Art in Psychotherapy, Psychotherapy in Art

Mike Hickes praises a TV drama’s success in bringing awareness of the value of psychotherapy to a wider public. Despite dramatic licence and unrealistic boundary violations, he believes that In treatment demonstrates the fundamental power of therapy.

Originally published in THE PSYCHOTHERAPIST, Issue 56, Spring 2014.

IN TREATMENT

One of the best shows I have come across portraying both the experience of being a psychotherapist and of being a client in psychotherapy is In Treatment, an HBO drama series that aims to bring the therapeutic process to the TV screen. For me, what particularly differentiates it is the way in which it concerns itself with, and comes alive through, a relentless and almost exclusive focus on the intimate connection between therapist and client.

 

Presented through a unique scheduling structure, In Treatment comprises a series of tight half-hour one act plays. No changing scenery, no action, simply one intense encounter after another, screened evening after evening for four or five days each week. The therapist Paul Weston (played by Gabriel Byrne) encounters a number of different clients and Paul’s uneasy relationship with his vocation and his own personal struggles are exposed through brief vignettes of his life outside the therapy room and a session each week dedicated to his own personal therapy.

 

Intensity of the therapeutic relationship

We watch as Paul sits there week after week in one-to-one therapy. Some moments deeply characterise the intensity of the therapeutic relationship while others show the isolation and vulnerability so familiar in one’s life as a therapist in private practice.

 

In Treatment has run for three seasons and has evolved through different scriptwriters. The first two seasons were adaptations of the Israeli series Be Tipul, whereas in the third and final season the script was entirely original. In the final season, viewers were supported online through a dedicated HBO website that provided short video extracts of sessions, accompanied by informed and contrasting commentary from three psychotherapists, providing different perspectives on and insights into the therapeutic interactions portrayed.

 

Possibility for personal change

For me, the art and the potential for success of good television drama lie in the writers’, producers’ and actors’ ability to create an intimate atmosphere where the audience is able to understand and be moved by the drama’s characters in new and different ways. Where ‘the other’ is ‘seen’ and ‘experienced’ by the audience, where the drama arouses curiosity and stimulates reflection. Ultimately, artfully created TV drama has the potential to reveal new perspectives, examine new ways of being, indeed open up the possibility for personal change.

 

In many ways, these characteristics relate to the art of therapy, where therapist and client work closely together co-creating an intimate therapeutic relationship. The therapist provides a space where a client can feel listened to, heard, understood and not judged – where exploration and reflection on a client’s experience and view of the world can lead to opening up to other perspectives, a different point of view, new possibilities for living and choices about how to live.

 

Felt connection

Where things differ is that the art of good psychotherapy emerges through felt connection, the intimate and unique experience of client and therapist ‘in it’ together. It is an authentic felt sense, informed by different ways of knowing, always interpretative, at times intuitive, sometimes spiritual and, in the way that I practice, phenomenological. What is experienced is what is created and informed by the subjective and interrelational ways of knowing between two people.

 

The art of In Treatment is that it comes alive through its creative and dramatic film direction, its skilful and subtle acting and the character of the therapist Paul, as it emerges, even through slight eye movements, hand gestures and shifts in posture. Paul has a raw, vulnerable and honest quality, and the sensitive, intimate camerawork creates a powerful atmosphere, zooming in slowly at the right moments, anxiously circling the room, capturing both the intensity and the intimacy of the client–therapist encounter.This intensity is enhanced by the heartrending performances of the actors playing Paul’s clients.

 

A voyeuristic experience?

But can the viewer ever be really ‘in it’? If the viewer is only observing another’s intimacy by being drawn towards what is going on in the therapy room, it simply becomes a voyeuristic experience. The viewer cannot actually experience what is there, unspoken but felt between client and therapist. So, while the scenes may evoke empathy, curiosity and insight into the process of therapy, the viewer is surely apart, in a place of observation, a commentator, only able to take a critical stance, judging what they are seeing and experiencing it as a third party. If this is the case, the audience will not experience what is at the very heart of a therapeutic relationship and perhaps axiomatic to successful therapeutic outcome.

 

Suspension of disbelief

Alternatively, the viewer’s experience could be considered from the perspective of the poet Coleridge, who in 1817 proposed the idea of ‘suspension of disbelief’. Coleridge’s proposition was that a writer could infuse a ‘human interest and a semblance of truth’ into a tale such that the reader might be able to suspend judgment concerning the plausibility of the narrative. This might result in what is known in the theatrical and science fiction genres as ‘cognitive estrangement’ (Parrinder 2000), where an audience is able to reconsider their own situation from the alternate perspectives depicted – to learn from other worlds. Perhaps viewers of In Treatment may be privy to more than simple observation and in this suspended disbelief enter more fully the therapeutic relationship and what goes on ‘in between’ than mere observation suggests?

 

A vital ingredient for TV drama is of course the ‘drama’ itself. In fact, I found that watching the shows sometimes left me feeling surprisingly anxious, uneasy and emotionally affected. On edge. These feelings were not typical of the kind of emotional experiences I have had during or after seeing clients – or of being a client myself. Not only was this because I was simply an observer of the encounters portrayed, powerless and not ‘in it’, but also because there is something exaggerated in the way that the therapeutic drama is played out in the show, perhaps deliberately to maximise impact.

