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.

ON SPIRITUALITY

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


....For most people ‘spirituality’ simply means the opposite of ‘materialism’. If asked for further clarification they might say that there is more to life than money and possessions; pressed further, they might say it means making room for realities that we don’t understand. A sense of spirituality, they might say, does not allow that kind of scientistic dogmatism that wants to tie everything down, leaving no room for mystery. Spirituality is the sense that there is something invisible beyond our mundane, everyday existence that is, at the same time, vital to sustaining it.
....Such a view has a very long history going back to Greek thought that was later used to formulate Christian theology. This view divides the whole of reality into just two substances or essences. One is ‘mind’ and the other is ‘matter’. Spirituality is just another word for the ‘mind’ category. Basically it means that you are a soul in a body, a ‘the ghost in the machine’.
....Perhaps the value for us moderns is that ‘spirituality’ provides a shelter for all we don’t know, for our sense of the great wonder and mystery of life. And perhaps we need that room where we can house our vast sense of ignorance. That very sense is one of our most important intellectual qualities. Without it a person is a pig-headed and ignorant know-all. With that sense of the unknown one can be truly humble and blessed with curiosity. So maybe the value of the notion of spirituality is that it provides a safe-haven for this most wonderful gift: the knowledge of our ignorance and room for the many-sidedness of life.
....Of course, the question arises: safe-haven from what? I have already suggested: safe from the rising tide of one-eyed scientists, technocrats and know-alls; and for us caregivers of the soul it is a bastion against the behavioural sciences and drug-happy psychiatrists. A sense of the spiritual saves us from falling into the crass materialism that seems to be enveloping our modern helping professions.
....But the idea of spirituality as a defence mechanism undermines the very notion itself. It sets us up as against so-called ‘materialism’; at the same time validating the existence of what we argue against – as all defence mechanisms do.
....The truth is that we are shit-scared of science. It seems to want to turn everything into mechanisms, locking us into a mechanical universe where there is no room for imagination and freedom. We are afraid of materialism. What this fails to understand is that, underpinning science is always a philosophy; and philosophy can always be talked about and questioned deeply. I don’t mean questioning the facts that science has discovered, like physics or evolution, but what at a deeper level they mean or further imply. As Daniel Dennett says, ‘There is no such thing as philosophy-free science’.
....We shouldn’t really run scared. How about being brave enough to consider the universe as one single substance. What would this mean? It would mean that we don’t need the distinction between spirit and matter, between the supernatural and the natural, between science and soul. It would mean that we don’t need a special separate realm to house the unknown. It would mean that the known universe and all that we don’t know is one single continuum.
....Even neuroscience is leaving behind the idea that the body is a machine. Randolph Nesse says that our genetic knowledge now reveals ‘that our central metaphor for the body is fundamentally flawed. The body is not a machine. It is something very different, a soma shaped by (natural) selection with systems unlike anything an engineer would design. Replacing the machine metaphor with a more biological view of the body will change biology in fundamental ways.’ But, he goes on, although the body is indescribably complex this ‘implies nothing supernatural. Bodies and their origins are purely physical.’
....Without actually saying it, all he means by ‘purely physical’ is simply that we do not need another separate supernatural realm to account for it. This is being brave enough to think of the universe as a single continuum.
....In this light ‘physical’ doesn’t have any meaning; any more than ‘spiritual’. They are really superfluous and misleading labels, well past their use by date.
....As an aside, in ancestral times, as in primitive societies today, there was no distinction between spirituality and science. Their science was eminently practical.

