The meaning of anxiety: Rollo May

The Meaning of Anxiety: Rollo May

Contents

Introduction. 3

Centrality of the problem of anxiety in our day. 3

In philosophy and theology. 4

In Psychology. 4

Chapter 2 Philosophical Interpreters of Anxiety. 4

17^th Century. 4

Spinoza. 5

Pascal 5

Kierkegaard: Anxiety in the 19^th century. 5

Chapter 3 Anxiety interpreted biologically. 7

The startle pattern. 8

Anxiety and the loss of the world. 8

Origins of anxiety and fear as seen by Goldstein. 8

The capacity to bear anxiety. 9

Neurological and physiological aspects of anxiety. 9

Perceptions of Danger. 9

Balance in the autonomic system.. 10

Voodoo Death. 10

Psychosomatic aspects of anxiety. 10

Gastric functions. 11

Culture and the meaning of disease. 11

Chapter 4 Anxiety Interpreted Psychologically. 12

Do animals have anxiety?. 12

The study of children’s fears. 12

Maturation in anxiety and fear. 12

Fear Masking Anxiety. 13

Stress and anxiety. 13

Recent research on anxiety. 13

Cognitive theorists. 13

State and trait anxiety. 14

Relationship between anxiety and fear. 14

Faith. 14

Anxiety and Learning theory. 14

Personal Comment. 15

Chapter 5 Anxiety interpreted by the psychotherapist. 15

Freud’s evolving theories of anxiety. 15

Anxiety and Repression. 15

Origins of anxiety as seen by Freud. 16

Trends in Freud’s theories of Anxiety. 16

Rank. 16

Adler: Anxiety and inferiority feelings. 17

Jung: anxiety and the threat of the irrational 18

Horney Anxiety and hostility. 19

Horney origins of anxiety. 19

Sullivan: Anxiety as apprehension of disapproval 20

Chapter 6 Anxiety interpreted culturally. 20

The importance of the historical dimension. 21

Individualism in the renaissance. 21

Competitive individualism in work and wealth. 22

Fromm: Individual isolation in modern culture. 23

Anxiety and the market place. 23

Mechanisms of escape. 24

Kardiner:  Western man’s growth pattern. 24

Chapter 7 Summary and synthesis of theories of anxiety. 25

The nature of anxiety. 25

Normal and neurotic anxiety. 25

Origins of anxiety. 26

Maturation of the capacity for anxiety. 26

Anxiety and fear. 27

Anxiety and Conflict. 28

Anxiety and hostility. 28

Culture and community. 29

Chapter 8 Case studies demonstrating anxiety. 30

What we seek to discover. 30

Harold Brown. 30

Chapter 9 The study of unmarried mothers. 31

Chapter 10 Gleanings from the Case studies. 31

Anxiety underlying fear. 31

Conflict: Source of anxiety. 32

Rejection by parents and anxiety. 32

Cleavage between expectation and reality. 33

Chapter 11 Methods of dealing with anxiety. 33

In extreme situations. 33

Destructive ways. 33

Constructive ways. 34

Chapter 12 Anxiety and the Development of the self. 34

Creativity, Intelligence and anxiety. 34

The realisation of self. 35

Definitions. 35

Irrationality. 35

Anxiety. 36

Notes. 36

Introduction

Centrality of the problem of anxiety in our day

Mid-20^th century anxiety is rife:

Conditions for anxiety

1.       External

a.       ATom  bombs

b.      War       

c.       Social, economic, political upheaval

2.       Internal

a.       Psychological disorientation

b.      No clear values

c.       No clear standards of conduct

1920s: age of implicit anxiety: symptoms of anxiety in literature

1950s age of explicit anxiety: Camus, existentialism

Camus:

17^th Century=century of mathematics

19^th Century=century of biology

20^th Century=century of fear

Kafka: Anxiety rises when bureaucratic efficiency replaces meaningful relationships and individual autonomy

Anxiety lowers when you have a home, a calling and are a member of a community.

Hesse: Anxiety rises when we value more the rationalistic and mechanical as opposed to the dynamic and irrational

Signs of covert anxiety

1.       Compulsive work to gain  money (a feeling of power in face of the powerlessness of anxiety)

2.       Compulsive joining of clubs to conform

Anxiety can be triggered when we feel lost and therefore unsafe, so when things have no foundation, when danger is that the whole thing could come crashing down.

Fascism is the answer to freedom and anxiety which can’t be managed is supplanted by authority and security. In confusion and emptiness there you will find anxiety, which some find intolerable and is addressed either on a personal or on a social level.

In philosophy and theology

Tillich: anxiety is man’s response to non-being

Kierkegaard: anxiety is fear of nothingness

Non-being does not just mean death, but death of what makes your existence meaningful. Meaninglessness is non-being. The self can dissolve through an attack on its values\meaning.

Niebuhr: anxiety is the concomitant emotion that reflects the paradox that man is finite and bound and yet has freedom.

In Psychology

Willougby: Anxiety is a contributory factor to suicide, mental disorders and divorce. All of the latter are rising in our age.

Chapter 2 Philosophical Interpreters of Anxiety

Up until Freud, anxiety was only a concern of philosophers and theologians. The only philosophers who were interested in it were those interested in existential conflicts and human crises. Anxiety therefore was of especial interest to philosophers who had a religious interest, i.e. Kierkegaard,
Spinoza and Pascal.

The separation of mind and body by Descartes creates anxiety for 19^th and 20^th century people but also sets the problem of anxiety for Freud.  This has led to a valuing more of the rational, determinate and mechanical against the irrational. This in turn has led to a suppressing of anxiety.

Anxiety as a problem didn’t emerge until 19^th century and only a topic for psychology from 1930. Anxiety rationalised is fear, which is determinate.

17^th Century

Rationality was the solution to the problem of man. Mathematics is the chief tool of rationality. It was believed that reason could conquer emotions.

Descartes: body can be understood and controlled by mechanical and mathematical means. This is why we are currently in an age that only values that which can be measured. Therefore we suppressed the irrational and that which can’t be measured as unimportant.

That we could control the body with rationality dispelled anxiety. This was the case as the threat of witches and sorcerers who could control your body with spells was quashed as it was rationality that was the controller of bodies, not magic.

The confidence in rationality in the renaissance went hand in hand with the rise of individualism. This however provoked anxiety due to the fear of being isolated.

The isolation of the individual however was seen to be overcome by individual’s adherence to universal rationalism which then joined people. So we need to liberate rationality in people for them to partake in universal rationality and therefore not be isolated again.

Therefore anxiety wasn’t a central problem to Spinoza or Leibniz as they were confident that rationality is all we need. This wasn’t the case for Pascal.

Spinoza

Spinoza believed fear is a subjective problem, a matter of ones state of mind. It is the opposite of hope.  Fear says something bad may happen, hope says something good. Spinoza thought that both fear and hope arise from a weakness of mind. He believed an emotion could only be overcome by a stronger one, so to deal with fear, then let courage use rationality to establish how life’s pitfalls can be avoided.

May sees one source of anxiety as emotional conflict, an impossible situation.

If you remove doubt from fear and add certainty then you get despair.

If we remove doubt from hope then we get confidence.

Spinoza thus sees rational certainty as that which can provide psychological security.

Pascal

Pascal thought that people suffered anxiety and used diversions to avoid thinking about it.  He didn’t see that the certitude of rationality was applicable in the contingent nature of existence, why am I rather than I am not. He also saw that rationality can be used by emotions, and indeed sometimes emotions can overrule rationality.  He saw rationality used for purposes of self-interest.  He said he would value reason more if it were rational. Pascal was an exception to thinkers of his time.

The power given to rationality in the seventeenth century dealt with anxiety, through giving a psychological unity.

Kierkegaard: Anxiety in the 19^th century

Where we had started with a universal reason applicable to all domains in the seventeenth century. In the 19^th century then you started getting a technical reason. As sciences disciplines developed independently, they became both autonomous and incommensurate.  At the same time of getting technical reason there was psychological compartmentalisation.  Where rationality tried to master emotions in the seventeenth century, in the nineteenth it started to repress it. So there was psychological compartmentalisation. Disunity is anxiety provoking, the disunity of the personality Freud tried to put back together again.  There was a cultural disunity as the church started to lose its power to religion, so you have their fundamental disunities, culture, personality and rationality.

In response to this disunity existential thinkers rejected traditional rationalism to understand humans, rather saying that their thinking, emotions and behaviour need to be understood as a unity.

Kierkegaard relates anxiety and freedom He sees freedom is the goal of personal development. In freedom we are in our essence, rather than an animal or vegetable, which are some ways in which we react.  Man is beckoned by possibility, who conceives of possibility, imagines it and by creative activity carries it into existence. Freedom brings with it anxiety.

Every person has the opportunity to develop, to learn to walk, to learn to talk, drive. This freedom is anxiety provoking as you have not been down these paths, this is normal anxiety.

Neurotic anxiety is the individual’s failure to move ahead in the face of normal anxiety. The more possibilities you offer yourself the more normal anxiety you have. Possibility passes into actuality via its determinant of anxiety.

Kierkegaard sees an infant as having unity with their environment, they don’t objectify, so they have anxiety, fear without object. The possibility for growth involves crisis, this can be conflicts with loved ones and his environment. Kierkegaard sees that infants start to objectify between the ages of one to three. The threat to a child of isolation and powerlessness is a source of anxiety. Developing, becoming a self, nurturing your possibilities is the case at the threat of conflict, isolation, and powerlessness which is anxiety provoking.

Kierkegaard sees man’s true vocation is to will to be himself, but the paradox of this is freedom, so whatever man strives for cannot be the goal, he must surpass this in his freedom. So whilst man might will the determinate to be himself, the reality is indeterminate.

To avoid becoming yourself, you can deny certain parts of you, you can state that your determined by an external agency, you can avoid developing certain parts of you, and perpetuate a repetition of what you have done before, you can develop certain parts that aren’t you, or a conventional version of you, so what society dictates.

Kierkegaard says selfhood, depends on an individual’s ability to confront anxiety and move ahead despite it.  Freedom he says is how one relates to oneself in every moment of existence. Children become self-aware around the age of 4.

Kierkegaard says anxiety maintains inner conflict: it is both afraid and maintains a careful eye on that which it is afraid of, anxiety makes the individual impotent. This can be seen in Freud’s repression, where the desire to do something is terrifying, so there is suppression, which is made in terms of anxiety, which protects the suppression. So at once when we feel anxious it points to something we are afraid of doing, i.e. we want to, to some level.  Kierkegaard anxiety is being sympathetic to what you hate and fear most, so it’s a possibility and it’s your worst nightmare at the same time.

In freedom I can both develop, move ahead and also do the opposite, this is my freedom, and this therefore is anxiety provoking by design. Neurotic anxiety is where you shut down your freedom in the face of anxiety. In fear you move away from your feared object. In anxiety you have a persistent inner conflict. Kierkegaard=anxiety is a state of conflict.

Self-awareness produces guilt and responsibility.

Kierkegaard=One has anxiety because one can create oneself. Anxiety means there’s a conflict going on. One has anxiety as one has possibilities, if life was determined then there would be no anxiety. So the conflict for Kierkegaard is either I embrace change which provokes anxiety though stepping into the unknown and killing the old me, or I don’t change and I atrophy, which restricts and therefore threatens the self, and produces guilt, in short the death of the person I should be.

To take a possibility is to kill an old piece of you, you have a responsibility to find the best ways that you to live and act.  In short you have a responsibility to actualise your possibilities. This is to find new and creative and more satisfying ways of living, ways of expressing yourself. You feel guilt if you do not do this. Every creative expression offers the possibility of aggression to your old self, to your environment and to your loved ones and it may not be a good choice, but only you can tell.

Sex is one place that is a symbol for anxiety, it is a powerful individual need, but it needs other people. So it then throws us into the anxiety of we are both an individual but also a shared being, one that is part of the society, the species etc. This creates the tension of the determined ways we should act, how we need to fit in with societies conventions but yet we have a need to be ourselves.

To not face anxiety, is to suffer from shutupness, where you inhibit, block awareness and avoid. Pathological anxiety responses aim to block out freedom, and constrict his development. Freedom is expansive and constantly communicating, freedom is the opposite. Shutupness is withdrawal and continual negation.

The difficulty with explanations of fate, is that if a bad thing happened it can happen again, it is the opposite to freedom and responsibility. If you feel guilt for your circumstance then you feel responsible and can do something about it. So it could be that if you consider yourself having freedom in how you respond, then you are less afraid of what happens, if you consider that what happens defines how you are then you may be terrified of something really bad happening.

For Kierkegaard somatic, psyche and possibilities are interrelated systems, disorganisation in one is shown in the others. This would means values\goals\plans\ of a person is a system in itself, meaningfulness then is a system.

Kierkegaard=rigid personalities lack inward certitude…Intriguing

A rigid personality, lacks inward certitude, and has truth and certainty by performing certain ceremonies which if he doesn’t do cast him into anxiety. People keep anxiety away by loud sensations, like you keep the wolves away in the forest. The anxious wolves are the lonely thoughts, the feeling...

It is only when you realise you can demand nothing of life, and catastrophe, death, contingency lurk next to man and could happen the next instant, that you can take a different attitude to reality.

Finiteness is the opposite of freedom, in trying to manage anxiety you become shutdown and not free. Inward certitude can be seen as a faith that you can cope, and that to face the anxiety that is freedom, this provides inward certitude.

Anxiety indicates the presence of a problem that needs to be solved. It is the recognition of a conflict that there is no obvious solution for which is highly threatening, damned if you do, damned if you don’t, but there is a problem here that needs to be solved.

Self-strength develops out of handling anxiety creating situation.

Chapter 3 Anxiety interpreted biologically

Explanations of anxiety

Integrative mechanisms that represent our understanding of an event as anxiety provoking e.g. beck

The startle pattern

The startle response is a precursor to anxiety or fear. The startle response is primary, innate and involuntary. The startle response exhibits a protective constriction of the body. It is said that due to the suddenness of the stimuli, it can’t be integrated, so a protective response is required. We are startled before we are threatened. Neurologically the stimulus is too much to be processed so the emergency response system goes into action. After the unconditioned startle comes the conditioned emotional response of fear, anger, curiosity etc.

Goldstein=Anxiety is the subjective sensation of the organism in a catastrophic condition. Catastrophic conditions is when an organism cannot cope with the demands of its environments or what it means to be this organism is in danger of collapse.

Goldstein Anxiety then is when someone’s existence is threated, be it cognitively, value, or physically. A person’s values, or beliefs about itself or the world, can be things it considers an essential part to its existence, again functionality, or resource….Thus anxiety exists within a person in certain situations. I appraise this situation to threaten something important to me.

The response you can have to this is to let go the element of your existence that is threatened, shut down your world, so you don’t enter into the catastrophic provoking situation

Goldstein believed our core drive is to actualise our nature. These drives to actualise your nature, can be psychophysical like sex, or psychosocial like success, if this is an essential element of your being then threat to this is anxiety provoking.

Anxiety and the loss of the world

Goldstein argues that anxiety is fear without object, indeed clients can report that it is precisely this objectlessness that is terrifying. Fear works with objects that you can fight or flee, Anxiety has no object so you cannot fight or flee. The anxiety response is meaningless frenzy, then a shutting off from the world, to reduce all affect and any engagement with the catastrophic or anxiety. So there is a situation in which there is anxiety, and it is this that we remove ourselves from.

Fear sharpens the senses and drives to action, anxiety paralyzes the senses and renders them unusable. The attachment in phobia of anxiety to a particular object, is a relief as then we have something to fear, although this is a pseudo object.