 

Boundary violations

The intense hostility, alarming aggression, harsh accusations, intensely hurt feelings, deeply cutting remarks and boundary violations are not, in my experience, typical or representative of what goes on in a therapeutic relationship. This combines with a 30-minute viewing slot that compresses and intensifies the experience of each session screened. Indeed, much has been written about the boundary violations in the series, which may make for good TV drama but are thoroughly misleading in terms of the ethical standards clients can and should reasonably expect from a professional therapeutic relationship.

 

So, on the one hand, I was certainly captivated by the drama but on the other hand the drama did not represent the real experience of being either therapist or client ‘in the room’. Of course, drama can and does emerge between therapist and client in the therapeutic encounter; drama and emotion are inherent in psychotherapy. However, this emerges through the experience and interaction of being together and struggling with the intimate problems and difficulties with living. The limitations or shortcomings of TV are that it is simply not possible to make that kind of internal experience of drama and emotion come alive for the viewer.

 

Insights into the psychotherapeutic process

Despite this qualification, In Treatment does provide viewers with an opportunity to gain real insight into the psychotherapeutic process, the therapy world, how it works and how helpful it can be in people’s lives. There is a lot of good therapy in the show. Putting aside debate about orientation and technique because the intention is not to offer a technical tool for CPD (although it is used with trainee analysts on one course at the William Alanson Institute in NYC), the series brings out the fundamentals of therapy: the emotional impact and empowerment; the importance of curiosity and open exploration; the value of experiencing a different point of view; how therapists facilitate self-examination and support the client to take responsibility and change. This is therapy and shows the power of being with another where the explicit and the implicit in the client’s life are gently and caringly brought to light and considered.

 

The therapist’s responsibility

Of course, Paul’s clients come to therapy for help in addressing their various difficulties with living. A question that one might ask is whether Paul’s clients are actually getting what they want from the therapy and whether are they more able to move forward in their lives as a result of the sessions? This raises fundamental questions: who and what defines successful outcome, as well as how to know. The series cannot answer all these questions but Paul’s performance as a therapist does address the most vital dimension of therapeutic progress, the litmus test: the therapist’s responsibility to facilitate the client’s process in gaining insight into the barriers underlying their difficulties, exploring and reflecting on these, and getting the client to the point where they can consider their choices and the consequences they face.

 

What Paul’s clients might do with this work, how they might later reflect on it and how they might use it outside the therapy room, we may have our hunches. There are some hints from ongoing dialogue in the sessions but we simply do not know, as we do not know in the ‘real’ world of therapy. The fundamental achievement of the series is its demonstration of what it takes to work in therapy and be in therapy, to develop insight, open up new possibilities, and that choices and responsibility lie within ourselves.

 

A caring therapeutic alliance

In series three, one of Paul’s clients, Sunil, a middle-aged Bengali man, is suffering from seemingly irrecoverable loss. Having lost his wife, Kamala, five months before moving to the USA to stay with his son Arun, Sunil seems utterly displaced. Lonely, increasingly estranged from his son, he is longing to be home in Calcutta with its familiar culture and music. He is grieving not only the death of his wife but also a long-lost relationship with Malini, his first love, as well as feeling deeply the absence of any valued role in life. Through the sessions with Sunil, we see Paul building a deep and caring therapeutic alliance, his empathy perhaps fuelled by his own experience as an Irish immigrant coming to the USA and his own loneliness and loss through a recent divorce. Paul sensitively responds to Sunil and works hard to identify the barriers he faces in moving forward with his life. Some of Paul’s interventions explore and reflect on Sunil’s explicit and harsh criticism of his son Arun’s marriage to Julia and his descriptions of inappropriate intimacy between them. Paul suggests that what might be implicit in Sunil’s explicit feelings is deep loss felt in his own life and that he may be experiencing jealousy of what Arun and Julia have in their relationship as well as the effects of a loss of intimacy in his own life.

 

I have several clients who have referred to their interest in and habitual viewing of the In Treatment series. I have also noticed in my own private practice an increasing trend towards younger people seeking help through therapy. I have no idea whether these are connected but I for one feel that In Treatment has achieved real success in what is a monumental attempt to portray the psychotherapeutic process more accurately for a broader TV audience. If it acts as a good TV drama and also demystifies and opens up the art and value of psychotherapy to a new generation, that is indeed artful television drama.

 

References

Parrinder P (ed) (2000). ‘Learning from other worlds: estrangement, cognition, and the politics of science fiction and utopia’,Liverpool Science Fiction Text & Studies.

Coleridge ST (1817). Biographia literaria: biographical sketches of my literary life and opinions.

What is mindfulness?

‘What is Mindfulness’ by Bodhipaksa of Wildmind Buddhist Meditation

 

Mindfulness is very simple, it is the gentle effort to be continuously present with experience, paying attention in a particular way; on purpose, in the present moment, and non-judgmentally.”

 

Paying attention ‘on purpose’

 

First of all, mindfulness involves paying attention “on purpose”. Mindfulness involves a conscious direction of our awareness. We sometimes (me included) talk about “mindfulness” and “awareness” as if they were interchangeable terms, but that’s not a good habit to get into. I may be aware I’m irritable, but that wouldn’t mean I was being mindful of my irritability. In order to be mindful I have to be purposefully aware of myself, not just vaguely and habitually aware. Knowing that you are eating is not the same as eating mindfully.