INSTINCT AND THE FELT-SENSE

...................by Stanley
Let’s start with a simple observation. There is a difference between our ‘head-take’ on a situation and our ‘body-take’ of the same situation. Put very simply, our head-take is how we ‘think’ about a problem; our body-take is how we ‘feel’ about it. Quite often the two are distinctly different. We often say colloquially, ‘my head tells me one thing and my heart something else.
....I am going to use the term ‘head-sense’ to stand for our, analytical, cognitive, thinking mind; and ‘body-sense’ for what we have come to know as the ‘felt-sense’. ‘Body-sense’ and ‘felt-sense’ I shall use interchangeably – they are the same thing.
....Lets clear the deck first. When I speak of the body-sense I do not mean ‘the unconscious’. You can have a direct and immediate awareness of your body-sense; this is not what is classically meant by ‘the unconscious’. Psychoanalysis has its place, but not here. I want to link two other disciplines: the psychology of focusing and evolutionary psychology. I want to examine how the felt-sense may have evolved during our long history.
....In therapy we focus on the felt-sense to discover our feelings on any issue. But we have to clearly distinguish between the felt-sense and the practice of focusing on it.
....Focusing is a deliberate, intentional action. The felt-sense is not intentional, but rather the body’s instinctive, immediate perception of any situation. It works whether you like or not. This body-sense must have been an adaptation that was slowly developed over millions of years and it is always active.
....Here’s something that’s fairly obvious. Our body-sense is something we are born with. Being hungry or fearful or sexy are bodily reactions that are instinctual. We don’t have to learn how to feel these things; we are all born with the capacity to react in these ways. As we say, they are hard-wired. Like the felt-sense they are universal, meaning they come with our genetic makeup, our human nature.
....Our head-sense seems to be different. We imbibe the logic of our culture, our language, our ways of thinking and our family dynamics. These are not universals. Different family – different way of thinking; different culture – different head sense.
....Our animal nature evolved according to Darwinian natural selection. 98% of our genes are the same as those of the chimpanzees. Six million years ago there was a speciation divergence that led to homo sapiens. What we call our body-sense is a gradual adaptation developed since then. During most of this time our survival depended upon skills that were non-linguistic, our mammalian body senses that were non-analytical non-cognitive, but highly effective.
....For any organism awareness of what is going on in the environment is vital for survival. I am suggesting that the felt-sense is our basic animal awareness of the environment primarily geared for survival in the broadest sense. It was developed over those millions of years of our early history and is now hard-wired and an inherited characteristic.
....An organism is only connected to life in ways that are useful to it – that is, ways that promote survival. Purely as an organism it is not important for us to know that earth revolves around the sun or to perceive the molecular structure of a meat pie before we eat it. The smell of a pie, yes. We are biologically hardwired to be put off by the smell of bad meat. That has always been important to avoid.
....So there is a difference between the kind of environment we were originally adapted to and the one we live in today. But for the felt-sense there isn’t as hard and fast a difference between these two worlds as one would expect. This is a curious and puzzling fact and it leads us to ask: has the felt-sense also adaptively evolved?
....What we call our ‘environment’ is what is useful for us to perceive. I am suggesting that what we call our ‘felt-sense’ is a wholesale but biased perception of our environment that reacts to it instinctively. This sense helps us in the close encounters of the everyday kind as it did for our pre-human ancestors. But, as an organism, our relationship to the environment didn’t stop with the beginning of civilization; and maybe at the organismic level there have been evolutionary changes in what we call the felt-sense. For example, we know that the body-sense is very sensitive to being understood. We know very precisely that the felt-sense will reject any description of how it feels that doesn’t fit. You say, ‘I am angry… No, that’s not it. (consulting your body-sense) I am irritated. That’s it. I am IRRITATED !’ We are the only animals on the planet that have developed such a high degree of organismic sophistication; yet this body-sense is still anchored in its original holistic pre-cognitive nature.
....This would clearly suggest that the body-sense has evolved enough to grasped language as part of its environment. In other words at organismic level of functioning we also now have a very refined feeling for language. Even more remarkably, we can also have a feeling for science, a feeling that is different from the scientific mode of conceptual thinking. A scientist reports that the solution to a chemical problem about carbon rings came to him in a dream or the answer to a mathematical equation came to her in the toilet. But it seems that the body-sense still doesn’t think analytically – it retains its original ability for holistic survival sensitivity and for flashes of insight that are instantaneous.