Goldstein: The fact that the anxiety response in the catastrophic condition confuses the senses and the perception, means that anxiety cannot have an object reference in the world. The relationship between self and world breaks down in anxiety

Severe anxiety is experienced as the dissolution of self. The dissolution of the existence of the personality, effective that which was most feared to prompt the anxiety. So it is better rather to speak of someone being anxiety rather than having it.

Origins of anxiety and fear as seen by Goldstein

Goldstein=Anxiety is developmentally primary to fear. Infant’s initial responses are diffuse and undifferentiated. Fears come later as objects are recognised. Goldstein=Fear is the threat that you could be thrown into a catastrophic situation. If you think of an anxiety\panic attack as the height of anxiety, the fear is the fear that this will happen again, i.e. panic disorder.

Whilst anxiety can reduce itself by placing its fear onto pseudo objects, and turn itself into fear. In therapy, anxiety can be reduced by reappraising the situation as not catastrophic, and not impossible. Again decatastrophisation shows the individual there is no catastrophe as they can manage it.

Children can have anxiety produced by sudden appearance, rapid approach, intensity of stimulus, all of these have one factor in common, you can’t adequate assimilate these experiences, thus the demands of the environment are too high and therefore you feel you existence under threat., I need to be able to cope with the demands of the environment, to be safe. I need to be able to get what I need out of the environment, be satisfied, Threats on either side will be a threat to my existence therefore produce anxiety.

The capacity to bear anxiety

Goldstein the capacity to bear anxiety is crucial for self-realisation. A new possibility for development of the self will show itself as anxiety. You need to move through anxiety not away from it. Children and creative adults have a high tolerance of bearing anxiety, they move ahead into new possibilities in spite of their anxiety. In new possibilities you can be shocked, you can have threats to your existence, but these threats can be overcome, this is going through anxiety. Goldstein: The more original a human the deeper his anxiety. Dogmatism is the opposite of someone who welcomes anxiety, someone who is creative.

Culture is the product of overcoming anxiety not sublimating as in Freud.

Neurological and physiological aspects of anxiety

The effects of the parasymptathic nervous system are pleasure, relaxation and comfort, coming from rest and digest functions. The effects of the sympathetic system are anxiety, anger and fear.

The sympathetic affects are preparation for fight of flight, which can mean chemicals released into the blood to help clotting, blood diverted to the major organs, increase in dilation to see more, panting to take on more oxygen, voiding of bladder and bowels so the organism is lighter to fight or flee.

Perceptions of Danger

When the autonomic system is activated then the thalamus sends signals to the hypothalamus, which activates the alert system, and the hypothalamus sends a signal to the cerebral cortex which then interprets the situation which is a major component in the extent of activation and whether its fight or flight.

The threat that prompts the autonomic system may be external or internal. The latter being unacceptable desires, that threaten the existence of the individual.  The cortex dampens down the responses of the lower areas of the brain, and it’s for this reason you see babies with strong emotions as their cortex isn’t well developed.  Thus if you remove the cortex then you get automatic and excessive reactions. Intense fatigue or illness may also inhibit the action of the cortex. Again the cortex helps interpret and differentiate, you can see this undifferentiated reflexive emotional response in babies.  

The cortex thus allows you to say where the danger is coming from, if it is truly dangerous or not, if it can be dealt with or not.

If an individual is confronted by an experience they think is beyond their control, they may be thrown back into a reflexive undifferentiated response.

Balance in the autonomic system

The sympathetic and para sympathetic systems are balanced, like flexor and extensor muscles. The sympathetic is stronger as it can overrule the para sympathetic.  Fear inhibits digestion, whereas it requires an awful lot of eating to overcome fear.

A small degree of stimulation in the sympathetic system, may seek to enhance the effect of a pleasurable activity, you may get a feeling of adventure, or sense of engaging in exciting sexual activity. It’s like the arm performs better when there is a slight bit of tension in it, likewise if there’s something at stake, something significant then performance is enhanced.

As the sympathetic and para sympathetic are a joined system, a see saw, then this can explain why some people when they feel anxious start eating, as this para sympathetic activity can start to quieten the sympathetic system, of course there may also be a relation to the comfort from childhood when anxiety was due to not being fed and being fed reduced anxiety.

In sex the early stages of sexual arousal are found in the para sympathetic system, so erections, correlated to the tender and gentle feelings of sex.  In a similar way some people when the masturbate finds it reduces anxiety. Sexual ejaculation and orgasm are however mediated by the opposite system, the sympathetic. So whilst the erection part of masturbation can allay anxiety, the orgasm can promote it.  Of course the psychological effects of sex are complex, and part of the overall organism but this is part of that.

Sympathetic stimulation results in a general state of excitement. Adrenalin has a general distribution in the blood stream, and thus produces a diffused effect, which explains why anger, anxiety and fear are all over feelings.

The fight flight or freeze response:

Fight, I can overcome the threat, eyes become restricted and focus on the attack surface, I feel anger

Flight, I can flee the threat, I feel fear

Freeze, I am helpless, I feel anxiety, I will play dead and hope the threat passes soon

The physiological process, the activation of the sympathetic nervous system, the release of adrenaline are the same for all response, fear, anxiety and anger. It is only the interpretation that makes the difference, and then the physiological responses on the basis of that.

Voodoo Death

Here you have a death from belief, I believe I have broken a taboo, or the witch doctor has cursed me. My sympathetic nervous system gets activated and is a high state of excitation. Paralysed by anxiety, and with no outlet, then death can occur. This can be demonstrated with cats, where if you remove the cortex, after several hours of sham rage, then the cats can die. Death happens as blood or oxygen does not get supplied to vital organs.

Psychosomatic aspects of anxiety

Humans as an organism are involved in transactions of input and output. If an emotion needs to be outputted but is inhibited then, you can get psychosomatic substitution. Bulimia as excessive appetite, Anorexia as insufficient appetite? Over protective mothers pre disposes a child to anxiety.

Some relation can be found between lack of appetite and frustrated feelings of love, which have then turned to hostility and then feelings of guilt. So the love as appetite, has to be thwarted as it is the cause of the pain.

Diarrhoea is associated with anxiety. Increased blood pressure is generally associated with anger Anxiety is seen to sit under anger, well I guess there’s an interpretation of threat.  Frequency of urination can be accompanied by anxiety connected to competitive ambition.

Gastric functions

There seems a symbolic relation between gastric functions and the need for care, dependent love and support, which came from being fed by the mother. So really things that are part of the para sympathetic system, the rest and digest system. When there is activation of the fight, flight then the need for the comfort, care and love gets accentuated, the need for rest, and digest increases.

In tests anxiety was shown to produce increased gastric activity which could result in gastric ulcers. NHS website says there is no hard evidence linking stress and ulcers, although it does say that stress makes them worse.

Wolff and Wolff, studied Tom who had a fistula into his stomach, they saw when he felt fear then gastric activities slowed. Other affects related to the hypo functioning of the stomach are sadness, discouragement and self-reproach. In times of anxiety then there was an accelerated gastric activity. Tom also showed hyper stomach activity when feeling resentment or hostility.

I guess one way to understand the relationship between stomach activity and the sympathetic nervous system, is when someone wants to restrict their sympathetic response, a form of somatic repression, restriction, inhibition maybe. This would then explain why there are no definitive relationships between stress and stomachs as it depends if the person is trying to inhibit it.

Eating whilst an anti-sympathetic movement, can also be seen as an act of aggression, in the symbolism that animals eat their prey.

Culture and the meaning of disease

The function of a disease is that it shrinks your world. This can resolve a conflict, as with lesser responsibilities and concerns there are more resources available for the conflict and for life. Health is a freeing of the organism to realise its capabilities. People can use disease like older generations used to use the devil. They would say that they could project their hated experiences onto the devil, In order to not take responsibility for them. As it is much more acceptable to have an organic disease than a mental one, this can influence the psych somatisation of mental distress.  The culture dictates how a person resolves their anxiety and what symptoms he employs.

With Tom, when he had an emotion that was a withdrawal without an intention to struggle, then you would see a decrease in gastric activity, e.g. fear, sadness, self-reproach.  However when there was a struggle, such as with anxiety, anger, hostility or resentment then the gastric functions were working overtime.

It is often that you can analyse rage and hostility (struggle emotions) to underlying anxiety, so there could be more ease for an emotion to turn into another one if they have a similar foot print.

There tends to be an inverse relationship between an individual’s ability to tolerate anxiety and the appearance of psychosomatic symptoms.

If there is a conscious struggle for which there has been no progress or which is becoming intolerable then symptom  formation can give some relief.  When people become organically ill anxiety tends to reduce. Then when good health returns, and a resumption of daily life is offered then anxiety returns.

Chapter 4 Anxiety Interpreted Psychologically

Do animals have anxiety?

Goldstein thought so, in the undifferentiated fright, like children. This would be deemed normal anxiety. As animals don’t have self-consciousness it seems more accurate to say they have a state of vigilance, they expect a danger and are looking out for it.

Animals can ask questions, what is it, what happens next, and have a time parameter within which the question and answer, makes sense, for dogs it’s about 30 mins, for sheep about 10 mins. Within these times these animals can plan for the future.

Vigilance in the part of animals is the precursor to anxiety in humans. Vigilance is a way of existing for an animals and involves multiple systems, all sensory systems, perception.

What is it, is the question of curiosity.  What happens next, is the question of planning.

Because we can plan, therefore we can live by ideals, values and goals.

Liddell state, anxiety and planning are two sides of the same coin. Anxiety accompanies intellectual activity as its shadow.

The human’s capacity for imagination, their use of symbols and meanings, their creative and intellectual capacities are the necessary conditions for anxiety. If there was no imagination there would be no anxiety. Liddell asserts that intellect and its shadow anxiety are products of man’s social intercourse. Although social intercourse is only available via the inner potentialities associated with individuality.

The study of children’s fears

Children can fear things they have never encountered, only imagined.  In the 1950s children were assumed to have instinctive fear of darkness, animals, large bodies of water, slimy things and so on, which are assumed to be prepared fears that are inherited from our ancestors.  Then the argument came there are only two build in fears loud sounds and loss of support, all others are conditioned said John B Watson. This was then disproved and what took its places was any intense, novel, unexpected stimulus that the child was unprepared for is frightening.  So you might say that anything that the child cannot react adequately is perceived as a threat, and responded to with anxiety.

Maturation in anxiety and fear

If you put a baby in a small pen, at different levels of maturation you get different levels of response, from none, to mild, to strong distress. To be able to feel fear, which requires an object to fear, then you need to be able to objectify and to understand that object as an object of fear, so as your knowledge grows then your fear can.

After the infant period, children can develop imaginary fears, i.e. they imagine things that could frighten them even if they haven’t seen them.  Once competition and social status becomes something they understand then fear can be related to loss of status.

Adults who report their childhood fears more often report fears of loss of social status than do children. They have a memorial perceptual bias, based on what their current concerns are.

Jersild=most childhood fears, children have had no experience of, e.g. fear of lions and witches, and aliens

Children’s fear is unpredictable, they can go to a place, have a stimulus then at some time it can be something to be feared. Children’s fear of strangers, is context dependent, and not obviously predictable, so Rollo May’s theory is that there is something underneath it, more complex than conditioning that can explain it.

Fear Masking Anxiety

Rollo May =the irrational and unpredictable nature of childhood fears becomes made sensible if these fears have an objectivated form of an underlying anxiety. The functionality of a fear masking anxiety is that anxiety can’t be defended against as there is no object to fear, although there can be a situation. But if there is an object then we know what to do, we can flight or fight it.  It can also be a relief of an impossible situation, so I love and am scared of my parents, I want to leave them but can’t survive without them. If I can then substitute the fear of lions for this then that will be easier I have no dilemma, I am scared of lions. But how can this substitution take place? Well by the lion somehow symbolising the parents in one aspect, then you would need to respond to the parents in a non-conflictual way, i.e. love, and the fear be put onto the lion so no contradiction and therefore anxiety maintains. This would be negatively reinforced, but again how would it be enabled? I suppose where you can get symbolic traction, when you can at some point look at the lion and see, feel the parent, when you can do that, then we’re off and running.  So fear masking anxiety, is that we have an anxious situation where we fear and we love say, and then we feel anxiety. If we fear something else we can love unambiguously and we get rid of anxiety.

Stress and anxiety

Stress is object based, anxiety not. Stress derives from physics and engineering, treating us an object that can bear or not levels of stress, stress happens from outside, or sometimes inside to us.

Anxiety depends on interpretation, so it’s not events that cause anxiety its how we interpret them. Stress\fear is a halfway station to anxiety. Anxiety is how we handle stress. Stress can sometimes relieves anxiety, so during WW2 then levels of anxiety dropped as you had something very specific to worry about. Thus people have something concrete to pin their inner turmoil on.

Stress is a threatening part of the situation, I am being stressed because of x, and anxiety is the whole. I feel unsafe as I am weak, the world is threatening.

Recent research on anxiety

Cognitive theorists

Cognitive theorist, e.g. Lazarus’ claim an individual’s appraisal of the threat serves as the key to anxiety. Anxiety, for them, ties up with expectancy and unresolved fear. So novice parachutists had high arousal prior to jumping which was found as overwhelming experienced as aversive.  Experienced parachutists were high focussed arousal that increased their awareness.

Epstein linked anxiety with self-esteem. If you think yourself can disintegrate, you can lose identity as you are fragile, then you are more likely to catastrophize.

Increases in self-esteem produce feelings of happiness, integration energy, freedom and expansiveness. Decreases in self-esteem produce feelings of unhappiness, disorganisation, anxiety and constriction.

Maybe this is the thing with anxiety and its attempt to constrict, it attempts to hold the self together

State and trait anxiety

Trait being a way of responding, state being transitory condition fired by the autonomic nervous system.  Trait anxiety generally dates back to early childhood, where there was maternal rejection through punishment.

Relationship between anxiety and fear

Conditioning theorists who equate anxiety with fear, have developed behaviour therapy on the basis of this. Their greatest success is with phobics. However conditioned fear cannot be the basis for anxiety as conditioned fear basis itself on certainty whereas anxiety basis itself on uncertainty and lack of control

Faith

Charles ford=people with faith in religion, their commanding officer coped with anxiety inducing situations much better than those who didn’t.

Anxiety and Learning theory

Mowrer= when a behaviourist saw anxiety they thought it as a symptom, which was the solution to a psychological problem.  Anxiety was a conditioned form of pain reaction.   So organism perceives danger, stimulus, then its response is anxiety.  Any behaviour which reduces anxiety becomes rewarded.  Therefore on this doctrine learning theory is at the basis of all anxiety.

However as Mowrer worked to prove this, he used anxiety and fear interchangeably, he used the threat of electrical shock to show negative reinforcement, and he equated anxiety with the physiological symptoms of pain.

Then he questioned things when he asked himself why  animals learn non integratively neurotic behaviour, this he argued was that because they were incapable of anticipating long time rewards and punishment to balance them against immediate punishment and reward.

Mowrer argues that integrative behaviour depends on integrating the future with the present.  Goldstein showed that when there is cortical damage, then abstract and possible experience isn’t possible all that is left is the concreted.

To transcend the present, we need language, with its symbolic and rational approach.  We also need social and historical development as the future depends on socially constructed values, well socially constructed everything, goals, language, culture etc.

Mowrer thought that man’s ability to transcend the present was based on the symbols of universal values that were constructed through the history of society.

Thus there becomes a major difference between integrative learning and adjustive learning. Adjustive learning adjusts to difficult situation, so it is negative reinforcing in the present. Integrative learning incorporates both the current situation and the imagined future situation. In some ways there is sense of self and identity, of that person that moves through the past, present to future than someone that just adjusts feelings in the present. Thus integrative learning supports identity in a stronger way than does adjustive.

Mowrer sees that anxiety is as a result of a social dilemma, e.g. child loves and fears parent.

