Wednesday, January 28, 2009

Unity of self

So the self what's that all about. The common conception is the self is the essence of human, something that has come through time in a form called human nature and is described in linguistics by the unity that is the word I, it is the unity that makes my life mine, after all whose else could it be.

So the contention here is that there is no unified self and the only reason that we might talk about it is out of a need for the narrative coherence unity brings. The only reason we talk about human nature is that we have a common interpretative framework.

This is obviously heresy to most people, but that's the stakes when you hold up light to the axioms that we use and see them to be useful sure, but just not true.

So we will notice that in experiencing the self as a notion is posed after the fact. So if I am sitting in the bar two things happen one I get the experience of this, its shapes and sounds and after the fact I describe it as mine. The self that is posited is derived from the intention that I have, so that the self that I posited is a relaxed, slightly tired one. If I drill down into this self there are a myriad of ways in which I can describe it.

The outcome of this is that the self posited is unique. So lets have a little look at this unique self, which is incredibly well known to us. Well I can remember one of the things I can do when needing to relax is to go to the pub. Thus it becomes a possibility for me in so far as it is part of my past. I give myself to this event in so far as I understand myself as a man who has worked hard is now relaxing with a beer. This is such a familiar story, having been told by countless people and in countless films and all it needs is a hard worker, a beer and a pub. Its a nice little story of someone rewarding themselves with a little escapism.

The trip to the bar only functions as it does as I have previous experience of doing this. To understand this a little better remember the first time you went to a pub you had none of the thoughts and feelings you currently do about a pub visit. It was only after having a past to choose this option from and to have a familiarity with the story that it works. Indeed when you first skulked into a pub significantly under the legal drinking age then it was a completely different story, one of rebellious youth.
So apart from a past experience of this, to make the story work we need an actor, a unity to make the narrative meaningful. This being the major driver for the unified notion of self. If we thought that we continually reconstruct the self, which is what I'm proposing, then we would be groundless and therefore meaninglessness. If we had no unified self we would have no actor and therefore no story and therefore be meaninglessness.

Meaninglessness is a huge fear for humans. When humans didn't understand and faced meaninglessness they invented explanations sun gods , humours that controlled the body and cameras that stole souls. We associate meaninglessness with depression, it is not something we can tolerate and will see us buying personalised number plates as being a meaningful preference to a random string of numbers.

The standard defences of a unity of self are, bodily ,memory, and a self knowledge approach. Lets start bottom up shall we, ok self knowledge. I know I'm a unity as I always act in the same way, okay I change over the years but at each point I have an enduring self image, so I might say of myself I am generous, kind and do not lie.
When then you act in ways that contravenes these values then either the self has to change or you have to see yourself as not responsible for the action.
Thus you might excuse yourself as being drunk or angry or in war time you might say you were just following orders. However as you can see you are interpreting your actions and attributing some to your unified self and others you are casting off as aberrations. If the latter is too pronounced split personalities can ensue that take over. So with this act of interpretation then we construct the self.
Okay maybe unity of character doesn't quite cut it.
What about the body it is a unity so why don't we say that the unity of self is coextensive with the unity of body, I am my body. Oh dear if that were the case then we would be in a very awkward place with things like phantom limbs, and the feeling that anorexics have with always feeling bigger than they are. I suppose as with any contradiction you could write it off as an aberration, but then once more you would be constructing the self out of bodily interpretations, these I consider part of my embodiment part, this part not.

