tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31843938045217215962024-03-18T03:03:30.385+00:00Philosophical Perspectives in Clinical PsychologyPhilosophical reflections on psychology, psychotherapy, phenomenology, psychopathology, psychiatry and psychoanalysis.Richard Gippshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18001492312162861823noreply@blogger.comBlogger350125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3184393804521721596.post-63519338051956918002023-10-21T11:17:00.008+01:002023-10-22T11:25:52.649+01:00you've been framed<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgQkNVjBBuVaFa8UTIIK0LCVocN8O991r27aliQ2nHrdFuMmfggvktfh2BDsc1CIJ8Eog00Qqbe28MqOmJy_XClTtSBZB7UU3oQZx_d7zork_aMMHsJoEs9xoNOl07lu4YhwKv7Qkfo-P9QX_LxtHeyH-uq5hPYhToQmdMJrcscZiuHVyK_JBI46npZq-fq/s2940/photo-1508004680771-708b02aabdc0.webp" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img alt="https://images.app.goo.gl/aa9efMUwNxGVGCJV7" border="0" data-original-height="1960" data-original-width="2940" height="133" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgQkNVjBBuVaFa8UTIIK0LCVocN8O991r27aliQ2nHrdFuMmfggvktfh2BDsc1CIJ8Eog00Qqbe28MqOmJy_XClTtSBZB7UU3oQZx_d7zork_aMMHsJoEs9xoNOl07lu4YhwKv7Qkfo-P9QX_LxtHeyH-uq5hPYhToQmdMJrcscZiuHVyK_JBI46npZq-fq/w200-h133/photo-1508004680771-708b02aabdc0.webp" width="200" /></a></div>A central claim of much social-scientific critique of psychiatric nosology is that psychiatry too often naively adopts a (let's-call-it) <i>realist</i> perspective on psychiatric illness categories, whereas in truth we'd do better to see a diagnostic category like 'depression' as one, optional, sometimes useful, sometimes not, way of <i>framing</i> human distress / problems in living. It's the second part of this claim that I'd like to focus on here. What do we mean when we talk of framing? Regarding that talk, what's <i>its</i> value; what are<i> its</i> limitations?<p></p><p>The first useful thing to point out about frames (conceptualisations, constructions) is that they aren't themselves in the truth-speaking game. They have to do with what's prior to this: with ways of seeing/thinking/talking/conceptualising. (This is part of the complaint against the realist: the realist is oblivious to these prior questions, and their only critical apparatus is geared up to answering questions about the truth or falsity of judgments.) Now, once you have a frame in place, then you can ask whether some or other (frame-deploying) judgement is true. But the frame is not itself a judgement; it is not itself truth-assayable. Our social-scientific critic has it then that we can't then meaningfully ask, at least in any straightforward way, 'does mental illness as such actually exist?' For talk of 'mental illness' is, they'll say, a window through which one looks, rather than something which may or may not be being accurately seen through such a window. Even so, there are, they note, different, non-existence-related, kinds of critical question we can ask about framings. For example, we might ask whether a particular way of framing matters is or isn't really <i>useful </i>for us, or whether it hasn't perhaps become <i>unhelpfully hegemonic</i>. Or, noticing that frames give us the basic categories in terms of which judgements are made, we might ask <i>whose interests</i> are served by the widespread deployment of such and such a way of talking, seeing or thinking.</p><p>What's not often talked about by those who focus on framings is the limit, scope, remit, of the frame metaphor. It's this that I want to focus on here. To pre-empt: my thought is that whilst ignoring frames is naïve, so is taking "frame" to be a master concept for the interrogation of psychiatric judgement.</p><p>To start us along our path, consider first what might look like a rather different, metaphysical, matter. This has to do with what's wrong with that kind of<i> transcendental idealism</i> which has it that the mind always supplies the <i>form</i> of our judgement when it brings its concepts to bear on experience, whilst extra-mental reality supplies, through reality's impingements on us, our judgement's <i>content</i>. Take this all the way to a natural conclusion and we arrive at a peculiar view of the unconceptualised world as an intrinsically formless 'noumenal dough' which only has any order within it because we've been applying our cookie-cutter concepts to it. ... The problem now is that if the unconceptualised world really is such an intrinsically amorphous dough, why should there ever be any reason to apply one concept to one experience, another to another? Without structural constraints coming from, rather than imposed on, the experiences, how is discriminating judgement even possible? ... But note that talk of this or that 'structural constraint' shall itself be empty if it doesn't itself deploy more particular concepts. The point generalises: whenever a pundit of the idea of unconceptualised experience talks about our bringing our concepts to bear on any particular experience, <i>which </i>experience do they have in mind? If they can't individuate it without deploying a concept, then what are they even talking about? But how could they pick it out without a concept? (Wittgenstein, <i>Philosophical Investigations</i>, §261: "So in the end when one is doing philosophy one gets to the point where one would like just to emit an inarticulate sound. -- But such a sound is an expression only as it occurs in a particular language-game, which should now be described.")</p><p>One way past this problem is to draw a distinction between conceptualisation and framing. Sure, all experience must be <i>conceptualised</i>, but this doesn't mean it all requires <i>framing</i>. Psychiatry's social-scientific critics, for example, typically suggest we should apprehend their object using concepts such as "suffering", "problems in living", "experience", "belief". Thus before we have 'symptoms' we already have (say) 'hallucinations'; before we have 'psychosis' or 'delusions' we already have 'beliefs' and 'experiences'; before we have 'neuroses' we already have 'anxiety', etc. These, then, are the pre-framed but even so always-already conceptualised experiences which are only elevated to the status of illness and illness symptoms when they're viewed through an optional psychiatric lens which frames them a certain way. The idea of non-conceptualised experience may indeed take us down impossibly dark philosophical alleyways, but the idea of non-framed experience needn't.</p><p>That, perhaps, is all well and good. But how shall we distinguish between such concepts as are frames and such as are more basic and are required by anyone before we can so much as talk about those experiences which are psychiatry's concern? One way to do this - and I can't think of any other! - is to say that if that over which the psychiatric frame precisely ranges can be picked out without using the frame concept, then it, the frame concept, can happily be seen as an optional extra. Thus we might ask, of the 'suffering' concept itself: is there a way to pick out bona fide experiences of suffering other than through that very concept ('suffering')? If not then we shall count 'suffering' as basic: as a concept which is not itself a frame.</p><p>The validity then of talk of framings, when it comes to psychiatry, rests, I suggest, in the viability of reductive analyses of psychiatry's diagnostic concepts. Is it really possible to decompose depression, or obsessive compulsive disorder, or the schizophrenias, or specific phobias, into constituent behaviours and experiences the appreciation of which need involve no awareness of them as 'symptoms <i>of mental illness</i>'? Is the <i>kind</i> of suffering met with in the mental illnesses in principle no different than the kinds of suffering met with elsewhere? Do general concepts like 'problems in living' and 'suffering' really get us into anywhere near-enough specific a terrain as we encounter with 'mental illness'? Do we really not need to tacitly borrow a specifically psychiatric vision in order to hone in on just those problems in living, just those instances of suffering, as are met with in the mental illnesses? Social scientists (including psychologists) sometimes talk as if all of this is just obviously the case. And those who take too conceptually seriously the ICD's or the DSM's putative operationalisations do something similar. My own thought is that all of that is rather naive. Mental illness concepts, as I see them, involve us in the apprehension of a nexus of formally inter-penetrating (hence irreducible to any raw ingredients) ongoing suffering, irrationality, and automatic-yet-motivated state-maintaining avoidance of suffering. </p><p>Whether I'm right in that analysis of mental illness is of course a topic for another day. What I hope to have shown here, though, is something far more modest: that the idea of mental illness talk as offering an optional framing is not something which can be respectably engaged in unless one's prepared to admit certain constraints on what shall count as frames and to spell out how they differ from such concepts as are not optional organisations of experience. What certainly won't do is simply saying something like 'but in this other culture they don't use mental illness concepts when discussing their travails.' Why won't it do? Because it doesn't by itself help us see whether they are simply blind to the character of certain of their own experiences, or whether instead they have adopted one set of metaphors or idioms or conceptualisations or what-have-yous over another. (After all, perhaps a psychiatric sensibility allows us to see that which is otherwise invisible?) ... That the presumption of a radical cultural relativism goes along with the presumption of the validity of 'framing' talk should surprise nobody. What the former can hardly do, however, is vouchsafe for us the latter.</p>Richard Gippshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18001492312162861823noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3184393804521721596.post-23019333681699496842023-07-02T17:02:00.064+01:002023-12-05T13:43:56.469+00:00soul<b>Introduction</b><div><b><br /></b>
Do you know, it’s almost every day that we talk of soul? It matters not whether you’re a ‘believer’. It matters not whether you’re inclined to talk of something called ‘life after death’, or whether you find any ready use for Epictetus’s notion that, as a human being, 'you are a little wisp of soul dragging a corpse about with you’ (Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, book IV, XXXI). No; as novelist Jeanette Winterson said:<div><i><br /></i></div><div><i>you don’t have to believe in God to know that you’ve got a soul. We know what we mean when we say, ‘This<b> is soulless</b>’ or, ‘I’ve <b>sold my soul</b>’ and we know what we mean when we say, ‘This has <b>got soul</b>’…<br /></i><br />Here Winterson is, I believe, rather wiser than Catholic philosopher Peter Geach when he wrote that the <br /><i><br /></i></div><div><i>only tenable conception of the soul is the Aristotelian conception of the soul as the form, or actual organisation, of the living body; and thus you may say that a man thinks with his soul, if you mean positively that thinking is a vital activity of a living human being, and negatively that thinking is not performed by any bodily organ. (</i>‘What do we think with?’ in <i>God and the Soul</i>, p. 38.<i>)</i><div><br /></div>Geach here construes our only options as being a spooky ‘Platonic-Cartesian’ conception of soul as immaterial entity, separable from the body at death, or a non-entitative Aristotelian conception of soul as man’s rational ‘form’. What gets lost with this rather restricted choice choice is, I'll suggest, precisely what’s ordinarily meant by ‘soul’.<br /><br />We speak of soul in dozens of idioms - idioms such as ‘he’s the<b> life and soul of the party</b>’, ‘she was <b>a lost soul</b>’, ‘she possessed <b>greatness of soul</b>’, ‘the hard labour was utterly <b>soul-destroying</b>’. There are many of these - and it’s by exploring a good range of them in what follows that I hope to shed light on ‘soul’’s meaning.<br /><br /><b>An Individual Person? </b><br /><br />Consider such phrases as ‘Over <b>two hundred souls went down with the ship</b>’, ‘He was <b>the only soul on the lonely hillside</b>’, ‘Old King Cole <b>was a merry old soul</b>’, ‘he’s <b>a wise/sensitive/poor/good soul</b>’, ‘Those who accepted his message were baptised, and about <b>three thousand souls were added to their number</b> that day’ (Acts 2:41). Regarding such uses the dictionary tells that here ‘soul’ means ‘an individual person’. Something similar can be found in the Catechism of the Catholic Church (363) which has it that: ‘In Sacred Scripture the term ‘soul’ often refers to… the entire human person.’ And we can see why such sources speak thus: substitute ‘person’ for ‘soul’ in contexts such as the above and we’ll always be left with a truth. And yet when we invoke soul in these cases we’re doing more than deploying an archaic synonym. By bringing a person under the description ‘soul’ we’re doing something of semantic importance. <br /><br />To get at what this is, consider the following: ‘5 souls were seen lurking round the children’s playground despite it being closed for maintenance’. Or ‘there were 15 souls swimming in the lido’. Such sentences immediate strike us as peculiar in a way that the previous phrases didn't. Why? Partly, perhaps, because we find ourselves imagining discarnate spirits floating about in swimming pools or futilely hovering over the swings! But also because we don’t understand why the word ‘soul’ has here been used, by contrast with the souls that went down with the ship or the single soul on the lonely hillside. <br /><br />And why <i>do</i> we use the ‘soul’ word in such cases? What I’d like to stress is that when we bring a person under the ‘soul’ description, we're considering them under a distinctive aspect - as a unique mortal living her life well or poorly; sometimes suffering or experiencing joy, sorrow, conscience, self-consciousness; able or struggling to love; hoping or despairing; able to be kind or cruel, courageous or pusillanimous, introverted or extroverted; and sometimes trying, and sometimes failing, to do her best. (‘Indeed one might have seen that <b>he was an honest soul</b>, even at the distance of a thousand leagues’. M. de Cervantes <i>Don Quixote </i>II. iii. xv. 289) This, I suggest, is why it was (and sometimes still is) that ships, or <a href="https://www.ancient-hebrew.org/studies-words/getting-to-the-heart-and-soul-of-the-matter.htm" target="_blank">aeroplanes coming in with mechanical problems</a>, but not (say) carriages, typically had (a certain number of) souls in them (even when not sinking!): a journey over the sea or into the air takes us out of our everyday land life and highlights our vulnerability. Loneliness can do this too: throw us out of our lives and into contemplation of them; perhaps, we naturally imagine, something like this is the state of mind of the above-mentioned solitary man on the lonely hillside.<br /><br /><b>A Way In </b><br /><br />The <b>eyes</b>, it’s said, <b>are windows to the soul</b>. The origins of the phrase are not clear (no, it's not Matthew's gospel, nor Shakespeare, although Cicero's (<a href="https://topostext.org/work/752">De Legibus</a> §1:27) ’As for our two eloquent eyes, do they not <i></i>speak forth every impulse and passion of our souls?’ shows the basic idea, if not the ‘windows’ metaphor, to have been alive in antiquity), but it (eyes as windows or mirrors of the soul) was in use in English and French by the 16th century. We also talk, by the way, of <b>soulful glances</b> or <b>soulless eyes/expressions</b>. In Samuel Richardson's (1748) <i>Clarissa</i>, Mr Belford says of Clarissa that ‘What she thought, I cannot say; but, in general, I never saw <b>so much soul in a woman's eyes</b> as in hers.’<br /><br />Now it's sometimes said that all this simply has to do with the emotional expressivity of our eyes. And our eyes, in the context of our faces, are indeed highly emotionally expressive. Vertically widened eyes show more white (other animals show far less of their eyes' white), narrowed eyes show very little - showing us fear, surprise and awe, or disgust and hate, respectively. The eyebrows curve in sadness. The surround of the eyes wrinkles in joy. Furthermore, when we're engaged with one another in conversation, our pupils dilate and constrict in synchrony with one another - as does a portion of our neurological activity. <br /><br />But, think about it for a moment, and you realise that a soulful glance, one that reveals so much of Clarissa’s soul, is not simply one that betrays or reveals whatever emotional state she happens to be in. A soulful glance expresses a restricted range of such states - including a deep pensive sadness or cynical despair, hopeful yet fraught expectation, a preoccupied yearning, or an open joyous lovingness and vitality. Passing annoyance, shock, surprise and disgust at others are simply not what we mean by ‘soul states’. Thus when someone lets us in, and <b>bares her soul</b> to us, she’s telling us not of her everyday pleasures and annoyances but of what she’s most ashamed about, what in her heart she allows herself to long for but fears to be ever unavailable, how she struggles to maintain her hope, and so on. <br /><br /><b>On What’s Innermost </b><br /><br />The eyes, I mentioned, are windows to the soul - and part of what this metaphor does for us is highlight the way in which soul life is both essential and interior life. ‘By looking into my eyes <b>she peered right into my soul</b>’. And when we bare<b> (</b>or <b>pour out) our souls</b> to one another, we let the others into the truth about such of our secret guilt, shame and yearnings as we normally keep hidden - out of shame and fear of rejection. Ilham Dilman <a href="https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-1-349-15546-0_11">put this well</a>:<div><br /></div><div><i>People often speak of the soul when they wish to bring into focus those aspects of a person’s life in which he is most truly himself. ... To see a man’s soul is to see what he is really like - the fears behind the exterior assurance, the loneliness and the need for affection drowned in a busy public life, the callousness behind a facade of respectability, the kindness or the remorse in a heart caught up in a life of voice.</i></div><div><br /></div><div>Especially when it follows ‘very’, ‘soul’ signifies our innermost depth and truest nature: His gaze <b>pierced her very soul</b>; the music <b>stirred his very soul</b>; ‘uncontrolled feelings of jealousy can ... <b>blacken the very soul </b>of the jealous’ (P M S Hacker), ‘we have had to dig deep and <b>examine the very soul of</b> our organisation and admit our mistakes.’ It’s worth noting here that the OED offers us, inter alia, for ‘soul’: ‘the central or inmost part of a person’s being’, whilst the Catechism of the Catholic Church (363) gives us this: ‘“soul” also refers to the innermost aspect of man.’<br /><br />A cognate use of ‘soul’ which I find particularly evocative is for what otherwise and more usually is called the soundpost of a violin or cello. This soul is a wooden dowel which sits inside the instrument underneath the bridge, bridging the top and back, integrating it. (We also find this in French, with its talk of l’âme of the violin). It’s there to augment resonance, brightness and darkness of tone; without it the instrument sounds shallow and flat; positioning it correctly is an art. It’s not I think difficult to understand the rationale for this appropriation of ‘soul’ by the luthier. <br /><br /><b>Soul Life </b><br /><br />Brevity … it is said … is <b>the soul of wit</b>. Such talk of soul references a life-giving germ. We also find this sense alive in the <b>life and soul of the party</b>. We might wonder if the latter phrase is rather oxymoronic (in the USA it’s just ‘life of the party’); the life and soul of the party is a lively and entertaining person who generates an infectious positive energy around them and sets a buoyant tone for the occasion. <br /><br />It's worth noting that souls can sometimes receive or require stirring - especially when they're at a low ebb. Thus <b>soul music</b> can <b>stir our souls</b>, and we might say of a musician: ‘<b>he’s got soul</b>’. When? Does it just mean he’s emotionally expressive? No, for the emotions expressed by someone who ‘has soul’ must be deep. Especially in the inflection which soul talk receives in black America, such music is expressive of a wisdom that comes from such suffering as has become at least partly transcended through it. ( ‘The essence of life; feeling, passion, emotional depth - all of which are believed to be derived from struggle, suffering and having participated in the Black Experience. Having risen above the suffering, the person gains ‘soul.'' Geneva Smitherman, <i>Black Talk: Words and Phrases from the Hood to the Amen Corner</i> (Houghton Mifflin Co., New York, N.Y., 2000. Rev Edn. p266).) Whilst dictionaries may tell us that soul-stirring experiences are those that arouse emotion, this is far too general: jealousy, despair, hate, etc., can't be a result of soul-stirring. Instead, when the soul is stirred, enthusiasm, joy and hope arise and sorrows are felt more honestly. Relevant here, I believe, is the fact that we sometimes shed tears of joy, that we're sometimes 'moved' or 'touched' by what we encounter or read about - by stories which tell of extraordinary hope, love, fidelity, courage, tenderness, comradeship, injustice, justice, perseverance, etc. There is, for what it's worth, a use of the 'soul-stirring' concept which references mere sentimentality, but the more standard use instead concerns the arousal of such emotion as indexes our honest encounter with what in life is most poignant, humanly significant, and of value.<br /><br /><b>Turmoil and Repose</b> <br /><br />St John of the Cross's own talk of the<b> dark night of the soul </b>carries few of the connotations of angst and despair that the phrase typically conjures today. We get closer to the latter with our talk of <b>an unquiet soul</b>, or when we pray for a soul's repose ('<b>God rest her soul</b>'. One version of the Eternal Rest prayer ends with 'may their souls, and all the souls of the faithful departed, rest in peace'). Psalm 116:7 tells us 'Return to your rest, O my soul, For the Lord has dealt bountifully with you.' And Matthew 11:28-30, gives us some of Jesus' 'comfortable words': 'Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find <b>rest for your souls</b>. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.' <a href="http://clinicalphilosophy.blogspot.com/2023/03/it-is-well-with-my-soul.html">Horatio Spafford</a>, learning that the ship on which he was travelling to join his wife was over the spot in the Atlantic where his four remaining children lay dead (their boat went down the week before, only his wife survived), went back to his cabin and began to write his poem/hymn 'It is well with my soul'. The first verse: <br /><br /><i>When peace like a river, attendeth my way,<br />When sorrows like sea billows roll;<br />Whatever my lot, Thou hast taught me to say;<br />It is well, it is well, with my soul.</i><br /><br />Spafford gives pause for thought to anyone who carelessly takes wellness of soul to simply mean such happiness as requires sorrow’s absence.<br /><br />With what is the unquiet soul burdened? Sometimes a troubled soul may primarily be afflicted by despair or deep lonesomeness; Spafford’s verse gives us another viable answer: <br /><i><br />My sin, oh, the bliss of this glorious thought!,</i></div><div><i>My sin, not in part but the whole,<br />Is nailed to the cross, and I bear it no more,<br />Praise the Lord, praise the Lord, O my soul! ... <br /><br />For me, be it Christ, be it Christ hence to live:<br />If Jordan above me shall roll,<br />No pang shall be mine, for in death as in life,<br />Thou wilt whisper Thy peace to my soul.</i><br /><br />The <b>troubled soul </b>whose trouble is sin has a bad conscience, is struggling to be its better self (e.g. to remain hopeful in troubled situations), and may be battling with its own animus (i.e. a driven disposition to hostility, schadenfreude, envy, etc). This soul suffers from wretchedness, and 'wretchedness' - along with 'yearning' and 'longing', 'lonesomeness' and 'melancholy' - is a piece of what I want to call 'soul language'. Its wretchedness is particularly powerful if it fears that what it did was not only unforgiven but also unforgivable. <br /><br />I'd like to note, however, that it’s not enough, for being a troubled soul, that one be any old wrongdoer. For soul trouble essentially involves a certain kind of inner conflict. In fact, the greatest soul trouble comes from the double whammy, quite ordinary in human life, of both having a bad conscience and also being ashamed of this. ‘<b>Confession</b>’, it's said, ‘<b>is good for the soul</b>’. ‘By confessing his crime he <b>lost his liberty but regained his soul</b>’. And we engage in <b>soul searching</b> when we undertake a deep and anxious examination of our hidden motives, feelings, and ownmost desires. Confession and repentance not only do something to address one’s guilt; they also lance the boil of our shame. We persecute ourselves for our wrongdoings not simply because of their wrongness but because we fear being shunned for them. We are also tempted to deny their wrongness - and to the extent that we do this we are, as discussed above, left in further inner turmoil, the clash of conscience and denial kicking up a storm within. When we confess, however, we take a bold step of fully owning our guilt, so now we are once again one with ourself. And we also break out past our shame, daring to look up into the other's eyes again where we can experience rejection or, we dare to hope, forgiveness. Genius in the Christian message, I’d say, is its stress on redemption through sincere repentance. Such an approach to soul life is in fact life-giving in a way I’ll consider further later. <br /><br />Consider: ‘Lord, I am not worthy that you should enter under my roof, but only say the word and my soul shall be healed’. If we were asked to say whether, at this point in the communion rite, we are praying for our guilt, our shame, our hopelessness, or our loneliness to be healed, I think we shouldn’t want to choose. And yet it’s surely the forgiveness of our sins against God, those stemming from vicious pride, that are to the fore. We find a similar sentiment in the Anglican Prayer of Humble Access: 'We are not worthy so much as to gather up the crumbs under your table; but you are the same Lord whose character is always to have mercy. Grant us, therefore, gracious Lord, so to eat the flesh of your dear Son Jesus Christ, and to drink his blood, that our sinful bodies may be made clean by his body, and our souls washed through his most precious blood, and that we may evermore dwell in him, and he in us.’ <br /><br /><b>Damage, Blemish and Loss</b> <br /><br />A further range of idioms concern damage or blemish to the soul. Martin Luther King said this: 'Segregation is a blatant denial of the unity which we have in Christ. It substitutes an 'I-It' relationship for the 'I-Thou' relationship, and relegates persons to the status of things. It <b>scars the soul</b> and degrades the personality.' Here it’s not guilt but shame, a felt loss of dignity, that’s to the fore. But when Aquinas (Summa Theologiae I–II q.86 a.1 ad 3) talks of a <b>stain on the soul</b>, the stain is largely a matter of sin: “The stain ... signifies a certain privation of the soul’s brightness.… It is like a shadow, which is the privation of light because of the obstacle of some body, and which varies according to the diversity of the bodies which constitute the obstacle [to the light]." PMS Hacker provides a more recent example (see above quote) when he wrote of how 'uncontrolled feelings of jealousy can infiltrate the mind, dominate the will, and blacken the very soul of the jealous.' (p.227 of <i>The Passions</i>). Here the soul is considered as the organ not only of hope but also of love. We will consider later how all these moments of it interrelate. For now, though, let’s continue pursuing our idioms - such as the<b> iron entered into his soul</b> - as when you succumb to bitterness and despair after ill-treatment. (This one, interestingly, arose by way of a mistranslation of the Bible from Hebrew into Latin, the original matter having to do with oneself being placed into iron (i.e. into fetters) rather than iron being placed into oneself!)<br /><br />Certain kinds of labour, abuse, or disappointment can be <b>soul-destroying</b>. We may sometimes say this of such work as is simply boring, when we feel our motivation and joy seep away. ‘The daily rat race is soul-destroying: you soon give up all aspirations and just try to survive the boredom.’ The destruction becomes more significant when our hope also gives out. (I want to note here that destroyed souls, like the morale of which they are constituted, may be rebuilt.) ‘Drag myself into the gym..and fuel myself with dread at the thought of facing another <b>soul-sucking</b> day in Hollywood.’ (OED: 2009 G. Bullock-Prado <i>Confections of Closet Master Baker</i> ii. 20) <br /><br />Souls may also be given away, signed away, or sold. ‘Now he’s working 7 days a week in the factory for this tyrannical boss, he <b>can't call his soul his own</b>.’ Faust (a la Marlowe, Goethe, and Mann) may not have exactly <b>sold his soul</b> to the Devil, but to risk it on a bet with Mephistopheles was great sacrilege, and a Faustian bargain is now understood as one in which one sells one's soul for material gain. (Judas Iscariot also 'sells out', betraying Jesus for thirty pieces of silver.) Mark (8:36; see also Matthew 16:26; Luke 9:24-5) records Jesus saying 'For what shall it profit a man, if he gain the whole world, and suffer the loss of his soul?' It’s useful here to think on the difference between the soul that's sold or signed away and the soul that's in turmoil. Someone who sells his soul deactivates his conscience in order to pursue hedonistic ends; he stops caring about the depravity into which he has sunk (see Ilham Dilman). He may at first have felt pangs of conscience, but he deals with the inner conflict by shutting down his fellow feeling. Oscar Wilde, looking back at the debauchery of his younger days, commented that ‘I <b>ceased to be captain of my soul</b>.’ Wilde, that is, had - under Bosey’s baleful influence - become moved simply by his base desires, <span style="font-family: inherit;">and had given up on the regulative ideals of dignity and probity. (I'm informed that here Wilde is quoting from W E Henley's poem <i><a href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/51642/invictus" target="_blank">Invictus</a></i>; last stanza: '<span style="text-indent: -1em;">It matters not how strait the gate, </span><span style="text-indent: -1em;">How charged with punishments the scroll, </span><span style="text-indent: -1em;">I am the master of my fate, </span><span style="text-indent: -1em;">I am the captain of my soul.')</span> </span></div><div><br />As well as it being possible to sell or lose one's soul, it’s also possible to be <b>a lost soul</b>. Souls may be lost in two ways, both of which concern the central themes we’ve already met. Either the lost soul is morally wretched, seemingly beyond retrieval (it takes amazing grace to save such a wretch as is lost thus). Or it’s lacking in hope: lonely, without self-belief, and without sufficient self-understanding, self-possession or wisdom to take stock of and make changes to a life which isn’t soul-nourishing. <br /><br />The term <b>soul murder</b> was popularised by Ibsen and Strindberg. Ibsen defines it as the destruction of the love of life and capacity for joy in another human being. In his (1896) play <i>John Gabriel Borkman</i>, he has a character exclaim:</div><div><br /></div><div><i>You are a murderer! You have committed the one mortal sin! You have killed the love-life in me. Do you understand what that means? The Bible speaks of a mysterious sin for which there is no forgiveness. I have never understood what it could be; but now I understand. The great, unpardonable sin is to murder the love-life in a human soul.