Mowrer agrees with Freud where real fear is repressed which results in neurotic anxiety and symptom formation. Freud saw the drive that creates the fear as an instinct, Mowrer sees it as an ethical dilemma. The individual fears withdrawal of love and approval, on the part of significant others. It is these fears that are then repressed, so I fear withdrawal of love but I can’t leave you.

Mowrer would say that anxiety is the repression of the superego, of the moral conflict that the person faces, not the outcome a la Freud. Anxiety is an outcome of responsibility and guilt, I love you but I fear or hate you, I have guilt for my fear and hate, and responsibility for my love. I am in an impossible situation, and it is a moral, value based impossible situation, I only have turmoil due to my values.

Mowrer shows anxiety as a turmoil, a conflict, and also a problem to be solved. Anxiety is the expression of personal disorganisation that seeks integration. I love and I fear and I want to integrate, maybe my fear is unfounded, maybe I want to moderate my love. Maybe I want to see I can cope without this love. Anxiety under treatment should result in moral fear and guilt.

Personal Comment

Prior to 1950 nothing written about anxiety save Kierkegaard. The people who come to therapy are the people who have moulded theories of anxiety. So if sexual and aggressive desire are repressed, then the person in society would be seen as weak and neurotic and worthy of therapy, thus Freud develops his ideas. If the desires for friendly, charitable relations with others, then this is the mark of a competitive person, who will achieve their goals irrespective of the human outcome, these are considered in our society successful.

Adler maintains one of our basic human needs is to be a responsible social creature.

Chapter 5 Anxiety interpreted by the psychotherapist

Freud’s evolving theories of anxiety

Rank: life fear is anxiety going forward becoming an individual, death fear is anxiety going backwards dissolving the individual. Between these two fears the individual is thrown back and forth through their life.

Freud has had a massive and lasting influence, so you don’t need to agree with him, but it’s useful to know what he said.

Freud is in a long list of explorers including Kierkegaard, Nietzsche and Schopenhauer who saw the significance of the irrational elements of the individual.  These aspects tend to be suppressed post renaissance in the west.  Whilst he wanted to be a scientist, he aimed to describe the irrational within a rational framework! Freud saw anxiety as the basic problem of emotional disorders.

Freud’s theories evolved throughout his life.

Freud distinguish between fear and anxiety, fear has an object, whereas anxiety is the state of a person. Freud saw there being  objective anxiety and neurotic anxiety. The form is real and a reaction to an external danger like death. He conceives it as natural, rational and useful. It is part of the instinct to self-preservation. This anxiety aims to prevent sudden threats for which the individual is unprepared and is functional.  When the level of anxiety is disproportionate to the threat then this is dysfunctional. Any development of anxiety beyond the initial prompting to survey the danger and prepare flight is inexpedient.

Anxiety and Repression

Freud noticed that people who have inhibitions or anxiety symptoms are remarkably free of anxiety. In phobias or OCD if the rituals or avoidance are performed then there is little anxiety around. With phobia there is intense anxiety around the object but little in other places. Thus the argument is that there is a substitutive processes going on, where all anxiety in the person’s life is substituted for this one focus. Freud thought frustrated libido is transferred into anxiety, but then what about sexually fulfilled anxious people.

Objective anxiety generates a flight reaction to external threats. In neurotic anxiety then the flight is from one’s own affect.

So Freud Theory 1: repressed affect (standardly libido) is transformed into anxiety, the reason is the affect is seen as dangerous

He then splits up the psyche into ego, super ego and id, which forces theory 2.

Theory 2 is there is anxiety through the perception of an impossible\ambivalent state by the ego, e.g. I love and hate my father, it is this anxiety that is then repressed. The ego now becomes the source of the anxiety.

Neurotic anxiety for Freud was related to objective anxiety. The internal neurotic anxiety was a preparation for an external objective anxiety. So with a little boy he hates his father but can’t act on it, as his father is far larger than him, which threatens objective anxiety. In some ways I need to renounce my feared love of my mother as I fear the retaliation of my father.

Origins of anxiety as seen by Freud

Freud sees anxiety as part of the self-preservation instinct.  Freud’s objective anxieties would be fear of fire, heights, darkness and loneliness.  Freud finds the origins of anxiety in the birth trauma and the fear of castration.  The birth trauma becomes the affective template for any life threatening situation.  The prototypes of birth anxiety and castration are that they show the anxiety of separation from the loved one, or the meaning maker.

Trends in Freud’s theories of Anxiety

Freud moves from anxiety is the outcome of repressing libido, to anxiety is what is repressed and is a result of trying to avoid external objective anxiety, so we see a trend in terms of anxiety being internally generated, i.e. conflicting drives, to be externally generated. He also argues that symptoms prevent the development of more anxiety and are created to avoid the danger situation of which anxiety sounds the alarm. So Freud is moving from an intra-psychic view of anxiety to an organismic one.

So we have anxiety is when we feel helpless (we cannot flee), that can be cut off from safety, put into a dangerous situation. It can refer the threat to what makes us us, which can be our life, or something attribute or possession that makes us us.

Rank

Rank saw that the central problem for humans is individuation, and that life is a series of separations. Each separation gives the possibility of more autonomy and individuation to the human. Leaving the womb, the breast, the school. For Rank anxiety is the apprehension of these separations. Anxiety is thus felt as the threat to the individual’s unity, and stability of their current situation.  Anxiety is also experienced if separation isn’t made and the individual doesn’t become more autonomous, doesn’t develop.

Anxiety is then felt as you leave the wholeness and there is projection into a radically different state in the world. Anxiety can also be felt if you don’t take that step and you feel constricted, choked even.

Rank sees that we come into the world with fear and it exists independently of outside threats. He also states that having an object to point this primal anxiety at is therapeutic.

For Rank the following are terms for anxiety

1.       Primal fear

2.       Fear of life

3.       Inner fear

For young children the feeling of undifferentiated insecurity is a reasonable definition of anxiety.

For Rank there is life fear and death fear. Life fear is the anxiety at every autonomous possibility. So let’s call it life anxiety is the anxiety that when you develop yourself you develop new relations, new aspects of yourself and consequently kill old parts. Thus it is the anxiety of losing the unity that you had as a person, that safety.  Life anxiety is the fear of individuation

Death anxiety then is the fear of being swallowed up by the whole. It is anxiety least one stagnates in dependent symbiotic relationships. It is anxiety that you do not develop yourself to your full potential.

Rank thinks: The neurotic then cannot keep these two aspects in balance, they fear losing stability so don’t develop their potential, nor do they have loving relationships as they fear dependency on others. Many neurotics have a great need to appear independent, but actually keep excessive dependence. Because of this exaggerated anxiety then the neurotic engages in widespread constraint of his impulsive and spontaneous activity and which as a consequence has widespread guilt.

Rank sees that individuation is only possible by means of relations in the world with others and collective values. This is then why you see the prevalent type of neurotic with a feeling of inferiority and inadequacy, a fear of responsibility, guilt feelings and hyper self-consciousness because the collective values in society that has been given by religion, static class frameworks, have been taken away and the individual has been thrown to the middle, with no values.

Adler: Anxiety and inferiority feelings

Adler uses the term inferiority in the same way that others use the term anxiety. I.e. the basic motivation for neuroses.

Adler sees humans beginning life in a state of biological inferiority and insecurity, i.e. babies are inferior to their parents. This helplessness is overcome by increasing social relationships. Normal development can be affected by objective and subjective factors

Objective inferiority can be organic weakness, cultural weakness i.e. being a member of a minority that there is prejudice to, or being in an adverse position in the family constellation. Objective inferiority can be adjusted to.

How neurotic symptoms develop in relation to weakness is how that weakness is perceived. This is between weakness as a fact and as a feeling. The former sees the fact of weakness, I have a bad back, I am not very good as a painter. This is in comparison with the feelings, I am weak, which are descriptions for the self. Neurosis develops when weakness, inferiority are cited as something about the self, something about the core existence. When weaknesses are seen as facts, they becomes hurdles to surmount.  When inferiority is about the self, then you can get power based compensatory strategies.

Adler saw the development of this position when an adult has a child in an exploitative fashion where the child provides a function, to be compensation for their weakness, as an extension of their own self, in this case the child’s self-identity will be on the basis of power\weakness of the attribute the child is loved for. If the love of the child is quite apart from the function they provide for the parents, then the child has a self-identity irrespective of power\weakness.

When your parents have conditions of worth for you, i.e. you are loved in so far as you are x. Then you feel inferior and anxious when you are not x, and spend the rest of your life trying to be x. This also tends to equate self with x, so if x is not there, then you would say I am not good, I am weak, I am bad. However if there were no conditions of worth, then you would not equate the I with any specific attribute, and if you lack x, you would say I lack x, but not equate yourself with x.  So here you get where anxiety comes in, I am loved in so far as I am x, I am loved in so far as I have worth, what I am is x. Thus a central part of myself is x, and if it is threatened then I feel anxiety.

The neurotic activity to overcome inferiority is to gain power over persons, to put yourself up and others down, however this generates inter person hostility and leads to an increase in isolation.

For Adler: the feeling of anxiety when the self is threatened is a cue to retreat to previous positions of security, so it evades responsibility and decision making. Adler saw anxiety as also being a weapon of aggression as a means of dominating others.  So a child’s anxiety can be used to control her mother’s actions.

For May: the secondary gain of control in anxiety is not the main aspect of anxiety, but rather is used in desperation in the face of this situation.

For Adler anxiety can be overcome by the bond which binds the individual to humanity: only the individual can go through life without anxiety is the individual who is conscious of belonging to the fellowship of man. Thus anxiety can be overcome through love and socially useful work, so anxiety is socially constructed and socially overcome.

Jung: anxiety and the threat of the irrational

Jung never synthesised his views on anxiety, however Jung did believe that anxiety is the individual’s reaction to the invasion of the conscious mind by irrational forces. So a fear that I could go mad, is Jung’s anxiety.   Thus it could be an invasion of our animal instincts from archaic aspects of our human functioning,  If the irrational forces are only thinly blocked off then there is a threat of psychosis, if they are completely blocked off then there is a stifling of creativity (going sane phillips!)

Kierkegaard would say to avoid futility you have to work through anxiety and not avoid it.

Jung: People have a fear of the secret perils of the soul. Jung says that man places an excessive importance on rationality which doesn’t lead to rational integration but rather the use of the intellect for purposes of ego and power.  Trying to force everything under the guise of rationality leads to nature fighting back, and it is here were you can develop health anxiety, which is nonsensical, but it is the irrational of the human breaking through, under its dominance by rationality. How can I make sense of this, well desires are not rational, I want to eat, fuck, punch, possess etc., they can be subsumed under rational banners, only allowing those that allow me to get to a stated end. Again action is not rational, we can rationalise after the fact, but to allow the irrational is to allow action that is desire even if it doesn’t fit under a rational goal.  So really the irrational is to do things that do not fit within a purposive rational plan.

Horney Anxiety and hostility

Freud\Jung saw anxiety as a property of the individual Horney, Stack, Fromm and Sullivan as anxiety arises out of disturbed interpersonal relationships in a social setting. So psychosocial..

Whilst intra-personal anxiety triggers are not denied, i.e. frustrated drives, it is only when this frustration threatens some value or mode of interpersonal relationship which the individual holds vital to their security. The other gives me danger or security, they can abandon me, they can ridicule me, they can hail me, they can value me, they can thank me. I have value only in the eyes of the other, my security is mostly threatened in an interpersonal context, death is the only exception to this.

Horney places anxiety as prior to instinctual drives.  The concept of drive equates to some level of compulsion. Horney argues that impulses and desires do not become drives except to be motivated by anxiety.

Drives become compulsive in neurotics as there is low frustration tolerance. Compulsive drives aim not at satisfaction but at safety.

For Horney a fear is related to a specific danger to which the individual can make a specific adjustment. Anxiety is the feeling of diffuseness, and uncertainty and uncertainty and the experience of helplessness toward the threat. It is the feeling of being unsafe because either of inadequate capabilities or because of size of potential threats, but in the light of this, there isn’t a specific threat just that I am not safe. For Horny again anxiety is the threat to some core aspect of the personality.

Horney origins of anxiety

Normal anxiety=feeling in the contingency of existence in the face of death, powers of nature etc.

Neurotic anxiety=arises out of the conflict between hostility and dependency. Anxiety is the expected hostility from others.

Basic anxiety is Horney term for anxiety that leads to neurotic defences. It is neurotic in two ways one that it forms neurosis and two that it comes out of disturbed relationships between child and significant other.

For Horney then anxiety is the outcome of the impossible situation, where the child feels anxiety as they are dependent on their parent and are hostile to them. The hostility is then repressed, which makes the child less able to fight real dangers and gives them through their repression a greater feeling of helplessness. Helplessness inheres in the basic nature of anxiety.  Neurotic symptoms are then security measures against basic anxiety. They are the response in the face of your own helplessness in the face of a potentially hostile world.

Anxiety is the response to the threat to something a person thinks their safety depends on.

If you are in fact helpless and can do nothing about it, then a neurotic defence makes sense, as you defend yourself against the anxiety, it is all you can do as it is real.

Therefore you have basic anxiety, a conflict of hostility and dependence, where you feel helpless, you develop a neurotic response of masochistic dependence, and become very clingy to someone. Then if that relationship failed you would feel anxiety, as the basic anxiety coping strategy is now undone.  Again the coping response to the basic anxiety, may be narcissistic, or becoming unobtrusive. Again if these coping strategies are threatened then anxiety is felt.

With neurotic anxiety then the question to be asked is what vital value is being threatened which is vital to the personality against previous helplessness.

So anxiety can be triggered by anything that threatens the coping mechanisms of not feeling helpless.

Sullivan: Anxiety as apprehension of disapproval

Sullivan says=

·         psychiatry is the study of interpersonal relations

·         Personality an interpersonal phenomenon, developing out of initial relationship with primary care giver.

·         Person and environment one indissoluble unit

·         Relationship with primary care giver, the prototype for relationships with other significant people, the matrix of which ends up forming the personality

·         Two types of human activity that aim at satisfactions, e.g. eating, sleeping and those aiming at security, which relate more closely to man’s cultural equipment. Security aims at ability and power. Presumes that the power motive of security ties up with a human desire to expand in ability and achievement.

·         The organism has a desire to have a widening impact on its environment

·         Language is a tool for man to get security with over his, environment and fellow man, the precursor of this was crying

·         Anxiety arises out of infants perception of the disapproval of significant persons in their interpersonal world, this disapproval threatened the relationship, which in turn would provoke a helplessness

·         It is through Primary Care Giver reward and punishment that the personality develops

·         Anxiety restricts the activity of the infant in areas the Primary Care Giver disapproves of. Anxiety is thus the policeman that operates when the Primary Care Giver isn’t there

·         To try to limit anxiety then we try to avoid the things that can provoke it, so we might disassociate from phenomena that provoke it, or avoid situations, deny certain experiences etc.  Thus we limit our experience to manage anxiety

·         With strong provokers of anxiety, e.g. a strong desire, an unambiguous situation, then it can be heard to dissociate and it is then that substitutive and compulsive symptoms develop.

Chapter 6 Anxiety interpreted culturally

Anxiety can be both triggered by standard and values of current culture and also managed by the stability and unity or lack of it by culture.

So currently being strong, independent and a competitive success is a source of anxiety as people repress their dependent needs, and fear they can achieve the former.

Hallowell: quantity of anxiety is a function of beliefs superimposed upon dangerous situations

The importance given to competitive success by society correlates with the amount of anxiety that threats to it not happening give. Individual competitive success can also be achieved through the failure of others as much as one’s own progress

Individual Competitive success is a cultural product, it cannot be seen to relate to security, as communal success can provide security, and indeed individual competitive success can weaken society, and therefore security. Indeed other societies, e.g. kamanche Indians, have competition as an independent factor to security.