 

Let’s take that example of eating and look at it a bit further. When we are purposefully aware of eating, we are consciously being aware of the process of eating. We’re deliberately noticing the sensations and our responses to those sensations. We’re noticing the mind wandering, and when it does wander we purposefully bring our attention back.

 

When we’re eating unmindfully we may in theory be aware of what we’re doing, but we’re probably thinking about a hundred and one other things at the same time, and we may also be watching TV, talking, or reading — or even all three! So a very small part of our awareness is absorbed with eating, we may be only barely aware of the physical sensations and even less aware of our thoughts and emotions.

 

Because we’re only dimly aware of our thoughts, they wander in an unrestricted way. There’s no conscious attempt to bring our attention back to our eating. There’s no purposefulness.

 

This purposefulness is a very important part of mindfulness. Having the purpose of staying with our experience, whether that’s the breath, or a particular emotion, or something as simple as eating, means that we are actively shaping the mind.

 

Paying attention ‘in the present moment’

 

Left to itself the mind wanders through all kinds of thoughts — including thoughts expressing anger, craving, depression, revenge, self-pity, etc. As we indulge in these kinds of thoughts we reinforce those emotions in our hearts and cause ourselves to suffer.

 

Mostly these thoughts are about the past or future. The past no longer exists. The future is just a fantasy until it happens. The one moment we actually can experience — the present moment — is the one we seem most to avoid.

 

So in mindfulness we’re concerned with noticing what’s going on right now. That doesn’t mean we can no longer think about the past or future, but when we do so we do so mindfully, so that we’re aware that right now we’re thinking about the past or future.

 

However in meditation, we are concerned with what’s arising in the present moment. When thoughts about the past or future take us away from our present moment experience and we “space out” we try to notice this and just come back to now.

 

By purposefully directing our awareness away from such thoughts and towards the “anchor” or our present moment experience, we decrease their effect on our lives and we create instead a space of freedom where calmness and contentment can grow.

 

Paying attention ‘non-judgmentally’

 

Mindfulness is an emotionally non-reactive state. We don’t judge that this experience is good and that one is bad. Or if we do make those judgements we simply notice them and let go of them.

 

We don’t get upset because we’re experiencing something we don’t want to be experiencing or because we’re not experiencing what we would rather be experiencing. We simply accept whatever arises. We observe it mindfully. We notice it arising, passing through us, and ceasing to exist. Whether it’s a pleasant experience or a painful experience we treat it the same way.

 

Cognitively, mindfulness is aware that certain experiences are pleasant and some are unpleasant, but on an emotional level we simply don’t react. We call this “equanimity” — stillness and balance of mind.

 

REF: http://www.wildmind.org/applied/daily-life/what-is-mindfulness

From ‘ Brain Pickings’ … On Anxiety and Creativity

Kierkegaard on Anxiety & Creativity

by Maria Popova

 

“Because it is possible to create — creating one’s self, willing to be one’s self… — one has anxiety. One would have no anxiety if there were no possibility whatever.”

 

“Anxiety is love’s greatest killer,” Anaïs Nin famously wrote. But what, exactly, is anxiety, that pervasive affliction the nature of which remains as drowning yet as elusive as the substance of a shadow?

 

In his 1844 treatise The Concept of Anxiety (public library), Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855) explains anxiety as the dizzying effect of freedom, of paralyzing possibility, of the boundlessness of one’s own existence — a kind existential paradox of choice.

 

He writes:

 

‘Anxiety is a qualification of dreaming spirit, and as such it has its place in psychology. Awake, the difference between myself and my other is posited; sleeping, it is suspended; dreaming, it is an intimated nothing. The actuality of the spirit constantly shows itself as a form that tempts its possibility but disappears as soon as it seeks to grasp for it, and it is a nothing that can only bring anxiety. More it cannot do as long as it merely shows itself. [Anxiety] is altogether different from fear and similar concepts that refer to something definite, whereas anxiety is freedom’s actuality as the possibility of possibility.

 

[…]

 

Anxiety may be compared with dizziness. He whose eye happens to look down the yawning abyss becomes dizzy. But what is the reason for this? It is just as much in his own eye as in the abyss, for suppose he had not looked down. Hence, anxiety is the dizziness of freedom, which emerges when the spirit wants to posit the synthesis and freedom looks down into its own possibility, laying hold of finiteness to support itself. Freedom succumbs to dizziness. Further than this, psychology cannot and will not go. In that very moment everything is changed, and freedom, when it again rises, sees that it is guilty. Between these two moments lies the leap, which no science has explained and which no science can explain. He who becomes guilty in anxiety becomes as ambiguously guilty as it is possible to become.’

 

He captures the invariable acuteness of anxiety’s varied expressions: Anxiety can just as well express itself by muteness as by a scream. Kierkegaard argues that, to paraphrase Henry Miller, on how we orient ourselves to anxiety depends the failure or fruitfulness of life:

 

‘ In actuality, no one ever sank so deep that he could not sink deeper, and there may be one or many who sank deeper. But he who sank in possibility — his eye became dizzy, his eye became confused. . . . [W]hoever is educated by possibility is exposed to danger, not that of getting into bad company and going astray in various ways as are those educated by the finite, but in danger of a fall, namely, suicide. If at the beginning of education he misunderstands the anxiety, so that it does not lead him to faith but away from faith, then he is lost. On the other hand, whoever is educated [by possibility] remains with anxiety; he does not permit himself to be deceived by its countless falsification and accurately remembers the past. Then the assaults of anxiety, even though they be terrifying, will not be such that he flees from them. For him, anxiety becomes a serving spirit that against its will leads him where he wishes to go.’