</i></div><div><br /></div><div>And in his 1903 memoir, judge Schreber wrote of how Flechsig, his psychiatrist, had committed soul-murder on him. Since that time the idea of soul murder has periodically been fashionable, especially to describe the deadly effects on the personality of pathological parenting. <br /><br />We also meet with disquiet in the soul in those who suffer deep loneliness and shame. Such individuals struggle to believe in their lovability, yet still want love; they have not utterly turned their back on such a possibility. So their disquiet doesn't consist simply in their dismal lack of worth, their sense of friendlessness, and so on. It consists in this combined with a residual hope that things could be otherwise, a longing for friendship, a wish to be esteemed and loved by others. A dictionary entry for a ‘soul salve’ gives us this example of the idiom in use: ‘Whenever I feel alone in the world, I go to church. Each visit is a <b>salve for the soul</b>.’ (Someone who is troubled may also be in need of <b>soul doctoring</b>.) In the communion service, everyone is as one before God, equally in need, equally fallible and in need of grace, equally invited to know of God's love for them. This experience of solidarity, recognition and love, from neighbour and God, is the antithesis of loneliness and shame. <br /><br /><b>A Brief Metaphysics of Soul </b><br /><br />This discussion of soul idioms has so far has been organised by sketching the families of metaphors in terms of which we articulate soul. I started there rather than by jumping into metaphysics because I wanted both to remind us of how we actually do all talk of soul in everyday life, and also to impress on us the true importance of what we’re doing when we do so speak. The aim, in short, has been to subvert that philosophical tendency to say ‘oh, but those are just idiomatic uses; when we really want to know about the soul itself, we should instead turn straight to metaphysics’. For our ordinary language, I suggest, often carries a deep wisdom in it - a wisdom which can be ours too if we halt the temptation to brashly presume that our reflective understanding of soul need learn nothing from the practical understanding shown in our intuitive grasp of soul idioms. If after having developed a clear understanding of what you’re doing in using it, you still feel minded to pursue metaphysical questions about soul which ignore that wisdom, then, well... knock yourself out. In what remains, however, I’ll begin to develop my own reflective appreciation of the nature of soul, first discussing some seemingly discrete themes before moving on to suggest how they’re unified in the “soul” concept. These themes have to do with the significance for our soul life of hope, love, core, conscience, and life. </div><div><br /></div><div>There are, so far as I know, no soul idioms that explicitly mention hope. Even so, an intuitive understanding of soul as, as we might say, the ‘organ of hope’ is common. Hence Emily Dickinson: ‘Hope is the thing with feathers - That perches in the soul’. Hence Gabriel Marcel: ‘hope is for the soul what breathing is for the living organism. Where hope is lacking the soul dries up and withers’ (<i>Homo Viator </i>p. 10). Uplift and despair are the soul’s ownmost moments. (See also Marcel’s note: ‘The soul lives by hope alone; hope is perhaps the very stuff of which our souls are made’ (<i>Being & Having</i>, p. 80). The ‘alone’ seems wrong to me, and the breathing analogy may also mislead, to the extent that they incline us to overlook the equal significance of love in the soul... of which more later.)</div><div><br />And what’s hope? The hopeful soul is buoyant; it finds itself wanting to populate the future with potential meaning, opening up possibility spaces before it into which it and others may move. It lives in eager anticipation of good things. We may, if we wish, use the words ‘hope’ and ‘optimism’ to mark the poles of a conceptual contrast (see e.g. Eagleton’s <i>Hope Without Optimism</i>). The optimist, let’s say, has a Pollyannaish attitude: their anticipation of the good takes the form of positively skewed empirical prediction. Accordingly they’ll be not only disappointed, but also surprised, when reality doesn’t sufficiently respect their enthusiasm! The optimist populates the future with supposedly likely meaning. The hopeful subject by contrast knows full well the merely potential nature of this meaning; and yet they’re no less realistic in their attitude toward what shall happen for all their hope; even so they willingly move toward such a future. Their anticipation of the good takes the form of an eagerness for it and a willingness to be disappointed if that shall be their lot (they're not refusing to ‘get their hopes up’ by never looking forward to anything). The hopeful person is able to spot opportunities, and the life in them autocatalytically begets more life. The above-mentioned Horatio Spafford, because - (and despite the death of his son, the drowning of his four daughters, and the loss of all his investments in the great fire of Chicago) - he could say ‘it is well with my soul’, could also go on in hope to father another three children (one of whom also died), move to Jerusalem with his wife, and set up the American Colony, an extraordinary philanthropic enterprise. <br /><br />Interesting about hope is that we hope not only ‘for’ or ‘that’ but also ‘in’. Thus we might put our hope in the Lord (or in a worldly ruler). This is akin to the distinction between believing that and believing in. If I believe or have faith in you, then inter alia I put myself, including my hope, in your hands. And if my hope is in you, then I live in trust of your redemptive potency. I labour this here only because I want to urge that hope takes significant forms that transcend any particular ‘hope that’. Yes, of course, I can hope that - say - you get better soon. But more than that, the hopeful person is alive to potency and not mere actuality; they’re nourished in their action not simply by some particular thing which may lie before them but more generally by the ‘promise of things’. They're alive, in short, to that inner force or figure (that ‘internal object', to speak with the Kleinians) which the psychoanalyst Neville Symington calls ‘the lifegiver’. Life's meanings have not crumbled away for this person; they are, naturally, less prone to hope’s antitheses: paralysing fear and despair. By placing my hope in what lies beyond me and beyond worldly satisfactions, my pusilla anima (oligopsykhos) grows into a magna anima - my pusillanimity is replaced by magnanimity. <br /><br />In talking of hope I’ve talked already a good deal of life. Hope, that is, gives us energy; it makes for (not-unwarranted) enthusiasm (en-theos: divinely inspired).That which is soul-destroying or soul-sucking deprives us of ready energy for life; our soul then is at a low ebb. If you want an epitome of the soulless, think on the lifelessness of hospital rooms and corridors filled with machines, nothing organic, no view of the natural world, perhaps a few weeds growing up between concrete slabs outside the window. If however our soul is stirred by a rousing speech, or if we enjoy the company of the life and soul of the party, we at least temporarily regain our appetite for life. Hope, that is, is no mere abstract attitude toward the future; it’s a lively state in which one thrums with 'vitality affects' (Daniel Stern). The life of the soul is this joy at life that transcends despair and awakens us to possibility. Such soul energy has no empty manic tinge to it, and far from depending on inwardly splitting the psyche to avoid contact with despair, or outwardly splitting off the psyche from a difficult reality, it inwardly integrates us and promotes our willing participation in what lies outwith our control. <br /><br />In <i>Psalm 23</i> King David sings ‘He leads me beside still waters, He restores my soul. He guides me in paths of righteousness for His name’s sake.’ And in singing thus he’s not talking about two separate matters - the restoration of his soul life and being led in the paths of righteousness. We see this confluence of morality and hope reflected in many of the idioms considered earlier: the soul is scarred, destroyed, blackened, sold, lost and stained through sin, and is restored, washed, provided with a salve, doctored, healed, regained, by he who confesses. He whose soul is washed of its sin can once again feel hope, can participate gladly in life again. He who has corrupted his soul must now, in his small-souled way, gain his appetite for life not from hope but from the satisfactions of power and sensory pleasures. <br /><br />To say that the soul is the organ of hope is to say that we can’t understand what it is to ‘have soul’ unless we understand that it essentially involves our being able to experience hope (and dread and fear). But what form of hope is it that bespeaks the uncorrupted soul, and how does this axis of hope in the soul relate to its other axis, namely our conscience? My final suggestion is that the soul’s nourishment is love. What we ultimately hope for is: a life of love. What we dread is exile, existential death, being found unlovable. Shame alerts us to this dread. And one of the things we can be most ashamed by is our moral wrongdoing, our wrongdoing which breaks the bonds of love between ourselves and others. <br /><br />As was the case with hope, our soul idioms also scarcely alert us to the centrality of love in the soul’s life. We have, to be sure, such notions as the <b>soulmate</b> (someone with whom we feel a great affinity, and with whom mutual recognition and understanding flows in a wonderful way. The term was coined by Coleridge (‘To be happy in Married Life... you must have a Soul-mate,’ (1822)), but the concept predates it (thus Montaigne writes of how, in the deep 'friendship which I'm talking about, souls are mingled and confounded in so universal a blending that they efface the seam which joins them together so that it cannot be found. If you pressed me to say why I loved him, I feel that it cannot be expressed except by replying: ‘Because it was him: because it was me’.’ (1580 - On Friendship)). Similar notions are those of the <b>kindred soul</b>, or <b>soul sister</b>. Yet such idioms don’t by themselves take us where we need to go. <br /><br />Love’s significance for our soul life can however be grasped more clearly if we ask whether we’d consider someone who had sold his soul, whose soul had become utterly corrupted, to nevertheless readily be able to love others? Or: could someone who was dead to love nevertheless give you a soulful glance? Consider too the unquiet soul, someone who suffers the soul’s dark night (i.e. who descends into depression): can we understand their loss of hope, their descent into despair, in abstraction from the question of whether they still enjoy a ready access to love in their heart, or whether they can trust in the intelligibility of the enlivening idea of their lovability, or whether they can trust that their love for another could be well-received? The answer to all these questions is, surely, ‘no’. (‘He who does not love remains in death’ 1 <i>John</i> 3:14; 'Love... has from everlasting come into existence from the soul aspiration toward the higher and the good, and he was there always, as long as Soul, too exist' Plotinus, <i>Ennead</i> III §5.9; 'My love is my weight' Augustine, <i>Confessions </i>XIII, 9).) Ilham Dilman notes: ‘when someone who has lived a life of pleasure discovers a limit to it in coming to care for others and he condemns his previous life, we say that he has found his soul.’ We intuitively understand, then, that it’s love - agape, caritas - which animates the soul, and that the soul is the site of love and hope’s mutual nourishment. Such hope as is of the soul is for a life lived out of and in receipt of love. (Borrowing from medieval philosophy, perhaps we could talk here of the ‘convertibility’ of such spiritual virtues as animate the soul?) To love is always-already to hope: it’s to want the best for someone and to want apt union with them. For one’s soul to be alive is for one to be alive to the significance of love in life, as a disclosive force which shows us the reality of others and which awakens us to life and to life’s value. We see something of this confluence or interpenetration of life, love, hope, and conscience in the soul when we consider that against which our souls rebel. Mrs Alving says to Pastor Manders: “Yes—when you forced me under the yoke of what you called duty and obligation; when you lauded as right and proper what my whole soul rebelled against as something loathsome…” (Henrik Ibsen, <i>Ghosts</i>). Our souls rebel against the lifeless and the loveless; if they do not rebel then they lose the hope that’s in them. The superego’s dominion involves the fear-based suppression of life, whereas the true conscience is the life-giving voice of love within.</div><div><br /></div><div>Within the Old and New Testaments, ‘Nephesh’ and ‘Psyche’ appear 753 and 105 times respectively. The King James Bible translates these as ‘soul’ in 475 and 58 instances; the New International Version has 110 and 25 occurrences of them - i.e. other words (‘heart’, ‘yourself’, ‘himself’, etc etc) are more often used instead of ‘soul’ in the NIV. So far as I know it’s typically understood as controversial to assert that Biblical writers were working with the idea of a soul separable from the body. In this talk I’ve not attempted to answer the question ‘what is a soul?’; to be honest, I find the question to itself be unclear. I may have a stain on my soul; and I may ask you to do something for my sake; it’s not clear to me that asking ‘what is a soul?’ is a clearer question than asking ‘what is a sake?’ (W V Quine, <i>Word and Object</i>.) For this reason I'm tempted to put it in the 'more-confused-than-deep' box along with its notorious box companions: 'what's consciousness? what's mind?' Doing something for my sake means: doing it to help me; my soul being stained means that I carry a life-depleting guilt within me. I will confess that I myself find it no less confusing to be asked whether my soul, than my sake, outlives my body. Whether it be swept up into God’s eternity on my death (and in this sense 'puts on immortality') is, it seems to me, perhaps another matter, as is whether someone may meaningfully pray for my soul’s repose after I’ve died. (You can wrong - e.g. calumniate - me even when I’m dead. Why then can’t you also meaningfully pray for my soul after I've gone?) Instead of attempting to make sense of and answer the ‘what is a soul?’ question, I've instead looked at how we use the word ‘soul’. Whether that use is Biblical or is what's met with in everyday discourse, what I’ve hoped to bring out is how the term indexes our life as love-filled, hope-full, life-receiving-and-giving, conscience-bearing creatures. (And hence too as hate-and-despair-ridden egotistical creatures.)</div><div><br /></div><div>With this mention of life, love and hope etc ... with this mention of 'the birth day of life and love and wings' (E E Cummings, 'i thank you god for most this amazing') ... I'm not trying to reductively analyse soul talk into what's intelligible otherwise, but instead suggesting how, in the soul, these themes are alive in irreducible interpenetration and mutual shaping. Tempting as it may be to cash out soul-talk in non-soul-referencing terms, there’s always then - as it seems to me - a ‘little wisp’ of meaning which then goes missing; the ‘subtle body’ of the ‘soul’ concept is trashed - or, as D Z Phillips <a href="https://philpapers.org/rec/PHIDTS-4">once put it</a>, we then risk losing the very soul of our soul language. In that process, I believe, we've lost something essential for our ‘anthropology’ - i.e. for our reflective appreciation of what it is to be a human being living a human life. Soul talk gains its value because of what in human life isn’t well captured by a simple enumeration of such other matters. Consider by analogy how, whilst emotional experiences (jealousy, anger) manifest themselves (not incidentally but) constitutively in this or that characteristic behaviour, even so the concepts of such emotions can’t be reduced without loss to a list of these behaviours. If articulating such a relation - between soul and feeling, or between feeling and behaviour - puts a strain on our analytical resources, then, well... so much the worse for our resources.</div></div></div>Richard Gippshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18001492312162861823noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3184393804521721596.post-40473334804070359492023-04-10T19:58:00.011+01:002023-08-07T12:18:49.392+01:00schopenhauer's prickles<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgAaXCKSTPsRrAdeDgoGJIRRbg4vgXPAsRXiLAVs_RhUBJb-JGMEYKNOXdGLhE5_86RxnGmyVhPUczF4biHQXNz2TbLq9oaeRM8zCBO6gVM2UfZ3DkT4B130Am1TqoyMo3GPO10NhibZFbYQCIQO6wcuNE0kBdw1W5UncQJ17kArfIlK3KRHqY8StCEBQ/s500/0465042864.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><img border="0" data-original-height="500" data-original-width="331" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgAaXCKSTPsRrAdeDgoGJIRRbg4vgXPAsRXiLAVs_RhUBJb-JGMEYKNOXdGLhE5_86RxnGmyVhPUczF4biHQXNz2TbLq9oaeRM8zCBO6gVM2UfZ3DkT4B130Am1TqoyMo3GPO10NhibZFbYQCIQO6wcuNE0kBdw1W5UncQJ17kArfIlK3KRHqY8StCEBQ/w133-h200/0465042864.jpg" width="133" /></span></a></div><span style="font-family: inherit;">It was Deborah Luepnitz's lovely work on the psychotherapy of intimacy and its dilemmas which first introduced to Schopenhauer's fable of the porcupines. In her book she follows the poet Molly Peacock who wrote of how 'there must be room in love for hate'. Their point isn't that love itself somehow involves hate, but that a relationship which is deeply loving is one that will <i>inevitably</i> sometimes anger or otherwise trouble us (unless we stifle the anger and become depressed). In Luepnitz's capable hands the fable - which she inherits from Freud - helps us tolerate and normalise the inevitability of our dissatisfactions with both intimacy and solitude. One of her patients writes <span style="background-color: white;">“When there is no man in my life, I feel empty and unlovable, and can barely enjoy anything. When I get close to a man, I feel smothered and pampered, sort of chubby with love. I long for time to think, to work late, to feel the edges of things, just to be. Is this sick or what?” After Luepnitz relates the fable to her, the patient says "it's soothing". I think we can - and should - all relate to this. The task of love is to do one's best within the 'tragic' back and forth push and pull of love to manage one's relationships - not to 'comedically' transcend this fray into the unreal bliss of a soul mate or self-satisfaction.</span></span><p></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white;">My point today is just that Luepnitz's, and perhaps even Freud's, is a redemptive (mis)reading of Schopenhauer's fable. But wait, I get ahead of myself! What's the story? Freud references it in his book on <i>Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego</i>, and it belongs to 19th century philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer's </span><span style="color: black;"><i><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parerga_and_Paralipomena">Parerga and Paralipomena</a>.</i><span> (By the way, those weird words just mean something like 'random addenda to my main work'. Odd how this book of his was the one to revive his intellectual fortunes!)</span><i> </i><span>First, though, the tale in Luepnitz's own words:</span></span><span style="background-color: white;"></span></span></p><blockquote><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhQIu5kDU7_Bg_nEXvt-AMUwuUTinuwiIkIbRB2GyLGfZfbaWpgjuaIY34DsH6CDku46YzUZJg3YxrciiMr6b6ln-f12710lGojQkgBxrYCtSFf3VglNMVW7kuPHgNhA3R29qMeL7CSSIN5Sv7UEZaNWrvGr6yoD8jH91T5rhptmGGIwum0CxJ663fwpQ/s375/9781718942400.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><img border="0" data-original-height="375" data-original-width="263" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhQIu5kDU7_Bg_nEXvt-AMUwuUTinuwiIkIbRB2GyLGfZfbaWpgjuaIY34DsH6CDku46YzUZJg3YxrciiMr6b6ln-f12710lGojQkgBxrYCtSFf3VglNMVW7kuPHgNhA3R29qMeL7CSSIN5Sv7UEZaNWrvGr6yoD8jH91T5rhptmGGIwum0CxJ663fwpQ/w140-h200/9781718942400.jpg" width="140" /></span></a></div></blockquote><i>A troop of porcupines is milling about on a cold winter’s day. In order to keep from freezing, the animals move closer together. Just as they are close enough to huddle, however, they start to poke each other with their quills. In order to stop the pain, they spread out, lose the advantage of commingling, and again begin to shiver. This sends them back in search of each other, and the cycle repeats as they struggle to find a comfortable distance between entanglement and freezing.</i><br /><p></p><p><span style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Note that in Luepnitz's hands we find none of Freud's somewhat unholy pessimism about the possibility of love not based in idealisation and narcissism, nor about a putative death drive, and so on. We instead find a beautiful humanistic hope-bringing realism about human life, one that holds out for the possibility both of developmental repair and of albeit fragile loving relationship in the midst of life's conflicts. We don't get to the redemptive neighbour love that René Girard rescues for us - where the withdrawal of projection, the work of conscience, and the end of the violence of scapegoating all come together in the radical proclamation of the divine innocence of a sacrifice to end all sacrifices. We don't get, that is, to the Christian solution to the group-based splitting and projection of which Freud is writing. Even so, what we find in Luepnitz's tragic oscillation around a 'comfortable distance' is something which offers a valuable ethic for psychotherapeutic practice.</span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white;"><span>Turn to the original Schopenhauer, though, and we meet with something really rather different - not only more pessimistic than Luepnitz, but also more dismal than Freud:</span></span><i> </i></span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;"></span></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><blockquote><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhNRmKZAdiPw-LrpVin9qG9gkDS3yDEDkAbDW7RVk632GP7Hkjfiqy2m3v_BLA-8OOMupc6aWF84-gXwrx5-XRyP2wWUw0fMWDZXwOHv5XomH-bMi4fvmZd36Vy4AesjA9_fmxVakVkCsqDq7TuS2Z-TBIkwEQMRJvCKyoUrd0eCPhyX5ueBYTz9JWEIw/s1360/61g27pRTmgL.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1360" data-original-width="907" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhNRmKZAdiPw-LrpVin9qG9gkDS3yDEDkAbDW7RVk632GP7Hkjfiqy2m3v_BLA-8OOMupc6aWF84-gXwrx5-XRyP2wWUw0fMWDZXwOHv5XomH-bMi4fvmZd36Vy4AesjA9_fmxVakVkCsqDq7TuS2Z-TBIkwEQMRJvCKyoUrd0eCPhyX5ueBYTz9JWEIw/w133-h200/61g27pRTmgL.jpg" width="133" /></span></a></div></blockquote><i>One cold winter's day, a number of porcupines huddled together quite closely in order through their mutual warmth to prevent themselves from being frozen. But they soon felt the effect of their quills on one another, which made them again move apart. Now when the need for warmth once more brought them together, the drawback of the quills was repeated so that they were tossed between two evils, until they had discovered the proper distance from which they could best tolerate one another. Thus the need for society which springs from the emptiness and monotony of men's lives, drives them together; but their many unpleasant and repulsive qualities and insufferable drawbacks once more drive them apart. The mean distance which they finally discover, and which enables them to endure being together, is politeness and good manners. … By virtue thereof, it is true that the need for mutual warmth will be only imperfectly satisfied, but on the other hand, the prick of the quills will not be felt. Yet whoever has a great deal of internal warmth of his own will prefer to keep away from society in order to avoid giving or receiving trouble or annoyance.</i><br /><p><span style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Schopenhauer, it seems to me, likely had - poor chap - what today we'd call a personality disorder. He was sent away to live with a relative from the age of 9-11. His father's drowning (when Arthur was 17) was probably a suicide; his mental health had been increasingly poor. Arthur's relationship with his mother was famously bad, later on, and when he reached 30 they broke off all contact.</span></span></p><blockquote></blockquote><i>My Dear Son, I have always told you it is difficult to live with you. The more I get to know you, the more I feel this difficulty increase. I will not hide it from you: as long as you are what you are, I would rather bring any sacrifice than consent to be near you. <br />I do not undervalue your good points, and that which repels me does not lie in your heart; it is in your outer, not your inner being; in your ideas, your judgment, your habits ; in a word, there is nothing concerning the outer world in which we agree. Your ill-humor, your complaints of things inevitable, your sullen looks, the extraordinary opinions you utter, like oracles, none may presume to contradict; all this depresses me and troubles me, without helping you. Your eternal quibbles, your laments over the stupid world and human misery, give me bad nights and unpleasant dreams...<br />Your Dear Mother, etc., Johanna Schopenhauer</i><br /><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhUIe6frkVv6sMOo07yHGk_W2qfaOyLe6kMn0BsP3r8L6f97tsnnYIUr9U6l0dEs9iFuctgzNc0_3bSKrHFLnUr0jWjdcpw6yc0m7UrHnDOFISpwDVlvzjf0XKAHJowH6wMWO3BUG0i9drPKxfPGNwbwpuzSjb4hD3td4LAgwqWTq3hZcJu2yXaXUbw-A/s500/41K6uj9TH+L.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><img border="0" data-original-height="500" data-original-width="318" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhUIe6frkVv6sMOo07yHGk_W2qfaOyLe6kMn0BsP3r8L6f97tsnnYIUr9U6l0dEs9iFuctgzNc0_3bSKrHFLnUr0jWjdcpw6yc0m7UrHnDOFISpwDVlvzjf0XKAHJowH6wMWO3BUG0i9drPKxfPGNwbwpuzSjb4hD3td4LAgwqWTq3hZcJu2yXaXUbw-A/w127-h200/41K6uj9TH+L.jpg" width="127" /></span></a></div><span style="font-family: inherit;">Poor prickly Arthur always </span><span style="background-color: white;"><span><span style="font-family: inherit;">struggled to make friends, and his work on the metaphysics of love reduces it to an unhappy reproductive instinct which unfortunately prolongs the misery of the human race. We see some of this in his fable too. In Luepnitz's hands it becomes something soothing for those committed to the idea of our life's meaning properly residing, at least in part, in one another. But in the original we have a miserable tale in which we've but 'a need for society'; 'empty and monotonous lives'; 'many unpleasant and repulsive qualities and insufferable drawbacks' (projection much?); a lack of 'internal warmth' (and if we did have this quality of internal warmth then we'd just keep own own company 'to avoid giving or receiving trouble or annoyance'). Rather than stay invested in albeit difficult genuine love - for that is simply impossible - we must, says Schopenhauer, be content with </span>the<span style="font-family: inherit;"> formality of manners and politeness. Now</span></span></span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: inherit;"> I've no clever final words with which to wrap up this little post, but I do just want to emphasise how there's something pleasingly reparative going on in the repurposing of Schopenhauer's fable by Luepnitz. Through Freud, Schopenhauer had a significant impact on psychoanalysis. And as psychoanalysis developed its understanding of the value of the therapeutic relationship and its internalisation, it also increasingly distanced itself from Freud's own later therapeutic pessimism. And as the fable of the porcupines is retold within psychoanalysis it itself becomes part of a redeeming narrative in which we might even, y'know, sometimes seek the warmth of one another's company, or offer that warmth to another, for its own sake and, for a little time at least, put both prickles and politesse aside.</span><div><p></p></div>Richard Gippshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18001492312162861823noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3184393804521721596.post-18364619981372711982023-04-08T11:10:00.010+01:002023-04-10T23:23:45.070+01:00better to be alive?<p><span> I read in today's <i>Analytic Philosophy</i> journal that it's <a href="https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/phib.12302?" target="_blank">better to be alive</a> than otherwise. I confess that, whilst I'm intuitively thankful for my life, and whilst I believe it right to be so, I find it hard to make out a cogent argument.</span></p><p><span>Why so? Because it comes intuitively to me to think that I need to <i>exist</i> in order for there to be situations that for me are sensibly considered better or worse. If there <i>is</i> no me, then there's no situation or predicament or state of affairs to be talked of. This is akin to Kant's claim, right-headed in my view, that 'existence is not a predicate'. (We properly predicate being red or shiny of a tomato; existence however is not a property, but the being - the sine qua non of any actual predication - of the tomato. (And yeh I know you can also play the utterly derivative/parasitic language game of predicating properties of imaginary tomatoes.))</span></p><p><span>The author - Christian Piller - invites us, in his very nicely written paper, to see the matter of the intelligibility of it being better to be alive than not along the lines of it being intelligible that sometimes it's better that we did the thing we did than the thing we didn't. We did wait to cross the road; we didn't step out in front of the bus. Piller, if I'm gamely grokking his gist, says: look, sure, the situation in which you stepped out in front of the bus <i>didn't obtain</i>. Even so, despite it not even obtaining, we can still properly say that it's better that you didn't do that! This is manifestly intelligible! (Agreed.) And so why can't we say the same of human life? I am not, Piller says, saying that non-existence <i>is</i>, but that it<i> would have been</i>, worse for me. Sure, he urges, if you didn't exist then your non-existence couldn't be said to be worse for you. Even so, he says, given that you<i> do</i> exist, from this standpoint, from the 'standpoint of your existence' if you like, your non-existence would indeed be worse - and worse <i>for you</i>! Oh, he also says that whether a life is 'worth having' can be understood in terms of what may or may not obtain within it: a life which involves friendship and health is better and hence, he says, more worth having than one which, ceteris paribus, doesn't. This, he thinks, is enough to get off the ground the idea of a good life being better than no life.