....We know that the bodily felt-sense can somehow synthesise a new idea in an abstract field. Any scientist will tell you that discovery sometimes comes in a flash that doesn’t follow a rational step by step process - that comes afterwards as a confirmation. The body-sense can solve logical or theoretical puzzle by leaping, as we say, outside the square. Just how it does this is difficult to say. Of course, such a solution could not arise without the head-sense’s grasp of the theoretical problem in the first place. But what is clear is that the organism, as a bodily sense, contributed something vital. On the question of this cooperation between different parts of the self, evolutionary biologist Nicholas Humphries says:
What makes the parts of an oak tree belong together – the branches, roots, leaves, acorns ? They share a common interest in the tree’s survival… Then, here’s the question: What makes the parts of a person belong together – if and when they do? The clear answer has to be that the parts will and do belong together just in so far as they are involved in the common project of creating that person’s life… they are engaged in one and the same enterprise: the enterprise of steering me – body and soul – through the physical and social world.
....There is a good evolutionary reason why women generally are more in touch with the body-sense. Multitasking has always been necessary for the woman because of the nature of her tasks. The ability to multitask using intuition and instant response to novel situations is an attribute of the body-sense. For our ancestors, men had to be concentrated on specific tasks like hunting, building and defense. As a consequence, men may have adapted by developing a larger and more dominant head-sense that can more effectively concentrate.
....It might even be profitable to conceive that the head-sense is built on top of the body-sense as a continuous evolutionary adaptation. Yet still, we actually experience the body-sense as quite a different mode of being.
....In therapy we discover that our felt-sense shows us the immediate step in any situation – always in a life enhancing direction. Not a logical line forward – but the next step necessary. When we stop and focus on a problem we consult this body-sense; but we are not given an awareness of simply what is going on. The body-sense does not just give us raw data and leave it to our everyday head-sense to work out how to use it. The ‘take’ of the body-sense is not unselective. Precisely the opposite, it is slanted; it is always relevant to survival. In any situation not any move we could make will be appropriate. The body-sense always produces the next step – and that step is geared toward the broadest goal of survival: well-being, furtherance and aliveness – not only for oneself, but for those upon whom we depend. Indeed, this simple and pronounced bias is often missing in our head-sense of a situation. The head-sense can be so enmeshed in ridiculous cultural ideas that it often fails to cut through the crap. Much of the head-stuff we harbour are culturally transmitted viruses (memes) , such as toxic religions that are quite inimical to survival; and every culture is swimming in lesser adverse absurdities that compete to fill our heads.
....The felt-sense is there whether we turn our attention towards it or not. It is there because it is an inherited, instinctual part of our nature. The deliberate action of turning towards it is what we call ‘focusing’. This psychological ability is not instinctual, but acquired; and, as we know, individually acquired characteristics are not inherited. We don’t come equipped with a built-in ability to psychologically focus.
....Our environment is no longer merely the natural world as it was. We have developed an external environment that is structured and symbolic and our head-sense is part of that world. But make no mistake, this created world has been a crucial, perhaps the crucial factor, in our survival as a species. But at the same time, it can put us out of sync with our instinctive nature which was adapted to a quite different natural environment. Our instinctive survival nature – our felt-sense – has its own ‘take’ on this new environment and it is not so hemmed in by arbitrary and fixed rules and injunctions and thus it is more simple, creative and original.
....There are negative cultural factors that can fill our head-sense and divorce us from the bodies. The overblown work ethic and achievement fantasies of modern society are not helpful; neither is our education system that’s geared to promoting academic concentration that tends to sever our vital connections. There are also family cultures that are openly hostile to any manifestation of intuition and imagination and that fail to nurture the body-sense.
....We know that some people are well tuned-in to their body-sense and can make immediate survival decisions. Even such fortunate people have areas where their natural good sense, their felt-sense, has no input into their lives. They have to be shown how to focus on these areas so that their body-sense can help them take the necessary steps to go forward in living.
....We should not be dismayed by the idea that some of our basic psychological qualities are biologically inherited. Evolutionary psychology has done a great deal of interesting and valuable work that makes a lot of sense, extending enormously our idea of ‘history’ and what makes us tick. I’ve tried to show here how the relatively new conceptions of psychological focusing might be more understandable when looked at from the evolutionary perspective.

