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’.