</span></p><p><span>Against all of this I've a few gripes of different sorts: </span></p><p><span>The first is logical. I don't see how we're to gain reassurance about the dubious intelligibility of it being better to exist than otherwise from the manifest intelligibility of it being better to (actually) cross the road than to (subjunctively, as it were) be run over. It's rather the contrast between these situations that stands out for me. After all, either of the latter options requires my existence, whereas that's what's at stake in the former. </span></p><p><span>Second, I just don't grasp what's being said with the idea that, from the standpoint of an actually existing chap, any more from the non-existent standpoint of a non-existent chap, it's better for me to exist than to not. I mean, sure, if you ask me 'well Richard, would you rather carry on living or instead be painlessly snuffed out?' I'd go for the former. But the interesting question to my mind is what this amounts to. Turning it into one claim about preferences amongst others; assuming it enjoys something like the same logic: this in my opinion is unpersuasive. For what I'd suggest to be rather more natural would not be that we gain our reflective sense of what we mean by our desire to hang onto our lives, or to say 'yes' to life, or 'I value my life, I don't want to die!' from a more general notion of preferring one thing to another ... but that, instead, we glean our reflective sense of what it so much as means to say 'it's better to be alive than otherwise' from a close examination of those former affirmative expressions. </span></p><p><span>At this point I should own that there's another section of Piller's paper which I've not yet covered. So Pi<span style="font-family: inherit;">ller in fact largely accepts that, for many ordinary comparative judgements (it's better to be x than y), you've kinda gotta exist to even be in the game. But he says there are other comparisons which we can get '</span></span><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(28, 29, 30); color: #1c1d1e;">by entailment from non-comparative judgements'. Thus '</span><span style="background-color: white;"><span style="color: #1c1d1e;">if one thing is F and another is not F, then the first thing is, by entailment, more F than the second.' He gives us the example of his sister who wants something blue for her Christmas present. In the shop there are only two remaining items: a blue jumper and an audio file. The latter is not something which enjoys colour, so one might think there's no contest in the sense of: 'no meaningful way of raising the question' rather than 'no way to justify doing other than buying the jumper'. But no, Piller says that '</span></span><span style="background-color: white;"><span style="color: #1c1d1e;">lack of a comparison notwithstanding, the choice seems clear: I ought to buy the blue jumper. When something blue was available it will not do as a reason for buying the audio file to claim that there was not anything bluer than it.' I mean, sure, that's not a good reason! But so what? Piller 's idea is that for something to be worth buying here, it's gotta first be so much as in the game of being blue, and if the choice is between something blue and something not even blue we can say that whatever the former is it's better than the latter because it's at least in the running. </span></span><span style="background-color: white;"><span style="color: #1c1d1e;">Against this I'd simply say that I don't see that this notion of 'better' (through 'entailment from non-comparative judgements') meets any general application in our lives. Sure, sometimes we can imagine his sister saying 'Well, at least he listened when I said I wanted a blue thing!' when he buys her a hideous blue jumper. At other times we might imagine her, despite her earlier bonkers request for a blue item, baulking at his gift of a blue-painted turd over a non-coloured £1000 e-gift voucher. And I certainly don't see that it - this notion of 'better' that springs from a consideration of non-comparative judgements - meets an application in the case of 'it's better to be alive than otherwise'. The issue here is one that bedevils/vitiates the work of many analytical metaphysicians: of assuming without argument that concepts are to be grasped in the abstract and then merely applied in particular cases appeal to which will be by way of exemplification, rather than that we do well to gain a reflective sense of </span></span><span style="background-color: white; color: #1c1d1e;">what it so much as means to say this or that by looking first at what we're doing with our words, to what ends, in particular contexts.</span></span></p><p><span>Third, I want to register that the topic in question is kinda <i>important</i>. Does someone feel their life is worth living - or not? Are they someone on whose lips 'it's better to be alive!' ring true or false? Adjacent to the 'analytical' concerns of Piller's paper are matters of deep existential import which get barely a look-in. To make a truly wisdom-loving examination of that which is of interest to Piller would surely require that we examine what '<i>But I want to live!</i>' <i>means</i> on the lips of the recently diagnosed oncology patient. What are these words doing in her life? What's their expressive force; what their significance? So too if we think on prayers of gratitude for one's existence - and I mean, not just for all that's good in it, but for the simple fact of it. That I as it were made it through when many miscarried or aborted foetuses didn't: this might mean something to someone; its voicing may be part of a whole attitude to life, a whole ethic of (say) humility. An ethic that venerates life in a particular way. Here we're far away from the (to my mind) dubious intelligibility of 'Thank you God that you've given me a chance to be alive as opposed to never being born' which utterance is putatively intelligible simply in terms of the logic of certain kinds of comparisons we allegedly make in other contexts. (Think by the way on how morally ugly it would be to pray in supposed thanksgiving that <i>you</i> are one of the lucky as opposed to unlucky ones!) </span></p><p><span>Finally, I think that we'd do well to look at what the motivational pay-off and ethical cost of indulging the nonsense of 'I rather prefer being alive to not existing'. I suggest - this might be surprising at first but hear me out - that we might here not be a million miles away from why a certain form of the fear of death takes us over. Thus if we've first of all defensively abstracted ourselves from the world, to make ourselves invulnerable, and make our embodiment a contingent matter rather than an existentiale, then the idea of dying will start to seem not so much like the horizon of life but instead like something that happens within it. And that is of course both a comforting thought (it doesn't really happen to <i>me</i>) and a terrifying thought (it does however <i>happen </i>to me). Might something analogous be going on for (e.g.) Piller? He - recall - finds it both intelligible and often true to say that for the existing person, if not for the non-existing person, it's better to be alive than not. And I - recall - find my head boggling at this. (My bebogglement boiled down to: whilst it's clear to me that it's better for Geoff to have a hotel on Mayfair than for Margery to have a single house on Old Kent Road, we might yet be more envious than commiseratory of Tim who instead of joining in the Monopoly game had the perspicacity to go for a walk.) My suspicion, in other words, is not only that he who thinks it better to be alive than non-existent is confused, but that the fact that this confusion is obscured, the fact that it seems to the 'better to be alive' pundit to make sense to carry on as he does, may be because he's tacitly invoking a magically still-extant 'me' for whom it would be not so good to be non-existent.</span></p>Richard Gippshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18001492312162861823noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3184393804521721596.post-29026601756169884902023-03-27T14:00:00.009+01:002023-04-04T14:50:34.197+01:00gallagher on loneliness<p></p><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhr2MntkP5bFS9llUBhiF0I6dvU-X7N69xcr62el2piHZzMuTTGzwnw_GENbj3D5DcoSU7j1OAURApi7IL7q8T3ufGuUVfi8QbsMzBw8p1h7BD8fLDgb--UNflUTYHzs3O4vg-yM_LtpgOp1J7cqs4G6wnl3Dn6KOB7k_s5dXFy_d80o3NFs3P1og9MVA/s256/shaun_gallagher.jpg" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><img border="0" data-original-height="256" data-original-width="231" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhr2MntkP5bFS9llUBhiF0I6dvU-X7N69xcr62el2piHZzMuTTGzwnw_GENbj3D5DcoSU7j1OAURApi7IL7q8T3ufGuUVfi8QbsMzBw8p1h7BD8fLDgb--UNflUTYHzs3O4vg-yM_LtpgOp1J7cqs4G6wnl3Dn6KOB7k_s5dXFy_d80o3NFs3P1og9MVA/w180-h200/shaun_gallagher.jpg" width="180" /></span></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Shaun Gallagher<br /><br /></span></td></tr></tbody></table><span style="font-family: inherit;">In a <a href="https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11245-023-09896-4" target="_blank">new paper</a> Shaun Gallagher takes issue with the very concept of such loneliness as is putatively existential - i.e. an ineliminable, defining, aspect of our being. Against this he pits not only Heidegger's <i>Mitsein</i> but also Trevarthen's <i>primary intersubjectivity</i>. Along the way Frieda Fromm-Reichmann's conception of paper <i><a href="https://psptraining.com/wp-content/uploads/Fromm-ReichmannF.-CPS_Loneliness.pdf" target="_blank">Loneliness</a></i> receives a psychological critique. Gallagher's principal conclusion seems sound to me, but I'm dissatisfied with some of the steps he took to get there, so thought to write a little about it here.</span><p></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;">The high priests of existential loneliness, as far a<span>s I know, are Levinas, Jaspers, Booth, Mijuskovic and Moustakas. Jaspers (<i>The Individual and Solitude</i> p. 189) h</span>as it thus: <span></span></span></p><blockquote><span style="font-family: inherit;">to be an “I” means to be solitary</span></blockquote><p></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span>Levinas (<i>Time & The Other</i> p. 42) makes sim</span><span>ila</span><span>r noises:</span><span></span></span></p><blockquote><span style="background-color: white;"><span style="color: #333333; font-family: inherit;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgjr4tZbHWQlRQYwNV91ZFxHrva-N51I3jfWoM7J8b9JaJofproxA_5jq1vRl-x18W35HUV6Oadd5MPyaee0_BSCR9-9B-Wr2LkzyZfKc5hIOZMDBEthd_OVCz-anB7jQMJKsG4baKZmgYZG8jIzLGU6ymmtS3TF6SrZsyatc6kzmO738EYS6OaOsLnwQ/s1469/Emmanuel_Levinas.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1469" data-original-width="1024" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgjr4tZbHWQlRQYwNV91ZFxHrva-N51I3jfWoM7J8b9JaJofproxA_5jq1vRl-x18W35HUV6Oadd5MPyaee0_BSCR9-9B-Wr2LkzyZfKc5hIOZMDBEthd_OVCz-anB7jQMJKsG4baKZmgYZG8jIzLGU6ymmtS3TF6SrZsyatc6kzmO738EYS6OaOsLnwQ/w139-h200/Emmanuel_Levinas.jpg" width="139" /></a></div>It is banal to say that we never exist in the singular. We are surrounded by beings and things with which we maintain relationships. Through sight, touch, sympathy and cooperative work, we are with others. All these relationships are transitive: I touch an object, I see the other. But I am not the other. I am all alone. It is thus the being in me, the fact that I exist, my existing, that constitutes the absolutely intransitive element, something without intentionality or relationship. One can exchange everything between beings except existing. In this sense, to be is to be isolated by existing. Inasmuch as I am, I am a monad. [I offered a critique of this <a href="http://clinicalphilosophy.blogspot.com/2017/02/levinas-all-alone.html" target="_blank">here</a>]</span></span></blockquote><p><span style="font-family: inherit;"> </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: inherit;"><span>Moustakas (</span></span><i style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(51, 51, 51); color: #333333; font-family: inherit;">Loneliness</i><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: inherit;"><span>, p. ix) ramps it up even further:</span></span></p><blockquote><span style="font-family: inherit;">ultimately, in every fibre of his being, man is alone - terribly, utterly, alone.</span></blockquote><p></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white;"><span style="color: #333333;"><span style="caret-color: rgb(51, 51, 51);">Against these authors we may </span></span><span style="color: #333333;"><span style="caret-color: rgb(51, 51, 51);">contrast</span></span><span style="color: #333333;"><span style="caret-color: rgb(51, 51, 51);"> Heidegger who (<i>Being & Time</i> p. 156) wri<span>tes:</span></span></span></span><span style="background-color: white;"><span style="color: #333333;"><span></span></span></span></span></p><blockquote><span style="font-family: inherit;">The Other can be missing only <span style="font-style: italic;">in </span>and <span style="font-style: italic;">for </span>a Being- with. Being-alone is a deficient mode of Being-with...</span><span style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(51, 51, 51); color: #333333; font-family: inherit;"> </span></blockquote><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(51, 51, 51); color: #333333;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiztXSc9hEYEEDwuYielHyeCy8Bg-JK8Xy850HVRhMzdgFoxLsZEJR3VzZOnhNaw-pnGOkfFcLUvjv0z5XsG38qrMoedJI49irBOvbeQE7IAk7SgEguM2hBHNXpfUNgjOSubjx-_6-N_qOIgfBzuOoUA0I9DzeKV_ema-xspXlcBd0kn8DusSslLBaHdA/s987/Karl_Jaspers_1946.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="987" data-original-width="763" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiztXSc9hEYEEDwuYielHyeCy8Bg-JK8Xy850HVRhMzdgFoxLsZEJR3VzZOnhNaw-pnGOkfFcLUvjv0z5XsG38qrMoedJI49irBOvbeQE7IAk7SgEguM2hBHNXpfUNgjOSubjx-_6-N_qOIgfBzuOoUA0I9DzeKV_ema-xspXlcBd0kn8DusSslLBaHdA/w154-h200/Karl_Jaspers_1946.jpg" width="154" /></a></div>To be fair, Jaspers, whilst not stressing the ontological priority of Mitsein, also ends up not entirely in the existential loneliness camp since for him (</span><i style="caret-color: rgb(51, 51, 51); color: #333333;">Philosophy, vol 2</i><span style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(51, 51, 51); color: #333333;">, p. 14), solitude and being-with are equiprimordial:</span><span style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(51, 51, 51); color: #333333;"><span></span></span></span><blockquote><span style="font-family: inherit;">Solitude and communication; neither one of which is objectively what it <br />can be existentially. Objectively, communication is merely the relationship of interchangeable subjects who understand each other, and solitude merely the isolation of an atomized individual. Objectively there is either one or the other; existentially, both are in one.</span></blockquote><span style="font-family: inherit;"></span><p></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white;"><span style="color: #333333;"><span style="caret-color: rgb(51, 51, 51);">Like I said, against the notion of existential loneliness, Gallagher offers us Heidegger's Mitsein and Trevarthen's primary intersubjectivity. But what's his actual argument? It boils down to this:</span></span></span><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333;"></span></span></p><blockquote><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333;">you cannot have it both ways, i.e. posit both an a priori transcendental condition of being-with, which specifies a deep interpersonal structure to human existence, and a transcendental existential loneliness that </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333;">specifies</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333;"><span> the opposite, and treat these as in some way equiprimordial. It seems a </span>theoretical<span> contradiction... At best one could say, as Heidegger does, </span>that<span> one is derivative (or a deficient mode)...</span></span></span></blockquote><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"></span></span><p></p><p><span style="background-color: white;"><span style="color: #333333;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Well, that seems fair enough to me - but where's the actual argument? Well... we don't get one. What we instead get is a description of primary intersubjectivity - i.e. of the fact that, from birth, we are attuned and responsive to the gestures, movements, expressions, intonations etc. of others. But it's surely not too hard to imagine an existential loneliness pundit saying "Yes <i>of course</i>, I know about all that! But surely that's just empirical psychology! I however am trying to give you existentialia!"</span></span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;">As I see it, in order to effect a satisfactory critique of the existential loneliness pundit one first has to understand <i>why</i> he wants to say what he says. This will help one understand what (he thinks) he's getting at, and give one a chance to say what's wrong with the philosophical or psychological motivation underlying the making of the claim. (Gallagher doesn't do this, and it's what makes his paper somewhat unsatisfactory to me.) Why is it, for example, that people are apt to say "You're born alone and die alone" when, well, I'm pretty sure (how about you?) that my mum was there at my birth, and that one of the <i>utterly contingent</i> tragedies of our recent covid-19 lockdown policies was that many people were forced to die alone rather than surrounded by loved ones? Clearly these aren't the kinds of things that the high priests of ontological solitude are agitated by. Instead, I suspect, they are driven by such concerns as:</span></p><blockquote><p><span style="font-family: inherit;">i) Although primordial intentionality inexorably relates us to a world including to others, we must always, to be brought into relation with others, thereby also be separated off from them. The underlying (and surely correct) hunch here is that <i>identity is not a relation</i>.</span></p></blockquote><blockquote><p><span style="font-family: inherit;">ii) There are decisions that must be faced in life which, if you are to retain your human dignity, must be taken alone. Even if you decide to make a decision with someone else, that first decision - to make the second decision together with someone - must itself be taken alone.</span></p></blockquote><blockquote><p><span style="font-family: inherit;">iii) If we think of birth and death as a matter of shifting between different states of being, we might also think of this as rather like moving through a door from one room to another within the house of Being. And that journey - the thought is - can only be undertaken alone.</span></p></blockquote><p><span style="font-family: inherit;">Against these I'd suggest:</span></p><blockquote><p><span style="font-family: inherit;">i) It is indeed correct that, as we may put it, relationship individuates. But it isn't very helpful - or: it is unhelpfully hyperbolic - to articulate this individuation in terms of loneliness or solitude. Relational individuation is a condition of possibility of being - full stop; loneliness and solitude, as ordinarily understood, are intelligible only as modes of intrinsically relational being.</span></p></blockquote><blockquote><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgWjSTQicCWPshEdX1wQOCSLMhZA-jOmnojLrsjIJwx2KB5BeI-Wz2InAb5ygggi4oPTTnLrarMBUNnOHC-jNZkTWY7eE9qYCRufzhxx0t3CTySU3KnrTGCBMS02AoFOi0BSDXZUlC398sMG8hEKeXz7BWdmPSkqDmqqF6Qy5x3HbAqjdC2qTeQwi1I2w/s1639/Caspar_David_Friedrich_-_Wanderer_above_the_sea_of_fog.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1639" data-original-width="1280" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgWjSTQicCWPshEdX1wQOCSLMhZA-jOmnojLrsjIJwx2KB5BeI-Wz2InAb5ygggi4oPTTnLrarMBUNnOHC-jNZkTWY7eE9qYCRufzhxx0t3CTySU3KnrTGCBMS02AoFOi0BSDXZUlC398sMG8hEKeXz7BWdmPSkqDmqqF6Qy5x3HbAqjdC2qTeQwi1I2w/w156-h200/Caspar_David_Friedrich_-_Wanderer_above_the_sea_of_fog.jpg" width="156" /></span></a></div><span style="font-family: inherit;">ii) We make lots of decisions together without deciding to decide thus. Even getting a divorce <i>can</i> be a joint endeavour! It's true that we may sometimes have to step up and be the locus where the buck of responsibility stops. The hero's journey is in particular one of stepping up fully into a silverbackesque form of self-determination. There might (?) be something especially Western about all that. But whilst we can if we wish go all Caspar David Friedrich and stress this solo aspect of our lives, we might equally well stress the virtues of cooperation, mutuality, joint decision-making, dependency, faith, etc. It's ... not necessary ... to engage in such mood-painting; the profundity of the heroic existential journey shouldn't be mistaken for depth of ontological insight.</span><p></p></blockquote><blockquote><p><span style="font-family: inherit;">iii) We could picture life and death as different states of being, and of transitions between them as journeys. But we could also - and might even do better to - picture death as a state of non-being, and so also be happy to drop the journey metaphor. Now the matter of whether we are or aren't accompanied can devolve back to an ontical rather than ontological matter. Well, it can at the end of life; at the beginning it's kinda analytic, at least until we employ artificial wombs, that your mum's there. </span></p></blockquote><p><span style="font-family: inherit;">My own (psychological, ad hominemesque) view, for what it's worth, is that existential loneliness pundits were probably rather lonely people who existentialised their personal predicament and foisted it on the rest of us as an existentiale. Well, you can take or leave that! But a psychological matter on which I would like to elaborate - because I think it unfair - is Gallagher's treatment of Fromm-Reichmann.</span></p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjh0Eo5pEG0lCFsOGkE0W1Q0rx3ar_ghR6WzxY_Ro5AI1Mhv0iiAs2yeo0t-tfCtTFYb6_KtJjaU5nQSxE79-_H3p1yGY4yDKCEe_RJ9vm9UkB8AQrS53U5nLnoRWyRs-Ld0IkcwSjUmKegFbAIy_2C-dSzeLexS2w_50I_hDjKgORCFwbnpJBNHvf1Fg/s187/frommreichman.gif" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><img border="0" data-original-height="187" data-original-width="150" height="187" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjh0Eo5pEG0lCFsOGkE0W1Q0rx3ar_ghR6WzxY_Ro5AI1Mhv0iiAs2yeo0t-tfCtTFYb6_KtJjaU5nQSxE79-_H3p1yGY4yDKCEe_RJ9vm9UkB8AQrS53U5nLnoRWyRs-Ld0IkcwSjUmKegFbAIy_2C-dSzeLexS2w_50I_hDjKgORCFwbnpJBNHvf1Fg/s1600/frommreichman.gif" width="150" /></span></a></div><span style="font-family: inherit;">As Gallagher notes, Fromm-Reichmann doesn't mention existential loneliness. One might think, then, that she's simply no prophet of it. The conclusion appears compelling to me because the deep deep loneliness of which she writes - what I call 'loneliness beyond loneliness' - is seen not as any kind of basic setting of any human life, but instead as the tragic plight of those unfortunate souls who she and (if I recall correctly) her colleague Harry Stack Sullivan called 'the lonely ones'. These inpatients at Chestnut Lodge, note, suffered severe borderline and psychotic illnesses. To this degree they're not to be taken as paradigms of the human condition; they may be 'more simply human than otherwise' but, in their loneliness at least, they're stepping out of a human conversation which many of us happily remain within. But no, Gallagher says that her description of profound loneliness nevertheless 'comes close to how [existential loneliness] is characterised. Specifically, a default incommunicability is part of that description since the experience of existential loneliness is said to involve a non conceptual experience of nothing... An alternative explanation, however, is that silence about loneliness may be due to cultural/normative stigma'. To make this point vivid, Gallagher cites the experience of two depressed individuals who talked of how they experienced stigma and social anxiety regarding talking to others especially about their loneliness. </span><p></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;">In my view, Gallagher has here simply missed the clinical music. It's not that Fromm-Reichmann is writing about 'clinical loneliness' and that 'clinical loneliness' is whatever loneliness is experienced by whosoever becomes a clinician's patient or by whoever is given a clinical diagnosis. Nor, I suspect, did the schizophrenic patients she worked with suffer either from a difficulty of ordinary loneliness except ramped up to a higher degree or from stigma. No, these poor souls instead had so fallen into their loneliness that it had become for them a total condition, rather than a feeling that could be isolated or commented on. They have as it were become icons of loneliness; they've become loneliness itself. It cannot be thought about or consciously felt by them because it's not a trickle of lonely water running through them; instead the crystalline structure of lonely ice has frozen over their entire form. Just as a delusional patient cannot have insight into their delusion unless they begin to relinquish it, so too can a sufferer from loneliness-beyond-loneliness only begin to talk of loneliness when their capacity to think and feel, so disabled by their struggles to tolerate intersubjectivity whilst remaining self-same, have come back online. This is, psychologically speaking, a far deeper concern than that of which Gallagher writes. Even so it's hardly so deep as to characterise Dasein itself! In fact, I'd say, and against the romantic proclamations of psychotic seers, psychotic life is one of Dasein's paradigmatic deficient modes.</span></p>Richard Gippshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18001492312162861823noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3184393804521721596.post-61049080146193608762023-03-09T13:22:00.021+00:002023-07-04T14:46:05.865+01:00it is well with my soulWhat kind of relationship do you enjoy, right now, with your own emotionally charged experience? I mean: all this hurt, tiredness, joy, agitation, sorrow, worry, delight, anticipation, dread, guilt, shame, buoyancy, chutzpah: do you accept and honour it as a moment in the rolling seascape of your soul, or do you instead feel badly about (some of) it? Do you rebel against it and yourself? Do you wish it away? Do you think less of yourself for having it? Are you relentlessly struggling against it?<div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhk0h9NT7Ba__GF2l0m5CnTNmwMl5lypUvnly-e2RNuOy-jhoB7dHiWsjK1k_bKMZtprdBz1bwzY88P86LP9yZDcQ5YOiVb_AQ-3M_-D6p_XgAg26fuimg6vPi6uCBgNQpA1roJlOLU8qVdiNV2skAxUwVIAIWVluiTkG-0EaK6rwpsdNn-_nwsHl3J0A/s1140/robin-hood.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="570" data-original-width="1140" height="100" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhk0h9NT7Ba__GF2l0m5CnTNmwMl5lypUvnly-e2RNuOy-jhoB7dHiWsjK1k_bKMZtprdBz1bwzY88P86LP9yZDcQ5YOiVb_AQ-3M_-D6p_XgAg26fuimg6vPi6uCBgNQpA1roJlOLU8qVdiNV2skAxUwVIAIWVluiTkG-0EaK6rwpsdNn-_nwsHl3J0A/w200-h100/robin-hood.jpg" width="200" /></a></div></div><div>Zenists, Stoics, 3rd wave CBTists, and sundry others tell us something like this: We can't control the 'first arrow' of the pains that life inexorably throws our way. What we can learn to relinquish, however, is the shooting of that '<a href="https://grandrapidstherapygroup.com/second-arrow-of-suffering/" target="_blank">second arrow</a>' that we then reflexively shoot at ourselves: our reaction to our reaction. Passing sadness or worry get augmented into ongoing depressed mood when we refuse to accept them. Prolong this further and we arrive at what used to be called 'neurosis': the mind becoming perennially allergic to itself, caught up in inner battles with inner phantasms, no longer enjoying an open relation to the world. Left to themselves, however, and the first arrows soon enough drop out and our wounds heal over.</div><div><br /></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgbbKkgudmkl7qpQy6dItZuvfRYhZuZ8s-2cs5YtgVSdS_-bvgpTNP-gwXH3EcQdru4sZcQFX96nr_pUenKfvxblilrpiw-C57r4t38-J5rU2LLTfK4q9sAKYf48VNzXmULl3lKeylvNqerICeDij53iRES-FwXG2fzUY1C7my7km7Csq89gYVrUhUYxg/s235/horatio-spafford.jpeg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="235" data-original-width="178" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgbbKkgudmkl7qpQy6dItZuvfRYhZuZ8s-2cs5YtgVSdS_-bvgpTNP-gwXH3EcQdru4sZcQFX96nr_pUenKfvxblilrpiw-C57r4t38-J5rU2LLTfK4q9sAKYf48VNzXmULl3lKeylvNqerICeDij53iRES-FwXG2fzUY1C7my7km7Csq89gYVrUhUYxg/w151-h200/horatio-spafford.jpeg" width="151" /></a></div>In this brief Lenten post I want to retell the story of Horatio Spafford (born 1828) and the extraordinary moment of acceptance he achieved in the midst of great tragedy. Part of my reason for sharing it is to help resist the temptation to think that it's only if we go back to (the indubitably valuable resources of) pagan antiquity or the Buddhist east that we can find what we need to help us hold back the second arrow. (There may of course be aspects of the Christian faith that, as you see them, put you off from engaging with what else it has to offer! But my point here is simply to emphasise an aspect of the wisdom it <i>does</i> contain.)</div><div><br /></div><div>Horatio was a 'successful' American lawyer and property dealer who married his Norwegian wife Anna Larsen when he was 33 and she 19. Even before the fateful voyage of which I'll shortly tell, they suffered tragedy: the great fire of Chicago in 1871 destroyed most of his investments, and their son, little Horatio, died aged 4 from Scarlet Fever. The Spaffords decide to vacation in England, but at the last moment some important business affairs to do with the great fire hold Horatio back from boarding the Ville du Havre; he will follow Anna and their four daughters Annie, Maggie, Bessie and Tanessa (12 yrs - 1 yr) in a few days.</div><div><br /></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj5nKUd8EJ4WH7qwoqhtu9QutYbakrQKJOkSeIgKPtQgRXzp9RSqKVGdI-S_JMCigYze7rEy6vWrAS5Wo5hoemGWBRgG5sBVwhMKMbh6_-9I5oVSBU-bsa0heGM9TQOmrrg7Tqls384DJ3Yz_oDbCDTNoW7UkVRlXgem8RyAu3clYBFTz6T7Af_nhXYDA/s683/440px-Mrs_Anna_Spafford.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="683" data-original-width="440" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj5nKUd8EJ4WH7qwoqhtu9QutYbakrQKJOkSeIgKPtQgRXzp9RSqKVGdI-S_JMCigYze7rEy6vWrAS5Wo5hoemGWBRgG5sBVwhMKMbh6_-9I5oVSBU-bsa0heGM9TQOmrrg7Tqls384DJ3Yz_oDbCDTNoW7UkVRlXgem8RyAu3clYBFTz6T7Af_nhXYDA/w129-h200/440px-Mrs_Anna_Spafford.jpg" width="129" /></a></div>Mid-way through their journey, their steamship is struck by an iron sailing ship; Anna huddles and prays with her daughters; the boat sinks. Several hours pass and Anna is found unconscious, floating on a piece of wood. The children have all perished. One of the ministers with whom she was travelling remembers her saying “God gave me four daughters. Now they have been taken from me. Someday I will understand why.”Rescued and taken now to Cardiff in Wales, Anna telegrams Horatio: "Saved alone; what shall I do?"</div><div><br /></div><div><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjTpusnoSxNI5umGFiIzrqzn_nbH5-VlSFhDvZT_NZgDIhvWSMRcxwNlwhEEzAc5qGjRQf5lrK5Jh9Ff88IvLPXsVmSlZMza9f4adVENwRWGD4ngZG6NjFiH5p1TNmpYbBqCEBq3OErDHwJgGHOPStXKYjTMCek7CVel26A_vJfKNZkIwCVga445d4oFw/s400/Ville_du_Havre.jpg" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="290" data-original-width="400" height="145" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjTpusnoSxNI5umGFiIzrqzn_nbH5-VlSFhDvZT_NZgDIhvWSMRcxwNlwhEEzAc5qGjRQf5lrK5Jh9Ff88IvLPXsVmSlZMza9f4adVENwRWGD4ngZG6NjFiH5p1TNmpYbBqCEBq3OErDHwJgGHOPStXKYjTMCek7CVel26A_vJfKNZkIwCVga445d4oFw/w200-h145/Ville_du_Havre.jpg" width="200" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">the Ville du Havre</td></tr></tbody></table>Horatio follows right away and, mid-way across the Atlantic, is summoned to the bridge by the captain - who tells him that they are now over the site where his family perished. Returning to his cabin he's inspired to write the words of the hymn "It is well with my soul". Here's the first verse:</div><blockquote></blockquote><i>When peace, like a river, attendeth my way,<br />When sorrows like sea billows roll;<br />Whatever my lot, Thou hast taught me to say,<br />It is well, it is well with my soul.</i><div><i><br /></i>Later it was set to the tune <i>Ville du Havre</i> by the composer Philip Bliss:<div><blockquote><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="BLOG_video_class" height="178" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/ZYrL9ea1XUg" width="356" youtube-src-id="ZYrL9ea1XUg"></iframe></div></blockquote>What I want now to note is how familiarity with a culture and a faith can breed blindness to its human significance. The clear message of Spafford's hymn is one of taking up an attitude toward one's soul which connotes its inner movements as in themselves well. Whether he's feeling deep peace or unspeakable sorrow: <i>all is well with my soul</i>. The soul is working as it should. The second arrow can be left in the sheath.