The importance of the historical dimension

Anxiety can only be understood as part of a culture at a certain time, and indeed within the historical development of concepts of man and society. In many ways the rational individual was born in the renaissance. The idea here is that to understand anxiety, you need the historical development of the concept of person as much as the childhood of the adult.

A person is rigidly determined by history when they are unaware of it, in the same way that they are rigidly determined by their past when they are unaware of the relationship between their past and their present.

Individualism in the renaissance

The individualism of the renaissance is seen as a reaction against the collectivism of the middle ages. The citizen of the middle ages was aware of themselves by role, class, gender, nationality and none of these things changed. Emotion was channelled communally in festivals be they via the church or the crusades of the army.

By the 14^th and 15^th century the hierarchical structure of the church and society which previously had been a structure to channel emotion became a structure to suppress it and suppress  vitality,  The last century of the middle ages was pervaded by feelings of anxiety and depression , with the dread of death and fear of devils and sorcerers. The pictures of Bosch and Grunewald show this very vividly.

Giotto, in the “first renaissance”, depicted a new humanism, the range of individual experiences and emotions and in the same manner an individual naturalism.  In medievalism man had been part of a collective, part of a role, a unit in a social organism.  For Giotto in the initial blush of the renaissance it is the individual who is valued, but in the full renaissance then it is the powerful individual that is valued.  This is the seed for the current anxiety for competitive success, the powerful individual is valued.

With the renaissance came social mobility, anyone with intelligence and courage could achieve success. Also what was required was a moral laxity. Success was the standard by which acts were judged, if you could accumulate value then the acts were good.

The post renaissance individualism saw society as the arena for the individual to achieve triumph over. Success in accumulating value for themselves judged all acts.

Opposing the limitless success and power of competitive individuals is set a continuous restlessness and perturbation. You can see this in the eyes of the people in Angelo’s painting of the dammed,  frightened by their fall, and in the Sistine chapel. This continuous restlessness can be found in people who are successful in competitive 183 individualisms, which is seen as the psychological isolation and the lack of positive values within the community.

Fromm: individualism brings strength and isolation, doubt, scepticism and therefore anxiety.

Competitive individual success at any cost, by villainy and infamy or by being heralded and a hero. So aggression over society or by being desire by society, just set yourself apart and over it, the individual craving for fame. This need for recognition is the sign of an isolated child.

An individual’s attitude towards others becomes an attitude towards himself. Alienation towards others soon leads to alienation towards yourself.  As much as others becomes objects to be manipulated so he becomes an object to be manipulated too, to have wealth and power over, what does this mean? Thus you only value yourself on the basis of your success over yourself, your continual improvement. So others are to have success over, which leads you to treating yourself in the same way, as an object to have power over, so you need continually increasing success over your past achievements otherwise you fail, should you fail you show yourself self-contempt. Success is a goal without satiation point and the desire for it increases with achievement. The use made of success is largely power over others.

In the middle ages rewards were post mortem, for your social body, be it family, church, country, post renaissance in the here and now. Post renaissance reward is about standing out from your fellows.

Post renaissance, then rewards are given for individual striving within the bourgeoisie morality.

The problem for post renaissance western culture is how an inter-personal community can be developed with the values of individual self-realization, thus freeing its members from individual isolation and concomitant anxiety inhering in excessive individualism.

Competitive individualism in work and wealth

Competitive individualism has been greatly abetted by the economic developments post Renaissance. Pre renaissance the guilds made competition impossible. Post renaissance people are seen to have a right to amass wealth and the employ it as power. Post renaissance nothing is seen as having more authority than individual reason. The idea was that economic egotism would lead to economic harmony is society at large. Economically for the most part of the two centuries post the renaissance this was true as people material ownership increased, however this was at a psychological cost inter personally and intra psychically.

The intrinsic meaning of work became the salary not the activity, social and self-esteem moved from the application of labour the acquirement of money, the work meant nothing in itself, it was a job only. Given the factors or production weren’t owned by employees the job was therefore precarious. When the creative activity of the work gave social esteem and self-esteem then there was an increase of the feeling of self-strength and a decrease of anxiety.

Industrialism led to wealth being the accepted criterion of prestige and success. Wealth is eternally competitive as someone can always have more than you. Wealth becomes not something the increases enjoyment but rather becomes a symbol of success and worth.

One way to deal with anxiety, the feeling of helplessness is to increase activity, although this only allays the symptoms. Competitive economic individualism is the principle that can cause anxiety, however the middle classes when anxious will defend this principle to the hilt seeing it as the salvation, when in reality it is the cause.

May: competitive individualism militates against the experience of community and the lack of community is a central factor in the creation of anxiety.

Fromm: Individual isolation in modern culture

Central concern is psychological isolation as the outcome of economic freedom, the personality is constructed as powerless, isolated and alone, and individual competitive success is the way back to power and value. Isolation is the first cousin to anxiety. Humans develop within a social matrix but then when isolated the individual fails to relate to himself of his intrapersonal world. This is similar to Kierkegaard who saw anxiety in terms of individuality, freedom and isolation.

For Fromm there are two types of freedom positive and negative, negative freedom is freedom from restraint, and positive freedom is freedom to build new relatedness.

So as a child grows they individuate from the parents bond, then they feel anxiety. At that point then they can either move to new relatedness, surrender freedom to avoid anxiety by forming a new dependency or by formulating neurotic patterns.

To release the negative constraints of freedom, provokes anxiety as you have less sense of belonging, less identity and therefore less potential value. It was society that demarcated you as valuable and without it you aren’t.  To create new freedoms is to release the old dependency and create new ways of belonging that suit you, but then it could so be that that will be seen as a dependency in time which will need to be overcome.

The post renaissance individual has economic freedom but is threatened by powerful supra-personal forces of capital and the market, with everyone a competitor.

Anxiety is especially a problem of the middle classes. The middle classes being between the very rich and the very poor. The very poor wanted to break the law to get what they needed, the very rich broke the laws to get what they wanted, the middle classes tended to uphold and prescribe the law, so they could work towards what they deserved.  The middle class were thus hostile to the very top and very bottom but because they wanted to preserve an ordered structure couldn’t display this, so repressed it, and repressed hostility can lead to anxiety.

One means of allaying anxiety is frantic activity, Anxiety that arises out of the dilemma of powerlessness in the face of suprapersonal economic forces on one hand, but the belief in the efficacy of individual effort on the other hand.

Why does frantic activity allay anxiety, maybe it gives the sense that you are working towards powerfulness, it’s a distraction and you don’t feel the anxiety.

Anxiety and the market place

In the modern capitalist society then people are seen as commodities who have value, salary value, capital value, social value, desirable value… Self-confidence/esteem is largely what others think of you, how they value you. Thus you are alienated from yourself in that you value yourself in terms of what others think of you. Thus self-esteem is dependent on the market place of the other, who value, it is safer to be valued on the basis of the attributes that you see and enjoy, although if value requires rewards, then it is only socially that this can happen

This means that to allay anxiety, to have worth, to be safe you continually have to achieve in the market place, to retain your value in the eyes of others.  In modern capitalism we become cogs in impersonal machines, as consumers or suppliers, the machines being too big for us to comprehend.

Mechanisms of escape

Autonomy conformity=adopting the personality that is offered to you by your culture

The idea being that if you conform to those individuals around you, you will no longer feel isolated or anxious. However they do that at the price of renouncing autonomous strength and hence become powerless and insecure.

Sadism and masochism offer mechanisms of escape where the individual becomes absorbed in the other. Masochism aims to get rid of the burden of freedom and its isolation and anxiety.

Sadism is a response to the feelings of helplessness that anxiety and isolation develop.

Kardiner:  Western man’s growth pattern

Kardiner: western man has a basic personality structure, which has changed little over past 2000 years.

Development of personality= The first personality growth pattern is strong bond with mother, producing individuals high valuation of themselves, producing strong ego and strong superego. Strong bond with mother leads to passivity and affective dependence in times of crisis. The second personality growth pattern is the introduction of taboos, e.g. sex and toilet training. Doubt arises in the continuation of parental care because of the punishment and withdrawal of love when the social rules come to be passed over, through punishment and rewards. This can then lead to hostility developing which may be directed towards the parents and if so must be repressed, if it is high. Alternatively the hostility may be directed towards siblings who threaten to take care away. As the affective needs of the child are reduced, when rules are appliedto them  their emotions are less looked after this can produce higher anxiety and greater need for dependence on mum. (God this feels a bit like a fairy story). During this period the need for obedience is greatly enhanced (this makes sense and follows for the importance of rule bound behaviour later.

This personality pattern leads to considerable emotional potential but an incapacity for direct expression because of the blocked action pattern. Its positive aspect is high degrees of productivity but its negative aspect is high levels of anxiety.

Success, social prestige arise from this personality growth pattern.

Success is made the compensation for the shortcoming of all other functions, e.g. his affective needs being looked after, the pleasure of knowing that he is cared for. Self-esteem comes out social prestige and success.

Wealth is a symbol of social prestige. When anxiety arises then the antidote to this is success, which reasserts self-esteem.

Competitive striving is motivated by hostility, an original hostility that was borne out of the original taboos and restriction and threat to take the primary care givers love away. Competitive striving however just creates hostility with co-workers and provokes more isolation and pain which then as the anxiety that drives competitive striving requires a balm.

May= it is the inconsistency, irregularity and undependability of parents behaviour towards children that creates anxiety, mistrust and isolation.

Society is the replacement structure of family, feudal lord and church as the arbiter of social control, of definition of the self, however if you are competitively engaged with society then it becomes an unstable platform.

Chapter 7 Summary and synthesis of theories of anxiety

The nature of anxiety

Freud, Goldstein and Horney think that anxiety is a diffuse apprehension and that the difference with fear is that fear is of a specific object, whereas anxiety is a general feeling, which can be provoked in a situation.

Phenomena of anxiety are of uncertainty and helplessness. Example of anxiety: a student’s professor fails to acknowledge student and student feels anxiety thinking am I nobody, am I nothing. Fear is going to the dentist. Anxiety stays with me, fear goes when I’m not going to the dentist.

The threat of anxiety is therefore to something deep in us, to something closer to the core or essence of my personality.

Anxiety is then the feeling of threat to the essential parts of one’s personality. This can be either through not doing the things that you think will keep your essential aspects safe, e.g. don’t walk in the woods at night. When the fear becomes specific, then you can direct your energy and flight or fight. Anxiety is the feeling that this fear could reoccur and you don’t know when and you don’t know where.

Anxiety can I guess also be felt in the face of a specific object, that threatens your being, e.g. threat of redundancy which means that without a job, you would no longer be you, you would be in your eyes worthless. The threat then is also for you as a subject being distinct from other objects. In full anxiety then separation between these two is lost.

Anxiety then is the threat to an essential part of your being. This can mean one of your values or attributes, e.g. success, or your possessions, or your sanity, or your relationships. It can also be provoked by coping responses you have against anxiety, e.g. being close to a strong person.

In most languages it is said that you have a fear, but you are anxious. Anxiety is the experience of the threat to dissolution of the self.

The threat to the self that anxiety is can be:

1.       Physical=Death/Disfigurement

2.       Cognitive=meaningless

3.       Emotional=madness

4.       Socially=isolated

5.       Behaviourally=incapacity

6.       Values=purposeless

Normal and neurotic anxiety

Normal anxiety= living under an oppressive regime, knowing at some point you are likely to be taken to a concentration camp. Normal anxiety is proportionate to the threat.

Normal anxiety is

1.       Proportionate to the threat

2.       Doesn’t involve intra psychic conflict

3.       Does not require a neurotic defence mechanism

4.       Can be confronted consciously constructively

Normal anxiety is a lesser intensity than neurotic anxiety, and can be managed by rational activity.

One common form of normal anxiety is that related to the threats of nature, i.e. sickness, fatigue and eventually death.   A normal response to this, is to act in a way to make the probability less likely, but accept that some of them may happen. In most people normal and neurotic anxiety is inter mingled.  Neurotic death anxiety can be the case when death comes to symbolise ultimate powerlessness and helplessness, where the actual concerns may be closer to home.

Life is a process of separations which can provoke anxiety, so individuating from parents. Rank shows that normal anxiety inheres in all experience of separation, as this anxiety is overcome, then new richer relationships are constructed.  Normal anxiety may be known as potentially anxiety creating situations as if the anxiety situation is handled effectively, only small levels of anxiety may be felt.

Normal anxiety is objectively threatening, any similar person would feel anxiety, Subjective anxiety is subjectively threatening, in that similar people in a similar situation would not experience anxiety.

Neurotic anxiety is:

1.       Disproportionate to the objective danger

2.       Involves repression\ disassociation

3.       Involves retrenchment of activities and awareness such as inhibitions, development of symptoms and other defence mechanisms

Repression of fear of a threat results in the individual being unaware of the source of their fear thus you can get objectless anxiety. Indeed what could also be repressed is anxiety.  Repression increases the individuals feeling of helplessness in that it involves a curtailing of their own autonomy, an inner retrenchment and shelving of their power.

Origins of anxiety

Normal anxiety is an expression of the organism to a life threatening and uncertain threat.  It seems that humans have the capacity to react to threats which is inherited, what those threats are seem to be dependent on the society born into.

Babies have very few protective responses, most fears are conditioned response by learning.  Babies are scared of new things, sudden noises, strangers, falling, basically neophobes

Freud saw two sources of neurotic anxiety as the birth trauma and fear of castration.  However Mowrer pointed out that the threat needs to be present for the affect to remain so the birth trauma can be seen symbolically.

To the infant the mother is the source of their physical needs and their emotional security.  Therefore Sullivan held that anxiety has its roots in mother’s disapproval which means the threat of physical and emotional satisfaction. Horney has the origin of conflict being the conflict between dependency on parents and hostility towards them.  Fromm and Kierkegaard hold that the roots of anxiety are in the process of individuation and the need to relate to other people in the community.

Maturation of the capacity for anxiety

Three types of human response to danger

1.       Startle response

a.       Pre emotional innate reaction

2.       Anxiety

a.       Undifferentiated emotional response

3.       Fear

a.       Specific emotional response

At 8 months babies get stranger fear, so a stranger walks into the room, they might cry.  That the threat response develops in this way makes sense as the infant can’t differentiate objects in the early months.  Soldiers however demonstrate in opposite ways, under severe threat, the threat becomes undifferentiated.

Very young infants show apprehension, behaviour that shows threat without having a specific feared object, so anxiety.

May: Startle response, then normal anxiety, then fear and finally neurotic anxiety. Adults do the same thing, if there is a gunshot you are startled, feel anxious whilst you find out whether the gun was pointed at you, then fear when you see who fired.

Anxiety and fear

Fear can suspend gastric activity, anxiety increases it.  Fear has a flight response, anxiety doesn’t.  Anxiety has a catastrophic response where fear doesn’t.

A large proportion of children’s fears are irrational. The proposition is that it is anxiety which underlies these fears and can make sense of them. So we can see both anxiety and substation in action. Anxiety is a general term, so a fearful situation is anxiety provoking, how much anxiety depends on how significant the threat is to person’s existence.

So fear is of a specific thing, anxiety is general. Anxieties object is some essential part of the personality, fears object is specific. So the idea is that fear can threaten us, and is like a war being fought on a specific battlefront, anxiety is the threat of being overwhelmed as you don’t know where you are going to get attacked from.

So for instance if I am frightened that I could lose all my money and this is an essential part of my personality then I can feel anxiety, I don’t know when and where this attack on an essential element of me will take place. If there is a run on the stock market where I have all my money then I can be afraid that I could lose all my money, but I know where to direct my energies to managing and responding to this crisis.

Fear is of something objective and specific, I am afraid that the run on the stock market will lose me my money, so I can respond to that.