[1] Humphrey, Nicholas. One Self: a meditation on the unity of consciousness. Social Research,
67, no. 4, 32-39, 2000.
[1] Dawkins, Richard. Viruses of the Mind. http://www.cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/Dawkins/viruses-of-the-mind.html

THERE’S NO PLACE LIKE HOME.

.......................Louise and Ferdy: dramatic personifications.

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

....Are you missing your feelings? If so you’re lucky, for a long time I didn’t have any feelings to miss. Well, that’s not quite true. I did have feelings, but they were only for other people, not for me. I was known as a very feeling and sympathetic person. I could only feel sympathetic, sad or angry for others, on behalf of others, as it were. These days I am beginning to feel some of that compassion for myself, but for most of my life it never occurred to me. Even more so when I had children. Having children just reinforced my urge to self-sacrifice. I didn’t look upon myself as a good mother – although people used to tell me I was too good for my own good. I knew in a way they were right, but being that way felt natural. If you have lived most of your life without your own feelings it only occasionally seems like something is missing.

,,,,But now I know I also had a selfish reason for being so selfless. The first time I ever felt angry it surprised and horrified me. It happened in the kitchen when my husband criticized the way I cooked the potatoes. Small enough thing – nothing unusual. But there was a kitchen knife lying on the bench. Something rose up in me and I wanted to plunge the knife into his back. That moment in my mind I actually did it. I ran into the bedroom shaking with fear.

....It was after that experience I started therapy. I soon realised I did have a selfish reason for being so unselfish: I was afraid of myself – afraid, not only of my anger, but any sympathy I might have for myself. In my childhood they called it ‘wallowing in self-pity’. A big no-no. For me, feeling for others was a way of self-preservation. Deep down, the only way I knew to be accepted.

....In my sessions we did a lot of work on the feelings in my body. At first I didn’t know what my therapist was talking about. I got irritable when he asked me to look into my body to see how I felt. That irritability was actually the beginning of a feeling that was already there. Only it turned out to be much more than irritability – it was rage and sorrow.

....Another thing I found out was why I often felt so tired. Eventually I learned that to have my feelings I had to come home. Again and again I had to come home – I mean come home to my body, the place where you are supposed to live. I was always tired because deep down I didn’t want to live, I wasn’t living with myself, for myself. My body was my enemy. It had all the feelings I didn’t want, all the feelings that could have ruined me if they got out. I went through a period where I just couldn’t be bothered with the effort it took to stay alive and cope.

....The only way not to have feelings is to simply vacant. Now, when I meet a person like I used to be, I recognise that ‘no-one-at-home’ look. I feel sorry for them. They make a good show of being alive; doing all the right things; smiling and nodding at the right times. But that’s all it is – a show.

....When I was young I was taught a big lesson: having feelings was dangerous. Nobody said as much, but that’s how it was. I was the youngest with three bossy brothers, a macho father and a useless mother. I had to make a survival choice – hide myself and my feelings or face being ostracised and annihilated. That’s what it was like. Choosing to live took one sharp act of decision: leave home ! Home – the place where all one’s feelings are. Leave them all at home. Leave ones primary home whilst still living on in the family home. Strange isn’t it? One chooses to live and be good; set the body up to make the right noises and look OK – otherwise stand back and just watch yourself pretending to be in the game of life. Watch my body acting whilst having nothing to do with it. All the while knowing somehow one is hiding. I used to do that physically too. I used to hide in the kennel with the dog.

....Today life is much more difficult. Well, perhaps not so much for me, but for others whom I seem to puzzle. Some think I have changed for the worse. Particularly my husband Ferdy. He’s a good man, but he now finds me difficult. I feel sorry for him, but not so sorry that I will give up myself. My main problem with him now is he stifles me. The one thing he hates is me saying ‘I want some space’. I really don’t know whether  our marriage will survive and I don’t really know how I will feel if it doesn’t; but I do know I can’t go back to how it was.

 

 

HOW HUMAN NATURE BECOMES A PERSON

an excusion into evolutionary psychology
............................by Stanley

....The idea that all the great variety of cultures ancient and modern are built up upon a universally shared human nature has been out of fashion for quite a while. Instead we have had what is known as the ‘blank slate’ theory that says there is no such thing as human nature. You are born a blank slate and the habits, language and customs of your culture totally shape you – you live in it, you think with it. Culture is everything. This view is known as ‘post-modernism’. It is so called because it opposes what was a ‘modern’ view, starting with the 18th century Enlightenment, that there is indeed such a thing as objective ‘nature’ – human included. The post-modernists would insist that the whole of human history proves their point. Except that there is a small slice of human history they overlooked. 