</div><div><br /></div><div>Later verses talk a good deal about sin, and again a certain kind of over-familiarity, perhaps especially <table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhXLWtrr4h71FzbqF5tDdDP2LbPgD8Js-_Y8WC8_xPiwTbxF5PNDoccmXTrWOvuv8O0_F73Vxrby3CCmNZK1p-6xcgBBosuTjyoB1GlF1eL3GBpiskA6ooOWHwAZgL0B07-erWMi09lBJ-j870665SIZzWXt4x7aKRwbNg09PjDhDVop-6wxKnhLBc-HQ/s850/service-mss-mamcol-011-0001.jpg" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="600" data-original-width="850" height="141" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhXLWtrr4h71FzbqF5tDdDP2LbPgD8Js-_Y8WC8_xPiwTbxF5PNDoccmXTrWOvuv8O0_F73Vxrby3CCmNZK1p-6xcgBBosuTjyoB1GlF1eL3GBpiskA6ooOWHwAZgL0B07-erWMi09lBJ-j870665SIZzWXt4x7aKRwbNg09PjDhDVop-6wxKnhLBc-HQ/w200-h141/service-mss-mamcol-011-0001.jpg" width="200" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">"Saved alone, what shall I do?"</td></tr></tbody></table>an over-familiarity with corruptions of such discourse, can readily breed blindness to its human significance:</div><blockquote></blockquote><i>Though Satan should buffet, though trials should come,</i></div><div><i>Let this blest assurance control,</i></div><div><i>That Christ hath regarded my helpless estate,</i></div><div><i>And hath shed His own blood for my soul.</i><br /><blockquote style="text-align: left;"></blockquote><i>My sin, oh the bliss of this glorious thought!</i></div><div><i>My sin, not in part but the whole,</i></div><div><i>Is nailed to His cross, and I bear it no more,</i><br /><i>Praise the Lord, praise the Lord, O my soul!</i><div><br /></div><div>Our first thought might be puzzlement: why has Spafford switched registers so quickly from talk of the trials of our lives to Christ's redeeming crucifixion? And what's this odd insistence anyway of linking a 2000 year old crucifixion to my own suffering now? Well, here's one simple thought: rather than perseverate on the idea of whether I ought to have thought or felt as I did, I can think instead on how all can again be well with my soul if I acknowledge my sin and turn to follow the redemptive light of Christ. This slate-cleaning is, in other words, all the motivation and understanding we need to not release a further kind of second arrow. Accept or reject the Christian theology - that's for you to decide for yourself. But notice the significance of sin's registration here: when I introduced the topic of the two arrows I talked of 'life' throwing the first one at us. The fact, however, is that often enough what pains us is not what life throws at us, but what we throw at it. It's this other, further, more encompassing, redemptive message of the cross, our forgiveness for as it were piercing Christ's side, of which Spafford's hymn speaks. So whether or not our first-order thoughts and feelings are in moral order yet anyway painful, or instead manifest temptation and so pain our conscience: trust in God's love for us, trust in our essential lovableness, and we can once again move past our transgressions and bear life's tribulations.</div><div><br /></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjPpvOFDHAvz0qG5z8p5WXZ4pfYbNnN5_QlqVJY1Zs6MmsRXx7TFbOhra4Q3VB2MBFG6_M8JaEAh75QAF6iFpPB_skqb57wTxGrUssYfraAkKhukJQhwGMLVdryewFAf18f4P1YqPv5OEq_xOTqYDfAEQsf400gkSm8DmrrNMHjWMeBYy_YfHFOuab0ZA/s392/spafford%20tomb.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="392" data-original-width="287" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjPpvOFDHAvz0qG5z8p5WXZ4pfYbNnN5_QlqVJY1Zs6MmsRXx7TFbOhra4Q3VB2MBFG6_M8JaEAh75QAF6iFpPB_skqb57wTxGrUssYfraAkKhukJQhwGMLVdryewFAf18f4P1YqPv5OEq_xOTqYDfAEQsf400gkSm8DmrrNMHjWMeBYy_YfHFOuab0ZA/w146-h200/spafford%20tomb.jpg" width="146" /></a></div>For bear them the Spaffords did. Another Horatio, a Bertha, and a Grace were born soon after. Then this little Horatio also died - of Scarlet fever at the age of 3. Finally pater Horatio moved away from his worldly interests (what we call 'success') and the family moved to Jerusalem where they founded the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Colony,_Jerusalem" target="_blank">American Colony</a>. This establishment carried out philanthropic work to people of all faiths in Jerusalem, establishing soup kitchens, orphanages and hospitals. Its mission continued until the Second World War.</div><div><br /></div><div>Horatio died of malaria in 1888; Anna continued with her philanthropic work in Jerusalem until she died in 1923. They were both buried in the Protestant cemetery on Mount Zion. Eternal rest grant unto them O Lord, and let perpetual light shine upon them; may all be well with their souls.<br /></div></div>Richard Gippshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18001492312162861823noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3184393804521721596.post-74821227919875266652022-10-09T15:26:00.011+01:002023-03-28T09:16:42.759+01:00on madness<h3 style="text-align: center;"><span> </span>on madness: understanding the psychotic mind</h3><div style="text-align: center;">Available from Bloomsbury in paperback, hardback, and e-book</div><div style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/on-madness-9781350192546/">https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/on-madness-9781350192546/</a></div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgwZTBOWd5mUw8AUzz0eG1YAN_RkDXAeRE1TZKc7Nqw8KfPKqVDThLmFebaS5uVwTWPONHkNwW5dEsIf2DEuwk511vkI-K6dGFfzJOZ59RJgjKRzv1H3QhW7_kooMJmDqKAuZcLG9CNEeMI2Bu16TPKPv61S_Ul_RPLKI4DAGF_0GdXsH_9Kv9J47Zh_Q/s640/FFD6B0A5-0D1A-4F54-AED5-9C7C7A298CF8.jpeg"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgwZTBOWd5mUw8AUzz0eG1YAN_RkDXAeRE1TZKc7Nqw8KfPKqVDThLmFebaS5uVwTWPONHkNwW5dEsIf2DEuwk511vkI-K6dGFfzJOZ59RJgjKRzv1H3QhW7_kooMJmDqKAuZcLG9CNEeMI2Bu16TPKPv61S_Ul_RPLKI4DAGF_0GdXsH_9Kv9J47Zh_Q/w283-h434/FFD6B0A5-0D1A-4F54-AED5-9C7C7A298CF8.jpeg" /></a></div><h3 style="text-align: left;">description</h3><br />Can we reach the psychotic subject in their delusion? Psychopathological theorists often try to find a way to characterise this subject's inner predicament so that their opaque utterances and actions will now rationally hang together. In this pathbreaking work, philosopher and clinical psychologist Richard G. T. Gipps demonstrates how such efforts at rational retrieval actually result in us setting our face against the psychotic subject in their distress.<br /><br />Bringing together patient memoir, psychopathological observation and philosophical thought, Gipps offers a profound alternative. On the one hand he shows how, by appreciating just why we can't locate rational order within psychotic thought, we can better understand what it is to suffer delusion and psychosis. On the other, he recovers for us the value of such expressive, motivational and symbolic forms of understanding as only become available once we've been turned away at reason's door. In such ways Gipps not only solves the psychopathological problem of delusion, but also shows us how to bear a truer witness to the psychotic subject in their brokenness, pain and despair.<br /><br /><h3 style="text-align: left;">table of contents</h3><br />Introduction<br />1. Mental Illness<br />2. Delusion's Rational Irretrievability<br />3. Reality Contact<br />4. A World of One's Own<br />5. The Divided Self<br />6. Self and Other<br />7. Hallucination<br />8. Disordered Thought<br />9. Psychotic Symbolization<br />10. The Politics of Insanity Ascription<br /><br /><h3 style="text-align: left;">reviews</h3><br />"'What is it for a mind to become ill?' In On Madness, Richard Gipps takes us on a richly textured philosophical and psychological journey showing, in a Wittgensteinian spirit, how delusion, as other psychopathological concepts, have their meaning only 'in the stream of life'. A work of philosophical psychopathology which, in resisting the temptation of definition remains firmly grounded in understanding." --Danièle Moyal-Sharrock, President of the British Wittgenstein Society, Professor of Philosophy, University of Hertfordshire, UK<br /><br />Gipps’s is a deeply necessary work, because it is the first book of philosophy to take seriously that madness and delusion defy positive definition. For the ground required in order to predicate of the non-sane the kinds of things we can normally take for granted is missing. The desire to say of someone who is suffering the severest forms of strangeness that she thinks such-and-such is typically, Gipps wisely warns us, dangerously over-reaching, running the risk, if doggedly pursued, of being itself a madness of method. This brilliant book retrieves the disturbing, disturbed, difficult reality of psychoses from beneath the layers of motivated metaphysical scientism that have accreted over them. Moreover, Gipps shows how the very failures of the various forms of scientism themselves often take us as close as we can get to understanding the non-sane. -- Rupert Read, Associate Professor of Philosophy, University of East Anglia, UK<br /><br />In this fascinating meditation, grounded in the thought of Wittgenstein, Richard Gipps argues that an adequate understanding of madness must first recognize the limits, perhaps even the impossibility, of any such understanding. Psychosis for Gipps is like the God of “negative theology”: indescribable and unknowable, approachable only through negation. His subtle critique of psychiatric and psychological concepts nevertheless illuminates many mysteries that are typically obscured by standard forms of explanation and description. -- Louis Sass, Distinguished Professor of Clinical Psychology, Rutgers University, USA<br /><br />Richard Gipps has produced a remarkable book that forces us to reconsider the rather easy definitions of madness that we are so easily drawn into, often quite unwittingly. Delusions are not just false beliefs in the house of reason, which might be corrected or easily translated, for reason itself is functioning here in a different way. Gipps has the advantage of being both a clinician and very talented philosopher with a deep understanding of Wittgenstein. This book will appeal both to psychiatrists and psychoanalysts who have an interest in philosophy and to philosophers who will see how examining madness brings fresh new ways of thinking into knowledge, reason and epistemology more generally. -- David Bell, Psychiatrist and Psychoanalyst, Former President British Psychoanalytic Society, UKRichard Gippshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18001492312162861823noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3184393804521721596.post-70320727975886760652022-07-26T21:55:00.009+01:002022-07-29T06:51:02.585+01:00do computers compute? do calculators calculate?<p>The question answers itself... a pedant may think. Well, of course. If what it is to compute is to enable us to answer our computational questions without ourselves having to perform the computation, then yes, they do.</p><p>But in themselves? Is there a fact of the matter, independent of our relationship with the device itself, a fact about the inner workings of a computer, that make it apt to say of it that it is right now computing this rather than another result?</p><p>It's not an idea I'd considered before reading Awais Aftab's latest response to our ongoing blog conversation. This is the<span style="font-family: inherit;"> part of his text that caught my eye:</span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="caret-color: rgb(117, 117, 117);"></span></span></p><blockquote><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="caret-color: rgb(117, 117, 117);">Bennett and Hacker said: “The computer calculates” means no more than “The computer</span><span style="caret-color: rgb(117, 117, 117);"> </span><a name="_Hlk103364752" style="caret-color: rgb(117, 117, 117);">goes through the electricomechanical processes necessary </a><a name="_Hlk103367480" style="caret-color: rgb(117, 117, 117);">to produce the results of a calculation without any calculation.</a><span style="caret-color: rgb(117, 117, 117);">”...</span><span style="caret-color: rgb(117, 117, 117);"> </span><span style="caret-color: rgb(117, 117, 117);">Unlike Bennett and Hacker, I don't think that it is simply the case that results of a calculation are produced</span><span style="caret-color: rgb(117, 117, 117);"> </span><i style="caret-color: rgb(117, 117, 117);">without any calculation</i><span style="caret-color: rgb(117, 117, 117);">; I think that a relationship between abstract mathematical entities is embodied in a physical system. The embodiment of such a mathematical relationship is independent of the place the computer has in human lives.</span></span></blockquote><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="caret-color: rgb(117, 117, 117);"></span></span><p></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="caret-color: rgb(117, 117, 117);">Why does any of this matter? Well, it may inform our sense of whether or not the brain - which is not a cultural artefact, is not a device the motions of which enjoy a meaning through their uptake in a particular cultural praxis - can be said to process information, calculate, etc. If a computer's state transitions can be said to embody meaning in and of themselves, then why not a brain's too?</span></span></p><p><span style="caret-color: rgb(117, 117, 117);">The notion is, to me, surprising, counter-intuitive, hard to make out. But let's try working with an example. We have a device in front of us which we use to make additions. There's 5 buttons we call '1', '2', '3', another we call '+', and a final one we call '='. There's also an LCD screen on which similar-looking figures are displayed by the computer. If you press '1+2=' the machine displays '3'; if you press '1+1' the machine displays '2'. (We can imagine extending this to more complicated patterns - e.g. adding a '4', a '5' to the buttons and to the display.)</span></p><p><span style="caret-color: rgb(117, 117, 117);">It's easy I think to see how, because of our use of it, the device can be said to be 'calculating the sum of 1+2'. And if in a dark room the cat stood on it, depressing the same buttons, and if we'd turned the light on we'd have seen a '3' on the screen, what should we say? Well, we might say that here too the device is yet calculating. Or we might not. (Take your pick as far as I'm concerned.)</span></p><p><span style="caret-color: rgb(117, 117, 117);">But what of the idea that it's performing calculations regardless of whether a display is plugged in? There are, the thought might go, 0s and 1s encoded in the calculator's operations. ... But wait, why call this or that electrical pulse a 0 or instead a 1? And how can we tell which pulse is which? I mean, it's easy if we ascribe the meaning to this rather than that pulse. But aside from such an ascription, how should we tell? </span></p><p><span style="caret-color: rgb(117, 117, 117);">And if we type in '1+2=' and it displays '3', how do we know what the relation is between these numbers in our number system and the actual numbers which the calculator quite independently of us has encoded in its workings? For example, perhaps from the calculator's point of view, as it were, it has just performed the addition '2+4=6'. So that our '1' is its '2'. How could we tell whether our '1' is its '1' or is instead its '2'? Or, for that matter, how do we know our '1' is not its '10', our '2' its '20' etc?</span></p><p><span style="caret-color: rgb(117, 117, 117);">For that matter, perhaps when it's helping us arrive at the correct answer for our addition tasks, it's actually making systematic errors according to the rules which, unbeknownst to us, are allegedly embodied in its system. Or perhaps its doing something quite other than maths? Or maybe the maths is just a hobby for it, or a spandrel of some sort, and the real task it's performing is artistic.</span></p><p><span style="caret-color: rgb(117, 117, 117);">What now of an abacus? Imagine a fancy redesigned one with 3 beads. To perform an addition you take, say, 1 bead, then another 1 or 2, then put them in a chute, and - so long as you have a certain gate opened that you call '+', the beads roll down and collate together where you count them up. You have to know, of course, that the beads stand for numbers, just as you have to know that the marks on the calculator screen are symbols. But shall we say that this device, independently of whether we are using it for addition, or whether a monkey is playing with it, has embodied within it certain mathematical relationships? Again, what are they? How would we find our what they are? We think of each bead as standing for '1', but what do the beads really stand for in themselves?</span></p><p><span style="caret-color: rgb(117, 117, 117);">I don't mean those suggestions seriously of course. It's just that I don't see how one would not be open to them if the idea of a calculator, or anything for that matter, embodying mathematical rules independent of the place of the calculator in our lives is taken seriously. My hope is that, by finding these implications of the idea of the contraption in question as performing particular calculations independently of their use in our lives, that very idea will itself come to seem rather less plausible.</span></p><p><span style="caret-color: rgb(117, 117, 117);">Perhaps it be said that all that it is for a device to calculate 'in itself' is for it to engage in certain mechanical transformations onto which certain mathematical transformations </span><i style="caret-color: rgb(117, 117, 117);">could</i><span style="caret-color: rgb(117, 117, 117);"> be mapped. ... 'So are you saying that the planets in motion, the tree with its sap rising and falling within it, and so on, all can be said to be 'performing calculations' so long as their motions can be mathematically represented?' ... Well, no, that obviously won't do. But perhaps what makes the difference between a mechanical system which is and which isn't a calculator is that it be capable of being used to 'perform' far more than one calculation. A pocket calculator which could only compute 1+2 would be a sorry thing, and we might baulk at giving it its (honorary or legitimate) standard designation. (Is it the limitations of the abacus that also make us reluctant to describe it in such terms?) But how about a bona fide pocket calculator that, say, breaks down after you've used it twice? Was it calculating? Well, perhaps we'd say it was since the very notion of it </span><i style="caret-color: rgb(117, 117, 117);">breaking down</i><span style="caret-color: rgb(117, 117, 117);"> presupposes that it now doesn't perform the capacity which... Well, which what? Which it was designed to perform? For which we used it? Or which it 'had in itself'? I think we might say what we wished here, so long as we made ourselves clear. </span></p><p><span style="caret-color: rgb(117, 117, 117);">But in any case I suspect that this latter possibility - this subjunctive conception of natural computation (<i>were you to</i> project onto the mechanical system such and such a rule, then...) - wasn't what Aftab had in mind. And it will in any case be possible to project onto the operations of any such system <i>any number of</i> rules (the above-stated problem of what number to pair up with the electrical pulses - 1, 10, 100? - in the calculator's wiring). Do we really want to say that a single burst of electrical activity in the pocket calculator is really computing any number (an infinity even?) of sums at the same time? ... Or if you imagine that the range of projective possibilities could be narrowed down to one for the calculator, now think of that messy gloop in your head where, presumably, many different physical 'realisations' may be had, at different times, for the same 'calculation'. Or wherein the same 'realisation' may be said to be component of different 'calculations' at different times. </span></p>Richard Gippshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18001492312162861823noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3184393804521721596.post-79745468872360694742022-06-24T08:51:00.008+01:002022-06-26T16:02:11.784+01:00parental love, parental intrusion, and love's diverse strands<p>Did my mother or father love me? This is a question all psychotherapists will, at some point, have heard a patient ask. The patient presents with some confusion, perhaps having taken the fact of their parent's love for granted much of their life. And yet, on recovery of their personal being, on dismantling of the adaptive self-presentation which they'd instinctively concocted to manage their parental relationship, they start to wonder. "That I ever so much as needed to concoct thus; that I was so stifled by a barrage of parental intrusion and control ... how could a loving parent have so radically failed to clear the space for their child's untrammelled personal existence?" The question is pressing: the self-presentation runs so damn deep into their psychological bones that even as an adult they're struggling to know they're not expecting too much, not being narcissistic, when at times they feel critical of and aggrieved by their parent. And to know oneself for unloved is after all a terrible thing - and many a patient will for a long time have chosen to continually deploy depressive defences rather than risk too much contact with that notion.</p><p>I think there are two important things to be said about this, things which are often simply <i>not </i>said or understood, but which <i>need </i>to be understood. So, well... so I'm going to say them. </p><p>First of all, consider how love's thread is composed of various strands, and how not all of these strands are available at all stages of life. The fullest forms of love show themselves in that of the fully mature adult. Here we meet with a complete set of: i) wanting to enjoy an appropriate union with the beloved; ii) wanting the best for them; iii) rejoicing in their existence; iv) being able to pull them into view as a distinctly <i>other</i> person, with their own values and needs and sensibility, and offer them ethical recognition in all of that (Iris Murdoch: love is the honouring of alterity; it is '<span style="caret-color: rgb(32, 33, 36); color: #202124;">the extremely difficult realisation that something other than oneself is real</span><span style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(32, 33, 36); color: #202124;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">')</span></span>; v) wanting some kind of reciprocation in i)-iv). But the younger child is not able to do more than i) and v). All going well they want to be with and share with their parent. Does this mean they're less loving that their parent? No: this isn't a quantitative matter. It's about the form of love which is intelligibly predicable of humans at different levels of maturity. The young child isn't able to fully understand what we might call the 'reality' of other human beings: they're constitutionally egocentric. That others have tastes and preferences that are not their own is barely intelligible to them. This egocentricity is no moral failure: it's not egotism. </p><p>Consider next that it's also the case that not all adults have been able to master iv). They relate - often in not so obvious ways - to others as if they were extensions of themselves. (This is most pronounced in those who have characterological troubles of a sort attracting Axis II diagnoses.) They struggle to find intelligible how others can have different values and preferences and sensibilities, and tend to find these other characteristics 'strange', perverse, or instead feel criticised by their very existence. ('But it's for your own good, James'; 'I just can't see it's <i>necessary</i> for Tim to spend so much of his time online'.) Relationships between two parents with such developmental disturbance tend to be codependent, narcissist/echoist, reclusive, and set against the wider world into which the lingering alterity in the relationship is projected. And this is all a clear, direct, and tragic consequence of not having been able to adequately individuate during adolescence. (We simply don't acknowledge enough how much pseudo-maturity there is in this world.)</p><p>So there's two important consequences of all of this. The first is that there's often no single answer to the question of whether your parent really loved you. In some ways they truly did, and continue to. They're generous, perhaps, with gifts and offers to help you out; they really do want to spend time with you. But in another sense, they don't. Love has several strands - there are diverse criteria for the proper predication of love of someone - and they needn't all be woven together at all times. The second is that this may be no more a moral failure on their part than we'd say that a young child who hadn't yet escaped the orbit of their innate egocentricity was suffering a moral failure. They<i> don't</i> love, in sense iv), because they<i> can't</i>. The ultimately apt response to learning of such a deficit is not ongoing anger at the parent - but pity and sorrow. Honouring your father and mother now becomes valuing their having born you, showing recognition for what they do have to offer, doing what you can for them from an emotional distance, and so on.</p><p>I have of course left out the question of the extent to which we are all morally obliged to seek our maturation, to seek to transcend not only our egotism but also our egocentricity. But I think even the most hard-nosed critic of the intrusive parent will have to admit that, whilst we do well to chip away at our egocentricity's coal-face, we can't be held responsible for not mining its deeper seems. To some degree, character sets in in late adolescence, and the blindness of she who can't bring the other into view is not wilful.</p><p>None of this solves the hard question of how to resist the regressive yet natural urge to continue: to try to get the longed for water out of the parental stone, to establish a mature loving relationship, or to indulge depressive defences. With the depressive option, you collapse back into a conception of the self which prevents you from sensing intrusion and control as such, instead taking the hit of the uncongeniality of the relationship and chalking it up to one's own egregiousness. And those who love their parents will after all want, as part of that, to be close to them. But: you can't get what you want; this is one of the respects in which reality is inevitably, inexorably, frustrating. And part of 'adulting' is, after all, making conscious and then learning to carry one's wounds with dignity rather than trying to heal them. </p><p>Or, well... the dignity is in its own way healing. But that's another story for another time.</p>Richard Gippshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18001492312162861823noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3184393804521721596.post-84274872041841758552022-04-28T07:04:00.012+01:002022-04-29T06:49:32.266+01:00contra aftab... again!<p>Awais Aftab and I have been having a discussion, via our respective blogs, about the intelligibility of certain notions in cognitive science. This stemmed from our opposing valuations of Anil Seth's book 'Being You'. <a href="https://awaisaftab.blogspot.com/2022/04/language-science-and-perception.html" target="_blank">Here's</a> his latest post; below: my response.</p><p><b>Orbits and Explanations</b></p><p>What's an orbit, and what in a celestial system is properly said to orbit what? Well, take your pick:</p><p>i) What's properly said to orbit what (the sun orbits the earth, or the earth orbits the sun) depends purely on a decision as to what we set as our reference frame. (This was the 'geometric' conception I was working with before.) Pin the frame to the earth, and the sun will be doing the orbiting. Pin the sun, or go with Newton and pin the 'fixed stars' (imagine they exist), and we'll now have the earth doing the orbiting. (Note that, on this definition, talk of orbits just represents the distance and orientations of bodies: perfectly circular orbits are not here a different matter than two bodies rotating on their axes.) </p><p>ii) What's orbited is always the <i>centre of mass</i> of a system of bodies, not any <i>object</i> in it. Thus the centre of mass of the solar system is - because the sun is so massive compared to planets and moons - fairly near the sun's centre. The sun wibbles its way around it without it ever moving outside the sun's circumference. The earth orbits this centre of mass from a greater distance; so it always 'goes round', if not 'orbits', the sun.</p><p>iii) What orbits what is <i>given by a grammatical rule</i> which says: when two bodies move around one another, the body which is <i>most massive</i> is that which is orbited.</p><p>iv) If the centre of mass in a system remains <i>inside</i> one of the objects, we say the object in question is what is orbited. (This is another grammatical rule.)</p><p>Now if I read him correctly, Aftab would reject i)-iv) and opt instead for: </p><p>v) X is properly said to orbit Y if we have an <i>explanation</i> for X going round Y but not an explanation for Y going round X.</p><p>For Aftab, 'because Sun is extraordinarily more massive than Earth, it has a much larger gravitational pull'. And because of which has the much larger gravitational pull, we have 'a perfectly good explanation as to why Earth would move around the Sun' but not vice versa.</p><p>Now, Newton's third law tells us that forces between bodies are equal and opposite. So earth's gravitational pull on the sun is, one might think, as great as that of the sun on earth. And so I'm not entirely clear what Aftab means by saying that the pull of the earth on the sun is less than that of sun on earth. But perhaps we should distinguish between<i> pull</i> and <i>force</i>. Thus we might now say 'Because it's <i>so much more massive</i>, that same amount of <i>force</i> from the earth <i>moves the sun but a little, whereas because it's so much less massive</i>, the same amount of <i>force</i> moves the earth a lot'. And 'pull' we define in terms of the force's effects. (A big man readily pulls a little child along the ground and not vice versa, despite the fact that the forces in play between them are equal and opposite.) But the difficulty with this is that it simply <i>begs the question we're trying to address</i>. For why should we describe the effects in one way (the earth moves) rather than the other (the sun moves)? You can't here appeal to their movements in establishing which pulls which - well, not without a crippling circularity. (The example of the big man and the little child doesn't contradict this, for here we've involve a third body - the earth - which we've already established as our frame of reference.) The dilemma I see for Aftab here is simply: i) if you appeal to<i> grammar</i> to do the work of establishing which orbits which, then the appeal to explanation is redundant. ii) if however you leave room for<i> explanation</i> to do its alleged orbit-determining work, then you'll just end up begging the question as to what shall be counted as moving (and so as to what we shall count as orbited). My own proposal is that we instead just make clear which of senses i) - iv) we're using and leave matters there.</p><p><b>Perception</b></p><p>Aftab tells us that 'Gipps seems to think' that 'how do we perceive?' 'is not a meaningful question'. I'm a bit puzzled by that. After all, in both of my previous posts I said that it surely made good sense to enquire into the neurobiology and physiology of smell, hearing, sight, etc. Why can't that 'how?' question be used to prompt such enquiries?</p><p>Now I do happen to think - don't you too? - that we'd need to find out rather a lot more of what was puzzling the utterer of such words ('how do we perceive?') before we could be sure that anything we said would be meeting their need. (After all, word strings enjoy such meaning as they have <i>only in particular contexts</i>. 