Anxiety is the feeling that I could lose all of my money as financial institutions are unstable.

Anxiety seems more a problem of psychology and possibility

Fear seems one of problem solving

Anxiety: general, threat of being overwhelmed, helpless, out of control, a threat to something essential within your personality

Fear: specific, threatened, in need of response. If you fear that you can’t deal with your fears then this can result in anxiety, as the threat is to something essential to your personality

For example I am afraid of stepping out in front of moving cars, so I don’t, and I don’t feel fear anymore. I know that if I inadvertently stepped out in front of a car, felt fear, then I would very quickly get out of the way of the car. If I didn’t think I could manage this fear then I would be anxious as I wouldn’t believe I could cope with my fear of cars.

Anxiety and Conflict

Neurotic anxiety always involves inner conflict. An unresolved conflict means that one side of the conflict is always repressed which then produces neurotic anxiety. Anxiety produces helplessness, paralysis and impotence. This could be the sense of mum says left dad says right or we’ll leave you, choosing either side is anxiety provoking as both are essential parts of me. So therefore I feel anxiety. Could the same be true for an unresolved conflict, both are essential to the person so neither side can be chosen? Rollo May would answer yes. I also think that if there is a specific threat to something essential to the personality that is so strong that it is likely to happen then you feel anxiety, if the threat is to something essential to the personality but you are stronger than it, then you may well feel fear. Anxiety is the emotion when there’s a sense that we are overwhelmed by what is happening, I am hopeless, it is too powerful and there is no way of escape.

So what can cause anxiety?

1.       Unspecific threat to something essential to the personality

2.       This threat can be a conflict between two essential aspects, i.e. there’s a no win situation

3.       There is a situational threat, e.g. walking in woods at night, the thought I could die at some point

4.       There is a threat to standard coping responses e.g. being with a strong person, because without them I’m vulnerable

Freud’s libidinal frustration model as cause of anxiety is between the id of the individual and their superego, which is constructed by society.

May thinks that the anxiety provoking conflicts are conflicts between or a dialectical relationship between the individual and their society. The individual is free and unique but depends on their society for being valued, and for the types of behaviour that can be performed. They arise from society and use society’s tools and valuation and yet are free and unique.

Infants individuate from their parents, and their development is on one aspect to depend less on their parents and more on themselves, thus they detach themselves, feel anxiety and then develop more mature relationships with their parents. Any blockage during this development will cause anxiety. To detach is to get freedom from, but this must then be replaced by a freedom to, create new forms of interrelation or isolation will ensue and therefore anxiety. When there is dependence without freedom then there is a person clinging to a relationship who cannot live outside it. If you can’t live on your own powers then you are threatened by every new situation that requires you to act autonomously on your own powers.

The individual who is independent without relatedness will be hostile to those who they believe caused their isolation.  For the individual who is symbiotically dependent then the hostility will be directed at the person who they think has suppressed their freedom.

If an individual avoids autonomous conditions he becomes shut in and avoids conflict with others, although promotes a greater personal conflict in terms of neurotic anxiety and neurotic conflict.

The synthesis of the dialectic of individual in community is the individual’s progressive actualisation of his capacities in expanding community.

Anxiety and hostility

Anxiety and hostility are related, one generates the other. Anxiety with its feelings of helplessness, conflict, isolation is a painful experience. One is hostile to those who have created anxiety in you.

Hostility in anxious people gives rise to more anxiety as the individual feels helpless and if they expressed their hostility then they fear they would be crushed.

May argues that anxiety is primary and hostility secondary, I guess if you are not anxious then you express your hostility.  Hostility does exist on its own, but repressed hostility goes with anxiety.

Culture and community

Individual competitive success is the cause of much anxiety in current society.

Social prestige goals are defined as success and success is measured in economic terms.  The accumulation of wealth is seen as the accumulation of power.  Success is relative, it is competitive, it is success over others.

Any threat to your individual competitive success is anxiety provoking as this is an essential part of peoples’ personalities.

The sense of competitive success as defining worth starts at school with worth being co-extensive to grades, and who is most popular, cool, smart, good at sport and all the other competitions that go on. Love then can be then not be a means to overcome isolation but a way of self-aggrandizement, i.e. making yourself bigger through having acquired a mate, in the have a hot partner, and cute kids competition.

Anxiety comes from competitive individual success not merely when the means to success are threatened, but through the isolation that individual success leads to and the alienation from self and others, i.e. I have to be better than I was and better than you. Anxiety also rises out of the intra social hostility borne of individual competitive approaches. Likewise one’s self worth is precarious dependent on the market and the views and achievements of others.

The vicious circle of self-worth through individual competitive success, is feel anxiety, put more effort into individual competitive success, increase intra-social hostility and aggression, increase isolation and increase a feeling of helplessness.

Post renaissance there is a disintegration of the individual and a rise of anxiety, there is also a disintegration in society, where there is no unity but rather perpetual competition. In today’s society we are told that we can all be successful if we are determined and energetic, but yet this is only true for the privileged bourgeois in our society and everyone else is left feeling helpless and unsuccessful. The individual is dependent on his ability to get to a position of power, through education, connection and skill, and is then dependent on market forces.

There is also the illusion of the power of individual rationalism, i.e. I can live by the evidence and by the facts.  However decisions are mostly made by the anonymous das man, so in psychology you work with a client, and take a rational decision, but that is contradicted by the evidence of an RCT, the books written on the foundation of the RCT and the opinions of the colleagues who have read those books. Even if you show weakness in the RCT, there is a weight of opinion against you and your understanding of the case you are working on.

The illusion of rationality is also that there are no contradictions or vagueness, and that everything has an answer. This by its certainty can allay anxiety.

Unemployment can be anxiety provoking when the value of employment is under threat, when there is mass unemployment, those people who thought that having a job and earning was a vital part of their personality is now threatened, although with the current unemployment culture this has now changed.

Totalitarianism is the neurotic response to the need for community.

Chapter 8 Case studies demonstrating anxiety

Due to the terrifying nature of anxiety  can be repressed, put out of mind, etc., so working with people with anxiety then you need to be aware of what they are saying and what they are not, what they may be implying.

What we seek to discover

Neurotic fears will focus now on this object now on that and what makes sense of that is the underlying neurotic anxiety. Neurotic anxiety always has some conflict as its source, the conflict originally occurred between the child and the parent.  So why is there conflict in neurotic anxiety, in normal anxiety then we are afraid of dying so we take some level of steps to make sure this doesn’t happen too early but beyond that we accept that this is what happens to us. In neurotic anxiety, then we are afraid that we will lose our ability to be a success, where is the conflict here? A for instance TAF I want to scream abuse at strangers because I am angry, but an essential part of my character is to be a good upstanding person, so the thoughts come into my mind, causes me a lot of anxiety, in case I did act on them, and I then try to suppress them.   If I have thoughts of wanting to stab myself or others which is dystonic, then I may have a conflict through on one hand wanting to hurt myself as I am angry at myself and on another seeing being a responsible person as being vital to my personality, so the conflict then gets developed into intrusive thoughts.

Can it be shown that anxiety is related to hostile feelings and when anxiety subsides so does the hostility?

Can it be shown that anxiety retards the development of the personality and that creative individuals are confronted with higher levels of anxiety?

Harold Brown

Kierkegaard=Anxiety is afraid, yet it maintains a sly intercourse with its object that it cannot look away from. Anxiety is a desire for what one dreads. What one fears one desire, anxiety makes the individual impotent.

The idea here is that there is an impossible conflict which threatens something significant to the personality and that an event happens where there is something of subjective significance to the original conflict, then affect of this conflict then arises.

So with responsibility OCD, it could be that leaving the house is a trigger to anxiety because it is a cue to be responsible, and that there is a conflict in that if I am responsible then... may have a childhood thing where if I am responsible then it means that I won’t need dad and he will leave me.

How come relationships with your parents can keep having anxiety making effects? Well, what can also be the case is that is the relationship you have with your mother is prototypical. If you are successful your mother resents you but you are dependent on your mother. Now as an adult you see less of your mother, but feel that you can’t have intimate relationships if you are successful, and you could keep this belief going by ensure you have relationships with people who need to be dominant over you, in the same way that mother was, thus the prototypical relationship continues, indeed it makes sense, that you would be attracted to a similar person to the person who taught you about intimacy.

 If you are asked to be responsible which you do think yourself equipped to do then you may feel hostile. If the person who asks you to do this is vital to your wellbeing then you will need to repress your hostility.

There is an inverse relationship between anxiety symptoms and how much anxiety is in consciousness. The function of these symptoms is to protect the person from anxiety provoking situations.

Chapter 9 The study of unmarried mothers

Study of unmarried mothers as they are in a crisis situation in a shelter which means their individual behaviours are more amendable to study, more pronounced, than in normal situations.

So all mothers have an extra marital pregnancy are all in an anxiety provoking situation. Argument being here that the anxiety they feel will be both related to the specific situation and also show individual patterns that would be provoked by any anxiety situation.

Sometimes the anticipation of danger is felt as more unpleasant than the danger itself so people rush into it.

Repressed guilt gives rise to anxiety, repressed hostility gives rise to anxiety.

Sometimes parents both reject and overprotect, the latter being compensation for the former.

If a situation that provokes anxiety doesn’t provoke an internal conflict then it is said to be realistic.

Scared stiff can be a literal event, where fear will constrict the muscles

 You can restrict your engagement with the world and other people to restrict your anxiety.

Idealisation can be a way of covering up felt hostility to someone, you can see this happening when there is small chink in the idealisation, then large scale hostility will erupt.

Psychotic developments can cover up anxiety.

Rebelliousness to gain a mothers concern.

Anxiety can be laughed off, denied, said that I don’t care about it, intellectualised away.

High standards can be the outcome of a strong superego and can lead to repressed spontaneity and instinctual promptings.

If you fail against introjected standards then you can reject yourself, punish yourself for these failings, with the self-taking the place of the person who you introjected from.

Conflicts underlying neurotic anxiety can be the hiatus between reality and introjected expectation from the parents.

Chapter 10 Gleanings from the Case studies

Anxiety underlying fear

Conscious fear can be a substitute for anxiety, it can keep it hidden, thus as you experience more anxiety then the fear drops and vice versa. Thus the rational and realistic fear can displace the anxiety, which is diffuse and personality threatening. What relation is there between fear and anxiety, can you unpick the fear to get to the anxiety? A neurotic fear is an exaggerated aspect of the underlying anxiety, it is a particularised foci of underlying anxiety. The fear to act as a displacement to the underlying anxiety, must have a subjective logical relation to it.

It can happen that there can be severe underlying anxiety and then a respite, even though the conditions for the underlying anxiety haven’t changed. May suggests that there is standardly guilt accompanying internal neurotic conflict, and that after a severe anxiety attack, there’s some relief as the guilt has been paid off, through the pain of the anxiety.

Neurotic anxiety and hostility rise and fall together: Anxiety has a sense of complete helplessness and therefore hostility is directed to the person(s) who occasioned it. Repressed hostility can lead to anxiety if the hostility would threaten a vital aspect of the person. To repress hostility you may take its opposite and adopt more behaviours of trying to please people.

Conflict: Source of anxiety

Things that activate a personality threatening inner conflict will occasion anxiety. Anxiety is a predictor of threat, when there is a threat to an essential value then the feeling is anxiety, when the threat is to a peripheral value then the feeling is fear.

In neurotic anxiety then you need

1.       A threat to an essential value

2.       If threat 1 is avoided then there is a threat to another essential value

In other words there needs to be a conflict between 2 essential values, in realistic anxiety, there is the anxiety say about death, and you can manage it so it doesn’t become neurotic, you manage it by living a life to give you a greater probability of having a longer life.

Difference between occasion and cause of anxiety. The occasion is the situation where anxiety will be triggered, the base conflict is the cause of the anxiety and the occasion heightens one aspect of it. The occasion of anxiety is that which activates the conflict which is the cause of anxiety. The more realistic the anxiety, then the closer the relation between occasion and cause, e.g. in a boat surrounded by sharks occasions anxiety. The more neurotic the anxiety then the greater the displacement, the more you need to interpret back from occasion to underlying conflict.

Rejection by parents and anxiety

The theory is that rejection by parents predisposes an individual to anxiety. This correlates when the person can’t accept the rejection as an objective fact, so when they have high expectations of their parents, they can’t believe that their parents reject them.  These can go together, you idealise your mother to cover up her rejection of you. The idealisation enables you to suppress the hostility you feel towards them, it’s the opposite of what is felt. To avoid this anxiety if you can appraise your parents objectively then you don’t get neurotic anxiety, I you don’t accept their rejection, idealise them, or perpetually try to change them when objectively this isn’t going to happen, then you get caught in neurotic anxiety.

Sometimes the parental relationship, i.e. the relationship you have with your parent gets internalised and influences the relationships that you have with others, your patterns. So you might need to be completely dependent on another but then believe that others are not dependable. If the parental rejection is taken as what it is, then affection can be sought elsewhere, if however it isn’t, the parent is idealised to compensate for the rejection, then the conflict will become neurotic.

Cleavage between expectation and reality

Neurotic anxiety doesn’t seem to arise out of having a bad mother who rejects you but out of having a mother you never knew would be bad or good. It seems there comes problems when the parents mask their rejection with concern or love. When a parent is rejecting and hostile the child can give hostility back and get their needs met elsewhere, but if the parents rejection isn’t clear then the child suppresses their hostility. So if mum acts hostile sometimes but covers it up with pretences of  love then the child needs to understand this, which they may do by making the hostility unconscious and a conflict with their idealisation of the parent, thus for them to be hostile to the parent, would jeopardise their idealised relationship which would be threatening.

Chapter 11 Methods of dealing with anxiety

Anxiety has a purpose originally to protect us from wild beasts, now we get anxiety when we are afraid of losing out to the competition, being ostracized or isolated. The purpose of anxiety remains the same to protect those things that are vital to our existence.

Some triggers of anxiety, that we will die, get ill and become isolated are realistic things that we can learn to accept. The limitations of our life can produce anxiety as it can art.  Much advertising shows people who have got over their anxiety with just one purchase, happiness awaits. Things people do to show they are in control of a situation, e.g. arguing, joking etc. are ways of reducing anxiety. This would be everyday anxiety management, it only becomes clinical on the extent that it is done. Humour gives a distance from threat, so gallows humour is quite functional.

In extreme situations

Soldiers in Vietnam conquered anxiety by

1.       Self-belief

2.       Belief in something they belong to: Religion\Cause

3.       Keeping busy

In extreme situations you need defences against anxiety

Destructive ways

The negative ways of dealing with anxiety range from behavioural traits like excessive shyness, through neuroses and psychosomatic illness to psychosis, as well as avoidance. Negative approaches merely get rid of the symptoms rather than the underlying causes so the anxiety returns.

Normal response to neurotic comes when the behaviour to allay anxiety becomes habitual rather than any intrinsic wish to perform the action.

Rigidity of thinking can also be a way of protecting from anxiety.  This gives temporary security at the cost of finding new truths\experience.

Beliefs in superstition\fate etc. is a way of avoiding full responsibility.

Conscious activity is more painful than neurotic symptoms, but is also more useful as it shows the problem that can be addressed.

The way to run away from something in yourself is to dissociate, deny, diminish or joke about.

Sometimes anxiety can be used as a defence, see how anxious I am, you couldn’t possibly make me more anxious.

Constructive ways

Anxiety represents a challenge as there is the presence of a contradiction with a person’s value system.

Two common methods of resolving anxiety:

1.       An expansion of awareness so any unconscious conflict becomes conscious, so that you can synthesise the problem

2.       Achieving of goals within the conflict

Neurotic anxiety is the result of failing to deal in childhood with anxiety provoking situations.