 

Core to this premise is the conception of anxiety as a dual force that can be both destructive and generative, depending on how we approach it. Like Nin herself observed in her reflection of why emotional excess is necessary for writing, Kierkegaard argues that anxiety is essential for creativity. Perhaps the most enduring and thoughtful interpretation of his treatment of the relationship between creativity and anxiety comes from legendary existential psychologist Rollo May’s The Meaning of Anxiety (public library), originally published in 1950:

 

‘We can understand Kierkegaard’s ideas on the relation between guilt and anxiety only by emphasizing that he is always speaking of anxiety in its relation to creativity. Because it is possible to create — creating one’s self, willing to be one’s self, as well as creating in all the innumerable daily activities (and these are two phases of the same process) — one has anxiety. One would have no anxiety if there were no possibility whatever. Now creating, actualizing one’s possibilities, always involves negative as well as positive aspects. It always involves destroying the status quo, destroying old patterns within oneself, progressively destroying what one has clung to from childhood on, and creating new and original forms and ways of living. If one does not do this, one is refusing to grow, refusing to avail himself of his possibilities; one is shirking his responsibility to himself. Hence refusal to actualize one’s possibilities brings guilt toward one’s self. But creating also means destroying the status quo of one’s environment, breaking the old forms; it means producing something new and original in human relations as well as in cultural forms (e.g., the creativity of the artist). Thus every experience of creativity has its potentiality of aggression or denial toward other persons in one’s environment or established patterns within one’s self. To put the matter figuratively, in every experience of creativity something in the past is killed that something new in the present may be born. Hence, for Kierkegaard, guilt feeling is always a concomitant of anxiety: both are aspects of experiencing and actualizing possibility. The more creative the person, he held, the more anxiety and guilt are potentially present.’

David Whyte on Regret and Robustness

Regret.

…To admit regret is to understand we are fallible: that there are powers in the world beyond us: to admit regret is to lose control not only of a difficult past but of the very story we tell about our present; and yet strangely, to admit sincere and abiding regret is one of our greatest but unspoken contemporary sins.

The rarity of honest regret may be due to our contemporary emphasis on the youthful perspective; it may be that a true, useful regret is not a possibility or a province of youth; that it takes a hard-won maturity to experience the depths of the emotion in ways that do not overwhelm and debilitate us but put us into a proper, more generous relationship with the future. Except for brief senses of having missed a tide, having hurt another, having taken what is not ours, youth is not yet ready for the rich current of abiding regret that runs through and can even embolden a mature human life.

Sincere regret may in fact be a faculty for paying attention to the future, for sensing a new tide where we missed a previous one, for experiencing timelessness with a grandchild where we neglected a boy of our own. To regret fully is to appreciate how high the stakes are in even the average human life; fully experienced, regret turns our eyes, attentive and alert to a future possibly lived better than our past.

Robustness

To be robust is to be physically or imaginatively present in the very firm presence of something or someone else. Being robust means we acknowledge the living current in something other than our own story. Robustness is a measure of the live frontier in our lives, whether it is a wrestling match, a good exchange of ideas in the seminar room or a marital argument in the kitchen. Without robustness all relationships become defined by their fragility, whither and then die. To be robust is to attempt something beyond the perimeter of our own constituted identity; to get beyond our own thoughts or the edge of our own selfishness. Robustness is not the opposite of vulnerability: robustness and vulnerability belong together; to be robust is to show a willingness to take collateral damage, to put up with noise, chaos or our systems being temporarily undone. Robustness means we can veer off either side of the line while keeping a firm on-going intent. Robustness is the essence of parenting: both of children and ideas. 

A lack of robustness denotes ill-health, psychological or physical, it can feed on itself; the less contact we have with anything other than our own body, our own rhythm or the way we have arranged our life, the more afraid we can become of the frontier where actual noise, meetings and changes occur, the temporary need to stop things happening eventually becoming a permanent identity based on siege, where life itself has been turned into the enemy…

We are never one thing, but always the meeting…Robustness is not an option in most human lives, to choose its opposite is to disappear.

Readers Circle Essay Series I
Robustness
© David Whyte

FOUR EXISTENTIAL CHALLENGES: By Thomas Greening

FOUR EXISTENTIAL CHALLENGES: THREE RESPONSES TO EACH

Adapted from: Greening, T. Existential Challenges and Responses.
The Humanistic Psychologist. 20 (1), Spring 1992.
Thomas Greening, Ph.D.

Existential humanistic psychology postulates certain basic challenges
inherent in the human condition, and studies how people come to terms with
these paradoxical “givens” (Bugental, 1971; May, 1961; Greening, 1971;
Yalom, 1980). Thus, it includes the study of pathological reactions, normal
responses, and creative initiatives by individuals, groups and cultures. Using
the insights from social constructionism, we must also acknowledge that the
assignment of these evaluative descriptive labels may say as much about
the labeler as the person or behavior being labeled.