'How do we perceive?' does not, in and of itself, invite any particular enquiry; its sense is radically underdetermined.) But it's surely not hard to imagine contexts - I already adverted to some neurobiological contexts in my previous posts - into which a word string like 'how do we smell?' or 'how do we touch?' could be inserted and in which it could constitute a meaningful question. </p><p>But perhaps here's the focus of our disagreement. There's a use of the 'how do we x?' question which asks which component actions we need to perform in order to succeed at action/task x. How did you plough the field? Well, I got the tractor out, filled it up with gas, attached the plough, lowered the plough into the earth, drove it over the field, etc. My thought is that, when you ask 'how do you x?' in<i> that</i> spirit, we're typically already at the end of the action line when we get to hearing, smelling, moving your finger, etc. At this point, other questions and other answers may find their place - for example, 'when you move your finger / smell the rose, what happens in your nose/brain/arm to make this possible?' Our interests will now typically be framed in physiological terms. Cognitive scientists, however, typically take there to be one or more intermediary levels of explanation here - levels that in some sense are still worth calling 'psychological' even if we're no longer talking about the actions of whole persons. It is about the viability of such levels that, I believe, Aftab and I are in disagreement. But, to be 100% clear about this: I'm not trying to rule out a priori that enquiries and explanations framed in cognitive scientific terms are possible. My method is different: it's to urge that those who posit such a level a) aren't clear about what they mean, and b) rather look as if they've got in an unwitting muddle. (The difference between 'you're talking nonsense!' and 'might you say what you mean, because so far as I can tell you're not using words in the normal way here?' should I hope be obvious by now.)</p><p><b>Prediction</b></p><p>The terms in which Aftab articulates this intermediary level are 'information', 'inference', and 'prediction'. It's not, as he puts it, that the brain makes (Bayesian) inferences or predictions or processes information in the<i> ordinary</i> sense of those terms. Instead it does something <i>analogous</i>. So, what are these analogous senses? Seth didn't tell us in his book, and I've not yet found ready elucidations in the cognitive science literature. Now, Aftab doesn't tell us what it is for a brain to make something like an inference, but he does offer a suggestion as to what it might be for it to make something analogous to a prediction. This is <i>predictive text on a phone</i>.</p><p>If I understand Aftab right, then the idea is that the brain may be said to make predictions in the same sense that the phone makes predictions when we're texting. It's not that the brain predicts in the normal sense of 'predict', since otherwise we'd be in the peculiar business of trying to explain<i> our</i> ability to, say, make predictions in terms of our <i>brain's</i> ability to, er, make predictions - which would kinda be a non-starter. (It'd be like positing representations to explain how we see things - when the notion of a representation, if it's being used in anything like the <i>ordinary</i> sense, is clearly of something which itself needs to be seen. Or like explaining procedural knowledge in terms of the possession of theoretical knowledge which we'd have to know what to do with... etc. etc.) Instead, the brain 'predicts' in the sense of 'predict' that's in play when we talk of the phone predicting. Well, what is this sense, and is this a realistic suggestion?</p><p>Consider an online or paper dictionary: type in / look up 'arbo' and it will (let's imagine) show an alphabetical list like 'arboreal', 'arboriculture', 'arborization' ... etc. When we use predictive text, though, the order of words appearing on the screen isn't alphabetical, but instead depends on how often we've personally used them before (and how often we've used them after the previous word you've just written, etc. etc.). It's this difference - from a pre-programmed static order to a dynamically updated order - that gives our talk of the phone 'predicting' its sense.</p><p>I don't know that any particularly clear intuitions exist regarding what happens if this 'prediction' no longer displays. I mean: imagine that the problem is just with the output to the screen: might we say the phone is still predicting text? And at what point of failure in matching displayed word with intended word do we say that the phone is no longer predicting? Is it making bad predictions then, or just not predicting? And of course it's not that the phone <i>knows</i> what a word is, <i>knows</i> that you're typing on it, has <i>any</i> kind of orientation towards the future, can <i>read or speak or write</i>, has any genuine <i>competencies</i>, knows a <i>language</i>, can <i>try or not try</i> to do anything, etc. Speaking and writing - and ordinary predicting - are activities that go on for beings with a social form of life, and not only does the phone not enjoy sociality - it's not even alive. The phone has no praxis: it's not oriented to the truth; it's not engaged in intentional actions, since it has no ends other than those set by the programmer or those for which it's employed by the user; it doesn't actually follow or fail to follow rules - though <i>we</i> of course can describe its activity by using a rule (i.e. it behaves in accord with, rather than actually follows, rules); it only gets things 'wrong' or 'right' in an utterly derivative sense - i.e. in relation to <i>our intentions</i> to write this or that word; it can't <i>think thoughts</i>, and so the 'predictions' it makes aren't instances of thought; it <i>understands</i> (and <i>misunderstands</i>) nothing. But that's all fine of course. We don't mean that the phone is <i>really</i> making predictions in the normal sense. Predictions, after all, are <i>actions</i>, whereas all the phone (and, for that matter, the brain) has going on in it are instead (and as Aftab himself alludes to) <i>happenings</i>.</p><p>Now, Aftab says that what we have, when talking of predictive text, is nevertheless an <i>analogical rather than metaphorical</i> sense of 'predict', and that it's 'similar enough' to what we do when we think about what will happen and issue an actual prognostication. I confess I'm not quite sure what to make of this given both the myriad dissimilarities and the utterly derivative, artifactual, sense in which a phone 'predicts' anything. But perhaps the clue is in what Aftab also says: models of celestial bodies only make predictions of the planets' positions in a metaphorical sense, and to say of a pancreas that releases insulin (or whatever it does) in proportion to what's consumed rather than 'waiting' to detect blood sugar levels (I've no idea how it works; just imagine, ok!) is to indulge a 'pure metaphor'. In these situations there's 'nothing like prediction actually happening (as far as we know)'. .... But<i> why</i> is it that we say that the phone is doing something <i>like</i> predicting but that (my imagined) pancreas is not? Well, the only disanalogy I can see between them is that what the phone is involved with, even though of course it knows nothing of it (since it's not a knower), is semantic information or meaning. The marks on the phone's screen count as information because of how we relate to them, because of the place this artefact enjoys in our rich communicative, social, lives. </p><p>The question still standing, now, is whether the brain could make predictions in something like this sense in which the phone predicts. And the issue I see with this suggestion is that there's an important sense in which we don't<i> use</i> our brains to think or smell. Now, sure, and of course, you'd have a hard job thinking or perceiving without a brain! And I don't mean to turn my face against idioms like 'use your brain for goodness sake!' That's not my point. What <i>is</i> my point is that the significance of the phone display really is a function of the phone having a role as an artefact within our discursive form of life. The significance derives from that use. The brain, however, has no such role. We can't see or hear or smell it or what's going on in it; we can't handle it; it's not a tool. It's part of us, an organ inside us, rather than something to which we, the 'whole us', stands in a meaning-conferring relation. Meaning is not conferred by us on our own brain activations: the activations are not used; they've merely a causal, rather than a meaningful, role in our normative practices.</p><p>In short, the relationship between brain stimulations and human psychological activity is quite unlike that between phone displays and human psychological activity. (This, in effect, is precisely why the functionalist notion of 'brain as computer' failed all those years ago.) Whilst artefacts enjoy a derivative form of intentionality, organs don't. However we ought to articulate the relationship between events in my <i>noggin</i> and the thoughts <i>I </i>have, analogising with artefacts won't do it.</p><p><b>Information</b></p><p>During his discussion Aftab suggests that 'maybe, just maybe' the brain makes something analogous to inferences about what is in the world around it. He doesn't delineate this analogous concept directly, instead choosing to focus on something he calls a 'physical' as opposed (presumably) to an ordinary, 'semantic', sense of 'information'. What is this 'information'? Information, in the sense in which, say, the brain can be said to process information, is present if the</p><blockquote>state of a system at one point in time has a discernible relationship with the state of a system at any other time (e.g. you can use an equation to calculate the state of a system at one point given the state of the system at another point). In the case of perception, let's say I see a tree in front of me, and then I copy the shape of the tree on a piece of paper. We can think of this in terms of flow of 'information' -- there is a relationship between the physical state of the tree, the physical state of my brain, and the physical state of the piece of paper.</blockquote><p>The 'system' here is presumably the tree-brain-paper system. To offer another example: the longer you leave a pizza in the oven, the less 'information' it eventually contains as to what toppings (vegetables, cheeses, microbes, etc.) were on it when you put it in. Information in this sense is, note, relative to what's <i>discernible </i>by some or other observer. (It may also be something like Shannon-information, another non-semantic kind of 'information' which cognitive scientists have said is relevant to the study of brain processes.) </p><p>Now it seems very likely to me - despite Wittgenstein's <a href="http://inamidst.com/stuff/witt/process">Zettel §610</a> - that there'll be physical-information 'about' (i.e. reliably correlated traces of) the environment 'in' the brain. There's presumably no little mouse <i>neurone</i> that lights up whenever you see or smell a mouse, but there will be brain activation <i>patterns</i> which <i>in some way or other</i> map onto both the objects around one which are causally impacting on the senses and onto what perceivers take themselves to perceive. As Aftab rightly says it's the task of neuroscience to work out these relations between sensory stimulations and perceptual reports / perceptually-informed activity.</p><p>What I can't yet see, however, is that this notion of physical information is going to get us anywhere when it comes to making sense of what it is for a brain to (in some or other similar-to-our-normal-use-of-the-terms sense) make<i> inferences or predictions</i>. After all, what inferences in the ordinary sense have to do with precisely is information in the semantic sense. Yet here we're all agreeing that there's no ordinary, semantic, information in the brain.</p><p>This, then, is the difficulty I see for the cognitive scientific project as it's typically spelled out. On the one hand it's urged that the brain is making predictions, inferences, etc., not in a metaphorical sense but in something <i>like</i> the literal sense. To support this it's pointed out that artefacts like computers and phones do after all make something like predictions, process information, etc. However then when it's pointed out that these artefacts are only said to engage in meaning-related activity in a derivative concessionary sense, because of the place we confer on them within our normative practices, and that the brain enjoys no such role - its role being instead its causal contribution to our capacity to engage in such practices - then notions of information etc which don't have to do with ordinary meaning are instead invoked. But the difficulty now is that <i>causal operations on meaningless physical information</i> look simply nothing like predictions and inferences in anything like their ordinary forms.</p>Richard Gippshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18001492312162861823noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3184393804521721596.post-52168750519974269582022-04-13T13:07:00.021+01:002022-04-29T16:48:04.774+01:00nota bene<div><span style="font-size: xx-small;"><br /></span></div>I don't know about you, but the reason I often make <i>notes</i> after psychotherapy sessions is because I need <i>aides-memoires</i>. I've about 18 patients - in my private psychotherapy practice - at any one time; most of them attend just once a week. And sometimes they'll say something, or I'll think of something during or after the session, that I want to make sure I hold onto for later lest it should then prove relevant. ... Or they'll share the first name of their new girlfriend or pet tortoise or arch enemy, and I'll think it a good idea to jot that down since, truth be told, I'm not always very clever with names. ... What's more, I suffer from migraines, and these impact my memory formation and recall - so if I've a migraine I'll tend to write down a little more of what we talked about in the session. ... Occasionally I'll jot down something which, it seems to me after the session, is rather important - yet which keeps evading both my patient's, and my own, consciousness when we meet. And if, on a rare occasion, I feel I have to contact another professional - perhaps my patient is becoming psychotic or suicidal, say - I'll make a note of doing that too. ... Oh: early on in therapy I'll sometimes use the notes to sketch out a tentative 'formulation' - i.e. I sketch out something of my sense of what might be going on for the patient. This can, I think, help me organise my thoughts, although I confess I've not tried comparing times when I've written this out with times when I've not to see which came out best. (I mean, how could one even set about doing that in a scientific manner?) ... As well as documenting these things - which can take two or three sentences, yet may range between three words and a page of A5 - the only other things I ever document about my patients are: when they attend, whether I've invoiced them, whether they've paid - and of course I'll somewhere note their contact details.<div><br /></div><div>These notes are locked in a drawer in my consulting room (which, naturally, is also locked). Nobody gets to see them except me. Or, well: I might on occasion share something in them with the patient - if, say, I've sketched a formulation in a diagrammatic manner. But really they'd not be of use to anyone else, including the patient, since what they're designed for, their <i>whole purpose</i>, is, as I said, to function as aide-memoires for <i>me - </i>and so they're replete with the requisite shorthand and clinical terminology to effectively support that end. </div><div><br /></div><div>Not only must nobody else ever look at them, since they contain information disclosed in the privacy of the consulting room, but nobody else even need be able to read or understand them - since, like I said, the sole function for which I make notes is to support the therapeutic process. Further, nobody pays me to write them: the patient pays for, and receives, the 50 minute sessions; what they take away with them is what obtains during the session. Yet it seems to me that making them occasionally, sometimes, supports the therapeutic process, and probably doesn't interfere with it too often (I don't <i>think </i>I get too fond of my own ideas in that way, and so am not too worried about overly-organising my thinking about the patient - although to be fair this may <i>sometimes</i> happen: the dangers of not 'eschewing memory or desire' as Bion had it are never too far away)... and so I make them.</div><div><div><br /></div><div>Now all of that seems to me rather straightforward. And yet when we turn to the advice, instructions, rhetoric and rules of the bodies and bureaucracies which govern psychologists' practices, something rather different sometimes shows its face. The British Psychological Society - a professional body which no longer regulates psychologists' practice, but which many UK psychologists still belong to - tells us that the notes must only be 'of the highest standard required'. Given the actual requirements I have of my notes, that seems fair enough. But it then says that, even for private practitioners, these notes must be 'auditable', and must be 'accessible and useable by clients who have requested copies'. They should also 'serve their primary purpose...', which in my case I've documented above, '...in recording the care of individuals through the work of the clinician.' The impression one rather gets is that it's somehow assumed that the reason why you make notes is to record what takes place in the sessions in a way that's auditable by others and accessible to the patient. Yet, well: why?! And what if that's <i>not</i> your reason?! I can report that ... wait a moment while I screw my 'reflective scientist practitioner' head on... this just makes little sense. As I'll shortly describe, what in psychology we call the 'primary' or 'work' task - the actual legitimate and legitimating point of the notes - here risks drifting from view, and something else seems to take its place. Oh, I forgot to note that, according to the BPS, both 'supervisees and supervisors should record information discussed in supervision.' And all notes 'should always be signed and dated'. (I can't imagine why I'd sign my notes, nor why I'd want to document all the 'information' my supervisees provide me with during supervision.)</div><div><br />Or take the Health and Care Professions Council's (...these guys actually do regulate practitioner psychologists these days...) <a href="#">instructions</a> that 'you have a professional responsibility to keep full ['comprehensive'], clear ['comprehensible'] and accurate records for everyone you care for, treat or provide other services to.' Why? Well, the reasons given include to 'ensure service users receive appropriate treatment that is in their best interests' (I don't see how documenting the rubbish treatment you provide makes that treatment any less rubbish); 'meet legal requirements or respond to Freedom of Information or Subject Access Requests' (I don't see how you can comply better with FoI requests if your notes are fuller; in fact it'd be rather easier to comply if you had hardly any at all); and 'evidence your decision-making processes if later queried or investigated' (decision: to provide psychotherapy? to make a joke ten minutes into the session?). They do at least tell us that 'what records you need to keep, in what format and for how long, varies depending on the setting you are working in and the subject matter of those records.' So, good: there is that! But even so, what I understand to be the actual purpose of psychotherapy notes, and the reasons the HCPC offers for making them, rather seem to here be pulling apart one from the other. The spectre haunting these recommendations seems, to me, to be one of defensive practice, of documenting what's said and done in the clinic so that later you could justify yourself before another, or so that someone else could reconstruct what you said or did from these notes. And, again: this really isn't how notes function for a - or at least, for this - private psychotherapy practitioner. How many acts which are naturally and properly described as resulting from 'decision making processes' do you actually engage in, for example - other than that of taking on the patient for psychotherapy in the first place? Or, if we expand the grammar of 'decision' to include any intentional act such as a speech act, then how could anyone begin to note down the vast panoply of 'decisions' they make in any one session? (For what it's worth I'd submit that if you're engaging in decision processes properly so called, then you probably aren't actually engaging your<i> self</i> as the therapeutic tool, and so may not even be providing genuine psychotherapy in the first place. You're probably instead in something like an 'intervention'-providing business.)</div><div><br /></div><div>Now perhaps we shouldn't make too much of the above-described recommendations. Maybe they're only <i>really</i> apt for institutional settings, for example, so can be safely ignored. (If so, it'd be helpful if the organisations in question would say as much, and acknowledge that a requirement for notes that are both comprehensive descriptions of session contents, and comprehensible-to-non-psychologists, is hardly going to be legitimate in much of the private practice context.) Furthermore, the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) is explicit that records must only ever be 'limited to what is necessary in relation to the purposes for which they are processed' (this they call ‘data minimisation’). And <i>my </i>purpose in making my notes is, as I said, to help me hold in mind certain details from session to session, especially those which I'm likely to forget, lest they should later be relevant. To record anything else from the session rather risks going against the ICO's legal guidance, given the <i>actual</i> purposes I have.<br /><br />Rather worse failures of fit between the actual clinical purpose of psychotherapy notes, and the kinds of expectations which outsiders seem to want to impose on them, can be found when we consider the legal context. Take, for example, the instructions provided by the aforementioned quango, the ICO, which organisation aims to implement the law contained in the data protection and freedom of information acts and regulations, the ambition being to 'uphold information rights in the public interest, promoting openness by public bodies and data privacy for individuals'. That all sounds good in principle (although psychologists of all people shouldn't underestimate the psychologically, socially, and economically toxic effects of bureaucratisation). We do, after all, want to make sure that we don't get rogue practitioners who fail to respect their patients by failing to keep their therapy notes utterly private. But when we look at their guidelines, what we soon find is something rather different. In particular we find a rhetoric of 'data' and of its 'processing' which, according to the definitions they give, makes 'data controllers' of private practitioners. </div><div><br /></div><div>And what is this 'processing'? Well, processing means, inter alia, 'collecting, recording, organising, storing, using, retrieving, altering, erasing, disclosing'. And 'data' means 'any detail [sic] about a living individual that can be used on its own, or with other data [sic!], to identify them.' (This rather reminds me of the hopeless Nazi answer to 'Q: What is a Jew? A: <i>A Jew</i> is someone whose grandmother <i>is a Jew</i>...' Or, for that matter, of the equally absurd: 'Q: What is a woman? A: <i>A woman</i> is someone who identifies as... <i>a woman</i>'.) One might think: phew, all this only applies to 'data' which is 'processed' on a computer... so my hand-written notes are exempt. But, no, even an email from a patient counts as 'data', and emails are obviously constituted and accessed electronically. Furthermore, if you plan to put your paper records 'on a computer (or other digital device)' or if you 'file them in an organised way' then they too count as 'data'. Here, I think, may be a relevant out: after all, can they really mean that if I just stuffed my patient notes in a jumbled sack, I'm not subject to the law in the way that someone who had each patient's notes in a singular file would be? In other words, perhaps 'organised way' here means something like: 'supports searches across records'. But well, who's to say? One thing is clear: the ICO website doesn't say what it means by 'organised'. (I suspect that 'organised' here means 'enables identification', so that it's here rather an empty concept.)</div><div><br /></div><div>One might think: phew, the ICO only governs the activities of organisations, and being a 'sole trader' one is, by definition, not an organisation (since that term refers to an 'organised group of people with a particular purpose'). But no, the ICO (mis)use this term to 'include all data controllers, including sole traders'. So, well, fellow controllers, that's you and me.</div><div><br /></div><div>OK, so let's imagine that I and my peripatetic violin-teaching friend (who communicates with her pupils by email to arrange sessions; has records of their addresses and session times; makes notes of what pieces and techniques they're practicing at the moment) are indeed data controllers. (A difference between she and I, though, is that as a psychologist I also 'process' 'special category [i.e. more personal, more sensitive] data' which is (in some way I confess I don't understand) more protected than ordinary data.) What of it? Well, the first thing to note is that, if one is indeed a fat controller, then one has to pay the ICO a fat fee of £40 a year. What's this fee for? What does one get for it? What do one's patients get for it? ... Well, all I'll say is that I could find <i>nothing</i> approaching an answer to these questions when browsing their extensive website. And what resources do they have for me, a psychologist, on their website? Well, type in 'psychologist', 'psychology' or 'psychotherapy' in their search function, and you get nothing back that's relevant to private practitioners. There's plenty of information there that might be useful to bona fide organisations that are in the <i>business</i> of actually, you know, <i>collecting data</i>. But nothing for the private psychological practitioner. Again, as with the suggestions and instructions from the BPS and HCPC, the problem here seems to be that the guidelines have not been constructed with the private practitioner therapist in mind. Given this I'd say it's questionable whether one should register with them. And yet, they nevertheless appear to command a near universal agreement from professional bodies that psychologists and other mental health professionals delivering psychotherapy in individual private practice should register with the ICO and pay the annual fee. (The BACP tells its members they should do both; the UKCP tells its members they should just do the latter.)</div></div><div><br /><div>I want to say a little more about this 'data' that the ICO tells me I 'control'. So a patient may, during or after treatment, make the request to see their data or have it erased. Data, recall, include the information about when they attended, their contact details (... don't delete these before replying to the request...), the contents of the notes, etc. Now, one reason you might choose to document what you say and do in psychotherapy sessions has to do with a patient who later decides to sue you for bad treatment; you could then say 'well look, I did and said this, as I've written down here, and this is surely all well and good'. (I mean, if that's the way you roll, clinically, then, well, knock yourself out. I'll just note here that defensive practice of this sort may well come with psychological and professional costs which should not be underestimated - and which, it seems to me, may even impact the development of truly valuable psychotherapy relationships and thereby the work - and thereby be unethical from a clinical standpoint.) The ICO claims that you can refuse to comply with a data erasure request if you are establishing, exercising or defending legal claims. This doesn't specify whether you can keep it lest there be future such legal issues. However the example they then give is of a healthcare provider who they claim is legally proper to refuse a request to erase personal data from a previous patient because their liability insurance requires them to retain such records <i>in case of</i> complaints or legal claims. So it seems you can legitimately refuse to erase the 'data'.</div><div><br /></div><div><div>It's also worth noting that, again according to the UK legislation, you must ask the patient's permission (see <a href="https://www.legislation.gov.uk/eur/2016/679/article/6" target="_blank">6.1.a here</a>) to 'process' any of this data. 'Processing', remember, includes <i>writing and reading</i> the notes. I submit that this could legitimately be taken to provide a reason to take the text of the law with a pinch of salt, and to question whether it really can meaningfully be said to apply to the clinical situation. Here we're in the bizarre situation of being advised both to take comprehensive notes but also to first ask the patient's permission - which they may of course withhold.</div></div><div><br /></div><div>Here's an interesting thing about the ICO take on 'data': it <a href="https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/guide-to-data-protection/guide-to-the-general-data-protection-regulation-gdpr/key-definitions/what-is-personal-data/" target="_blank">tells us</a> that 'personal data only includes information relating to natural persons who: can be identified or who are identifiable, directly from the information in question; or who can be indirectly identified from that information in combination with other information.' What that means, in fact, is that if you don't have your patient's actual identifying details (i.e. name, address, phone number etc.) on the notes, then the notes don't count as data. Why not? you ask. For surely, if I've got a page of identifying details, and we can work out who my notes refer to by cross-referencing with that page of details, then the notes count as data? Well, no, read it carefully: it says that, in order for the notes to count as data, you must be able <i>to use them (by themselves or along with something else) to identify</i> the person, <i>not that you must be able to figure out who the notes refer to (by looking at the notes or looking at them in conjunction with something else)</i>. However I wonder whether the ICO isn't misrepresenting the law on this point. For <a href="https://www.legislation.gov.uk/eur/2016/679/article/4" target="_blank">what the regulations say</a> is that 'personal data' means 'any information relating to an identified or identifiable natural person', and an 'identifiable natural person' is 'one who can be identified, directly or indirectly, in particular by reference to an identifier such as a name, an identification number, location data, an online identifier or to one or more factors specific to the physical, physiological, genetic, mental, economic, cultural or social identity of that natural person'. (I take it that 'identify' here means 'work out who the person actually is - i.e. which individual human animal we're talking about'. And that 'directly identified' here means 'identified in the information in question'. And that 'indirectly identified' means: 'by consulting some other information'. And that these EU-derived regulations are post-Brexit now a part of UK law.) There's still something missing in the law here; the phrase which contains 'information relating to an identified or identifiable natural person...' presumably ought to be filled out with '...who can be identified <i>as the subject of</i> this information'. But that's just a quibble and so, perhaps regrettably, clinical notes do after all seem to typically constitute 'data' since, except when they consist of clinical hypotheses (which, qua hypotheses, constitute information about the clinician's rather than the patient's mind), they consist of information about someone who can typically be identified as their subject. </div><div><br /></div></div><div>I want to end with an observation. Having talked with a lot of psychologists, psychotherapists and counsellors over the years, I've noticed that 'the notes' get caught up in a variety of superego-invoking, negative-transference-engaging, problematics of their own. They become the place where what one did and said is visible to an imagined judge (a judging figure, that is, not necessarily a member of the judiciary!), and so become fraught with issues of accountability. They become a locus of lost self-possession, and an attitude prevails in which one stops understanding that, to be a good psychologist, one must do <i>one's spontaneous best</i>, or stops understanding that we ought to <i>model for the patient a form of self-acceptance in which one lives out of a trust that one is, in one's basic world-orientation, acceptable and valuable as a person</i>, but instead thinks one ought to be 'following protocols' set down by some<i> other</i> psychologist or organisation. Now I know of no empirical data suggesting it's in any way better to engage in a hidebound litigation-wary practice. And since it rather stands to reason that it simply <i>isn't</i> better to engage one's patients thus - that it could in fact inculcate a counter-therapeutic 'anality' in the practitioner - I suggest it's an ethical duty to do otherwise. But the principle part of all of this that I want to stress takes us back to where I started: If you start to worry about your notes, and find that your mind is getting colonised by oppressive and debilitating shoulds and oughts around them, then first <i>bring to mind their actual purpose</i>. The purpose to which you actually put them in your clinic; the end to which you write them. Why you so much as make them when your making of them is guided by the clinical task rather than by a self-possession-sapping negative transference to psychological, governmental, and legal systems. The purpose in relation to the clinical task, that is, which task is, presumably, hopefully: the recovery and growth of the patient.