......2.5 million years ago our ancestors, hardly recognisable as human, began a long journey through time that ended 12,000 years ago – a period roughly co-incident with the Pleistocene geological era. Someone from the end of that period you would recognise as fully human; and they would be in every sense – biologically and psychologically basically the same as us, with the same potentialities as ourselves. But it took evolution and natural selection over 2 million years to do it. 

.....In that ‘small slice of history’ human nature was formed and it remains basically unchanged in everyone today no matter what their culture. 

......Interesting to us are the more personal aspects of this. Some years ago when I first encountered evolutionary psychology I didn’t like it. I didn’t understand it because I had no knowledge of evolution. It seemed to me to be one of those dead-head scientific theories that would spoil my Jungian view of the world. I thought it could never account for the human imagination. I was wrong.

.....But still, a more pertinent question is this: if our inherited human nature make us all basically the same, the problem for us in person-centred psychology is how and in what way each human person is different; for us this is a crucial question. We are not asking about cultural differences – but the differences between you and me.

.....In our work, the concept of ‘the person’ is most important. Somehow we have to account for it. I believe what we are referring to is a continued development of a long evolutionary trend. What we call ‘the person’ is a refinement of our inherited ability to respond to the specificities of the environment. 

.....The more an animal can respond to the specifics of the environment the greater are its chances of survival. The ability to differentiate changes in the environment and respond appropriately is the key to the success of all the more highly developed mammals. The lower animals cannot do this so well. In  order to lay her eggs the female wasp (Sphex), first digs a hole in the sand, then goes out looking for a caterpillar which she stings and drags into her hole so  that her young can feed upon it. But first she leaves the caterpillar on the edge of the hole while she checks to see if the hole is OK. If you move the caterpillar while she is checking the hole she will go through the whole procedure again. No matter how many times you move the caterpillar while she is in the hole checking it, when she finds the caterpillar again she will go back and check the hole again. She never gets past this repetition if you keep moving the caterpillar.

.....Compare this to the ability of a cat chasing a mouse. The environment and the mouse are constantly changing and the cat responds to each specific change in present time. But far more complex is George at an interview with a board of examiners where he is trying to get a job as an electronics engineer. Not only is George facing a barrage of complicated questions coming from people who also emit shades of subliminal feelings towards him, he is also dealing with all his associated memories: the maths teacher who was sarcastic to him at school, his father’s heavy goals for him, his imagination and fears for the future, as well as his whole training as an engineer. All are present to him; and all are involved in answering the next challenging question from the examining board. No one in the world has ever been in exactly the situation George is in at this moment. And no one in the world will answer the next probing as George will. There are no existing patterns that will help him. His response in present time will come out of the total person George is. George is definitely no mere behavioral, stimulus response organism. He has come a long way from that.

.....Some evolutionary psychologists maintain that our value of the human person is a direct result of evolution and natural selection. I suppose you could say that the intrinsic value we place on the ‘person’ is the secular equivalent of belief in the soul which must have had, because of its ubiquity, some sort of adaptive advantage in evolutionary terms. 

.....All of which would have been laid down in our development during the Pleistocene some 2 million years ago. Evolutionary psychologist Nicolas Humphrey has said that we, and to some extent gorillas and chimps, have evolved to be ‘natural psychologists’. For good reasons we developed the ability to second guess the minds of our fellows, giving us, as a species, a survival advantage. 

.....From this beginning we became ‘a society of selves. The idea that everyone is equally special in this way is extraordinarily potent – psychologically, ethically and politically…  And from the beginning, it will have transformed human relationships, encouraging new levels of mutual respect, and greatly increasing the value each person puts on their own and other’s lives. Indeed, I would go so far as to suggest that it marks a watershed in the evolution of our species.’ 

..

..

DARWINMANIA

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

....To talk about the ultimate value of the individual seems absurd set against the 3.5 billion years since life began on the planet earth. Religion has fought hard not to get swamped by it. The question is: are we in the same boat. Does triumph of Darwin pose the same threat to a valid psychology of the person?

....That is seems to do so indicates that we are not at all as sure of ourselves as we might be. Biology seems set to have it all wrapped up. It seems our only recourse is to say that there are things about which science knows nothing. Of course, a good scientist would agree. ‘Certainly there is much we do not know’, but he would add … ‘yet’.