Kierkegaard said anxiety is a better teacher than reality as situations can be avoided but anxiety comes from inside and it can only be avoided at the cost of constriction of the personality. The aim really, like the child learning to walk and falling many times, is to move ahead despite the anxiety. To move ahead even if you are afraid can be accompanied by the spirit of adventure. However when the anxiety is more severe than it is accompanied by the sheerest kind of dogged determination. What has helped soldiers with this, is the threat of backing out, is greater than the threat of going forward.

Anxiety vs a value, neurotic anxiety means the former wins, whereas moving through the anxiety the latter wins.

Kierkegaard=you are restricting your development unless you pursue with inner integrity and courage the new experiences that arise for you every day.

Thus anxiety and fear can only be “overcome” through moving in accordance with your values, in spite of them.                

Chapter 12 Anxiety and the Development of the self

Agoraphobia as a shrinking of possibilities, a narrowing of the world, thus there is a restriction of the personality. Doing this blocks off any conflicts that can lead to anxiety. When anxious your productivity and originality drops.  Your productivity drops through the paralysis that anxiety leads to. On one side with anxiety, the threat you have dissolution of self, on the other side, to go through that which frightens you, towards your values, leads to realisation of potential, actualisation of self.

Creativity, Intelligence and anxiety

Do more creative people face higher levels of anxiety?

Kierkegaard=anxiety is experienced as you face more possibilities in your development

It wouldn’t mean creative individuals display more anxiety, as they could have developed better ways at managing it.

In May’s study this is the case, the more impoverished the character the less the anxiety.

An anxious student can reduces their anxiety by blaming themselves or others for their performance, thus feeling either depression or anger.

Small amounts of anxiety will spur performance larger amounts will debilitate it.

The argument is that neurotic anxiety is borne out of contradiction between expectation and reality at an early age. Artists however trade in this relation, their art is both how they see things, and how they imagine things, and i.e. there is a contradiction, a gap between the two. ~This leads to his picture being more stimulating than reality.  This is also the case with scientists who use his hypothesis and test against reality to find a new fact, likewise the moralist, who thinks how things are and how things should be and uses this gap to develop new behaviour via legislation. In these endeavours the gap between how things are and how the person would like them to be is called imagination, thus the gap between reality and expectation can either be the basis for anxiety or creativity. I guess the difference being in the former there is a threat within the gap.

In neurotic anxiety there is a contradiction in the gap between expectation and reality, e.g. I love and hate my mother, as she is amazing and evil. In productive activity this gap produces a creative tension which holds no contradiction, e.g. I want to change and work less hard, the old me with their values dies and is replaced by the new me.

The realisation of self

Two ways to use the concept self

1.       Sum total of all a person’s capacities

2.       Self-awareness and freewill

Kierkegaard, Sullivan and from use the term in the second way.

Self-realisation is the exploring of new possibilities, ways of being, capacities, which will be anxiety inducing as you don’t know how to do them, you may get into hostile situations and you will kill the old you as you do this. To realise yourself you must move through the anxiety. Anxiety is tolerated to varying degrees in everyone but most in children and creative individuals. Least of all in brain injured people.

Sullivan believes it is through anxiety experiences that the young child comes into being. The mother’s disapproval causes anxiety, so the child stops doing that which causes the anxiety.

As a child develops they become more independent of the parents, which creates anxiety. If they move through the anxiety then they develop different bonds with parents and others, if the anxiety is too great they return to dependency on their parents, and their dependency may be even stronger.

An enlarging of self-awareness happens when you realise new possibilities. As the child develops their ego, then on one side they have freedom to act, on the other side responsibility, so the emotions going with this being anxiety for freedom and guilt on responsibility side.

To venture causes anxiety, to not venture you lose yourself.

Definitions

Irrationality=that behaviour which you can’t predict, e.g. rational economic individual means someone’s behaviour follows the laws of economics. Irrational no good reason for a behaviour, i.e. it was out of character. Bizarre action, that is abnormal. So society define what is normal behaviour and if you act wildly outside it you would be defined as irrational. Likewise if you see the world radically different to the rest of the population then you would be defined as irrational. Irrational doesn’t follow the laws of logic, or the axioms of reasons, e.g. causality. Strong emotions as irrational? Irrational as that which cant’ be measured, as rationality needs determinacy.

Anxiety=

1.       I appraise this situation to threaten something essential to me.

2.       I am in an impossible situation that threatens something essential to me.

Notes

Anxiety definition and on the continuum

Anxiety bourne of weak self-esteem and conditions of worth from parents.

Anxiety as an inferiority meaning I am bad rather I am bad at…

Anxiety as the original threat of mums punishment about that which Im not, ie the development of the personality

Anxiety symptom relief through being busy

Success in individual competitive success is never ending

Importance culturally of being individually competitively successful: better than

Disassociation is avoidance of an experience, denial is avoidance of an experience

Two forms of anxiety, the threat to personality of where you are, the threat to personality of moving where you want to be, i.e. development.

Start 9.15  going for the hour then mobilisation then another hour

Schools of Psychotherapy

I'm taken now through both studying and being exposed to the students of various schools of psychotherapy.

It seems that the original author(s) of these schools had some original insight into the existence of humans. From their either directly or via metaphor they translated that into language then developed an integrated system a theory of everything from them, although the latter was based not on direct experience but on logical extrapolation.

From there students picked up the overall system and applied it by rote, not knowing about the difference between the original thought and the extrapolation. Indeed they defended the systems position against the students of other schools who had been through the same process.

It seems then that the art of psychotherapy is finding for each client what out of the various schools provides most for them and when some concept\technique\idiom emerges to use that but not to fall into the trap of proceeding from there around the rest of that pscyhological system.

Merleau-Ponty’s theory of perception and its therapeutic application

Merleau-Ponty's
theory of perception
and
its therapeutic application

 
An original piece of work by Robert Thomson.
Contents
Abstract    5

Introduction    6

Rationale    6

Research Methods    8

Literature Search    8

Source Material    9

Strengths and weakness of Research Methods    10

Objective-World Position    10

Refutation of the Objective-World    11

Introduction    11

Perception    12

Sensation    12

Constancy theory    12

Split between idea and object    13

Time and Temporality    14

Internality of consciousness    15

Perceptual Ideas    15

Action    16

Thought    17

Emotion    18

Summary    19

Merleau-Ponty's theory of perception    19

Introduction    19

Motor-intentionality    19

Horizonality    20

Ambiguity and Indeterminacy    20

Embodied worldliness of consciousness    21

Summary    21

Merleau-Ponty's Context    22

Introduction    22

Philosophic\Psychological    22

Descartes    22

Heidegger    23

Gestalt    23

Psychotherapeutic    24

Therapeutic Application of Merleau-Ponty    25

Introduction    25

Horizonality    26

Construction of the horizon    28

Making the determinate indeterminate    29

Re-siting horizonality    30

Embodied worldliness of consciousness    30

Motor-intentionality    34

Conclusion    37

Bibliography    39


 

Abstract

In the Phenomenology of Perception Merleau-Ponty (2002) states his theory of perception, which criticises the primacy of rationality in human experience. This dissertation will use this theory and seek to derive psychotherapeutic applications from it. It will conclude by using Merleau-Ponty's theory of perception to see the nature of the psychotherapeutic relationship to be an artistic one, one that revels in ambiguity and creative possibility.

 
To achieve this I state the primacy of rationality in human experience in what will be called the Objective-World position Hammond (1991, p.131-2.). The key elements of this position are rationality, objectivity and the internality of consciousness. I will use Merleau-Ponty's theory to refute this position.

 
Having stated the Objective-World position and refuted it the ground is cleared to state Merleau-Ponty's theory of perception. To understand the richness of this theory and its clinical applicability I will detail the philosophical and psychotherapeutic contexts of the theory.

 
I then apply Merleau-Ponty's theory of perception in a clinical setting using a combination of clients and client groups that I have worked with.

Introduction

Rationale

I write on Merleau-Ponty as I was moved by three aspects of his theory of perception.

 

1. World as horizon(horizon hereafter)
   1. Merleau-Ponty sees the world as the indeterminate background which provides the meaningful context to enable figures, i.e. that which we focus on in perception.
2. Motor-Intentionality
   1. Intentionality means that an idea refers to something else. Motor means action based. Merleau-Ponty sees that motor-intentionality is the structure of perception. To perceive is to be engaged in an action relationship with the world.
3. Embodied worldliness of consciousness
   1. Merleau-Ponty sees that consciousness is not something that exists internally in my mind but rather exists in the world and body. Consciousness is an aspect of objects we perceive. Our perceptions are enabled by the body which itself has consciousness of objects.
   
    

The effect of these three aspects is an attack on the importance of rationality, objectivity and the internality of consciousness.

 
Rationality, I would argue, is attacked as Merleau-Ponty sees the primary mode of engagement with the world as perception, which is motor-intentional rather than reflective.

 
Reflection is the basis of rationality; we reflect, abstract from experience and construct theories which are applicable by anyone. An example of rationality is Newton's first law of motion [Newton 2010, p.83], which refers to objects that are not perceived by anyone. The construction of this theory, I would suggest is produced in the following manner:

1. Perceive objects
2. Reflect on this
3. Abstract everything subjective from this perception to make an objective description
4. Produce the law of motion from this objective description

 
Objectivity is attacked, I would argue, as if our perception is motor-intentional then what we perceive is derived from the capacity of the body which enables our motor-intentionality. The body has a constitutive role in what we perceive. I perceive the chair as my body knows how to sit down on it, how to move it, etc.

 
These aspects move me as to see perception not rationality as the primary mode of being in the world. This changes both the way I see the world and launches an attack on the way we do therapy as Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT hereafter) and Psychodynamic therapies depend heavily on rationality, objectivity and the internality of consciousness. The effect of this attack means a move away from seeking causal explanations for client's distress, a move from explanation to description. The motor-intentional aspect of perception changes the emphasis in psychotherapy from conceptual to behavioural. The embodied nature of consciousness means we can use perception to further a client's understanding of themselves.

 
Finally the interest that I have in Merleau-Ponty has seen me write the following papers: (Thomson 2010a, 2010b and 2011).

 

Research Methods

Literature Search

The amount written on Merleau-Ponty's theory of perception and its relation to psychotherapy is limited which forced me to develop novel applications to psychotherapy. I found this strange when Heidegger's work had been the inspiration for the work of Boss and Binswanger why not then for Merleau-Ponty, who is conceivably more applicable than Heidegger? Welsh responded to this question saying:

"part of the reason is that Merleau-Ponty style of writing which, at times quite evocative, is often obscure.  But obviously this is the case for Heidegger to a larger degree.  Thus I assume that another part of the reason is the somewhat random way trends and schools are established in academic and clinical settings." [Welsh 2011].

 
The literature search involved:

1. Society for Existential Analysis Journal
2. PsychInfo
3. Google Scholar
   1. Search Terms:
      1. Merleau-Ponty and
         1. Psychotherapy
         2. Psychology
         3. Emotion
   
    

Source Material

The source material for this dissertation has been drawn from both the bibliography and the extensive reading I have undertaken for my undergraduate degree in philosophy and my postgraduate psychotherapeutic training, which this dissertation forms part of.

 
The main texts used in this work are

1. Merleau-Ponty, M., (2002). Phenomenology of Perception
   
2. Wyllie, M., (2010). Merleau-Ponty and Melancholia
   
   
    

I chose Merleau-Ponty's "Phenomenology of Perception" as this is his major statement of his theory of perception. Whilst this theory does change in later works (Visible and the Invisible, Merleau-Ponty 1968 where he introduces his notion of flesh), for the purposes of this dissertation his 2002 work was seen as sufficient.

 
I chose Wylie's "Merleau-Ponty and Melancholia", as this is one of the few publications that deals substantially with the application of Merleau-Ponty to emotions. Wylie's work was a phenomenal description of melancholia, which he drew primarily on Merleau-Ponty's ontology but he did also use aspects of Merleau-Ponty's theory of perception.

 
I used my clinical experience and training as the source material for the clinical application of Merleau-Ponty.

 

 

Strengths and weakness of Research Methods

The strengths of my research methods are that they result in a novel application of Merleau-Ponty to psychotherapy.
The weakness of my approach is that I have only had a few authors to learn from and to build on.

 

Objective-World Position

The Objective-World position, which represents in my opinion the commonly held metaphysical belief of the world and our engagement with it, is as follows:

 
There is a box of geometric points called space. A point described temporally is called the present and there is a succession of present moments; the moments that have gone are called the past, the moments that are not yet are called the future. Time is a transition of moments. In this box are subjects i.e. humans who have a psyche in their mind and objects such as cabbages and kings.

 
Perception works by light bouncing off objects (sensation) and creating images in the person's mind (ideas). The intentions of ideas are the objects outside the person's mind.

 
Knowledge abstracts anything subjective from perception so that you can start constructing theories for any place and time [Popper 1989]. The knowledge of a cabbage has no engagement with any subjective perception but rather is constituted by causal laws that state its interaction with other objects in the box.

 
It is this position of the Objective-World that Merleau-Ponty needs to refute.

 

 

Refutation of the Objective-World

Introduction

The Objective-World position has three central aspects, which Merleau-Ponty needs to refute.

1. Perception
   1. Sensation, i.e. as understood as the sole raw material for perception
   2. Constancy theory, i.e. a direct relation between sensation and perception
   3. The split between object and perception, i.e. that there is an idea of an object and the object itself
2. Time
   1. Time is a passing of present moments
3. Internality of Consciousness
   1. Consciousness exists within the psyche

Perception

Sensation

Sensation is the idea that as the light bounces of the object, the eye receives sensation from the external object and then the idea of the object is constructed. So how do the individual pieces of green sense data get produced into an apple rather than a frog? Any way that the Objective-Worlders attempt to do this will mean that they no longer have raw sensation creating perception; there must be something else to explain the theory.

 
Merleau-Ponty sees that we perceive things rather than have sensations which we construct into ideas,

"If I walk along a shore towards a ship which has run aground, and the funnel or masts merge into the forest bordering on the sand dune, there will be a moment when these details suddenly become part of the ship, and indissolubly fused with it. As I approached, I did not perceive resemblances or proximities which finally came together to form a continuous picture of the upper part of the ship. I merely felt that the look of the object was on the point of altering" [Merleau-Ponty 2002, p.20].

 

Constancy theory

The constancy theory says there is a one to one relation between the light from the object and the idea that it creates.

 
Merleau-Ponty (2002, p.6) shows the flaws in the constancy theory as when you look at the optical illusions of Muller-Lyer, the two straight lines don't appear equal due arrow heads pointing different ways. As the same thing, the straight line can appear to have two different properties of length, one longer one shorter, then you cannot have a direct relationship between the impression on the retina and the perception produced.

 
Objective-Worlders try to protect the constancy theory by saying that we judge sensations to be similar to previous experiences, however "the appeal to memory presupposes which it is supposed to explain" [Merleau-Ponty 2002, p.23].

 
However to understand an apple by prior knowledge of apples apart from being circular (how did we understand our first apple) reduces the vitality that an experience of apple, right here, right now. It's this-ness would be negated "It is never possible for two terms to be identified, perceived or understood as the same, for that would presuppose that their this-ness be overcome" [Merleau-Ponty 2002, p.17].

 

 

 

Split between idea and object

The Objective-Worlders cite perceptual errors, Dillon (1998 pp.24-5) as showing that there is an idea separate from the object, as the idea could be wrong about the object so must be different to it. For Merleau-Ponty the world is constituent of our perception, if we are misguided in our perception, the outline of a man from a distance turns out to be a shadow, then this ambiguity and indistinctness is part of the world, not an error on our part. There certainly is however, a position where you can get the best perceptual perspective: "For each object, as for each picture in an art gallery, there is an optimum distance from which it requires to be seen [...] at a shorter or greater distance we have merely a perception blurred through excess or deficiency" [Merleau-Ponty 2002, p.352] and to not get the best perspective can lead to perceptual error.