</div>Richard Gippshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18001492312162861823noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3184393804521721596.post-60519966620272730562022-03-27T22:15:00.030+01:002022-04-14T10:32:51.542+01:00contra aftab contra gipps contra seth<p><span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: xx-small;"></span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;">In a <a href="https://awaisaftab.blogspot.com/2022/03/gipps-vs-seth-muddle-of-predictive.html" target="_blank">recent blogpost</a> Awais Aftab has</span><span style="font-family: inherit;"> </span>expressed some welcome disagreements<span style="font-family: inherit;"> </span><span style="font-family: inherit;">with what I wrote in <a href="http://clinicalphilosophy.blogspot.com/2022/03/seths-vision.html" target="_blank">my critique</a> of Anil Seth's conception of perception '</span>Seth's<span style="font-family: inherit;"> vision' post. What follows is my response.</span></p><p><b>heliocentric or geocentric: what's the truth?</b></p><p>Aftab writes of a </p><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><p style="text-align: left;">scientific model according to which [the] sun is in orbit around the earth. This scientific model is decidedly false; the sun is not in orbit around the earth, however things appear to us.</p></blockquote><p>Here Aftab's flatly disagreeing with what I wrote in my original post - I expressly denied that this is a decidedly false claim. But he doesn't argue his case - so I'll now just reiterate and expand mine. It's important to note, before we begin, that whilst the explicit topic is astronomical, the real issue - to which we'll return after the physics is expounded - concerns instead the relevance of considerations of linguistic meaning when what's under discussion are allegedly scientific questions. </p><p>So: I take it as axiomatic that if we're to model the movements of bodies we must always first <i>stipulate</i> a reference frame. Being decidedly terrestrial creatures it's our typical habit to use the earth's surface as this 'immobile'-by-definition reference frame for ordinary modelling and measurements. This use amounts to a tacit stipulation, a stipulation which gives us a <i>rule of representation</i>: movements of people and cars and birds are to be measured relative to the earth's surface (and not, say, relative to that hypomanic rabbit running hither and thither over there, since that'd really complicate everything terribly). Such <i>rules of representation aren't themselves representations</i>: they aren't, that is, themselves happily styled 'true' or 'false'. There's no such thing as a 'correct stipulation'. There are just reference frames which are more or less useful depending on our needs. </p><p>Now, when we're discussing the movements of celestial bodies, we might surely offer <i>either</i> the sun or the earth as our reference frame. We could of course stipulate the moon but, depending on the scientific context, that'd probably make the maths very complex. Might we follow Newton and pin our frame instead to the 'fixed stars'? Well, we'd first need to say in what sense they're 'fixed', since it's generally thought that, what with the expansion of the universe, many of them are moving apart from one another. And we'd surely want to avoid Newton's notions of 'absolutely fixed', or 'absolute motion', or 'absolute duration', etc., since, so far as I know, that idea - of motion or duration not relative to any particular spatial or temporal reference frame but just, somehow, 'in itself' - has never been provided with a meaning. But at any rate, if we stipulate the earth, then the sun will properly be said to be moving around it - and vice versa. </p><p>Given this I simply find it hard to know what's meant by Aftab's 'This scientific model is decidedly false; the sun is not in orbit around the earth, however things appear to us.' But perhaps he would say 'But in science we always call the <i>simplest</i> model <i>decidedly true</i> and the more complex model <i>decidedly false</i>.' Well, we could say this - though I don't think we always, or even usually, do. (I think we typically just talk of the advantages of simplicity, and leave off talk of truth and falsity for when instead we're talking about representational fit. That, at least, stops us getting into unnecessary muddles.) But, sure, I'm happy if we do decide to use the word 'true' like that: now we all know what we mean, philosophy has done its clarificatory job, and we're back not talking past each other. So now, because of what it does for astronomical science, we'll say that a heliocentric model is there the 'true one'. Or because of what it does for botanical science (you're trying to measure the light shifting over a plant's leaves, and it's rather easier to think of the sun moving overhead rather than of the plant orbiting the sun), we'll say that the geocentric model is there the 'true one'. My concern though is that there was rather a whiff of 'but <i>in fact</i>, or <i>really</i>, or <i>as science reveals to us</i>, it's the earth that orbits the sun and not vice versa' to both Aftab's and Seth's presentations. And, at least on its face, such an 'in fact' appears to rather transcend mere matters of simplicity. Instead it seems to be an 'in fact' which has (...in fact...) rather gone on semantic holiday. An 'in fact' which, like Newton's notions of 'absolute' motion or duration, has attempted to prescind from particular contexts of enquiry, forgetting that it's only ever relative to a context that such notions enjoy a meaning.</p><p>Well, wait... why does any of this matter - wasn't the real topic the cognitive neuroscience of perception? So, well, yes: this all has to do with how we understand the significance of philosophy - in particular: philosophical reflection on linguistic meaning - for (would-be) scientific enquiry. So let's now turn to this.</p><p><b>language... or science?</b></p><p>After claiming that the geocentric view is 'decidedly false' Aftab goes on to urge that:</p><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><p style="text-align: left;">We shouldn't be so preoccupied with the language itself that we forget there is an independent scientific question to be asked. In a similar way, questions pertaining to the use of language about perception should not lead us to ignore the scientific questions at hand.</p></blockquote><p>Similar comments regarding the relation of linguistic philosophy to matters scientific are offered later:</p><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><p style="text-align: left;">To remember how to correctly use the word perceive doesn’t by itself tell us what the correct scientific psychological account of perception is, and any scientific psychological account of perception has to take into account the fact that the brain is confined inside the skull and only has access to signals in the sensory nerves. </p></blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><p style="text-align: left;">Does the brain approximate Bayes’s rule in the process of perception? This is an empirical question, to be settled by scientific inquiry, but it certainly cannot be settled or eliminated by an analysis of ordinary language.</p></blockquote><p>So, first, what <i>is</i> the 'independent scientific question to be asked' here, in this first context which, to recall, had to do with celestial movements? I confess the only one I can think of as a candidate might go something like: 'But, really, Dr Gipps, please leave aside all these parochial matters to do with this or that human-interest-relative context, and turn instead to matters of the raw scientific truth: just tell us, Dr Gipps: <i>does the earth orbit the sun, or does the sun orbit the earth?!!</i>' Yet, as I was at pains to show, it's here precisely philosophical considerations regarding language use - i.e. considerations regarding <i>what it makes sense to say</i> - and especially of distinguishing rules of representation (which as such aren't usefully described as true or false) from representations (which as such are either true or false) - which reveals that this <i>just isn't</i> a <i>good</i> question! We might at first think we know what it means. (Just like Anscombe, at first, thought she knew what she meant when she said that it <i>seemed to her</i> as if the sun went round the earth.) But then we think it through, and it turns out that we don't!</p><p>Turning now to perception, Aftab is of course correct that recalling how the word 'perceive' is properly used tells us nothing about which bona fide scientific theory of perception is correct. (And nothing in my original post declared anything else.) Where linguistic philosophy comes into its own, though, is when it helps clarify whether we are indeed asking bona fide scientific questions. My claim was that Seth seemed to think he was asking and answering clear scientific questions... but that this may be illusory. Now, philosophy can't help us answer scientific questions - but it can help us distinguish genuine from merely ersatz such questions. So, just as Seth and Aftab seem - if I'm not mistaken - to wrongly take 'Does the sun orbit the earth, or is it that the earth orbits the sun?' as a straightforwardly clear question - so too does Seth, as I read him, take his particular questions and answers regarding 'how we perceive' to enjoy a clear sense. But the appearance of meaningfulness, I claim, may be only a product of certain prior misunderstandings regarding how concepts work. If you conceptually assimilate donkeys to positive numbers, you may well think it a straightforwardly intelligible scientific question to ask just what the square root of a particular donkey is. (I don't say that we couldn't give this question a sense; only that it doesn't enjoy one on its face.) To undo that assimilation is not to obstruct scientific progress, but rather to point out that it seems we didn't so much as have a scientific question on the table. From Gellner's idiotic <i>Words and Things</i> onwards, philosophers have accused linguistic philosophy as being somehow antithetical to science. As I see it, however, this is entirely backwards. No science at all can happen if the questions being asked are not even empirical because they're riddled with conceptual confusion. By helpfully picking this apart, the linguistic philosopher is the one contributing to strengthening the scientific framework, whereas the would-be scientist who just ploughs on regardless despite their tacit confusion is holding back scientific progress by instead covertly indulging metaphysical nonsense.</p><p style="text-align: left;"><b>brains and their owners</b><br /><br />Aftab agrees that there is 'no mystery to how <i>I</i> see thing. I just do. I look around and see the world in all its beauty and ugliness. But in order for the brain to make this possible, an explanation is needed.' Brains however made perception possible long before explanations were available; I suspect Aftab really means: 'in order for <i>us to understand</i> how brain activity makes perception possible, we require a scientific explanation'. This to me seems utterly unobjectionable: sure, explanations aren't always required before we can understand something, but when we've got 'how does that work?' questions going on, an explanation will be just the ticket! So, yes: so far, so unobjectionable. Yet after noting that I suggest that an answer in neurological (I think 'neuroscientific' would have been a happier word choice by me) terms is required here, Aftab urges that this would:<br /></p><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;"><p>not offer us the explanation we need; what will be missing will be explanation that connects the neurological activity to the perceiving <i>I</i>. There is, therefore, a cognitive and psychological question here as well. What cognitive and psychological processes are involved in our ordinary experience of perception?</p></blockquote><p>I confess to not yet understanding this. If I want to know how, say, a Porsche can accelerate so quickly - the acceleration admittedly being a property of <i>the whole car</i> - I'll naturally be satisfied with an answer in purely mechanical terms, one which tells me about the functioning of the carburettor etc. Sure, I'll want to know too how the carburettor is connected to the throttle and the fuel supply and the engine and thereby to the wheels - but there seems to me no requirement for an extra kind of story, told at some other level of explanation, wherein I relate all of this to the accelerating car. Or, well, perhaps other details will be relevant too: depending on where I was coming from when I asked about the Porsche's acceleration, I might find it more illuminating to hear about the extraordinary funding of their R&D relative to other car manufacturers. But at any rate, we can I think imagine someone who is only interested in the question of what it is in the car itself that enables its rapid acceleration. And here they will, I think, be satisfied with a story about the mechanical goings on under the bonnet. So too a story about the eye, the optic nerve, the striate cortex, etc etc., which outlined the machinery of perception and detailed its operation could, I think, work in a similar way. <br /><br />Aftab goes on to tell us that:</p><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;">any scientific psychological account of perception has to take into account the fact that the brain is confined inside the skull and only has access to signals in the sensory nerves. The relationship between the voltage changes in the nerve membranes and the world outside the sensory organs is not a question that has a straightforward obvious answer, and I refuse to accept that this is a meaningless question that arises only because we are confused about how we use the word “perceive”!</blockquote><p>Now I'm not sure what it means to talk of a brain being 'confined' (perhaps 'safely contained'?) in a skull, and of it only having 'access' to this or that sensory signal. But perhaps the Porsche analogy can help us here. So you notice that whilst I wanted to understand the acceleration of the whole car, we somehow talked mainly about the carburettor and other internal components. The carburettor, however, doesn't have direct 'access' to the wheels or the road; it only has only has 'access' to the fuel and the air. This, you suggest, makes for an explanatory problem. ... Well, I demur. It may well be that the relation of acceleration to air intake is not straightforward: much will also depend on the current pitch of the road, the current speed, the drag of the vehicle etc. By all means, let's look at the whole picture. And the same - except more so - will be true of the 'relationship between the voltage changes in the nerve membranes and the world outside the sensory organs'. None of these enquiries will involve us in asking meaningless questions (and, note, I never claimed that they did); none of them presuppose confusion about how the word 'perceive' is used. What would be a confusion, though, would be the assumption that the brain's generation of perception / the carburettor's generation of acceleration required it to <i>reconstruct</i> or <i>represent</i> or <i>make inferences regarding</i> what's happening outside the skull / engine. (Or to put it otherwise: what would be a confusion would be if we conflated 'access' in the <i>mechanical </i>sense of i) enjoying this or that degree of <i>causal connectedness </i>to the world<i>,</i> with 'access' in the <i>epistemic </i>sense of ii) making the world's acquaintance.) No: such activities, if we're meaning them in their normal senses, are properties not of the brain or carburettor but instead, at times, of the person whose brain or car is under discussion.</p><p><b>prediction and inference</b></p><p>Let's now turn to that last question about brainy inferences etc in more detail. The part of Aftab's critique I find most thought-provoking is this: </p><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;">it strikes me as quite valid to hypothesize or talk about prediction in an analogous way to ordinary language but in a manner that doesn’t require intention or agency, etc. This is especially because we can meaningfully talk about mathematical models making predictions, and a variety of non-intentional, non-agential systems can enact said mathematical models. <br /><br /></blockquote><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEho8-3XUQ7VVBNsNHkG1qCKfd5UOXCA47_oCwW2AGS8ZmLUVY0WjvN_Ms-TcVS_XixNAB6sRjGe_Je5oX1PTwW4Pllv7ROu6g0Om9WsdFjGFSZYb-v0G_JBTCzc6plsp4vSPHi3Q36xTRcguEf27X1zj4VujVpR_P5BjcO7M4juGu8jM7f4zwE5esMnuA/s2060/Johannes_Kepler_1610.jpg" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2060" data-original-width="1500" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEho8-3XUQ7VVBNsNHkG1qCKfd5UOXCA47_oCwW2AGS8ZmLUVY0WjvN_Ms-TcVS_XixNAB6sRjGe_Je5oX1PTwW4Pllv7ROu6g0Om9WsdFjGFSZYb-v0G_JBTCzc6plsp4vSPHi3Q36xTRcguEf27X1zj4VujVpR_P5BjcO7M4juGu8jM7f4zwE5esMnuA/w146-h200/Johannes_Kepler_1610.jpg" width="146" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Johannes Kepler</td></tr></tbody></table>Now, I confess that while I think I can understand what it is for a mathematical model to make a prediction, I'm not entirely sure what it means for a system to enact a mathematical model, and I'm not at all sure what it means to say that the modelled system is itself making predictions. ... But let's turn again to the celestial analogue for a first pass. So: Kepler provided us with an equation to figure out the movements of two celestial bodies relative to one another. <img height="25" src="https://wikimedia.org/api/rest_v1/media/math/render/svg/5237696dca92ec2cb3380a01b695c48acf509fd9" width="118" />. We can model the moon's movements around the earth using this equation. If we said that 'the moon-earth system enacts this model', we're basically saying the same thing in different words. And <i>we </i>can use the model to help <i>us </i>predict the moon's location. But note, we can now deploy metonymy to arrive at: the <i>model</i> <i>predicts</i> where the moon will be in an hour.<br /><p>So, <i>if </i>that's what Aftab means by a 'system enacting a mathematical model', then I should say that I can see nothing wrong with it. To transfer it now to the context of the brain, we might say this: <i>Neuroscientists</i> can model, and predict, how activity in part of the brain covaries with past and present sensory stimulation and motor activity (say) using a particular model. We then shunt the words around a bit to arrive at: 'this is the model the brain enacts'. We will say the same too for the release of insulin in the pancreas in response to blood sugar changes etc. We can model this mathematically; lo: the pancreas enacts the model. But what we don't yet get to, from the notion of a mathematical model making predictions, is a cogent sense in which the planets, the pancreas, or the brain are themselves predicting anything. So it looks to me like we'll need something other than the metonymic, conceptually parasitic, notion of 'mathematical models making predictions' to get us to a sense for 'the brain makes predictions'. </p><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"></blockquote><b>linguistic innovation</b><br /><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"></blockquote><br /><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"></blockquote>This takes me to a part of Aftab's critique which I thought simply unfair:<br /><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"></blockquote><div><br /></div><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;"><div>Helmholtz, when he described perception as an inference, used inference in an analogous way: “[the “psychical activities” leading to perception] are in general not conscious, but rather unconscious. In their outcomes they are like inferences insofar as we from the observed effect on our senses arrive at an idea of the cause of this effect.” (Helmholtz 1867) [my emphasis, notice use of “like inference” suggesting an analogy].</div><div><br /></div><div>The... problem I have is with the insistence that unless an explicit definition is offered, the use must be considered muddled or nonsensical. Just because Helmholtz does not further specify what “like inference” is supposed to be, does that make it muddled and nonsensical? I don’t think so. Scientific ideas often begin as a sort of analogy, and are further refined and made more precise over time. Didn’t Wittgenstein have something to say about the meaning of a word being its use? If a word is being used by an entire community of scientists, can we not recognize that use as legitimate, even if a formal definition is lacking?</div></blockquote><div><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"></blockquote><br /><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"></blockquote>I leave aside the issue of whether Helmholtz or we know what Helmholtz is saying when he talks of <table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgmqY17izeL_WHRw5vEGyv5uGU8-3BfMxNTR51NqxdfyS0blfXsl83-Zf8L-6UmLM8_NlHH9DC3pcBnOOERusQwJpKwvgX6GkzYvFaUo2fSkrNVCg41OD54MgCf4ijmwT3CLLybIqOJw_5XOhjb8kt_wmrA6QqFIgfokK4F_KuO_Jb5HCrPzv8vwPNxkQ/s304/csm_Helmholtz_Fonds_Hermann-von-Helmholtz_0812945684.jpg" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="304" data-original-width="304" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgmqY17izeL_WHRw5vEGyv5uGU8-3BfMxNTR51NqxdfyS0blfXsl83-Zf8L-6UmLM8_NlHH9DC3pcBnOOERusQwJpKwvgX6GkzYvFaUo2fSkrNVCg41OD54MgCf4ijmwT3CLLybIqOJw_5XOhjb8kt_wmrA6QqFIgfokK4F_KuO_Jb5HCrPzv8vwPNxkQ/w200-h200/csm_Helmholtz_Fonds_Hermann-von-Helmholtz_0812945684.jpg" width="200" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Hermann von Helmholtz</td></tr></tbody></table><br />unconscious psychical activity leading to a perception, or of perception involving us ('we') working out what the causes of sensory stimulations are. I happen to find that all exceptionally murky, but it's not what Aftab is after. Instead he's pointing to the idea that Helmholtz's inferences are only <i>like </i>ordinary inferences. So, ok: fine! But then Aftab effectively claims that I was saying that unless Helmholtz, Seth, whoever, offers an explicit definition of a term used in a new sense, that new use must be considered nonsensical or muddled. But this really wasn't <i>at all </i>what I was saying - and I also don't think I've seen any Wittgensteinian commentators on cognitive neuroscience say anything like this. </div><div><br /></div><div>The easiest way to get clear about this is to rehearse the dialectic. As I offered it, my challenge was two-pronged, and went like this:</div><div><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"></blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><br /></blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"></blockquote></div><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;"><div>a) <i>If</i> you, cognitive neuroscientist, are intending such and such a term in its ordinary sense, then your claims are, for reasons I've given, simply nonsensical.</div><div><br /></div><div>b) If however you're using it in a<i> new, </i>or<i> somewhat new, </i>sense, a sense that we readers don't yet know, might you please both acknowledge when this is so (so we don't wrongly assume that you mean it in the ordinary sense), and also make this new meaning clear for us? If it's a new <i>technical</i> <i>scientific</i> sense, then yes a definition really would be lovely, since that's rather how we tend to do things in science. However perhaps you might instead give some <i>paradigmatic examples</i>, or do what you can to make clear what would <i>falsify</i> your claims, or elucidate whatever <i>ascription conditions</i> you can for the concept, etc.? Doing literally nothing to make yourself clear, however, well, dude: that's not cool! For making oneself clear isn't just a job for philosophers! It's part and parcel of ordinary responsible scientific practice.</div></blockquote><div><p>This is why, in my original post, I kept asking if Seth would tell us what he meant, rather than simply said 'what you're saying is nonsense'. I think I demonstrated that it would be nonsense if he was using the terms in the ordinary way. I think I demonstrated that Seth is bizarrely insouciant regarding the need to tell a reader of a popular book what his terms mean - and I do rather<i> suspect</i> that this might be because he doesn't think he is using terms in anything other than an ordinary sense. But I certainly can't demonstrate that there's not some occult sense he's employing. I can however complain that it <i>is</i> occult.</p><p><b>on use</b> </p><p>Finally, what of this?:</p></div><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><div style="text-align: left;"><p>Didn’t Wittgenstein have something to say about the meaning of a word being its use? If a word is being used by an entire community of scientists, can we not recognise that use as legitimate, even if a formal definition is lacking?</p></div></blockquote><div style="text-align: left;"><p style="text-align: left;">Well, I think it depends on what's meant both by 'can we' and by 'use'! </p></div><div><p>It's certainly true that there <i>are</i> indeed times when words are used with bona fide meanings despite the absence of any clear definition. I see no reason why this shouldn't obtain in science as well as in everyday life or in humanities discourses etc. </p><p>And it's surely true that we might often do well to <i>presume </i>that a word has sense on its users' lips. Innocent until proven guilty!, we might say, for matters of meaning.</p><p></p><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg80aUOHTHmkqUnpcdNg51VbR7Cm_8WKMlX8SFHwirB9xHtoLzq1ho3Yxw7ezSDXwwYGnQJ9c5-_NWeg6-5q-7_DZ1hG_sLIHYoSTYiBiXAaU4ZEb8TAwOo8dU0imLHm8dQ8lMHvR36ZVVm3FrwtU65in-hCXOwYYC8pkvCitGN6nvEvWQh_ICRDv2pAA/s800/Ludwig_Wittgenstein.jpg" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="800" data-original-width="547" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg80aUOHTHmkqUnpcdNg51VbR7Cm_8WKMlX8SFHwirB9xHtoLzq1ho3Yxw7ezSDXwwYGnQJ9c5-_NWeg6-5q-7_DZ1hG_sLIHYoSTYiBiXAaU4ZEb8TAwOo8dU0imLHm8dQ8lMHvR36ZVVm3FrwtU65in-hCXOwYYC8pkvCitGN6nvEvWQh_ICRDv2pAA/w138-h200/Ludwig_Wittgenstein.jpg" width="138" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Ludwig Wittgenstein</td></tr></tbody></table>But it's surely not the case that use <i>inexorably</i> makes for meaning. Just as a whole scientific community can be in error about matters of fact, I see no reason to think that they might not sometimes also be in error regarding whether certain of their own terms are meaningful. Or, to put it otherwise, I see no reason to suppose that scientists may not sometimes be 'held captive by pictures' or, to again put it otherwise, be unwittingly subject to 'illusions of sense'. (Some sciences are, I suspect, rather more prone to such illusions of sense than others. I have in mind physics like string theory, economics, psychology and cognitive science as the major contenders... but don't plan to argue this any time soon!) Newtonian physicists talked of 'absolute motion/space/duration', but this chat of theirs didn't ipso facto make such concepts meaningful! For as Wittgenstein might have put it, Newton had already unwittingly 'sublimed the logic of the language' of motion/etc, so his terms no longer enjoyed meaning.<p></p><p>To understand how Wittgenstein's comments on meaning and use don't commit him to the idea that any widespread use inexorably makes for meaning, it helps to distinguish between two senses of 'use'. In the first sense 'use1' refers to <i>however</i> a term or phrase is deployed by those who utter or write it. It refers, that is, to the mere fact of its deployment, the mere fact that people voice it. In the second sense, 'use2' contrasts with 'misuse'. (Use1 includes both uses2 and misuses2, but also includes such uses of terms as have no meaning and so which can't even be misused.) Now, people often mistakenly think that when Wittgenstein talked of the internal relationship between meaning and use, it was use1 he had in mind - as if he were trying to provide a reductive definition of 'meaning' in terms of how we shunt words about. I think this quite wrong, and that it's only the <i>correct</i> uses, the uses2, of a term that are of a piece with its meaning. (<a href="https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/abs/wittgenstein-on-philosophy-objectivity-and-meaning/what-is-meaning-a-wittgensteinian-answer-to-an-unwittgensteinian-question/04B8DC1BEF26AD50768DAC5F6BDD433E" target="_blank">Glock</a>: 'Meaning is a matter not of how an expression is actually used and understood, but of how it is (or ought to be) used and understood by members of a linguistic community. What is semantically relevant is the correct use of expressions.') So, to summarise: whether a community's deployment of an expression is meaningful is not something guaranteed simply by their using it. And whether it's meaningful will instead amount to whether it's use can be elucidated, whether it avoids oscillating unstably between different senses encouraging the making of illicit inferences, whether clear negations of propositions deploying the term can be formulated, and sometimes, yes, even whether it can be clearly defined.</p></div>Richard Gippshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18001492312162861823noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3184393804521721596.post-50395374762404242082022-03-19T11:22:00.014+00:002022-03-19T17:35:27.207+00:00diagnostic function<span style="font-size: xx-small;"><br /></span><p>In a <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0014p73" target="_blank">recent episode</a> of <i>The Life Scientific</i>, the guest - psychologist <a href="https://www.drjuliashaw.com/" target="_blank">Julia Shaw</a> (who researches false memories, forensic psychology, and bisexuality) - talks about coming to understand that her father was schizophrenic. She'd been home-schooled by him and, when she was 14, she realised that, whilst she 'didn't have a word for it', for him all was not well. After 9/11, for example, he spoke only to her; he was clearly out drinking too much in the day; he'd come home drunk from the bar and they'd watch <i>Mortal Kombat </i>through and through, or do a lot of sparring. ... And then later, in one of her first clinical psychology lessons, she learns about the 'paranoid schizophrenia' diagnosis: "Oh my God", she thinks, "that's my dad! It sort of put a construct to all of his behaviour and a lot of the experiences I had growing up."