So what about memory we appear to have a continual sequence of memories that I am the owner of. There are two parts of memory the factual content and what it means to me. whilst some would want to collapse these two to interpretation lets leave them as they are and talk about the facts as fixed. Take also the idea that we remember far more than we know and that we have what many claim to be unlimited storage but restricted recall. Evidence of this would be bringing back long since buried facts through hypnosis or therapy. There are also experiments where people undergoing brain surgery have had certain parts of their brain stimulated and they repeatedly had recall in full Technicolor a long forgotten memory. Point all these three make is we remember far more than we can recall and possibly everything.
So what makes us have the memories that we do. Well we need memory to support our lifestyle, I need to know about my house, my job and wife in a way that I don't need to know about any of their previous incarnations. We also remember things that have been significant, being given the bike when I was six or my first love when I was 7.
So how's about this what our memory is or rather what we recall are those things that provide us utility or what amounts to the same thing meaning.
Now what a person requires in terms of utility and meaning change and as such so will the memories that you select to support that and crucially so will the interpretation of the factual element of that memory. Therefore whilst we have a finite number of factual memories what we select and how we interpret them is determined by our current projects. The self that is provided from memory is one that can constantly reinvent itself.
People like to talk about a human nature about characteristics that exist through the ages that evolutionist can be proud of. Why is that? Indeed we can read Shakespeare and when he talks about love, vanity and pride why is it that we recognise these traits if not that there is a human nature that exists through time. Ok here's the thing, human memory is two fold one personal and two social. The same rules that I've mentioned above from the personal apply to the social. The reason why Shakespeare still talks to us is through sedimented interpretation, i.e. we continually go back to the same sources to give our lives meaning. Social memory is known better by the phrase history. There are enough fights between various political groups to show that history is about interpretation not fact
So there you have it there is no unity of self rather a continually interpreted one to suit ones current affairs in as far as they project into the future. Radical stuff but what does it mean, well it means you're free and this generally is both a good and a bad thing. As a bad thing there is no self that we can fall back on, we are groundless and this is going to feel scary we need both order and meaning to stave off anxiety. The good news and trust me people this is a hallelujah moment is you don't need to be a victim to your past. Within your faculties within all the possibilities that exist to you in your world you can and ought to be and that my friends is huge.

References
Ernesto Spinelli, The Interpreted world

Wednesday, January 21, 2009

Inner Self

There is a relation that we have with ourselves, possibly the primal relationship on which all other relations are modelled.
This is a strange relationship, it is the house after the party it is where when everything else has gone you always can come back to. The self that we are, is constructed out of values, capacities and characteristics, i.e. how we may react in given situations. It is a strange area, as with other relations it can have different emotional aspects. Some people are at peace and at one with this self, listen to its needs and its cautions. This merging, this unity between the self that is and the self that does is the relationship that existential psychotherapy aims for. It is the I Me relationship, Bubers term, for a reltaionship where the two sides merge, as opposed to the I We relation where there is no merging but there is a respecting of the inner self of the other, and in distinction to the I It relationship which treats the other as an object.
There are other ways to relate, the self can be ignored and left. This strange circumstance can happen out of our powers of imagination. Narrative is the application of imagination to action, it produces, interprets facts to provide a story, a framework to provide meaning for actions. Actors are pivotal in this, an actor implying certain actions, thus the hero will cast aside adversity, as will the captain of industry, or the alpha male. Everyone's lives are predominantly constructed with these stories and roles.
Many many peoples lives are led through these roles. Their needs for their ego are satisfied through this, feeling good about themselves through achievement using the axioms of their role to guide their life. All can be fine, until moments of crisis, when either all or part of their world collapses and they realise from the perspective of their self that their life has been empty. It is as if they stand at their grave stone looking back, weeping for what should have been.

The inner self needs to act, needs to realise itself, it needs its existence, as it was produced through its being in the world. To act there are three possibilities, to wish and to expect which are passive from the self and to intend which is where the self decides on action to achieve its desires. A wish merely hopes the world is a certain way, expectation deems that's how things usually are, and intention is what the self desires. The set of actions that the self can choose, the creation of their expectations is derived from their history. In here are their future possibilities, in here are their capacities that inform their expectations, which can acts as a brake or an accelerator to their actions. History is as most historians will tell you a political art. It is an interpretation, a creative act. As such a person has a large set of raw materials from which to construct their history. Given this history is a narrative act of stories and actors you can see how a persons future has all the possibilities of the story of their past. The only point here is that the desire for order precludes a too frequent reevaluation of ones history.