 

 

Time and Temporality

The Objective-World's view of time is that it is a succession of nows. The past is the now no longer, the present is now, and the future is the now not yet. There are two difficulties with this, firstly the relationship between these three dimensions of time. If time is three independent nows, then what enables the future to transition into the present and then the present to move into the past? "These instances of 'now' [...] have no temporal character and could not occur in sequence" [Merleau-Ponty 2002, p.479]. Somehow a unity of time needs to be given otherwise time is static which is not how it is experienced. Time needs to be temporal, and to be temporal means to reflect the lived sense of time.

 
Memory and anticipation are often used to justify the objective sense of time. However "in no case will this perception, which is present, be capable of pointing to a past event, unless I have some other viewpoint on my past enabling me to recognize it as a memory" [Merleau-Ponty 2002, p.480]. I need an independent understanding of time to get memory and anticipation to construct objective time.

 
Merleau-Ponty's understanding of time comes from a Husserlian concept of protention and retention, Husserl (1992). As we perceive any object then we have a sense where it has come from and where it might go. Retention is the awareness that the cup has come from the kitchen and protention is that it will end up in the dishwasher.

 
Protention and retention are progressive sequences getting potentially more indistinct and ambiguous, so the cup has a history of different moments as much as it has a conceivable future. The retentive chains may be static and dull where the past is as it has always been and the future is as it will always be. In this case time will drag. On the other side, the future is exciting, the past was fun, and then time will fly. This shows the temporal nature of time, its subjective as opposed to objective quality, where the experience of time differs dependent on context.

Internality of consciousness

The Objective-World has the dualities of mind and body. Mind and body are represented by mental and physical objects. Mental objects exist in an inner realm, which no one else can see or experience and they are detached from the world and do not exist in space. Physical objects exist in space.

 
There are several arguments that the Objective-Worlders use to justify their position, which I will use Merleau-Ponty to refute.

 

Perceptual Ideas

"Perception is not a science of the world, it is not even an act, a deliberate taking up of a position; it is the background from which all acts stand out, and is presupposed by them" [Merleau-Ponty 2002, p.xi].

 
The internal and external aspect of mind\body gets constructed as follow. When I perceive an object, say an apple, then I have an idea of the apple which refers to the actual apple. The idea of the apple is internal, the actual apple external.

 
However because we can talk about ideas as distinct from the object themselves does not mean that this is a metaphysical reality. Indeed we can never talk about ideas without them having intentional objects. No-one has ever seen an idea; it is a theoretical construct.

 
Consciousness is an aspect of our perception of objects; it is our perspective on objects "perception is precisely that kind of act in which there can be no question of setting the act itself apart from the end to which it is directed" [Merleau-Ponty 2002, p.435].

 
Merleau-Ponty sees that consciousness is not representational rather it is the structure of perception," perception is inseparable from the consciousness which it has, or rather is, of reaching the thing itself" [Merleau-Ponty 2002, p.435]. Perception of an apple is the consciousness orientation I have to the apple. If we have no ridded ourselves of the notion of idea, then what we are left with is the object of perception and we have no need for the internal\external split.

 

Action

Action supports the internality of consciousness as there is the notion that I have freewill that direct actions, a doctrine stated in On Liberty [Mill 2008]. I choose to have a cup of tea, I have that desire and this allows me to get a cup of tea, the choice and desire are seen as internal.

 
However with action whilst you may have a desire for tea as you go into the kitchen this is only articulated once. You don't repeat this as a mantra before getting a cup of tea. Your perceptual horizon of the kitchen is seen as the place where you make tea and you do.

 
It is possible to think to yourself, shall I have tea or coffee. Whilst you can, predominantly you don't, you see the kitchen, you can see where the coffee and the tea are and the choice you make is based on how you perceive the kitchen as the place to make tea or coffee.

 
Therefore we see primarily the notion of freewill being embedded within perception of the world and not an internal aspect.

 
"For the player in action the football field is not an 'object' [...] It is pervaded by lines of force [...] and articulated into sectors [...] which call for a certain mode of action"[Merleau-Ponty 1963, p.168].

 

Thought

Descartes' concept of res cogitans, [Descartes 2008] sees thought as being an internal aspect. Thoughts can be in images, that of the house that I grew up in, they can be propositional as I think of the capital of France or they can be fully fleshed out scenes replete with sensual data as I remember the smell and sound of the ocean on holiday.

 
As I think I speak to myself with words, I talk, sub-vocally and I listen, it is a conversation I have with myself. We think in words and images all of which are meaningful, there is no thought behind this signification,

"nor can thought seek expression, unless words are in themselves a comprehensible text, and unless speech possesses a power of significance entirely its own. The word and speech must somehow cease to be a way of designating things or thoughts and become the presence of that thought in the phenomenal world, and, moreover, not its clothing but its token or its body" [Merleau-Ponty 2002, p.211].

 

It is in the process of thinking that I realise what I think, it is in the process of speaking that I realise what I think "the orator does not think before speaking, nor even while speaking, speech is his thought" [Merleau-Ponty 2002, p.211] .

 
Thought is embedded consciousness within the world. It is a discussion of the current perceptual horizon with yourself, where you are speaker and listener. It is prompted by the current perception and affects the perceptual horizons to come.

 

Emotion

Emotions are held to be aspects of the inner private realm by Objective-Worlders. For instance an emotion such as anxiety, Freud saw as an internal reaction to a previous traumatic experience in the external world [Freud 1991, p.23].

 
Emotions are seen to be evinced by experiences within the world and are our private responses to them. They are put as the internalised outcome of a value system applied against external events. So to love someone and then for them to leave you for your best friend would apply certain values. Love is good, love is to trust and should be reciprocated therefore this act is abhorrent and will lead to a depression that holds the pain of the abuse of these values.

 
Behaviourists have long since attacked the internality of emotions and the notion of a mental substance that supports this. Ryle (2009) talked of there being no ghost in the machine rather emotions are just another way of describing actions.

 
Merleau-Ponty would be sympathetic to Ryle but he develops it in terms of motor-intentionality of perception. This is to say that an emotion, e.g. love will be an aspect that constitutes your motor-intentional perception of the world. When I am in love I walk in a fluid way, I see the beauty within my world and I am open, optimistic and friendly to those I meet "[love] is the way in which he establishes his relations with the world; it is an existential signification" [Merleau-Ponty 2002, p.444].

 
Emotions therefore are both our ways of behaving in the world and the way we perceive.

 

Summary

To dispute the internality of perception, action, thought and emotion, I believe refutes the notion of the internality of consciousness. For Merleau-Ponty
"Truth does not 'inhabit' only the inner man [..], there is no inner man, man is in the world, and only in the world does he know himself" [Merleau-Ponty 2002, p.xii].

 

 

Merleau-Ponty's theory of perception

Introduction

We have stated the Objective-World position above and refuted its three central aspects using Merleau-Ponty's thought. Now the ground is cleared to state Merleau-Ponty's theory of perception.

Motor-intentionality

In any moment I am engaged in a situation. The situation is a motor-intentional one. From the indeterminate horizon I focus on an object. As I enter the kitchen it becomes the horizon where I can make a cup of tea. "We experience a perception and its horizon 'in action' [..] rather than by 'posing' them or explicitly 'knowing' them" [Merleau-Ponty 1964, p.12].

 
The situation is temporal such that there is the lived past. Time passes as one situation flows to another, the essay quickly finished such that I can play tennis, or the slow hours drag as I wait for the phone call from my love. This is the sense of lived intentional time, temporality, not clock time, "My world is carried forward by lines of intentionality which trace out in advance at least the style of what is to come" [Merleau-Ponty 2002, p.483].

Horizonality

In any situation we focus on objects, people or things, through a horizon
"the inner horizon of an object cannot become an object without the surrounding objects becoming horizons" [Merleau-Ponty 2002, p.78]. This horizon is a combination of the temporal chains of protention and retention (as detailed on p.14) as well as spatial chains. Spatial chains are where my desk is on the carpet, in the room, in the house in the street, in the town etc. The combination of spatial and temporal chains forms the horizon which enables the object we focus on.

 

Ambiguity and Indeterminacy

Ambiguity and indeterminacy are essential aspects of the horizon, which is a strong challenge to rationality which seeks the unambiguous and determinate.

 
The situation can hold many possibilities through its indeterminacy and ambiguity, my desire can see a wide range of possibility or it can seem static e.g. in every situation I see the loss of my mother and my situation is understood through a fixed lens "The world is not what I think, but what I live through. I am open to the world, I have no doubt that I am in communication with it, but I do not possess it; it is inexhaustible" [Merleau-Ponty 2002, p.xviii].

 
For every object of my present or my past and future, I can site them in different horizons. An object of attention's polysemic relations with their horizon leaves them indeterminate and ambiguous.

"Ambiguity is of the essence of human existence, and everything we live or think has always several meanings [...] Existence is indeterminate [..] by reason of its fundamental structure [...] whereby the hitherto meaningless becomes meaningful." [Merleau-Ponty 2002, p.196].

 

Embodied worldliness of consciousness

We saw in the arguments on p.14 of this dissertation that consciousness does not live internally in the psyche. For Merleau-Ponty consciousness is the structure of perception, which as we saw above is motor-intentional. Perception itself is enabled by the body-schemas grip on the world, we perceive due to our bodies perspective and capacities, i.e. our sense organs, and those things, that our bodies treat as part of their body, for instance a tennis racquet in playing tennis to a seasoned player.

 
Consciousness therefore is both within the world and within our bodies "my existence as subjectivity is one with my existence as body and with the existence of the world and, finally because the subject which I am, taken concretely, is inseparable from this body and this world" [Merleau-Ponty 2000 p.408].

 
To see consciousness in the body, you could look at the touch typist, who knows how to touch type, but unless they have just learnt could not tell you which keys are where on the keyboard, but their body could.

 
To see consciousness in the world, you may be reminded of the examples above where the kitchen is the situation where the decision to make tea or coffee is embedded, or the sports field where the choices how to play the sport are made "it is through my relations to 'things' that I know myself" [Merleau-Ponty 2002 408].

 

Summary

Merleau-Ponty's theory of perception is radical. He disputes the primacy of rationality in our experience in the world, by showing it is motor-intentional perception with the world that is our initial engagement. In turn he disputes objectivity by showing how the world is indistinct, ambiguous and polysemic. Finally he shows how consciousness is not internal but rather embedded within the body and the world.

Merleau-Ponty's Context

Introduction

Merleau-Ponty's theory of perception is a refutation\extension of certain thinkers which in turn have spawned psychotherapeutic schools. In this section I will look at these thinkers, see how the refutation takes place and detail the psychotherapeutic applications. In this way we can see the psychotherapeutic space that Merleau-Ponty's work starts to take place in.

 

Philosophic\Psychological

Descartes

Merleau-Ponty's attack on rationality is in reaction to Descartes' dualism, which spawned the duality aspects in the Objective-World position Hammond (1991, p.131-2.). Descartes sought a logically indubitable position and established res cogitans, i.e. mind, then res existensa, i.e. body. He saw the criterion of clear and distinct, i.e. the type of certainty we get with simple mathematical proofs as that which could provide indubitable truth. Knowledge was therefore provided by rationality which enabled the clear and distinct criteria.

 
Descartes therefore has dualism and the primacy of rationality as his two central tenets Descartes (2008). Cartesian dualism is refuted by the internality of consciousness arguments above p11. The primacy of knowledge is called into question by Merleau-Ponty seeing that knowledge is only enabled by our primary engagement with the world which is perception. We perceive first then abstract from this to provide reflective knowledge. "The whole universe of science is built on the world as directly experienced" [Merleau-Ponty 2002, p.ix].

Heidegger

Merleau-Ponty's work on the externality of the psyche extends the Heideggerean notion of being-in-the-world [Heidegger 1988, pp. 78-86]. Being-in-the-world is the idea that the structure of human's experience is connected to the world and this is the basic unit; you can't conceptually isolate human's on one side and world on the other. "Being-in-the-world indicates in the very way we have coined it, a unitary phenomenon" [Heidegger 1988, p.78]. Whilst Heidegger challenged subject\object dualism through unifying them in the concept being-in-the-world, what he didn't do is to combine them, he still had the world and Dasein. Dasein was the conscious element of being-in-the-world and the world was the transcendent aspect. Merleau-Ponty saw consciousness as embodied, i.e. consciousness being literally of the world, and likewise the world as embodying our consciousness, subject and object are two sides of the same coin "the world is wholly inside and I am wholly outside myself" [Merleau-Ponty 2002, p.474].

 
Merleau-Ponty's work on motor-intentionality is an extension of the Heideggarean notion of ready-to-hand. [Heidegger 1988, p.109], which is where Heidegger sees the primary engagement we have with the world as one of doing rather than reflecting. The extension that Merleau-Ponty makes is to see it as the body as key in establishing motor-intentionality. He sees the skill of the typist being in their hands: "It [i.e. typing] is a knowledge in the hands, which is forthcoming only when bodily effort is made" [Merleau-Ponty 2002, p.166].

Gestalt

Merleau-Ponty's work on horizonality is an extension of the notion of ground in the figure\ground concept in Gestalt psychology. Fritz Perls, father of Gestalt, saw the figure\ground relationship in terms of a pre-existing world and a distinct organism or subject: "In the organism\environment situation it is [...] the relevance of environmental objects to the organism's needs which determine the figure ground" [Perls 2009, p.57]. Thus Gestalt psychology is a realist psychology that changes the atomistic thinking of perception in the Objective-Worlders' position to gestalts but leaves the rest of the infrastructure as detailed above the same.

 
Merleau-Ponty extends this by showing that the body schema constructs the meaningful figure/ground relationship. "Perception is just that act which creates at a stroke, along with the cluster of data, the meaning which unites them-indeed which not only discovers the meaning which they have, but moreover sees to it that they have a meaning" [Merleau-Ponty 2002, p.42]. The figure\horizon relationship is constructed by our body's engagement with the world. The horizon is constructed both by an objects spatio\temporal chains and the body's grip on the world which enables engagement with object. For Merleau-Ponty therefore the ground is a combination of the visible and the invisible, the spatio\temporal chains and the body.

 

Psychotherapeutic

There are psychotherapies that have a strong correlates to the philosophies of Descartes and Heidegger.

 
Any psychotherapy that trades with the subject\object distinction or the mechanism of science will be underpinned by Cartesian thinking; for instance CBT which understands the patient as having symptoms that can be removed through correcting their irrationality or their behaviour. The mind is constructed out of thoughts and emotions, the world is accessed via behaviour and the body is responded to as an object, this is the "hot cross bun" of CBT [Padesky 1990]. The hot cross bun is the relationships between the determinate and independent aspects of thought, emotion, behaviour, physical reaction and environment.

 
Heideggarian thought produced the psychotherapeutic practice of Daseinanalysis which seeks to ameliorate client distress through extending their possibilities. Daseinanalysis is the result of two major thinkers Medard Boss and Ludwig Binswanger, [Boss 1963] and [Binswanger 1942].

 
Heidegger has also greatly influenced the British School of Existentialists, notably Cohn (1997).

 

 

Therapeutic Application of Merleau-Ponty

Introduction

Philosophical ideas are used to support the axioms of psychotherapy as we saw how Cartesian dualism supports CBT. Philosophers can be directly appropriated into the work as Heidegger's is incorporated into Daseinanalysis.

 
Given that I have shown the radical nature of Merleau-Ponty's thought above I will now apply it as an initial application to psychotherapy. I will look at each of the three aspects of his theory of perception in turn with a section on horizonality, embodied worldliness of consciousness and motor-intentionality.