</p><p>Psychologists and psychiatrists of a so-called 'critical' bent have often challenged the value of such seemingly 'baggy' constructs as make up diagnostic systems. Now - and in what follows I set aside the value of diagnoses to the diagnosed individuals themselves - Shaw herself clearly found it very useful. I don't here intend to question this utility. What I want to ask is instead what the utility consists in. For I think it too easy to quickly assume that the value consists only in possession of a new label to describe what's going on. And for 'critical' psychs to then take issue with the rather magical-seeming notion that coming into possession of a mere <i>word </i>can provide substantive knowledge of anything more than semantics. (Thus Shaw eagerly takes up Al-Khalili's suggestion that the illumination came because "nobody had labelled" his paranoid behaviour 'schizophrenia' before.) The question of diagnostic utility then too quickly gets corralled both into a general discussion of the benefits and disbenefits of <i>constructs</i> in our lives - for example, do they <i>organise</i> our experience in useful ways - and also into a more specific discussion of whether the principles governing one particular organisation, one particular construct (one diagnosis, that is), are reliable and valid, or are instead arbitrary, haphazard, and pseudoscientific.</p><p></p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEiJ-0ikIbTMZFnDc__SBmHnTj0e4ACbfOBakoKWZjAHA7-OV8TcoxwyKDNWNtdj2AvxCGs_rnC2RLMPzx09ksK8_yMiOgJhY2ifqm_GSd84vzjAi1N9bLFnb8GbcyDn148wOIj5gPim4cOrb3-GVlkC-W5ltTJOItGfc80qDAUyoLpvlcHdMheW41SE1A=s300" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="300" data-original-width="236" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEiJ-0ikIbTMZFnDc__SBmHnTj0e4ACbfOBakoKWZjAHA7-OV8TcoxwyKDNWNtdj2AvxCGs_rnC2RLMPzx09ksK8_yMiOgJhY2ifqm_GSd84vzjAi1N9bLFnb8GbcyDn148wOIj5gPim4cOrb3-GVlkC-W5ltTJOItGfc80qDAUyoLpvlcHdMheW41SE1A=w157-h200" width="157" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">George Kelly</td></tr></tbody></table>What occurred to me, though, as Shaw was speaking, was that the value of knowing one's father to be schizophrenic may consist more in the clarity that arrives in truly <i>knowing someone for mad</i>. Not just mad in a loose way, either; not just 'mad' in a way which could be taken for a metaphor or a slur. But rather, mad in this, rather than that, way. It is not me; it is not the situation; it is not just another way of being human; not one way of making sense rather than another. It is instead my dad: there's something wrong with him; he's lost his reason. He's been quietly, and sometimes not so quietly, insane all these years. That this insanity has a particular form - it is schizophrenic rather than melancholic or obsessional, say - is of note here, I want to suggest, not simply because it offers some sense-making relief through the 'organisation' of one's previously disparate experience. (This constructivist trope of <i>sense-making as organising</i> is so central to so much psychology, from Kelly onwards that it can boggle psychologists' heads if you suggest we'd actually do better to adopt a rather more Aristotelian, rather less Kantian, anthropology.) For what matters here is, I suggest, not so much any particular organisation but rather (what I call) <i>allocation</i>. The diagnosis, first and foremost, enables not the provision of a 'subjective' organisation, but the recognition of an objective fact: that my dad's <i>not in his right mind</i>. Relational disturbances are now <i>allocated</i> to their proper source: they're not primarily a function of myself; they're not an irreducible function of the relationship itself; they're not a matter of the form of a particular social context; instead they're properly said to be <i>of</i> my father. And the provision of this, rather than that, diagnostic category - I suggest - may serve the function not primarily of further finessing the general diagnosis of insanity. Instead it validates it; it subserves it. <p></p><p>An analogy may be helpful. We're struggling in one of our relationships, and come to realise that the problem lies not within ourself, nor within a systemic property of the relationship, but instead in our friend or colleague. They are, we come to realise, vicious (i.e. vice-ridden). 'Why do you say that?' your spouse says. What makes it apt to say <i>they're</i> being a git, and what makes it apt to say they're being a <i>git</i>? And now you offer the judgement that they suffer a particular form of gititude: they're always drawing attention to the faults of others whilst boasting of their own successes. This can be important to note in its own right, of course. (By analogy: think of the different treatment implications that can sometimes follow from psychiatric diagnosis.) But what may be rather more helpful, from the provision of this more fine-grained judgement of gititude, is the warrant it provides for your taking your moral attitude of condemnation to your friend or colleague. If you want to ratify your allocation of someone to a genus, then showing how they meet the mark of belonging to a particular species within that genus will tend to do it. </p><p>To return now from morals to madness: the value of knowing one's father for schizophrenic may, I suggest, lie rather less in now knowing what treatment is indicated, or in understanding that he's one amongst others who have somewhat similar difficulties. Instead it may lie rather more in securely knowing that adopting a moral or relational approach is here inapt since he's <i>not in his right mind</i>. The dangers of such an allocation should be clear: that now every troubling thought or feeling or action of his is now chalked up to his insanity rather than to his situation or to oneself. But the possibility of abusing psychiatric judgement in this way is hardly grounds for avoiding it - any more than we do well to avoid moral judgement just because it may wrongly be used when instead psychiatric judgement would be more apt. Knowing him to be deeply, ongoingly, rationally awry in the way he experiences and responds to the world helps one get one's bearings, to know what's what. And we aren't forced to think of this as the provision from within ourselves, from within our language, of a scheme which we as it were 'impose' on our 'raw' experience of him. Leave those tired constructivist metaphors aside for a moment, and think instead on what it is to <i>acknowledge</i> morally or psychiatrically objective situations, rather than to <i>construe</i> some allegedly non-intrinsically psychiatric or moral situation a particular way. It's not that we're now <i>making</i> sense of him, if you like, but that we've now<i> recognised </i>what's what. Dad is mentally unwell. His behaviour isn't some version of normal of which I should be struggling harder to make sense. It's something which of its nature is <i>not</i> rationally intelligible. In this way he's a patient, not a rational agent. For this reason the social contract must be renegotiated. Losses must be mourned. But the relief of saying 'I shan't keep trying to play with someone who's breaking the rules', as it were - (and the 'as it were' is important unless we're to drift into unholy Szaszian libertarianism) - is palpable. I shall no longer bang my head against the cliff face of his unreason. I will no longer always try to reach shared understanding with him. There he goes - my poor dad. But here I am, freed now from the impossible obligation of, as it were, living within an impossible home. I can now carry on rationally - since I can now recognise that: he cannot.</p>Richard Gippshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18001492312162861823noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3184393804521721596.post-27957329479255143202022-03-16T07:44:00.010+00:002022-03-16T14:59:17.902+00:00self love<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEiR2ydJ8lLwOO9i99dTN_NXLxClS-bLbIDYYXwHTMuzxH77vfvN3yHOa5OnI4xpBVNeUxIiuZovAZ7Zef16tVZ2_qo79XCBYBDk6UCd3KdP125iLrp51n2pUzka9SebRIJkVr5a5n1lXygbv0hjlaTREuSKu82ADktH0snP0_HZRLOldcH9WBtU2DxiIg=s499" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="499" data-original-width="332" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEiR2ydJ8lLwOO9i99dTN_NXLxClS-bLbIDYYXwHTMuzxH77vfvN3yHOa5OnI4xpBVNeUxIiuZovAZ7Zef16tVZ2_qo79XCBYBDk6UCd3KdP125iLrp51n2pUzka9SebRIJkVr5a5n1lXygbv0hjlaTREuSKu82ADktH0snP0_HZRLOldcH9WBtU2DxiIg=w133-h200" width="133" /></a></div>A peculiar ambiguity is built into the English language regarding self-love. On the one hand: take pride in your work! On the other: pride is the mother of all sins. On the one hand: love your neighbour as yourself! On the other: self-love is an abomination. On the one hand: it's good to work and relate in such ways as lead to one feeling satisfied with oneself. On the other: self-satisfaction is morally ugly. We find psychoanalysis wrestling with this too, asking itself if it needs a concept of 'healthy narcissism' to complement the pathological sort. <div><br /></div><div>This seems an extraordinary carelessness on the part of our language. 'Self-love' almost appears <a href="https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/words-own-opposites" target="_blank">antonymic</a> (cp 'cleave', 'sanction', 'fast'). So: what's going on?</div><div><br /></div><div>The clue I'd like to pick up concerns how the word 'self' works in the English language. I think there's grounds to consider it an example of what Ryle rather misleadingly styled <a href="https://sites.ualberta.ca/~francisp/NewPhil448/RyleSystemMisleadExpr32.pdf" target="_blank">systematically misleading expressions</a>. We are primed, by virtue of some inbuilt semantic stupidity, to think meaning inexorably a function merely of reference. And so we imagine that the contribution of 'self' to the phrase 'self love' is simply to supply that love's object. That, however, is not how 'self' often works in the language. </div><div><br /></div><div>Take 'self-consciousness'. Rather than being simply a matter of being conscious of oneself, the ordinary concept typically has to do with an excessive awareness of how others see us. Or take the concept of 'selfishness'. If 'self' simply specified the object of an attitude, then we might think it perfectly alright to sometimes be selfish. After all, we are in our own needs and desires as deserving, ceteris paribus, as anyone else - and in fact, being best placed to meet our own needs, we do well to try to meet and realise them. But no, selfishness doesn't just have to do with our attempting to meet our own needs or realising our own desires. It instead has to do with doing those things <i>at the expense of others</i>, or with <i>not considering others' needs</i>.</div><div><br /></div><div>'Self', then, makes an important contribution to the English language which it is easy at first to overlook. Now: how about 'self love'? The suggestion I make here is that toxic self-love and pride concern not simply an esteem which has oneself as the object. Rather, they essentially involve self-in-relation-to-others, and they involve us in making a comparative, 'better than', judgement. Taking a healthy pride in one's work, by contrast, doesn't involve placing it in relation to the work of others. It involves valuing doing work with great care, and acting according to that value.</div><div><br /></div><div>And loving oneself? The implicit divine injunction clearly doesn't have to do with a longing to be with ourselves (whatever that might mean). It instead has to do with wanting the best for oneself. That we want this it takes for granted. (We might not do so these days in the West. Sharon Salzburg has a <a href="https://onbeing.org/blog/the-self-hatred-within-us/" target="_blank">great story</a> about asking the Dalai Lama<span style="font-family: inherit;"> '<em style="box-sizing: border-box; caret-color: rgb(85, 85, 85);">“Your Holiness, what do you think about self-hatred?”... </em><span style="caret-color: rgb(85, 85, 85);">He looked at me seeming somewhat confused and asked in response:</span><span style="caret-color: rgb(85, 85, 85);"> </span><em style="box-sizing: border-box; caret-color: rgb(85, 85, 85);">“What’s that?” ... </em><span style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(85, 85, 85);">When I explained to him what I meant by the term — talking about the cycle of self-judgment, guilt, unproductive thought patterns — he asked me, </span><em style="box-sizing: border-box; caret-color: rgb(85, 85, 85);">“How could you think of yourself that way?” </em><span style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(85, 85, 85);">and explained that we all have </span>“Buddha nature”.') This isn't a matter of 'wanting better for oneself than for others'. Life is not, or at least is not always, a zero sum game. No, it's a matter of wanting to flourish, to be healthy and happy, simpliciter. </span></div><div><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: inherit;">Contrast self-love or narcissism of the noxious sort, which aims at personal gain at the expense of the </span>fulfilment<span style="font-family: inherit;"> </span>of<span style="font-family: inherit;"> duties to others.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: inherit;">Why are people primed to conflate the forms of pride? Yes, the language is confusing, but that's surely not the end of the matter. So I'm imagining, now, the kind of person who thinks all pride is an evil. Why might they think that? Well, here's one possibility. Perhaps it's because their sense of self is so insecure, so weak, that they can't imagine one being pleased for oneself unless that be parsed through relationships with others. For this person, so lost in dependent or counterdepeindent forms of identity, any pride will necessarily involve a positioning of the self in relation to other. Rather than grow into a mature independent self, this poor person is left having to constantly manage himself. Keeping a suspicious eye on his self-satisfaction will be a central part of this.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: inherit;">For those interested, I recommend John Lippitt's <i>Kierkegaard and the </i></span><i>Problem<span style="font-family: inherit;"> of </span>Self-Love</i><span style="font-family: inherit;"><i> </i>for a non-linguistic, deeper, exploration of these issues.</span></div>Richard Gippshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18001492312162861823noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3184393804521721596.post-78986010085769396762022-03-13T09:04:00.018+00:002022-03-19T12:14:17.211+00:00it didn't hurt before, yet was so much less painful when it was fixed<p>A while ago a friend told me that, before he had his hip replaced, he wasn't experiencing discomfort - yet that, after he'd had the replacement, he was <i>so</i> much more comfortable! This, from a philosophical point of view, is an interesting experience. We typically use here phrases like become 'unaware of', or 'habituate to', (the pain) here to try to explain what was going on, to make good an apparent contradiction, but it's not obvious that they get us very far. To make the explanation work we construe discomfort on the model of our awareness of an object ... but since discomfort and our awareness of discomfort just<i> aren't</i> two different phenomena, one an experience and the other that experience's object, the explanation rather falls apart on us.</p><p>That life is like this, though: this is undeniable. No amount of Sartrean objections to the Freudian unconscious, the unknown experience, obviate the observation. And, let's face it, something similar happens with regard emotional rather than physical pain too. A patient, prior to developing a capacity for self-sympathy, typically remains oblivious to such hurts as can not only later be acknowledged but also then be acknowledged to - in some sense - have been alive earlier too. This happens, and far more widely than is typically acknowledged.</p><p>I don't raise this issue to try to psychologically explain it. It is, perhaps, not ultimately something that even requires explanation: it may instead simply be "there like our life", something in which we must acquiesce, an aspect of life to which we must just offer acknowledgement. And yet, if that's so, and if we're to not feel cheated of understanding, we shall surely instead at least require some explanation as to <i>why it's hard so to do</i>.</p><p>My own favourite metaphor for unconscious emotional life is owed not to the psychoanalysts but to the existential phenomenologists. We indwell unconscious affect like a fish which knows not of water yet endlessly swims within it; we can't get the distance from it to mentalise it. This water, though, runs all the way through us, so shaping the seeing eye that it can't itself be pulled into view. It structures the <i>Lichtung's</i> fabric, rather than shows up within it - and yet, being part of our very 'flesh' in this way, it's alive within every encounter we have. We could pile up the metaphors here, and they're useful both for bringing into view the phenomenon in question and for avoiding an unhelpful, personal/subpersonal-levels-muddling, pseudo-explanation in terms of (say) 'interoception'. And yet, let's face it, they're not really explanations. They don't really explain how it's possible; they just provide a picture which offers the phenomenon acknowledgement.</p><p>I've no doubt that my friend with the hip replacement was, before his operation, also walking in such a manner as would minimise discomfort without realising that he was even doing this. (Thomas Fuchs <a href="https://www.klinikum.uni-heidelberg.de/fileadmin/zpm/psychatrie/fuchs/Body_memory_Unconsious.pdf" target="_blank">writes well</a> about this sort of phenomenon in his treatment of unconscious mental life.) This too provides a helpful fact, as it were, with which to bolster our stand against the idea that Sartre's apt critique of the Freudian idea of the censor takes us far by way of refuting the notion of unconscious experience. We motivatedly veer away from that which we yet don't even experience. We don't need to think on what we yet somehow know to avoid. </p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjACQVPF0cdT4Hr5XkmhysFMh_pQ-ok7efDuvYmcUaaQb0do7VvK6EgbwF_UG9l4xv5R0Kl8OWuTz_ccw6vcEw_-3JCRgLL0u46_SZhb_k7UgQxUaJ6pocqLBSIBPNAfBMHvbHzsQpk4CoEAH50YtdkJHrj5UxXiForHhsa9oWw1s6KRff1OmMDZLKnZA=s500" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="500" data-original-width="326" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjACQVPF0cdT4Hr5XkmhysFMh_pQ-ok7efDuvYmcUaaQb0do7VvK6EgbwF_UG9l4xv5R0Kl8OWuTz_ccw6vcEw_-3JCRgLL0u46_SZhb_k7UgQxUaJ6pocqLBSIBPNAfBMHvbHzsQpk4CoEAH50YtdkJHrj5UxXiForHhsa9oWw1s6KRff1OmMDZLKnZA=w131-h200" width="131" /></a></div>The ACT idea that it's futile to try to avoid such thoughts or feelings ("whatever you do, don't think about a pink elephant") as (in particular) make for misery, so we should instead make room for them whilst defusing from them, is ultimately perhaps somewhat limited. For people do, it seems, manage rather well to intentionally not think about or engage with affective 'pink elephants'. In fact I'm happy to here report some results newly in: that I myself have succeeded in very intentionally not thinking on a certain topic, and maintaining instead a clear mind, for a few minutes at a time. If the very idea seems paradoxical then it may be high time to update our sense of what it is to direct our attention away from that which inwardly vexes us. And in truth, certain depressed and procrastinating patients are, in fact, the ultimate masters of this: their affective ostrich heads remain resolutely buried in the unmentalising sands.<p></p><p>One tempting but ultimately vacuous option here would be to talk of 'levels of consciousness'. We say something like 'my friend's pain did not "rise to the level" of a truly conscious experience, but instead plied its trade under the radar of self-conscious suffering'. This Freudian submerged iceberg metaphor, however, doesn't really get us anywhere. It just rehearses the fact of the phenomenon in question, whilst once again inviting us to occupy an epistemic perspective on our own suffering even as it denies that suffering can be understood ('thetically' / 'positionally') as its own intentional object.</p><p><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEh22uXkjod2fZKSZwjy3SeP2BTzYH1MdgMF2WYVua0pCSQzkLfUwJvDg3E5XMRq1hxocXigKSVeca9D7Gp-OyOBhQAeqfLgKEfICqecnINQbsw88mVXomKdaRYpM3D_V_t-jAPNTB3RPo89-NuV0pfD-rCLB2wXWh-Y5eDPhjf_EMKxBGZWdswReVBBhQ=s200" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="184" data-original-width="200" height="185" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEh22uXkjod2fZKSZwjy3SeP2BTzYH1MdgMF2WYVua0pCSQzkLfUwJvDg3E5XMRq1hxocXigKSVeca9D7Gp-OyOBhQAeqfLgKEfICqecnINQbsw88mVXomKdaRYpM3D_V_t-jAPNTB3RPo89-NuV0pfD-rCLB2wXWh-Y5eDPhjf_EMKxBGZWdswReVBBhQ=w200-h185" width="200" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Wilfred Bion</td></tr></tbody></table>Now Bion, it seems to me, is onto something important when he distinguishes mental pain and mental suffering. (He's talking about patients who he wants to say "experience pain but not suffering. They may be suffering in the eyes of the analyst because the analyst can, and indeed must, suffer. The patient may say he suffers but this is only because he does not know what suffering is and mistakes feeling pain for suffering it.") Self-solicitude and the capacity to suffer typically come along together, I believe, and the first may be born of the experience of 'internalising' the parent/analyst's solicitude. And yet we get nowhere here if at this point we just invent and pile on faculties and mechanisms, symbolisation, alpha function, etc. Whilst there's nothing wrong with the analytic concepts, there is something wrong with such of their users as take themselves to now be in possession of a causal explanation as to how disturbances of thought and feeling obtain - rather than, more modestly, a phenomenological articulation of clinically important facts.<p>Christopher Bollas talks of the 'unthought known', a concept I've found of value in my own life. One has an emotionally charged realisation regarding a significant fact or happening from earlier in life and can now attest that that about which one can now think, one nevertheless in some sense knew about all along. Is it just that the significance of the newly appreciated fact is now more clearly available to one? Well, it is that (but not the 'just'), but what this way of putting it misses is the significance of the knowledge in question. This knowledge is indwelt, it structures one's relationships like an inexorable yet by-oneself-unformulable a priori (Jonathan Lear writes well on this) rather than as one thinkable way of being among other possibilities.</p><p>The underappreciated Bede Rundle once suggested that it's intelligible that withdrawing one's hand from a pricking pin need not constitute a response to pain - if 'to' here means 'caused by'. Instead it could be that the pain and the response were effects of a common cause. 'I winced with pain' might, he said, be as or more apt a locution, in this regard, than 'The pain made me wince': </p><p></p><blockquote><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhuhKHEuwWiTvZk1bXJiKr5FLnfr8QsMtYRD0afx9-8DsszpicZ6kuNwz598z3c8Hu3DtLp-X2j79f02HzM_tlpMxneWULGh9yha1Hp5iE73iX-35F3hm4KZhWO1eI8Y14lBJT-CgTPQZnql64jSZqZfk9Tw2ilJy4BCYgBN9vmtDzMCg8Evd2TCIjsAA=s400" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="400" data-original-width="251" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhuhKHEuwWiTvZk1bXJiKr5FLnfr8QsMtYRD0afx9-8DsszpicZ6kuNwz598z3c8Hu3DtLp-X2j79f02HzM_tlpMxneWULGh9yha1Hp5iE73iX-35F3hm4KZhWO1eI8Y14lBJT-CgTPQZnql64jSZqZfk9Tw2ilJy4BCYgBN9vmtDzMCg8Evd2TCIjsAA=w126-h200" width="126" /></a></div><i>Compare an explanation which puts the shaking of a man's hand down to nervousness. 'Because he is nervous' does not here amount to a causal claim, but locates the behaviour within a larger set of circumstances, within a cluster of reactions whose causal structure has yet to be disentangled. / Closely analogous to pain is the example of sound: the hearing of a loud bang can actually succeed a startled reaction associated with it, minute though the time lag is. Note that, while this rules out the auditory experience as cause of the reaction, it does not necessarily contradict the claim of the sound to be cause, since, despite the different grammars of 'sound' and 'sound wave', their points of contact may allow the sound to be credited with causing whatever is attributable to the agency of the waves. </i></span></blockquote><p></p><p><span style="font-family: TimesNewRomanPSMT; font-size: small;">This is interesting. It's natural to object: but were he to not have felt pain, he shouldn't have withdrawn from the pin. And yet: is this not an empirical claim? Isn't it at least intelligible, that is, that the body's reflexive movements be sometimes a response to injury rather than to injury's sensation? Similarly: I remember that I once saw a huge snake on the path and jumped in fright - and that the jumping, the startle, obtained before I'd got a clear idea of what I was looking at. Here, however, we're rather far from 'unfelt pain', and rather closer to 'unfelt injury'. For what we'd instead be analogically after here, let's recall, is the idea of a body with/from which one disidentifies, as it were, when one's injured, and so avoids feeling pain - and with which one reidentifies at a later time - at which time one can not only feel pain again but also newly acknowledge its prior presence.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: TimesNewRomanPSMT; font-size: small;">Thinking about the relation of mood to emotion might help here. Thus when in a true mood one's not typically suffering a discretely emotional experience - but out of a mood can crystallise a particular emotion, at which point the mood ceases and one instead starts to genuinely suffer the emotion. Looking back at the moody time we might say: 'I now can see how much pain I was in / how angry I was before'. Looking back to times of what we call 'dissociation' can be like this too. My proposal now is that this isn't simply a subjunctive/hypothetical claim: that were I to not have been dissociated, I should then have felt pain / anger. For what that misses is that there's a whole new ease of being now in play which itself bespeaks a prior unregistered pain.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: TimesNewRomanPSMT; font-size: small;">So how can we understand why it's hard to acknowledge what's manifestly true: what I'm calling 'the fact of unfelt pain'? My proposal is as follows: We tend to misconstrue nouns as inexorably referring to things - and it's characteristic of our concepts of things to have but a few criteria of identity and, moreover, criteria of identity which inexorably co-occur. It's also the case that when we think of intense physical pain, we tend to think it's impossible that we wouldn't be alive to it. Finally, we tend to imagine that the later acknowledgement of an earlier psychological truth (about ourselves) amounts to a kind of memory judgement - a recognition of the truth of a proposition which concerns an earlier state of affairs. </span><span style="font-family: TimesNewRomanPSMT;">Pain, both physical and mental, is however not at all like this.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: TimesNewRomanPSMT;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: TimesNewRomanPSMT;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgHHUe9y38_cquUew9tra48wLkxwW1fxn1PyE7uNtvTKyrBcspLSdD-69Je0SmuRAzW_DBEaYjK30bt7BFXD6TwhPL49oDbLfLXB86mUowB0vltWVwB8JhiPXgzYtUY93iDdx62MFU7rmCbH7vfRCPRwctlSe4JUVp7gqNcp6nVdNeiGNb_KLgo2sojoA=s640" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="640" data-original-width="477" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgHHUe9y38_cquUew9tra48wLkxwW1fxn1PyE7uNtvTKyrBcspLSdD-69Je0SmuRAzW_DBEaYjK30bt7BFXD6TwhPL49oDbLfLXB86mUowB0vltWVwB8JhiPXgzYtUY93iDdx62MFU7rmCbH7vfRCPRwctlSe4JUVp7gqNcp6nVdNeiGNb_KLgo2sojoA=w150-h200" width="150" /></a></span></div><span style="font-family: TimesNewRomanPSMT;">First of all, there are several criteria for pain, and these can come apart. There's the behavioural response (move away from pain-inducing stimuli). There's the expressive response (the grimace). There's the pre-emptive avoidant behaviour. There's the expressive or reportative present-moment self-ascription. And then there's the later acknowledgement of the earlier pain. (I leave out the body's physiological activity which to my mind is extrinsic to the concept.) The meeting of any of these may be enabled by somewhat different physiological mechanisms. (Wincing, now, becomes criterial for pain - rather than something which, as Rundle suggests, may merely be an effect of a common cause. Thinking about what it is</span> <span style="font-family: TimesNewRomanPSMT;">to </span><i style="font-family: TimesNewRomanPSMT;">wince</i><span style="font-family: TimesNewRomanPSMT;">, i.e. about the internal relation of 'wincing' and 'pain',</span><i style="font-family: TimesNewRomanPSMT;"> </i><span style="font-family: TimesNewRomanPSMT;">should also help us out here!) The wrong way to think about these criteria is as evidence for the obtaining of a singular inner fact. Pain is not, as it were, an inner torchlight that is either on or off - the behaviour in question being evidence that the switch is in one or the other position. That is to make of pain what, following Wittgenstein, we may call a mythical 'beetle in a box', and once we've done that the temptation will be to think our denial of the torchlight makes of it 'a nothing' rather than 'a something'. Whereas what we ought to do is to here reiterate our question: ok, let's assume for the sake of argument that your talk of a torchlight beam is cogent: when do we properly say of someone that their torchlight beam is on?</span><p></p><p><span style="font-family: TimesNewRomanPSMT; font-size: small;">Second, we typically find the pain of significant injury to be so intrusive and unresponsive to the will that we find it hard to imagine not being able to avow (i.e. express through self-ascribing) it. Yet why should that be? I simply <i>have</i> had patients who only came to be able to acknowledge the pain caused by significant injury after we looked together at their pain with ordinary respectful sympathy.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: TimesNewRomanPSMT; font-size: small;">Finally, we need to acknowledge that a 'delay' in the avowal of a psychological fact needn't turn it into an empirical (i.e. merely factive, potentially erroneous) claim, i.e. needn't turn it into the expression of a judgement about one's own past state. I form a resolution, but do so while out hiking. My immediately calling my friend and sharing it is no more truly criterial for the fact of the resolution than is my finally doing so the next day - or six months later. I may of course never share it; I may forget about it; none of this, however, turns the times when I do share of it into something less than an avowal (i.e. when I <i>voice</i> <i>the earlier resolution</i>, rather than simply voice a<i> judgement</i> that I once made that resolution. Which isn't, of course, to say that I couldn't do the latter: as I might when I've quite forgotten it, and even on looking at the declaration of it in my diary cannot form an 'inner connection' with it - but yet have no cause to reject my diary entry.).