This paper considers four existential challenges:

1) Life (and death). We are alive but we will die, and we live a world that
both supports and negates life.
2) Meaning (and absurdity). We have a conscious capacity and desire for
meaning, but we live in a confusing and sometimes chaotic world that
offers many meaning systems and also denies meaning.
3) Freedom (and determinism). We are free and determined, and we live
in a world that allows and constricts our freedom.
4) Community (and aloneness). Human desire and capacity for authentic
relatedness are countered by inauthenticity, alienation and loneliness.

Each challenge consists of a blessing and a curse, a capacity for being
that also entails non-being, an opening restricted by finiteness. We are
endowed with “some” but not “enough.” Our glasses are half full and half
empty, and we can’t agree on what “half” is. We must choose what to do
with the “some” and how to endure the “not enough.”

To each of the four existential givens or challenges we have a choice of
three possible responses:

1) Simplistic over-emphasis on the positive aspect of the paradox. False
triumph over the difficulties presented by the challenge.
2) Simplistic over-emphasis on the negative aspect of the paradox.
Fatalistic surrender to the difficulties presented by the challenge.
3) Confrontation, creative response, and transcendence of the challenge.

Challenge 1: Life (and death)
We are alive but mortal, embodied but finite. Each of us lives in a
body that must be conceived, carried in a womb, born, nourished and
protected, and that inevitably dies from aging, disease, assault or accident.
Thus embodied, we experience pleasure and pain, security and danger,
vitality and vulnerability. We feel hearty and fragile, strong and weak. We
revel in our aliveness and quake with our fear of dying. We can become
energetic and wise about taking care of our bodies, and we remain at the
mercy of deadly forces.

Response 1:
Optimistic over-emphasis on aliveness. Search for immortality. Denial
of death. Grandiose assertion of vitality of mind or body. Refusal to
acknowledge finite embodiedness. Delusions of invulnerability. Cult
of youth, beauty, wealth, power, sensuality. Illusions that the life of
the body or the will can provide eternal life, through, hedonism,
action, power. “Ozymandias of Egypt.” Counter-phobic mastery
through high-risk sports, war, sexual exploits, health and diet fads.

Response 2:
Pessimistic, morbid obsession with death. Resignation, fatalism,
capitulation, even cooperation with death. Suicide, accident
proneness, neglect of health. William Blake: “Half in love with easeful
death.” Negativistic preoccupation with the transitoriness of being.

Response 3:
Celebration of life with all its phases and stages, knowing that they
form a story with an end. at least of life as we know it. Awareness and
affirmation of the life cycle. Confrontation of death and physical being,
living, as Don Juan in Castaneda’s books tells us, with death over our
left shoulder — not afraid or depressed, but aware and choosing life in
the face of death. Acceptance and transcendence of mortality.

Challenge 2: Meaning (and absurdity)
As individuals and as a species we have only a finite capacity for
consciousness, awareness, thought and construction of meaning.

Response 1:
True believers. Obsessive exaltation of rational thought, or empirical
science, or blind faith, or intuitive awareness as certain paths to “the
answer.” Fanatical belief systems and loyalty, compulsive system-
building, scholasticism, scientism. Deification of the human mind.
“Man is the measure of all things.” Insistence that life has meaning,
that we determine it now, that it remains fixed and dependable,
and that others support our meaning systems. Addictions to
ideologies, cults and gurus.

Response 2:
Compulsive iconoclasm. Anti-intellectualism. Denial of all meaning
and the quest for meaning. Derogation of learning, thought and belief
systems. Militant atheism, nihilism. Ridicule of believers. Collapse
into despair and meaningless. Flight into action, acquisition, drugs,
dogma or death to escape consciousness and the wish for meaning.
Insistent declaration that existence is meaningless, that life is absurd
and that the universe is ultimately chaotic.

Response 3:
Enjoyment and effective use of consciousness, without fixation on any
one form of it as the total or permanent solution. Flexible ability to
shift levels and forms of consciousness, even to lose consciousness,
depending on circumstances and goals. “Willing suspension of
disbelief.” Openness to meaning and belief systems. Receptivity and
curiosity. Ability to hold and consider contradictory ideas in one’s
mind at the same time. Ability to choose and affirm and act upon
provisional data and theories, while remaining open to feedback and
revision.

Challenge 3: Freedom (and determinism)
Finite capacity for freedom and choice. We seem to have some free
will, or at least some of us sometimes like to think we do. Thus, we have
choices about what to do with our freedom or illusion of freedom, how to
express and expand it, or at least how to test out whether we do indeed
have any.

Response 1:
Triumphant assertion of freedom without bounds. Demands for self-
expression unrestrained by other people, social systems, physical
constraints. Icarus. Rousseau’s “natural man” who allegedly would
blossom into perfection if supported instead of suppressed by society.
Confusion of license with freedom. Rampant individualistic self-
actualization made into a religion or ideology, without thought of
others.

Response 2:
Escape from freedom and choice (Fromm). Abdication, surrender to
tyrants, self-enslavement, fatalism, co-dependency, family
enmeshment, substance abuse. Building a “case” that life itself or
other people or our economic or physical limitations totally imprison
and predestine us. Conclusion that deterministic science or
socioeconomic conditions or geo-political forces sufficiently explain the
causes of all human events.