As a therapist entering into this paradigm then ones motivation is to be an ally to the client in their search for truth and their authenticity. Whilst the former is understood to be objective the latter is certainly not. Authenticity derives from the values of the inner self. This quest is one via description rather than analysis. The therapist holds a light to the clients life such that they can see their values and actions and decide if they are the right ones for them. Emotions that come out in this process are reactions between the self that is and the self that acts, the therapist shouldn't seek to lessen these through comforting but rather look for the message that is communicated through this. This then will allow the client to know themselves better, and a client who knows their inner self better is better placed to have a more satisfying life. At the gravestone then one can look back with pride.

Sunday, January 11, 2009

Assumptions

A client comes to a therapist, they have a problem or they are distressed. There are three aspects of their life that they need to look at :
1. Assumptions
2. Values
3. Talents

Assumptions
Assumptions is the clients world view, it is the structure in which they declare their goals of values, and use their talents to get towards it.
Thus a clients assumption is their world view. In therapy what the art is, is to allow clients to think about and get clarity on their assumptions. On seeing these, they can see then how their world has come to be on the basis of the assumptions. Given that they come to therapy with a problem or distress they will then be able to see how their assumptions about the world have contributed to their problems and thus give them the opportunity to change this.
The relationship then between therapist and client must therefore be one of the therapist being an ally to the client in their investigation of their assumptions and their choice to do something about it. If the therapist pointed out the assumptions that the client makes shows them how this contributes to their current difficulties and tells them what to do to fix it, then the therapist is creating a dependency and telling the client that they don’t know how to live their own life.
So the relationship between therapist and client is not paid empathiser, or life fixer, but rather ally. If the therapist merely provided an arena to allow the client to give emotional expression, then nothing would happen. The emotions would be discharged , maybe the client would feel better, but nothing would change. So sure therapy is a safe place to express feelings but it is not the goal of the therapist to encourage a dwelling in these feelings. The feelings are an outcome of the relationship between assumptions, values and talents and these can be changed, but only by the awareness and motivation of the client.
The aim of therapy is to ensure the client can manage their life. This is done by client the tools they have to see this problem, and then to work with their values so they then get the motivation to do something about it.

Values
Values are our motivators for action. They underpin our assumptions about the world so an assumption such as the world is a scary place, might hold the value of only trust those you know, or change is bad.
Assumptions about the world will get created at certain times for certain reasons. As this construct changes so the assumption may need to change. In therapy when a client holds onto a long outmoded assumption you will, under the surface find a strongly held value.
The ability for a person to change is determined by a person finding their motivating value, i.e. that value that is so strongly held that becoming aware of it means action to the contrary is either hard or impossible.
So values are strange things they are the most important but not necessarily the most visible. It is as if people take short cuts. Originally a person may act in full awareness of how their action fits with their value. I must be punctual as otherwise this is lazy and lazy is bad, after many repetitions of this all that is remembered is an instinctual desire to be on time. If circumstances change where the base value needs to be changed, then the client can be left in a bind as they are still acting on the basis of this value but are not aware of it and that's where therapy is needed to make the value explicit so as to change it.
This shows two main points firstly that life is a continual challenge there are no permanent answers and secondly therapy can be a psychic spring cleaning exercise where redundant values and assumption are removed and new motivating factors unearthed.

Talents
Talents are the conduit for values and the worlds in which we inhabit. For someone to make change in their life then they need to have belief in their power to change. Thus a precursor for change is an assessment and acknowledgement of one’s talents. These talents will be found in both obvious and non obvious places. The obvious will be consciousness the non obvious will be in the behaviors that you’re not proud of. In here in our worst moments we can see our talents being misused to achieve these unwanted outcomes. It is within these non obvious talents that real progress can be made where someone realises new strengths they have at their disposal. This discovery of hidden talent gives the client impetus to fresh investigation.

