who really and truly have never been shown how.
.....A client once said to me that they felt lost. It was one of those throw away remarks that turned out to be a deep global feeling, first experienced when she was very young. For quite a while in session she wondered all around it, trying to see it differently, trying to find out why it was like this, trying to understand it.
.....Finally, she said, ‘just let me say “I’m lost”.
.....I replied, ‘All right, just say “I’m lost”’
.....“I’m lost”, she said – and said it several times as though it was a relief – breathing and sighing.
.....Finally, (and I thought this was marvellous) she said,
.....‘Now I know I am lost, I don’t have to find myself.’
.....That’s what she said. Isn’t that completely awe-inspiring?
.....Acknowledging how things actually are, just that, is not only respectful; it is a powerful psychological act. In this case, just getting that she was lost, plainly and simply getting it, letting it be as it is, she found herself.
.....As simple as that.
.....Anyway, that night after watching the news snip with David Attenborough and thinking about science and counselling and ‘respect’, I had a dream. There was this swamp and, barely showing above the surface, was the skin of an elephant. Just a patch of skin – the whole dead carcass must be sunk deep in the swamp. Clearing away some of the bog the elephant moved slightly – it was still alive!
.....Sometimes in therapy when feelings are running underground, when some unknown something is going on, I will say,
.....‘There is an invisible elephant in the room’!
......It’s a joke, but it’s a way of noticing the feel of something that hasn’t come out into the open yet. Buried but alive. It helps to foster a curiosity for what is being overlooked, so we can work carefully, respectfully, brushing away the grains of sand.

CREATIVE CHANGE.

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

.....Nobody invented writing. Stick-pictures engraved onto clay tablets 3000 years ago, hieroglyphs they’re called, were not yet words or letters. Symbols for ‘bird’ or ‘house’ looked like stylised representations of the things themselves. This was not writing as we know it, but it opened possibilities that grew into the alphabet system. Just think what that made possible, step by step – each step emerging as a possibility inherent in what had gone before – until now there is not a single aspect of our civilisation that isn’t dependent on writing.

.....If there is one thing Darwin taught us it is that in nature as in culture, there are no master plans; no grand designs. Creative change doesn’t happen that way. No one invented the steam engine out of the blue. Its possibility emerged out of the burgeoning industrial age. It's impossible to imagine the steam engine being even thought of, let alone invented, in the Stone Age. James Watt, the inventor of the steam engine, simply realised what was immanently possible in his time. This is why so many great discoveries are made simultaneously by different people in different places. 

.....Leonardo da Vinci drew up a flying machine. But it went no further than his imagination. The Wright Bros were inspired by a toy helicopter given them by their father and made of bamboo and cork with a rubber band to power its rotor. In later years they said it was this toy that animated their interest in flying. The thing is, the toy actually flew. It was possible. Its time had come.

.....I want to switch to a question closer to home. Can you invent yourself ? How do people change? What about creative plans to be a better person?  What about setting goals, strategies and grand designs? People who come into the sphere of therapy invariably want to change. They have ideas and fantasies of the sort of person they would like to be. In practical life, of course, it is important to make plans. Much can be said and thought about this; but I want to hone in on the question of ‘personal change’, how does creative change happen in one’s personality? 

.....Putting aside for a moment all those objective areas where plans and program are obviously essential, the truth is, personal change doesn’t happen by design. Personal change evolves incrementally. No one invents it. In this there is no foresight. Personal change evolves out who you actually are, slowly out of what you have just become, the you that has just this moment emerged. This is why we can never predict the course of a session; not the therapist or the client; nobody can, because there are no maps. You are always emerging out of what you just were;  and what emerges is governed by what is possible; and what is possible is governed by what has just emerged. What is possible for you at this moment is limited by what you have become; as well as the real options available that are only visible from the present that is just happening.

 .....When dealing with personal problems, whatever your goals, purposes and fantasies may have been, they have to be revised or abandoned as they come up against present reality. Plans and ideas that are ill-adapted to meet present circumstances are like biological species that become extinct. Only those ideas and purposes that create a ‘psychological niche’, a place where you can thrive – only those ideas and purposes will survive and carry you forward. 