Response 3:
Exploration and expansion of freedom with awareness of the
interpersonal and physical context. Self-assertion with humble respect
for one’s finiteness, and gratitude for one’s powers, however limited.
Celebration of acts of apparent courage and freedom against odds.

Challenge 4: Community (and aloneness)
Finiteness and relatedness. We are social beings, conceived, carried,
born, and raised in relation to others. Our consciousness grows largely out
of experiences with others that are internalized. We are, or are the result of,
a giant conversation or dance with others that continues until we die, and
even after we die by our survivors. But each of us is also alone. No one has
exactly the same existence that I do, and therefore cannot fully share my
experience. I am often physically alone, and must make choices that only I
can make regardless of the help and consultation other people offer. My
being is encapsulated within my skin and my skull, and yet also extends
beyond these.

Response 1:
Denial of isolation, clutching at relationships. Hypergregariousness,
co-dependency. Over-involvement in organizations, mass movements.
Masochistic, selfless service to others. Excessive childbearing, family
enmeshment, socializing to escape loneliness.

Response 2:
Resignation or wallowing in loneliness. Misanthropic rejection of
people. Snobbishness or self-effacement as ways to distance oneself
and avoid the risks of reaching out and being disappointed. Making a
virtue or a philosophical system out of aloneness. Steppenwolf.
Holding grudges, refusing to forgive, as ways to maintain and justify
protective barriers against unpredictable intimacy.

Response 3:
Willingness to risk I-Thou encounters in a world that necessarily and
often tragically entails I-It relationships. Commitment to connect
authentically with other people in spite of being aware of the hazards
and barriers to intimacy. Courageous offering of oneself while feeling
compassion for one’s fears and hurts and those of others.

At any given time, one of these four existential challenges may
predominate in a person’s life, with the other three challenges assuming
relative degrees of priority in relation to it and to each other. Thus, after a
close call with death, a person might become very concerned with the
challenge of life vs. death, and then also be more concerned with meaning
vs. absurdity, or freedom vs. determinism, or community vs. aloneness. In
response to each challenge, any one of the three responses may be chosen.
For example, the survivor of a near death experience might choose to
celebrate life, relinquish obsessive intellectual systems to explain the
meaning of life, become more risk-taking in expressing freedom, but
withdraw from relationships with people who dependently cling to each other
to avoid confronting existential challenges. Various combinations of
pathological, normal and creative responses to each of the four challenges
may occur. It is possible to diagram these choices using a semi-projective
test being developed.

Psychological maturity or self-actualization in an existential sense can
be considered as the ability to cope creatively with all four of the existential
challenges by:

1. Choosing to affirm one’s aliveness even while confronting and
transcending finiteness and death.
2. Constructing and affirming meanings without idolatry.
3. Attempting responsible freedom within limiting contexts.
4. Loving and encountering others, and participating in larger human
communities, while acknowledging separateness.

These are the goals of existential humanistic psychotherapy, and they are
also intrinsic to its process.

LIFE vs. DEATH MEANING vs. ABSURDITY

l. Over-positive, false triumph 1. Over-positive, false triumph

2. Over-negative, surrender 2. Over-negative, surrender

3. Confrontation, transcendence 3. Confrontation, transcendence
of dilemma; balance of dilemma; balance

FREEDOM vs. DETERMINISM RELATEDNESS vs. SEPARATENESS

l. Over-positive, false triumph 1. Over-positive, false triumph

2. Over-negative, surrender 2. Over-negative, surrender

3. Confrontation, transcendence 3. Confrontation, transcendence
of dilemma; balance of dilemma; balance

References

Bugental, J. F. T. (1978). Psychotherapy and Process: The Fundamentals of
an Existential-Humanistic Approach. New York: Random House.
Greening, T. (Editor) (1971). Existential Humanistic Psychology. Belmont,
CA: Brooks/Cole.
May, R. (1961). Existential Psychology. New York: Random House
Yalom, I. D. (1980). Existential Psychotherapy. New York: Basic Books.

THOMAS GREENING, Ph.D.
Diplomate in Clinical Psychology

Owen Jones: Tragic deaths that demand a better response than I witnessed

Owen Jones

The Independent, Sunday 2 December 2012: Owen Jones

Last week, someone ended their life by throwing themselves in front of the train I was travelling on.

I’ll never forget the moment of collision: although, of course, it was not obvious what had happened until a shaken train guard informed us all over the loudspeaker. Neither will I forget the largely respectful silence that followed, or the woman who wept as she told a loved one what had happened over the phone. But it is difficult to shake the memory of the passenger who tutted when we were informed of the inevitable delay. Like myself, this person just had experienced the death of someone below us; yet all that could cross their mind was the inconvenience inflicted upon them.

Even worse responses emerged when I scanned through Twitter. As train delays mounted, some frustrated passengers took to social media to assail the “selfishness” of the poor individual who had just ended their life. It demonstrated a failure of humanity, as well as a total inability to understand – or willingness to understand – what was going through the mind of someone in such despair that they would seek to end their life on a lonely stretch of railway tracks. It reminded me of one of the lowest depths plumbed by Jeremy Clarkson (which, I accept, is quite a statement): those who died on the tracks were “very selfish” because “the disruption it causes is immense”, he wrote. The rest of the rant is too grim to be quotable.