The worlds we live in

There are four worlds in which we live which provide a framework for working through clients problems. They are a framework, that can help make sense of life, they are:

1. The physical
2. The social
3. The internal
4. The spiritual

The Physical
The physical world is the world of physics, the motivations of instinct. It is our engagement with the physical world of trees and mountains and our engagement with our physical bodies. It's the world of sex, sport and mountaineering. In terms of neurosis we can see eating disorders, body image problems as well as agoraphobia and claustrophobia.

We need a good relationship with our physical world to build the other worlds on; we must take our body through the physical world to do anything. You need to have a good feeling, an at ease feeling, a sense of home of your body in the world, through sex, sport, outdoor pursuits you can get this feeling. You can also see peoples values in this world played out through these activities.

It’s funny here think of the parallels between two aspects of our physical world, sport and sex. The base line is enjoyment of both and the feeling of enjoyment that it is me doing this with you, a worthy adversary or beautiful companion. If you can't find anyone to do it you can either grab a hand held ps2 or a porn magazine and get off from pretending to do it. If you need to boost your performance then take some chemical enhancements. When you're really good you can turn pro and then get loads of people to watch you, I do look forward to when sex becomes a show for the arena although not to when it becomes competitive.

I do think we do have a potential psychological time bomb where children don’t go out and play as parents are scared of them getting eaten by paedophiles. Then they play on computer games to get the interaction with the external world they want, but a computer game never satisfies, or provides a true picture of the physical world.

The Social
The next world which builds on the physical world is the social world. This is your interaction with the other and it’s more seen from a structural position. So this is the arena of group membership be it race or class or gender, the interaction is one around morality. In this arena again the art is to feel good within the groups that you are members of and for your membership of multiple groups to find either the movement from one group perspective to another is fluid or the synthesized perspective from all of them is suitable.

In terms of neurosis then the things that can get in the way are to not feel at home in your groups. This can mean either feeling excluded or just at odds enough with the group that you are a member of. In the case of membership of multiple groups, there can be a problems where you have contradictions that lead to paralysis in action as opposed to a creative tension.

There are four relations that you can have with the other who emerges to you. Not everyone emerges indeed most stay as unindifferentiated lumps of people that are passed daily without our awareness but who form a backdrop to our lives and would be sorely missed if they were absent. These relations to others are group relations not intimate relations which will invoke the internal world which is described later. The first is master to slave; the second slave to master, the third is of partnership the last is of indifference.

A partnership is fine whilst there is a common cause. You will also see competition with groups with opposing values. So power relations and utility are all that you will see in these relations, and it’s not even brute power but one that you can get the person you subjugate to accept and welcome your power, the willing slave.
So again to be successful here is to feel good about the roles that you are in which will probably be a mix between slave roles master roles and roles of participation. Again neurosis here would be that relationships here are anything else but at the power level, so that you can idealise these social relations as being ones of love and care, but be traumatised to find that they are usurious.

The Internal World
The internal world is the world of I and We. It is the place of intimacy towards yourself and with others. This place is where you consider being yourself; it is your character, your being with your character. It is your home.

This is your rock when all else fails this is where you come back to. When starting any new adventure this is the first mover. When you have a strong personal world then you feel like you could face anything and the world is a comfortable place.

Whilst it is in the modern era rare. The personal world of one can be merged with that of another when people are in love. It is rare today as individualism is to the fore and the deep notion of We is one that is eschewed.

It does seem though a paradoxical concept. To talk of this core world where everything starts and finishes with. It is a common idea to talk about being untrue to yourself or to be in bad faith as Sartre would talk about. So this personal self can be hidden or obscured from yourself. I suppose this is the same as with other worlds where you can fantasise about the nature of the physical world or indeed be deluded about it.


The Spiritual World
The fourth world is the spiritual world which encompasses the world of ideology, our values in life. It is often that these values are those that give life meaning and that provide a purpose for the other worlds.
The meaning, the values, the ideology of person are a motivation that can mean that problems in other worlds can be accepted. Changing these values can also see a reordering of the other worlds, so you can to some level see the spiritual world as being that which orders the other worlds, although paradoxically it is the world that is built on the other worlds



References

Existential Counselling and Psyhotherapy in Practice, Chapter 3, by Danny Van Deurzen

Tuesday, January 6, 2009

Poles and Validity

How do you get a client to validate that their new idea for action is a good one? You can of course get them to think about it from various angles but what about finding out what's missing are there any tools for that?
The areas which need investigation are those adjectives and indeed nouns that describe human behaviour, good, bad, controlled, flexible,ordered and chaotic.