 
I will now apply the three aspects of Merleau-Ponty's theory of perception in a clinical setting, that is horizonality, embodied worldliness of consciousness and motor-intentionality.

 

Horizonality

A client may drink too much and be unhappy about it. How they engage with the world doesn't serve them. They have a rationale for drinking and a rationale for being unhappy about it. Their rationality doesn't serve them. Rationality is derivative of their situation, their figure/horizon relation. Therefore it is the construction of this relationship and an investigation of the horizon that should take place. "In a dialectical relationship with the world, the human being in choosing a particular project structures a meaningful world and effects the emergence of causes that act as a means towards a particular end" [Wyllie 2010, p.82]. We have projects and create situations which are the arena of rationality where we define cause and effect. It is the pre-reflective body schema engagement with the world that constructs our horizon that determines our rationality.

 
Whilst Wyllie points to how the horizon constitutes the arena for our action and rationality, how in therapy can we apply this? What the therapist needs to do is to make explicit the horizonal aspects, so the client can see how they are constructing their world and how events in their world have now moved to affect their being-in-the-world.

 
I am seeing a client, let us call her Jill who has loss as a theme of her life. Her father was a strong man to her and she was devastated when he died. She became distressed by this death in that someone who was so strong and she loved so much should die. She thought of killing herself and was staggered that she could contemplate this when she saw how much she valued the life of her father. She is now depressed, seeks control over her destiny and has obsessional rituals with objects. She is concerned by her social status and feels like a freak. She is gay and single and everyone else is in relationships. She defines herself by what she isn't and what she lacks, i.e. in relationship and 'normal'. Her outlook is pessimistic and expects known pessimistic outcome.

 
The loss of her father, the loss of her relationship has been used as a horizon for her being-in-the-world. Loss is used to define her in terms of what she isn't. She attempts to control her world through obsessional control over objects in an attempt to feel control and agency in the face of loss where she had none. She prefers known negative outcomes as this supports her sense of agency without the threat of loss as there is nothing to lose. Loss and control are two horizonal elements of her being-in-the-world.

 
Her depression speaks of a fixed past and a fixed future, those that I love will die or leave me and I don't understand this. Her future becomes a bleak repetition of this past, and her present is shut down to control against this. Her desire for pessimistic control over her destiny is an attempt to stop being hurt by losing those whom she loves. She has responded to the problematic of the unknown and its confusion by exerting control over her world. The effect of this is depression as she has closed down the vitality of the world making it static via the use of loss and control as her horizon.

 
The therapeutic work approach we took has three aspects whose central aim is to make the horizonal into a figure in her world. Firstly there is the aim to see how her experiences of loss have coalesced and provided a horizon for her engagement with the world. Secondly there is the movement to make the sense of her loss ambiguous and indeterminate and therefore fluid and dynamic. Thirdly there is the sense of re-siting loss and out of controlness within her world so that she has other possibilities. This is the move to take horizontal aspects and to make them figures within her horizon.

Construction of the horizon

Working with Jill we looked at deepening her understanding of the loss of her father, her romantic relationship and how there were thematic connections between the two. As this work continued she saw how she defined herself in terms of her relationships, how she felt anger that those she had loved had left her and how she felt so confused that strong people\relationships should become weak and die. As more connections between the events became articulated we then looked to see how these events were affecting her being-in-the-world.

 
Part of her identity was tied up in her relation with her father and her partner, now they were lost she defined herself in terms of this loss. She saw herself in terms of what she didn't have rather than what she did, as a freak.

 
We investigated how her attempts to control objects were a response to the lack of control and confusion she felt in face of her losses and how her desire for known negative outcomes sought to use control as recompense for the feelings of being out of control with her losses.

 
We also looked at how the sense of futility and hopelessness that came out of her loss was now informing how she saw the world and how she didn't want to engage with the world because she saw it as futile and hopeless. Her relationships were informed by loss; her projects were seen to be futile; her prior loss defined her current being-in-the-world.

 
To show that there was no necessity in this horizon we challenged this perspective by accessing times when she didn't perceive like this. We looked at present instances where she saw futility and hopelessness and looked to see other aspects of this engagement which showed some hope and optimism.

 
What we did was to both show how she constructed her horizon and how it was impermanent and therefore replaceable and how her horizon influenced her being-in-the-world.

Making the determinate indeterminate

In this work with Jill we looked to increase the level of meaning that she had to her father and to her romantic relationship such that what was a fixed determinate meaning became a dynamic indeterminate meaning.

 
Her determinate meanings for her father were that he was strong and that he died and therefore now lost to her. We looked at this sense of loss and found that he still informs her being and that she is still in relationship with him, for instance she feels guilty that she got a tattoo after he died as he would not have liked it. We looked at the notion of him being strong and whilst he was, he was also many other things too, weak, vulnerable and in need of her for his strength.

 
We worked to get a richer understanding of her romantic relationship and it turned out that her partner instead of being the idealised romantic figure was very controlling and sought to alter Jill's whole way of being. The sense of her losing a perfect relationship was challenged and she saw more aspects of it. Seeing more aspects of the relationship made it into a dynamic/indeterminate event not a static/determinate one.

 
We then looked at the notion of loss and how it is a precursor to new relationship and how the loss can still be present in a new relationship without being defining.
In articulating and developing the meanings that she attributes to death and loss they became available to be engaged with, available to be challenged and then they became incorporated into the rest of her beliefs. By moving this inarticulate feeling into her awareness, by moving from horizon to figure, it becomes assimilated in terms of one of her possibilities and not the possibility. Her past doesn't become a fixed determining entity but one of possibilities; she sees the dynamic aspect of her loss, its multiple possibilities.

Re-siting horizonality

My client's horizon was one of loss and this informed her being-in-the-world in terms of negation and she saw herself by what she wasn't i.e. a freak. The work we did here was to reframe her understanding of herself. We did this by asking if she really wanted the normality that she said she did and what were the benefits. The answer was that she added spice and variety to the world and that it would be a boring place if everyone was normal.

 
We also looked at her need to control objects and her destiny. This control was at the cost of sterility in her world. She found that when she was spontaneous and didn't seek to control she had better times.

 
What Merleau-Ponty offers us is that our engagement with the world is constructed via its horizon. To engage with this horizon, to make aspects determinate, will show you how you construct your world and provide you with options to change.

 

Embodied worldliness of consciousness

The standard model of therapy from psychodynamic, person centred and in some existentialists is, when exploring the client's problems and world, to look inside, to introspect, use memory and develop the latent but unexpressed current affective and conceptual states. There is some difficulty with this, the intangibility of the content matter and the almost mystical aspect of accessing the unconscious and the past.

 
For Merleau-Ponty the unexplored aspects of the psyche and the past are out there in the world and in your body.

 
As described above there are spatial and temporal horizons which enable our focus on a figure. The temporal chain is the retentive chain of the past, and the protentive chain of the future. The spatial chain is the related objects that construct the world surrounding your object, which are both absent but perceptually engaged with.

 
You are engaged with the totality of your being\world within perception. I walk along the sea, and the sea looks angry and dangerous and a memory comes to me of people I have known lost to the sea. My memories, part of the retentive chain change dependent on the way of perceiving. Tomorrow I walk along by the sea and it looks fresh and inviting and makes me think how much I want to go for a walk with my friends.

 
In every perception the whole of a person's life exists, all different perceptions provide is a different highlight, a different focus on the ambiguous and indistinct structure that appears before them. To expand and develop the temporal and spatial chains will explore this.

 
The body holds and acts the person's life. The clenched jaw holds the tension between the poles of the excess of things to be done and the little time to do things in.

 
The perceptual horizon is accessed in terms of an affective state. The horizon and the affective engagement enables a figure to be focussed on and action to take place in the world. This action takes place as the figure of focus is seen in motor-intentional terms. The body understands how to manipulate it, what it feels like, how it might be when the cup is drawn to the mouth. The man who enters the room can cause my body to tense up and to start sweating. My body holds this man in fear yet I do not know why.

 
Gendlin has addressed this with his focusing technique [Gendlin 2003], however his focus is on the body as an object and does not deal with the body as subject nor sites the body as the opening to the world. So whilst the clenched jaw can be engaged with and listened to as to what it wants to say, a further aspect is to understand how the clenched jaw operates as a perceptual horizon for our world, how the clenched jaw creates our world.

 
For the client to further understand and engage with their lives, then everything they need to know is right in front of them. Through exploring the spatio\temporal chains of perception, through exploring the grasp the body has on the world, then their being will become more articulated.

 
The effect of this is there is no such thing as trivial conversation: talking about an office for example holds everything the client needs. This investigation would take place quite literally on the physical\temporal plane, so

 
Client: I was looking at this building
Therapist: Tell me about it
C2: Well it looks like a place where people are working
T2: What sense do you make of these people?
C3: Oh they're rushing to get their jobs done so they can get back to their families
T3: Where are their families?
C4: Not far
T4: What are they doing?
C5: Oh you know, daily stuff, nothing important
T5: You mean unlike the people in the building?
C6: Yes
T6: So there's a sense then of the people in the building doing more important work, although they're rushing it because they want to get home, where they want to be, where maybe they think is more important. Is this something that resonates with you?

 
From a trivial example there emerges a clash of values where the client presents the office workers being more important than the family yet also seeing it the other way around.

 
There is indeterminacy and ambiguity, there are many aspects that the client can pick up on, you could repeat the process and come up with different aspects and what this describes is the combination of the distinct\vague\resolute and contradictory natures of people's engagement with the world.

 
What Merleau-Ponty gives us is that through investigating the client's spatio\temporal chains of any situation then their current being-in-the-world becomes manifest. If this situation is one whose spatio\temporal chains they are not privy to as with the above example then they will have to imagine them. If they are privy to them then the articulation would seek to show new aspects of these chains as opposed to relying on fixed interpretations.

 
What this approach does is to make articulate the inarticulate of the situation which is a combination of inarticulate desires, affects and concepts.

Motor-intentionality

As we perceive so we are drawn to action. To want a cup of tea is to enter the kitchen and be drawn by what you see to make a cup of tea. When you are depressed the chair you sit in holds you like glue; your movement is slow as the carpet drags against your feet. The room in which you dwell holds you in it and the thought of going outside to see a friend is beyond you.

 
In these two instances the way the world is perceived calls you to action which can be dynamic or static and this perception in turn will determine how you continue to perceive the world. This settles the freewill/determinism debate as they are both true. We are free to perceive, we are determined in our action, we are not responsible for the contents we are given to perceive.

 
This gives clients some power. There is often the sense that their behaviour is out of their control, I am addicted, and I can't help myself. Seeing the perceptual horizon as that which draws you to action, then there can be strength that can be derived from a change within this.

 
Every time my client walks up a road he sees his friends, they are stoned. Everything about that street reminds him of the heroin that he takes every day. If his friends aren't there, the seat is where they would usually sit. The pawnshop is where goods are exchanged for drugs money and the alleyway is where a hit can be taken. The aim then is to make the motor-intentional aspects of the world vivid, to look for different ways to be engaged with them. This can be done by finding similar perceptual aspects in different situations that call for different behaviour by the client.

 
The [mind] set/setting/substance triad researched by Zinberg, [Zinberg 1986] has long been seen to be the crucial aspect within the substance misuse field, where the set and setting are more important than the substance itself. However the setting for them is seen as pre-existing the client. Merleau-Ponty however sees the client as involved in creating the situation, as detailed above.

 
Part of the way a situation is created is via the body schema. To investigate this will show your agency in creating the situation. "Through enactment people may realise previously disavowed experiences and give voice to them: without incorporation of bodily factors such as posture, comportment and gesture people may never come to realise fundamental aspects of their being-in-the-world" [Langdridge 2005, p.95]. Langdridge aims to further client's understanding through an awareness of the body-subjects meaningful engagement with the world.

 
The client walks up the road and his whole scene leads him to taking drugs. The work we can do with him is as follows:

1. Establish the motor-intentionality of his problematic scene
2. Describe his embodied engagement with this problematic scene
   
    

My client walks up London road, he feels an empty yearning in his body and an excitement that relief is close at hand. He sees people who aren't his friends and is reminded of them, he sees the church where they have scored before, he can feel the pleasure of the hit, he is reminded of the number of times he has scored in this road, he can smell the burning of drugs; the whole scene informs him of his compulsion. Every aspect of his perception calls him to take drugs, his senses are engaged with drugs and his body posture is engaged with drugs.

 
As soon as the key constituents are shown in their motor-intentional aspect, the road, his absent friends, the number of times he has scored, his bodily engagement with the scene, we are at the start of enlarging his awareness and changing his behaviour. Now aware of how the scene calls him, he can challenge this. This can be done from the mental or physical perspective which Merleau-Ponty sees as two sides of the same coin as above. The mental challenges would come in the reframing the scene. As much as it is seen as the place where drugs are taken, it can be seen as the place to be moved through on his way to his work. In as much as he sees his drug taking friends as absent as he sees other people, he can start to be intrigued by the people that he sees and wonder about their lives.

 
The physical changes can take place either 'internally' or 'externally'. The external changes can take the form of doing something different walking up the road. Whereas his standard walk has a certain track, then he can change this track. Aware in the knowledge that this is changing his sedimented reaction to this scene then he will see how other aspects of his perception change. He is now taking a stand on the compulsion that this scene is to him; quite literally his compulsion is within this scene.

 
The internal changes that can take place will be his response to his interoceptive awareness. He smells the air that reminds him of drugs, his body feels the pleasure of the hit and his body feels an empty yearning. In these instances then he can expand on his awareness in these senses. As much as the air reminds him of the smell of burning drugs then he can sit with this and notice how it changes to the smell of an autumn day. Likewise the empty yearning can take him into a church to let his yearning be held in the vaulting roof. Sitting with the bodily felt pleasure of the hit again can dissolve into the terror of the absence of a hit.

 
What Merleau-Ponty offers us is that the embodied motor-intentionality of perception causes action. To change action means to firstly be aware of this and once it is explicit then the client has some space to change it. The effect of this is to put power back into the hands of the client, who may think he suffers because of the world but now see that he co-creates the world via his perception.

Conclusion

In this dissertation we have seen how Merleau-Ponty's theory of perception challenges rationality and how this opens up a new way of working with clients. The central themes then are that the client has agency in creating their world and that it is the body as subject that is involved in this creation. We have seen how the horizon which is never fully given is what constructs the world for the client and how moving things from horizon to figure enables change in the client's world.

 
We also saw that the nature of being-in-the-world is ambiguous and indistinct and that this provides a dynamic flexible approach. Distinct and unambiguous are useful and have their place but it is always in the horizon of the ambiguous\indistinct structure of the world.

 
As part of this conclusion, I would also like to see what happens next, what trajectory this dissertation seeks to be part of.

 
"Given a perceptually new and historical situation to control, the perceiving subject undergoes a continual birth; at each instant it is something new. Every incarnate subject is like an open notebook in which we do not know yet what will be written" [Merleau-Ponty 1964, p.6].

 
The arena for therapy is not the interrelation of the psyche and the unconscious, or the explanation of mental disease but rather the embodied motor-intentional beings that we are. We move from the talking cure of Freud which deals with concepts, from the medical model of psychiatry to the motor-intentional world of Merleau-Ponty, where being is externalised and action based.

 
Therapy should be in terms of poetry rather than science. Poetry looks to have polysemic meanings, where science looks to use singular explanations of causality. For Merleau-Ponty the nature of the relationship with the world is ambiguous, indeterminate and polysemic, thus working with a client in therapy, working with existence is working within this stage. For Merleau-Ponty then the work in therapy is art, to use wonder to extend meaning, to revel in ambiguity seeing it as a creative possibility.

 
As you combine poetry and externalised action, then the result is theatre. Thus this is a call to the work between client and therapist to be a two handed play where the ever extending plot is devised in the silent space between them.

 

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