Around 200 people a year end their lives on Britain’s railways, and the Samaritans have launched a partnership with Network Rail to help railway workers spot the signs of someone who may need support. It is undoubtedly a horrifying trauma for the driver. A few years ago, railway driver Vaughan Thomas wrote of his own experience; months later, he could still see the victim “standing on the track, awaiting the inevitable”. Tragically, the Government has now withdrawn compensation for drivers scarred by such incidents.

For me, the incident underlined just how stigmatised and poorly understood mental distress is in Britain. It is desperately important that this is challenged, not least because lives are at risk. The number of suicides had been in decline for two decades until Lehman Brothers crashed; but, according to a study by the British Medical Journal earlier this year, more than 1,000 people may have ended their lives because of the economic crisis. Last week, the NUS reported that the number of students ending their own lives had surged. In 2007, 57 male students died by suicide; last year it was 78; the number of female students ending their lives had nearly doubled.

Men are three times more likely to commit suicide than women. Traditional, unreconstructed forms of masculinity have been challenged over the past few decades, and men are more likely to speak about their feelings than they once were; but the stigma attached to discussing mental health remains particularly acute among men. The disparity is at its most stark when it comes to class. According to the Samaritans, the poorest are 10 times more at risk of suicide than the most affluent. One in 10 women in the richest fifth of society are at risk of mental illness, according to the Health Survey for England; but among the poorest fifth, the rate is running at nearly a quarter.

According to one of the authors of the BMJ study, Ben Barr, joblessness, financial worries, debt and housing issues have all contributed to the rise in suicide deaths, and of course these are far more likely to affect the poorest. No wonder the Samaritans report that the number of people ringing them about financial worries has doubled since the crash began.

But even as mental distress and the risk of suicide soar because of austerity, the support is being slashed back. Back in October, 140 senior doctors savaged the Government over cuts to the NHS – protected, says David Cameron. As well as A&E departments closing, mental health wards have been shut or significantly cut in eight hospitals. In late October, Norfolk and Suffolk NHS mental health trust unveiled plans to cut 500 jobs and 20 per cent of its inpatient beds. For the first time in a decade, real-terms spending on mental health is falling. The website False Economy is documenting the slashing of funding to mental health charities across Britain. Even though the Government has announced it will give mental health parity with physical health under the NHS mandate, more people will inevitably die as support is ripped away.

The stigma, too, puts lives at risk. Last week, The Independent’s Patrick Cockburn movingly described his son’s experience with schizophrenia. “Mistreatment of the mentally ill is the trust test of any community because they are its weakest and most voiceless members,” he wrote. Back in 2008, the Government launched the Time to Change campaign to challenge stigma and discrimination towards those with mental health issues. It has a very long way to go indeed.

When Norwegian Prime Minister Kjell Bondevik stood down for three weeks in 1998 to deal with a serious bout of depression, he was applauded and later re-elected; but it is still seen as something those in British public life would generally never dream of discussing. That was somewhat challenged in June in one of Parliament’s finest moments, when MPs including Kevan Jones and Sarah Wollaston stood up to describe their own experiences.

We desperately need to hear more such voices. As mental health charity Mind describes, those with mental health problems are often isolated; are unable to take part in everyday activities; and struggle to get jobs. No one sufferer has the same experience, and there is no one solution. But all of us will know people in our families, workplaces and communities who are silently struggling, unable to seek support.

Existential themes in ‘Heart of Darkness’ – Joseph Conrad

‘Heart of Darkness’ is on one of the defining novels of the 20th century and was written by Joseph Conrad in 1899, the same year as Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams.

The narrator Marlow, a sailor, recounts his journey up a river into the heart of Africa, under the old days of Colonial rule, and recounts his experience of the amorality and darkness of those days which Kurtz, a man who he has gone to rescue, perhaps exemplifies.

Kurtz and what he represents are very much ‘out there’ in the brutalities and hypocrisies of colonial exploitation, but he’s also very much ‘in here’. The story is a ‘nightmare’ in which Marlow is in part confronting his own ‘shadow’ (Conrad’s words). Marlow is both repelled and fascinated by Kurtz, loathes him and admires him, and struggles with only partial success to integrate the meanings of his encounter with Kurtz. 
 


We are all, Conrad implies, potential Kurtzes, and the Heart of Darkness is there in each of us, as well as in a particular set of historical circumstances – like those ‘ordinary men’ who participated in the Holocaust. Marlow even says of Kurtz that ‘he’s kicked the very earth to pieces’.

He’s talking about Kurtz’s moral collapse and loss of bearings. But it also seems uncannily prescient that a similar greed, rapacity and lack of recognition of being in the world with others, and other things, something which in Conrad’s time cost at least a million African lives in the Belgian Congo through the ravenous pursuit of natural (mainly rubber and ivory) resources, now threaten the earth’s climate itself. We are all responsible.

Kurtz’s is also very much a tragedy of choice. He arrives in Africa a ‘philanthropist’, ‘a very remarkable man’, an idealist of genius, and becomes the opposite. His dying realization is that he chose this; that it could have been otherwise. This, as much as what he has seen, done and perhaps foresees, is the ‘horror’. 
 


There’s a fascinating phenomenological strain to the story – there are several episodes where Marlow is unable at first to organize meaning from his experience. Conrad was fascinated by the dynamics of human perception, and also by the struggle of the individual to fully communicate his (provisional and incomplete) experience and be understood.