....That little ‘yet’ is threatening. It suggests that eventually he is going to snuff out your soul because he will have found out about all that stuff. Explained it all away. No room for feelings or mystery, or personality, or the great ambiguity of life. You’re gone. Old Egg-Head will claim he has worked it all out. What on earth can we possibly mean by a ‘person-centred psychology’, let alone anything we call the soul? 

....This is a paranoia based on our fragile grasp of what we are doing.  In fact, biology is not our enemy but our friend. True science is a state of wonderment, the same kind of wonderment that stands out on every page of Darwin’s notes as he voyaged around South America in H.M.S Beagle. “The day had passed delightfully”, he wrote. “Delight itself however, is a weak term to express the feelings of a naturalist who, for the first time, has wandered by himself in a Brazilian rainforest”.

....There is the true naturalist’s openness to nature. In that sense we do no less than Darwin did and as every genuine scientist does. We stand before nature in the same way, with the same sense of awe – only with us, we stand before human nature.  

....There is no need to retreat into the supernatural in order to hold on to our realities and our values. We don’t have to invoke spiritual agencies, astrological influences, crystal balls, clairvoyance or the gods to escape the clutches of materialism. Neither do we have to fixate on quantum physics to reassure ourselves that even the scientists have passed beyond nature. Science is not about materialism or any kind of ism. It is about humility and a respect for nature as the great unknown. There is no need to create a realm that science cannot reach, because there is room enough in nature to accommodate our most valuable asset: our sense of the infinite vastness of what we do not know.

.....In Darwin’s time the accepted doctrine was that in the beginning God made all the species exactly as they are now. To doubt that for a moment was to face the unknown. It was to doubt what everyone knew. That Darwin did so was an act of great self-confidence and at the same time an act of supreme humility. He was confident enough to humble himself before nature and let it teach him.

....Perhaps the highest human cognition is ‘I don’t know’. This is not the same as the existentialist’s ‘nothing’. It is not the perception of nothingness, but rather that there is a something one does not know. That’s very different. And, more importantly, it is an unknown something that presses to be known. This pressure does not come from another realm, but precisely from what is observably there. Neither does this sense come from dwelling on a realm of unknowables like God, or spirit, or ‘the unconscious’, rather it comes from that which we directly know, what is directly before us. One example: for Darwin it was from the direct observation of the finches on the Galapagos Islands. It wasn’t just that he didn’t know what caused the variation in their beak size, but in looking at this obvious fact, there was something pressing to be known. Species change over time and place; that was obvious. But how? Why?

....It isn’t anything outside the observable that this unformed something presses its demands on us like this. It comes directly from what we observe.

....Also, whatever it is, this something cannot be derived from what is observed – it cannot be derived in the sense of ‘deduced from’. The observed form does not directly tell us what the unknown something is that’s pressing to be known. In this situation one’s present knowledge, by definition, has no way, no language, no concepts by which to formulate it…yet. 

....For Darwin, there was something about those finch’s beaks – something that wouldn’t let him go. It was a something which was as yet unformed, not even an idea. But by paying attention to it, a new idea comes. But how do you pay attention to something that isn’t yet an idea? 

....It’s no use saying that the unconscious does it. That just puts the same problem back one step: how does the unconscious form an idea from something that isn’t yet formed as an idea. The fact is, at this point, no one has the idea. 

....This is a philosophical problem and it presses on us to give it attention – which we are doing right here.

....Let’s look at some other concrete instances: if you have a problem, say a machine breaks down or let’s say you don’t know how to write a difficult letter or you don’t know how to finish an essay. What you do is attend to the problem in a certain way; the old thoughts and solutions don’t work, so now you attend to what is before you with a certain openness. Then suddenly the answer flashes on you. Where did the answer come from? Not from you, not from beyond. All we can say with certainty is that it comes from attending to the problem in a certain way, a contemplative looking at the situation rather than thinking. Just the way Darwin observed nature, out of which, eventually, came a new idea that shook the world of science.

....Incidentally, for those who are interested, this is where we part company from post-modernism.

....You may realise that this is the essence of what we call ‘focusing’. Focusing is all about how you attend to an unknown, unformed something in this certain way. 

....However, it is helpful to recognise that the scope of this idea is much broader than that of a psychotherapeutic tool. It is also what we do in good science and philosophy and why we should celebrate Charles Darwin who was, quite naturally, very good at it. Very good at it indeed.