.....What kind of person you become will be shaped by  the concrete possibilities that open up – in this moment ! This kind of evolutionary process can have no certain knowledge of the future. But two things are required: one is the desire to live well  – including those near and dear to you; the other is to be in touch as an organism with constantly changing reality as it presents itself.

.....You can perhaps guess how I am moving closer to the psychological theory of focusing. I’m trying to see how it's analogous to evolution in the larger sense; how individual therapy is an evolutionary process in miniature.

.....When a client has an unresolved problem in her life and is in touch with the felt-sense, she has an open ended attitude to what may come. There are no recipes. There are a host of ways to look at the problem. She looks at her vague, bodily felt-sense of all that.  There is no master recipe that can guide this process. There may be wishes and desires, but they are part of the problem. 

.....For a start, no one can even say what attitude to adopt to the problem. 

.....The real psychological question is: which way of looking at the problem will finally dominate all the other ways of looking at it?  One will – and all the others will become extinct. The one that survives will be the one that provides the ‘niche’, the space that will carry living forward. But before she happens upon that idea no one can say what it will be. Evolution has no foresight.

.....When she hits on the right idea or attitude she will have an ‘experiential shift’ – what we call ‘ a therapeutic step’. That’s where a living space, her ‘niche’,  will open up. Her whole orientation to the problem might change. She may even realise that what she thought was the problem wasn’t at all. That will lead on to the next round – the same process, but incrementally carrying her forward. 

.....It is important to realise that she, as an organism, is solving the problem in a similar way that we develop antibodies when attacked by a virus. Viruses are constantly evolving to keep open their own survival ‘niche’; and consequently the body is constantly dealing with unknowns of all kinds for which there are no precedents and no pre-packaged solutions. 

.....In therapy, the innate intelligence of the body, working in collaboration with the person’s conscious personality, is the key to success. My idea in this essay was to see if our basic knowledge of evolution can throw any light upon the processes that happen in psychological focusing.

THE EVOLUTION OF THE PERSON.