I was particularly interested to discover when researching the novella that the counterpart to ‘Heart of Darkness’ is a book I have always loved called ‘Things Fall Apart’ by Chinua Achebe. What immediately jumped out to me in this instance was the parallel between the appalling behaviour and attitude of the Colonialists towards the African population, and the stance taken by the Nazis towards Jews … and so much of the coflict that continues in the world today; the closed mindedness of the Colonialists to the other, their lack of any recognition or openness to the other or another, which Achebe so powerfully brings out.

A great read.

Erick Fromm – The Art of Loving

“To have faith requires courage, the ability to take a risk, the readiness even to accept pain and disappointment. Whoever insists on safety and security as primary conditions of life cannot have faith; whoever shuts himself off in a system of defense, where distance and possession are his means of security, makes himself a prisoner. To be loved, and to love, need courage, the courage to judge certain values as of ultimate concern – and to take the jump and to stake everything on these values.”

Rumi

MAWLANA JALAL AL-DIN AL-RUMI / TURKISH SUFI AND PHILOSOPHER
(30 September 1207, Balkh – 17 December 1273. Konya)

This being human is a guest-house.
Every morning a new arrival.
A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.
Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they’re a crowd of sorrows,
Who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture.
Still, treat each guest honorably.
Who may be clearing you out
for some new delight.
The dark thought, the shame, the malice,
meet them at the door laughing,
and invite them in.
Be grateful for whoever comes,
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.

~ Rumi

Why Choosing Your Life Purpose is So Darn Hard. Eric Maisel

Why Choosing Your Life Purpose is So Darn Hard
Do you know the pitfalls of life purpose creation?
Published on November 16, 2012 by Dr. Eric R. Maisel, Ph.D. in Rethinking Psychology

You must create your own life purposes if your life is to have purpose. The life purpose that we suggest that you adopt in natural psychology is the ongoing effort to make value-based meaning. But however you name and frame your life purposes, the onus remains on your shoulders to reject the idle question “What is the meaning of life?” and to personally answer the pertinent question, “How do I intend to live?”

In natural psychology we accept that creating life purposes and making value-based meaning amount to difficult business. They require that we live very intentionally, that we deal mindfully with circumstances and with the facts of existence, that we exert ourselves in ways that human beings do not regularly like to exert themselves, and that we accept a certain view of life, a naturalistic one, which to my mind is beautiful but which strikes many people as too cold, sad, and insufficient. It is this last problem that often pulls the rug right out from under the enterprise of creating life purposes and making value-based meaning.

People who see life as cold, sad and insufficient, who feel cheated by life and can’t get over wanting life to mean something more than it does, something “spiritual” or “intrinsically meaningful,” tend not to believe in the life purposes that they themselves create. Their reasoning goes something like the following. “If all I am doing is nominating this or that as my life purpose, how valid or important is that? That’s just me playing a certain kind of game in the face of genuine nothingness and it is a game that I can see right through. I’d really just as soon read a book, have a glass of wine, tend to my roses, or watch a little television than bother with these arbitrary and sort of phony life purposes that I’ve elevated to some high-and-mighty place. No, who cares about my life purposes—me included. Life is too hard and intractable and pointless and my little game of acting like I have some purpose is pretty pathetic.”

There are many variations on this narrative and each one amounts to a different face of self-abnegation and self-destructiveness. One narrative will be filled more with irony, another more with sadness, a third more with anxiety. But in essence they are all the same: it is the person announcing that if life purpose only amounts to something that she names for herself, something that is without cosmic significance, then it amounts to too little or even nothing at all. This is a hangover from the belief system that life should be meaningful in some other deeper, more important sense. If life isn’t deeper or more important than what it appears to be, then it is just an empty, burdensome thing that we are obliged to endure rather than a beautiful thing as implied by ideas like nirvana and heaven. If it is just this, then it is pathetic.

If this captures something of your mindset and the way that you reject the whole idea of life purpose, I hope that you will change your mind. If you don’t, you’re likely to feel empty and rudderless. You may well endanger yourself and find yourself engaging in risky behaviors, including addictive behaviors, so as to fill up time and soothe yourself. If you don’t, you will almost certainly create a huge opening for sadness and not maintain the deep, abiding motivation necessary to realize your ambitions and fulfill your dreams. Perhaps most importantly, if you don’t you won’t feel the quiet satisfaction of making yourself proud, a satisfaction that is available to you if you organize your life around the idea of value-based meaning-making.

Yes, you will still sometimes “see through” this operation and repeatedly realize that it is “just you” who has done the creating of your life purposes. And yes, you will need a strong, effective rejoinder to the painful realization that life is exactly like this. But you can do both, if you decide that it is in your best interests to do so. You can learn to accept that you intend to live life according to your own principles and values, even if the universe doesn’t care one way of the other, and you can learn how to effectively respond to the repeated realization that life is “exactly like this.”

How do you want to deal with these two potent threats to life purpose? How do you want to deal with the threat caused by our human difficulties in accepting that life is “exactly like this” and how do you want to deal with the threat caused by not having an available rejoinder for those times when you remember that it is “just you” creating your life purposes? Take a moment and consider these two questions and see if you can come up with your own answers.