Any of these words have an opposite, so for good bad, for ordered chaotic. The reason for this is on say good and bad this covers the spectrum of things we should but don't naturally do,ie good and those things we want to do but shouldn't. In short good and bad is the spectrum of actions that we would like to see ourselves doing in the world.

So by our definition we can already see that there is a desire to avoid the good and do the bad, if there wasn't we wouldn't need such words. As such a clients life must have adequate plans for both sides realising they have desires and indeed contrary desires in each camp. Whilst it is true you can with an inordinate amount of effort deny one side, deny the bad and profess you are a person that shall only do good. There is with such a brittle and inhuman model a very real chance that this will end in a calamitus breakdown .
The point is that in these human defined scope words we have investment and need in both sides, the need for order and the need for spontanaeity. Human excellence therefore is the tension between these poles to allow someone to excel on one pole and on its contradiction

An example of this might be someones position on order and chaos. You can seek to control your life to a very high degree but people in your life will resent trying to be controlled, will baulk at your shackels and chaos will ensue, again the attempt to exclude one side of the polarity leads to disaster.

As Scott of the Antarctic once said "respect the poles".

Friday, January 2, 2009

Angst

So it is said that Angst, or existential anxiety is our feeling when we relate to our own death or understanding of groundlessness that is the other side of freedom.

So this comes from Heidegger and Van Duerzen

Im slightly troubled by this, now anxiety I understand as fear without an object of fear, so I get a sinking feeling in my stomach, a sort of dread but I dont know what of. My best understanding of this is that something that I have repressed , something quite deep in me is getting affected. So for instance when there was a possibility of deep intimacy with a woman that was then taken away I had a feeling of anxiety, and indeed this was repeated in the same situation when there were feelings of jealousy and humiliation around this. They were all followed by anxiety. As I understand this, I have a desire that I wont acknowledege, then when this desire is engaged with in a negative way, let down, humiliated etc, then anxiety arises as I have pain but I dont know where its coming from. This pain being the original fear of this desire that sought it to be represssed.

I have been existentially engaged with my own death. This was for a short period maybe a few days and happened when my mother and when my sister died. I felt what it would like for me not to be alive to not be, it was a very strange feeling certainly but it had non of the shape of a feeling of anxiety.

Now with feelings of groundlessness, or understanding our ultimate freedom. Here I theroretcially understand this to be true, but existentially I act on the axiom that I have created for myself, my values.

The thing it seems with both these positions on death and freedom, is that they are taken ontically, from the position of myself as a being. This is to say that given myself I think about death and freedom as if they were things in the world, rather than my possibilities. So would it be better to experience angst therefore if I could engage with them outside of my ego. Well when Im depressed my ego shatters, but the ability to engage with anything as abstract or complicated as freedom goes out the window. Now its certainly possible that I could experience the engagement with death that I had with my sister and mother in a depressed state, but firstly that would be a very bad afternoon and secondly it hasnt happened.

So my question is what does angst feel like?
Id also like to ask, how can you engage with the being of death and the being of freedom, but I realise too many questions can put people off so I'll leave that for another time

References
Deurzen, E. van (2002) Existential Counselling and Psychotherapy in Practice, 2nd edition, London: Sage Publications.

Thursday, January 1, 2009

Individuality and truth

Ok here's a scary thought experiment. I'll be the subject as its horrible. I am locked in a room with 6 other people and my mobile phone. The 6 people delightful and articulate are convinced that I am Napoleon, I and my friends on the textual end of my mobile phone are convinced I'm not. Within a few days the people in the room are getting to me, within a few weeks I am regularly singing the Marsaillaise and speaking in cod french and within a few months I am walking out the door with a slightly small bloke desire to conquer Europe.