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

.....Like children, the best scientists have always asked silly questions like: ‘why does an apple fall down instead of falling up?’ Or ‘Is white really a colour?’ Evolutionary psychology is still at this stage, asking questions like: ‘Why do we like sweet things?’ ‘Why do we hate the smell of rotten meat?’ or ‘Why are we so afraid of snakes and spiders?’. ‘Why do we smile?’ ‘Why are babies cute’?
.....Of course, these questions are asked against a background of a suspicion that there might be an evolutionary reason why these universal human traits exist. The fact that they do not have to be learned, but are innate, gives a clue for us to suspect that they are genetically inherited – and that can only happen as a result evolutionary adaptation long before we were ‘civilised’.
.....From the birth of Christ to our day is only 35 generations; the Pleistocene era, during which we humans developed all our human faculties, lasted 80,000 generations – a somewhat lengthy but neglected period of our history. So, when you find a modern human trait that can be found across all cultures it means that it is part of a universal human nature developed during that long period.
.....I suppose this essay is really an exercise in developmental psychology big-time.
.....But now, I want to ask a question that is close to the heart of our work: does every human being, no matter what their culture, consider themselves, or even want to be, ‘a person’, someone with choice, a self with a sense of unique existence? Maybe not. Maybe this capacity is a late development not built into our human nature, but more like the ability to read or write, abilities that have to be learned. The capacity to speak a language is inherited – a baby will begin to speak without coaching. But it has to learn how to read and write; these faculties are learned on top of the genetic pre-disposition to speak a language, any language, an ability that was developed long before writing and reading. ‘Unlike its component parts such as vision and speech, which are genetically organised, reading (and writing) has no direct genetic program passing it on to future generations.’ 1
.....I’m thinking maybe it’s the same with the ability to be a person. Maybe we are not primed to be conscious, subjective agents, but rather to be super-aware of external agents. 2
.....Being a person doesn’t come naturally; you could say that it's unnatural. If we manage to do it we build it on top of our genetic pre-disposition to be aware, not of ourselves, but of external agencies, dangerous external agencies that would like us for breakfast.
.....In child development an awareness of external agencies comes before an awareness of the self as an agent. Self awareness as a separate person is a later development and comes when the child realises that they can deceive. In ancestral times, in the 1.6 million years we were hunter-gatherers, it was vital to be super-aware of external agencies. There were always predators lurking, waiting to strike; and there were no houses or fences to protect us. We are genetically powerfully predisposed to be wary of other agencies and their intentions. Beyond our immediate family and group, trust doesn’t come easily.
.....Evolution means slow incremental development. Nothing springs from nothing. Every biological change is built on a pre-developed structure. An imaginary proto-human in the Pleistocene didn’t just sit down one nice day, whereupon it was suddenly revealed to him that he was a person. First and foremost he would have had to be aware of other agencies, sources of nurturing, food and danger – always focused on their intentions towards him.
.....So total was this orientation that there was no notion that storms, floods or lightening were natural phenomena. These had to be living things with their own devious purposes; and so evolved demons, spirits, gods and finally religion; not to mention our whole rich world of the imagination.
.....As we know, children the world over are able to spontaneously create imaginary worlds and to populate them with all kinds of friends and enemies. Mythologies are the stories of our culture’s late childhood. We should remember that the basic instincts upon which all this is built are the very real circumstances that our distant ancestors experienced in the pre-historic years of our early childhood on the African savannah .
.....You might argue that in these early days the instinct for self preservation would surely have been strong enough to give a sense of ego, a sense of oneself. Certainly the instinct for self preservation is strong, but this is not the same as being a conscious agent. To be alert to the unpredictable behaviour of predators or game is not the same as to be alert to one’s own existence. In hunting or being hunted, for example, one doesn’t have to be afraid of what one’s own next move is. You are not unpredictable in the same sense. The intentions you have to keep your eye on are whoever or whatever is out there.
.....I am suggesting that our awareness of being a person is not biologically natural, but is built on top of an instinctive awareness of others as intentional agencies. Because of this powerful instinct a modern human, I think, struggles to be a person, a self-motivated, responsible, thinking agent. Our overriding concentration naturally goes to what others want, what others are doing, what the other’s intentions are, what they are up to.
.....For those who do struggle to be a person and, as the oft repeated phrase goes, tries to ‘find who I am’, the tendency is always to revert to an awareness of others before oneself. This emphasis is conducive to social cohesion, but it is also responsible for our susceptibility to be too influenced by leaders, stars, dictators, helpful bullies and manipulators of the mob, drowning out our attempts at individual and personal existence. Also, politically this makes democracy vulnerable and tenuous; and psychologically it makes religion, directed as it is towards the BIG OTHER, more popular than therapy which is directed towards the inwardness of the self.
.....I am suggesting that because of this most basic and powerful instinct it is understandable why people can be so easily conned and manipulated. It also makes understandable why the superego is so powerful in modern humans. We are never quite sure whether the superego is our friend or our enemy; is it punishing or giving good advice? The superego is the representative dangerous ‘other’ we keep in our heads. The influence of our parents in forming the superego is secondary – important but secondary as Freud knew. It's likely that its shaped primarily by our evolutionary inheritance – which Freud didn’t know.
..... In trying to overcome and lessen the influence of the superego so that we can become more authentic as persons it is as well to acknowledge what powerful factors we are up against; I mean by that, of course, our upbringing – our very early upbringing. The good news, apparently, is the miraculous plasticity of our inheritance. We are all born with the ‘capacity to change what is given to us by nature ... We are, it would seem from the start, genetically poised for breakthroughs’. 3
[1] Wolf, Maryanne. Proust and the Squid; the story of science and
reading brain. Icon Books, Cambrigde, 2008
[2] Dennett, Daniel. Breaking the Spell: religion as a natural phenomena, Viking, 2006
[3] Wolf, Ibid.