So whats going on here?

First there is the sense that you need a third party to validate truth. The underpinning to this is any rule bound system needs a third party to indicate when the rule had been broken, you cannot provide this for yourself. There is an origin of this idea from the private language argument of Wittgenstein.
Secondly there is a sense of the difference in types of truth, an existential truth, a conceptual truth and a virtual one. Hell more than one type of truth that sucks I thought it was true or false.
Existential truth is where your truth gets validated by existence. I have been reading RD Laings
divided self where he sees that as I meet you, I validate you in your sanity and you validate me in mine. So for any truth that I hold about myself the more it is validated by other people by it being able to be cached out in the world the more it is true. If I think I am a great baker, people better buy my doughnuts, and I better just smell the glories of my creations. A conceptual truth such as knowing that 2=1+1 is an analytic truth, which once you accept mathematical axioms become self evident. They are of type distinction to things which have existential truth. One is validated by definition, one by existence. The last truth, virtual truth is a new one and I think a bit of a scary one.
Communication is said to be 20% verbal and 80% non verbal, so at best txt could be at best 20% effective,you cant empathise with txt, hold txt as a role model nor enage with it as you could with a human, and I must say that the thought that you can replace being with people with being with virtual people is a psychological time bomb waiting to happen.

So when a therapist works with a client then they need to find out and enhance the persons world as they find it. One key here is for this world to have validity it must be engaged with by others to have existential truth. How this caches out is that if a person has private values or actions that do not engage with other people then they will not be well supported or valued in the persons psyche and in time will atrophy and die. They will have a degree of unreality because they have not been existentially validated.

So the Utopian dream from here is that you should work with people who share and engage with your values, as you should with people in your home life. I realise this is rarely the case, and people bracket themselves either at work or at home, and find places during their days when they can be themselves. Some maybe never get this luxury, and need the anaesthesia of drink and drugs to overcome this distance that they live from themselves, or need to have a 2 week holiday where others are their slaves to make themselves feel OK when they are treated as slaves.

References
Emmy Van Deurzen Existential Counselling & Psychotherapy in Practice, page 18-25

Space for Reflection

So the relationship between therapist and client is one that has been likened to a relationship between a violin player and a violin teacher. The client already knows how to live they have been doing it for many years but they want to improve on it.

The therapist has to enter the world of the client, I'm not sure there is a word for this but if you take a run up at empathy and go way past that you're in the right neck of the woods. So putting aside ones own world you have to look at someone else's and understand their values and their ways of being, and then you have to play these back to them for reflection and to see if there are better ways of achieving their core values.

There must be a knack to this fresh look at life. I had it just recently on Xmas holidays I drove to my sisters in Wales, which for some reason felt out of my life, maybe it was the holiday, maybe it was the drive to somewhere I don't usually go, but I had an epiphany and I had a fresh look at my life and a few ideas which were bubbling around joined and they focused and I had a new plan for myself.

To me there seems a difficulty in what Heidegger called everydayness. This is where you get sucked into life and have no perspective on life, no existential relationship to it. So I know how strong this is in my own life, where you go to work, read your paper on the train, have lunch, return home, eat your supper, phone a friend, go out, stay in, watch TV. There is a sense of not thinking, about going along on a treadmill that you have created for yourself.

Freud apparently to free up peoples thinking after free association used to tap, or even hit them on their forehead.

There needs to be something in this that therapy provides such that you can think freshly and with new perspective about your life. My best idea is scary and tactically used glove puppets, if anyone has better ideas let me know, I want to recreate for people the feeling of a random car journey, or of having a bath in a hotel you didn't expect to stay in and the concomitant(ooh get you and your dictionary) fresh thinking that ensues.

I've got to say I haven't experienced this in my therapy although there has been a gradual sense of growing perspective.

References
Again and for the next couple of weeks Emmy van Deurzen, Existential Counselling & Psychotherapy in Practice