</span></p><p><span style="font-family: TimesNewRomanPSMT;">To conclude, I want to ask whether, to sustain the attribution of pain to he who sincerely doesn't avow it, we must posit the operation of a defeating condition. Is it intelligible that my friend, or my patients, who were not, as we say, 'aware' of their pain at t1, but at t2 can offer a belated avowal for t1's pain, be properly said to have yet been in pain at t1 unless we also have an explanation as why they couldn't avow it at t1? Must we refer to a broader character trait of self-neglect, or (what needn't be an entirely different matter) the operation of a dissociative defence mechanism, in order to sustain the attribution of unavowable pain at t1? Or will a later acknowledgement suffice? Well, it may differ from case to case as to where our shared intuitions as to intelligibility lie - and in fact there also need be no universally shared set of intuitions here either. There may be an indeterminacy in the very concept, that is, perhaps especially when we come to mental pain.</span></p>Richard Gippshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18001492312162861823noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3184393804521721596.post-14816203961495660462022-03-09T12:33:00.039+00:002022-03-27T15:46:10.215+01:00seth's vision<p style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><b>on it 'looking as if' the sun goes round the earth</b></span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;"></span></p><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjguNxy3o57mjz3-eFca4lFKC73C9bOZW_jB5_uZv2XbBqxnpbm_n0qY2uuIZeTGpjK0v4Oe6fPCGlrCdz9Qgkx0H-5dicBM0C6FYUYtCuJdRhHrqW8I2MYJRVV8MQiAVrvYrD90WII0t8J/s563/Anscombe_Wittgenstein.JPG" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: 2em;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><img border="0" data-original-height="439" data-original-width="563" height="157" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjguNxy3o57mjz3-eFca4lFKC73C9bOZW_jB5_uZv2XbBqxnpbm_n0qY2uuIZeTGpjK0v4Oe6fPCGlrCdz9Qgkx0H-5dicBM0C6FYUYtCuJdRhHrqW8I2MYJRVV8MQiAVrvYrD90WII0t8J/w200-h157/Anscombe_Wittgenstein.JPG" width="200" /></span></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: inherit; margin-right: 4em;">Anscombe and Wittgenstein <br /> by Dave McKean</span></td></tr></tbody></table><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">A gloriously pithy little dialogue between Wittgenstein and Anscombe goes like so: </span><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><div class="page" title="Page 82"><div class="section" style="background-color: white;"><div class="layoutArea"><div class="column"><p><span style="font-family: inherit;">Wittgenstein: ‘Why do people say that it was natural to think that the sun went round the Earth rather than that the Earth turned on its axis?’</span></p></div></div></div></div></blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><div class="page" title="Page 82"><div class="section" style="background-color: white;"><div class="layoutArea"><div class="column"><p><span style="font-family: inherit;">Anscombe: ‘I suppose, because it looked as if the sun went round the Earth.’</span></p></div></div></div></div></blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><div class="page" title="Page 82"><div class="section" style="background-color: white;"><div class="layoutArea"><div class="column"><p><span style="font-family: inherit;">Wittgenstein: ‘Well, what would it have looked like if it had <span style="font-style: italic;">looked </span>as if the Earth turned on its axis?’</span></p></div></div></div></div></blockquote></blockquote><p></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;">On this, in chapter 4 of his 'Being You', Anil Seth offers a gloriously muddled take:</span></p><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;"><div class="page" title="Page 82"><div class="section" style="background-color: white;"><div class="layoutArea"><div class="column"><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgm_bZlsZ9P8Hyx4c_YxAuJPTrZHIbdD0fZqdknMtoxFx_qrCbMC9MlUhk0jLdJ8GP1b9_JZCqRB8hjLKHoOkx-gJCcHp0V2qsJX_hxRyIh5ujDybH1oCTyfdalpHXF39jsMQsRUOx2ak76bd5RrqsykVmv2mw-JWb86HE3zpDu0-2T4nkYQB8DE-Co5w=s475" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><img border="0" data-original-height="475" data-original-width="309" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgm_bZlsZ9P8Hyx4c_YxAuJPTrZHIbdD0fZqdknMtoxFx_qrCbMC9MlUhk0jLdJ8GP1b9_JZCqRB8hjLKHoOkx-gJCcHp0V2qsJX_hxRyIh5ujDybH1oCTyfdalpHXF39jsMQsRUOx2ak76bd5RrqsykVmv2mw-JWb86HE3zpDu0-2T4nkYQB8DE-Co5w=w130-h200" width="130" /></span></a></div><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span>In this delightful exchange between Wittgenstein and his fellow philosopher (and biographer) Elizabeth Anscombe, the legendary German thinker uses the Copernican revolution to illustrate the point that how things </span><span style="font-style: italic;">seem </span><span>is not necessarily how they </span><span style="font-style: italic;">are</span><span>. Although it </span><span style="font-style: italic;">seems as though </span><span>the sun goes around the Earth, it is of course the Earth rotating </span><span>around its own axis that gives us night and day, and it is the sun, not the Earth, that sits at the centre of the solar system. Nothing new here, you might think, and you’d be right. But Wittgenstein was driving at something deeper. His real message for Anscombe was that even with a greater understanding of how things actually are, at some level things still appear the same way they always did. The sun rises in the east and sets in the west, same as always.</span></span><p></p></div></div></div></div></blockquote><p><span style="font-family: inherit;">What's gone wrong here? Leave aside the fibs about Wittgenstein being German and about Anscombe being his biographer. Leave aside too the unhappy idea that 'really', or 'of course', it's the earth spinning on its axis, and not the sun orbiting the earth, that accounts for there being night and day. (Doesn't it just depend - as Einstein points out in his little introduction to relativity theory - on which<i> you stipulate</i> as your reference frame?!) Also put aside the notion that it's any more than a truism that the<i> sun,</i> rather than the earth, sits at the centre of the<i> solar</i> system. Focus instead on the fact that Wittgenstein's lesson for Anscombe is neither that 'how things seem is not necessarily how they are' nor that 'even with a greater understanding of how things actually are, at some level things still appear the same way they always did'. His point is instead that it in truth no more <i>seems </i>to us as if the sun goes round the earth than it <i>seems</i> as if<i> </i>the earth goes round the sun! Wittgenstein's emphasis isn't here on the 'no more'; it's instead on the presumption that 'seems as if' <i>is here being deployed with any meaning at all</i>. Anscombe's point, to repeat, is that she was caught up in a mere<i> illusion </i>of sense.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;">Not only is Wittgenstein offering neither the surface nor the deeper message which Seth ascribes to him, but the lessons Seth suggests are in truth <i>ruled out </i>by Wittgenstein's actual lesson. (Something can't meaningfully be said to<i> seem</i> one way rather than another, with or without greater understanding coming into it, if 'seem' is used without meaning.) Anscombe makes all this perfectly clear, by the way,<i> in the very paragraph</i> from which Seth takes his extract:</span></p><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><p style="text-align: left;"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgeEnACMnQGWlOWyrrnqh1ZFPFfe85CQKq-aojej2NOHpZE97RaXe8jF7atLozwA0f86xIi6tN-Sd3WQdB1NteaCDjbfNtbdr1t58xWS1PE1rP6gxHEXMuljYwhMW1QN6X65PyymJKnJpQtOAKo-A0UJkDclGD-Rx1dbC1y4H5Bo3UzQfAoYfj5WewUvA=s500" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 2em;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><img border="0" data-original-height="500" data-original-width="321" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgeEnACMnQGWlOWyrrnqh1ZFPFfe85CQKq-aojej2NOHpZE97RaXe8jF7atLozwA0f86xIi6tN-Sd3WQdB1NteaCDjbfNtbdr1t58xWS1PE1rP6gxHEXMuljYwhMW1QN6X65PyymJKnJpQtOAKo-A0UJkDclGD-Rx1dbC1y4H5Bo3UzQfAoYfj5WewUvA=w129-h200" width="129" /></span></a></div><span style="font-family: inherit;">The general method Wittgenstein does suggest is that of 'shewing that a man has supplied no meaning [or perhaps: "no reference"] for certain signs in his sentences'. I can illustrate the method from Wittgenstein's later way of discussing problems. He once greeted me with the question: 'Why do people say that it was natural to think that the sun went round the earth rather than that the earth turned on its axis?' I replied: 'I suppose, because it looked as if the sun went round the earth.' 'Well,' he asked, 'what would it have looked like if it had looked as if the earth turned on its axis?' This question brought it out that I had hitherto given no relevant meaning to 'it looks as if' in 'it looks as if the sun goes round the earth'. My reply was to hold out my hands with the palms upward, and raise them from my knees in a circular sweep, at the same time leaning backwards and assuming a dizzy expression. 'Exactly!' he said. In another case, I might have found that I could not supply any meaning other than that suggested by a naive conception, which could be destroyed by a question. The naive conception is really thoughtlessness, but it may take the power of a Copernicus effectively to call it in question.</span><p></p></blockquote><p style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">If it seems peculiar, at this point in our discussion, that Seth should just ignore Wittgenstein's actual lesson, I hope it shan't by the discussion's end. Or at least, that it won't seem peculiar <i>for him</i>. For what we find, again and again as we read his chapter, is him doing precisely what Wittgenstein was teaching us to not do: he (like many a neuropsychologist colleague of his) uses familiar terms but fails to assign them meanings in the novel contexts in which they're redeployed. (Perhaps he's somehow assumed not that the meaning of words in sentences is a function of their use-in-context, but - to borrow a metaphor a friend of mine once offered - that they carry self-contained meanings about with them in little semantic rucksacks on their backs.) And just as he projects his own favoured scheme for representing the interactions between sun and planets onto that scheme's objects - so that he now imagines it makes ready sense to proffer that 'really' or 'of course' the earth goes round the sun - so too does he without demur project his own (rather peculiar, anthropomorphising) forms of description onto the operation of the perceptual system, mistaking this for the proffering of insight into the essential nature of perceptual reality contact itself. </span></p><p style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Let's consider some examples.</span></p><p style="text-align: left;"><b><span style="font-family: inherit;">'I open my eyes and it seems as though there's a real world out there'</span></b></p><div class="page" style="text-align: left;" title="Page 83"><div class="section" style="background-color: white;"><div class="layoutArea"><div class="column"><p><span style="font-family: inherit;">Here's how Seth continues his discussion:</span></p></div></div></div></div><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;"><div class="page" title="Page 83"><div class="section" style="background-color: white;"><div class="layoutArea"><div class="column"><p><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span>As with the solar system, so with perception. I open my eyes and it </span><span style="font-style: italic;">seems as though </span><span>there’s a real world out there. Today, I’m at home in Brighton. There are no cypress trees like there were in Santa Cruz, just the usual scatter of objects on my desk, a red chair in the corner, and beyond the window a totter of chimney pots. These objects </span><span style="font-style: italic;">seem to have </span><span>specific shapes and colours, and for the ones closer at hand, smells and textures too. This is how things </span><span style="font-style: italic;">seem</span><span>.</span></span></p></div></div></div></div><div class="page" title="Page 83"><div class="section" style="background-color: white;"><div class="layoutArea"><div class="column"><p><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span>Although it may </span><span style="font-style: italic;">seem as though </span><span>my senses provide transparent windows onto a mind-independent reality, and that perception is a process of ‘reading out’ sensory data, what’s really going on is – I believe – quite different. [all italics in original]</span></span></p></div></div></div></div></blockquote><div class="page" title="Page 83"><div class="section" style="background-color: white;"><div class="layoutArea"><div class="column"><p><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span>What does Seth mean here by 'it seems as though there's a real world out there'? Recall that the ordinary use of either 'seems as though' or 'looks as if', in the context of talk about perceptual judgement, is either i) to distinguish veridical perception from perceptual illusion or hallucination, or ii) to express self-conscious caution. The point of i) saying '</span><i>it looked as if</i><span> there was an oasis there' is to make clear that here we're instead talking of a mirage. (And we understand what visual illusions are precisely by contrasting them with the ordinary business of seeing what's actually going on about us.) The point of saying ii) 'well it <i>looks as if</i> the golf ball's gone into the hole' is to make it clear that, being 50 rather than 2 yards away, we can't see it very well so may be wrong. Yet when it comes to 'I open my eyes and it seems as thought there's a real world out there' it's obvious that Seth is using the phrase 'it seems as though' in <i>neither</i> of these senses. He's not i) contrasting cases of misleading visual appearance with cases of ordinary perceptual encounter that take in how things are - since he's talking about ordinary, non-illusory, perceptual experience. It's not as if he could intelligibly say 'But it's <i>all</i> illusion, <i>all</i> a perceptual maya veil' since then we've lost the contrast ('veridical perception') which gives the concept of 'illusion' any content. And he's not ii) talking about being meaningfully cautious in perceptually less-than-ideal circumstances, since he's imagining our just opening our eyes in the day time and seeing whatever's right in front of us. </span><span>So </span><i>what does Seth mean by 'it seems as though'? </i></span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;">Well, he doesn't tell us. He uses words outside of their normal sense-affording context of application, but fails to spell out how he's instead using them. It's as if he were trying to extrapolate from the manifest intelligibility of 'The partly submerged pencil <i>looks </i>bent' to a putative intelligibility for 'This ordinary pencil right in front of me, in ordinary lighting, in a circumstance in which there's no hint of anything being awry, <i>looks </i>straight'. But any such transfer of meaning is illusory; the only illusion we here encounter is (not sensory but) one of meaning. Or, well, perhaps Seth does intend something specific, something else, with his words! But speaking as the reader of a book which is presumably written in order to be understood - it would've been nice to have been told what it was!</span></p><p><b><span style="font-family: inherit;">'commonsense' ... or 'out there'?</span></b></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span>As a foil for his own 'perception as controlled hallucination' view (we'll get to this later), Seth offers something called a 'commonsense' or 'how things seem' conception of perception. </span><span>This conception sees the world as being 'out there', and holds that our senses are 'windows' onto this 'external' reality, windows looked out of by 'the self', an 'I behind the eyes' which 'receives' and 'processes' 'sense data' in order to 'build an inner picture of an outside world'. ... And yet, and of course, if we're sitting in our study looking at the objects on the desk or the red chair, we don't experience these objects as 'out there'. After all, it doesn't 'seem' to us, we don't take it as commonsense to suppose, that we're somehow <i>trapped inside</i> our own bodies or heads! We might use the 'out there' locution to articulate what's beyond the front door, but such talk presupposes for its very intelligibility some perceivable 'in here' with which we may contrast it. And yet, in the case of looking at the paraphernalia on one's desk, there's no perceivable 'in here' to offer an intelligibility-providing contrast. (Thank goodness, right? Think how gruesome it'd be if the eyes pointed inwards.) And we look with, rather than through, our eyes. (What would I even look through my eyes </span><i>with?!</i><span> We may have adult teeth waiting in the wings to replace our milk teeth, but we don't have further eyes behind the alleged windows provided by our ordinary eyes.) What it is about this view that warrants its description as 'common sense' - rather than as something which, in a different sense of the idiom, really is rather 'out there' - is utterly unclear. It instead looks to me far more like what in C18th philosophy, and in even today's sciences of perception, but <i>not</i> for the man on the street, is fairly common </span><i>non</i><span>sense. </span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;"></span></p><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjdQVJ7lya66BQCBhJAYkJ0nQ0styGWc0YD1A5T1_FqmbU8t3woMC3nMRKUQQvcZ_JicH0_J7wNMo4P4K_Izm-ksg8bJVIggVeJJVeO5SUkpWwgzOSLlT3HIDoINFoxHZmaFdw79TOy0QxxIj4Ry3HaMYyftwBQhPNY40SjR8yIM3mJSyHBfhdFb-mbSA=s4519" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><img border="0" data-original-height="4519" data-original-width="3013" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjdQVJ7lya66BQCBhJAYkJ0nQ0styGWc0YD1A5T1_FqmbU8t3woMC3nMRKUQQvcZ_JicH0_J7wNMo4P4K_Izm-ksg8bJVIggVeJJVeO5SUkpWwgzOSLlT3HIDoINFoxHZmaFdw79TOy0QxxIj4Ry3HaMYyftwBQhPNY40SjR8yIM3mJSyHBfhdFb-mbSA=w133-h200" width="133" /></span></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Dan Dennett</span></td></tr></tbody></table><span style="font-family: inherit;">In truth Seth himself acknowledges that this conception is no more than conceptual confusion writ large: he notes that it gets us caught up in what Dennett calls the 'fallacy of 'double transduction'' whereby inner images are invoked to explain perception of the world, leaving us with the equally problematic issue of how we see these inner images. What Seth doesn't do, however, is question whether the <i>question</i> to which this 'inner image' view of perception offers an answer has a cogent sense. Now, one way to mobilise the 'how do we see?' question, one way to give it at least the appearance of intelligibility, is to imagine first that we really are somehow stuck inside our own skulls, and therefore forced to perceptually reconstruct a now external world using images that appear on the retina. And now the question 'well how do we do that?!' will - to say the least - appear pressing. But undo, avoid, this alienated conception of our perceptual encounter with the world, and it's none too obvious that there's a question remaining which requires the provision of an alternative answer. If 'how do we see?' is to be understood as inviting an answer in neurological terms, then all well and good. But a psychological or an epistemological answer? What, exactly, is the psychological or epistemological problem that the question is addressing?! I can't myself see one, and so don't see what it is that a psychology of vision is here supposed to be doing. But perhaps there <i>is</i> a good question hereabouts? Well, I'm all ears: do tell!</span><p></p><p><b><span style="font-family: inherit;">perception: 'generated by the brain'?</span></b></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span>Part of this allegedly 'commonsense' view has it that we ordinarily think that 'A coffee cup out there in the world leads to a perception of a coffee cup generated within the brain.' And it turns out that whilst Seth </span>will<span> dispute a neurophysiological outside-in or bottom-up theory - one in which the neurological events enabling perception follow a unidirectional cascade from eyeball to striate cortex etc - he actually <i>agrees </i>with (what in fact is) this only allegedly 'commonsense' view that perception is 'generated within the brain'. </span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;">Nobody (sane) could disagree that we're dependent for our perception on the activity of the brain. In order to see - to <i>actually</i> see, that is - a cat, the following ingredients are required: 1 medium sized cat, a few ounces of light, 1 or 2 retinae, and a goodly pinch both of optical nerve, and of striate cortex, activation. (Or, if all we're after is a mere cat <i>hallucination</i>, we may leave out the first 4 ingredients.) From none of this does it follow, however, that perception is intelligibly described as 'generated within' the brain. Perception just isn't the right kind of thing to be 'generated' anywhere. (In truth, and en passant: whilst I just offered the above 5 ingredients as a recipe for perception, we ought to acknowledge that, to truly be counted a perceiver, one must also enjoy <i>animate life:</i> a body, and all the neural and physiological movement control apparatus to sustain such a life. But let's not get into that here!)</span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;">Now, if we'd subscribed to what Seth construes as the 'commonsense' view - that perception involves inner images - we can I think imagine thinking of perception as being generated, since its in the nature of the coming about of images that we do talk intelligibly of their generation. Absent some such conception, however, and it's hard to see what talk of 'generation' could be getting at, let alone talk of 'generation within the brain'. Compare my paying for my shopping. Paying, like perceiving, is something I do. But must the paying be <i>generated</i> somewhere, perhaps somewhere within me? No, of course not. This isn't to doubt that it happens - it most certainly does (I'm not a thief). It's instead to doubt that there's any clearly intelligible role for talk of 'generation' here. So too, I suggest, for the idea that perception is 'generated by' - or as Seth also says, 'a construction of' - the brain. Perception is not the name of an entity or process; it's instead an action - which is to say, or by which I mean: it's something I do. The action <i>relies on</i> the generation of ATP, neurotransmitters, etc., sure. And when I do perceive, all sorts of activity obtains in my CNS - which activity certainly is generated. But my perceiving is neither such activity itself, nor some further activity generated by it; it's not itself activity in this sense - though in a different sense we might describe it as <i>an</i> activity. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;">This idea of perception as something somehow 'coming about' within us pops up throughout Seth's discussion, and colludes there with other peculiar ideas such as that our perceptual consciousness is not of the world but of what is generated by neurological processes: 'Whenever we are conscious, we are conscious of something, or of many things. These are the <span style="font-style: italic;">contents </span>of consciousness. To understand how they come about...[we should consider the functioning of the brain].' The idea here seems to be that what you are conscious of, when you are perceptually aware of something, is something which comes about inside the brain. This however is straightforwardly mistaken: what you're conscious of, when you actually perceive something, is something that's on the desk in front of you! And if you want to know how pencils, laptops and coffee cups <i>come about</i> - well, don't ask a neuropsychologist! (To voice this is not to engage in either naive or sophisticated or philosophical or psychological theorising about perception: it's merely to remember how to use the word 'perceive'.) ... Or perhaps Seth had in mind what philosophers call the 'intentional' rather than 'material' objects when talking about consciousness's 'contents'? But, well, that hardly helps, since we aren't conscious of intentional objects: they're logical constructs, not perceptibilia.</span></p><p><b><span style="font-family: inherit;">the brain: 'constantly making predictions'?</span></b></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span>When presenting his opponent, Seth frequently merges together two different stories about perception into one. The first narrative is an <i>empirically false theory</i>: a neurological story about perception being enabled by a merely bottom-up stream of neuronal activity that begins at the retinae and moves on to the striate cortex, activating 'feature detectors' as it goes along its merry afferent way. The other is <i>not even</i> false: it's the philosophically confused notion of a perceiving person as allegedly being in the desperate epistemic predicament of having to reconstruct the glories </span>of<span> the visual scene from the meagre data to be found on the retinae - as if we were all somehow trapped inside our own skulls. Bring </span>these together and we arrive at the idea of the brain now being involved in somehow solving this poor person's predicament. (As far as I can tell we also find something like this latter muddle in Helmholtz, Gregory, Frith, and in much of contemporary cognitive neuroscience.)</span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;"></span></p><span style="font-family: inherit;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEg1H6NLrarPGAw3SqaTYZZoFbLrY8P3g3-NL80wC43qUSDrQhM5QTKeFZpzIO_42JkVA5s0zRnKm2iWYTMe4AAEeNR-pRmBUBJqBDAggM_K2LPzAis0j_7Vb9ngE8cYA3Zuape9LR5Xw-_Nog7gZlzL51lUrCwfoUiguvDpw9OTp-zzNoMCVaxQh3ZabQ=s475" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="475" data-original-width="280" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEg1H6NLrarPGAw3SqaTYZZoFbLrY8P3g3-NL80wC43qUSDrQhM5QTKeFZpzIO_42JkVA5s0zRnKm2iWYTMe4AAEeNR-pRmBUBJqBDAggM_K2LPzAis0j_7Vb9ngE8cYA3Zuape9LR5Xw-_Nog7gZlzL51lUrCwfoUiguvDpw9OTp-zzNoMCVaxQh3ZabQ=w118-h200" width="118" /></a></div>Rather than separating out the empirically testable from the philosophically confused, Seth's own positive alternative is also something of an unholy hybrid. One aspect of it is a scientifically intriguing story - this has visual perception neurologically underwritten not only by afferent 'bottom-up' enervation deriving from retinal stimulation but also, and more importantly, by a complex 'top-down' set of central processes. Unfortunately however, and so far as I could tell (I've read chapter 4 carefully but rather skipped about in the rest of the book), Seth tells us absolutely <i>nothing at all</i> about the actual neurological details. (Perhaps he thought the reader just wouldn't find this of interest. ... I admit to finding this all a great shame. To return to Wittgenstein for a moment: recall his discussion with Bouwsma about the difference between the ghastly pop-sci writing of the likes of Jeans or Eddington, and the patient, empirically detailed, well-grounded, accessible writing found in Faraday's<i> Chemical History of the Candle</i>. The former tends toward the sensational and merges inchoate philosophical claims with poorly elucidated empirical details; the latter deploys careful plain prose to describe actual empirical details, making a circumscribed matter truly intelligible to a lay reader. Speaking for myself I found Seth's popular book ( - I'll own that I know nothing of his actual neuroscientific contributions, and have no idea if I'd even understand them - ), with its lack of actual neuroscientific detail and its sweeping, conceptually awry, claims about consciousness, to be rather more Jeans than Faraday.) The other is the philosophically confused notion articulated above: of an anthropomorphised brain in the dismal epistemic predicament of somehow fathoming an external world from the confines of its own bony cavern.</span><p></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;">Here's the story as he develops it:</span></p></div></div></div></div><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><div class="page" title="Page 83"><div class="section" style="background-color: white;"><div class="layoutArea"><div class="column"><div class="page" title="Page 85"><div class="section"><div class="layoutArea"><div class="column"><p style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">[T]he brain is constantly making predictions about the causes of its sensory signals, predictions which cascade in a top-down direction through the brain’s perceptual hierarchies (the grey arrows in the image opposite). If you happen to be looking at a coffee cup, your visual cortex will be formulating predictions about the causes of the sensory signals that originate from this coffee cup.</span></p></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></blockquote><div class="page" title="Page 83"><div class="section" style="background-color: white;"><div class="layoutArea"><div class="column"><p><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span>What is it for a brain to make predictions? Well, let's recall first what it is for a creature to make predictions. To predict you must first be able to 'dict' - i.e. verbally communicate, describe what is happening right now. After this you must be able to enjoy the kinds of thoughts about the future which are afforded to such language users <i>as have mastered tensed verbs</i>. Animals and young children can anticipate or expect </span><span>(we ascribe anticipation to them on the basis of their ongoing coping with a changing world, on the basis of their lack of surprise by changes, etc.) but not predict. Such mastery of tensed verbs is of course not simply a matter of being able to </span><i>say</i><span> certain things. It's rather a skill which requires its performer to be culturally situated, to act and react in such ways as warrant us talking of intention and agency, to be able </span>to<span> use a whole lot of other </span>language<span> too, to mean what one says, and so on. Literally none of these things are possible for non-human animals or pre-linguistic children, let alone any of their behaviourally inert, non-vocal, non-verbal internal organs. </span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span>So we're forced to conclude that - since it'd be a </span>nonsense<span> to say that a brain is actually expecting or anticipating, let alone predicting, anything - Seth must either i) be in a terrible muddle, or ii) be, wittingly or unwittingly, using the word 'predict' in a special way. Let's adopt interpretative </span>charity and assume the latter. Seth is really talking, we might say, about 'prediction2'. The question arises: what are the <span>criteria governing its use; what are its ascription conditions? When shall we say of a natural process - e.g. one occurring in the brain - that it constitutes a prediction2? Shall it be that, say, a leaf predicts2 the sun's position if it turns the leaf not to where the sun now is but to where it will maximise photosynthesis in twenty minutes? Shall we say that a pancreas (let's imagine, I've no idea how they work...) predicts2 what insulin shall be required to digest the food that's being eaten if it releases it not in response to current blood sugar levels but instead in response to mastication or smell? Well, we can do! That's just fine! A perfectly innocent metaphor which we perfectly well understand. Unfortunately, however, Seth doesn't tell us what <i>he</i> means by 'predict', so his theory remains either cogent yet occult, or, if he was intending his word in the normal sense, incoherent.</span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span>It might be argued: 'But surely scientists extend or creatively misuse words all the time; scientific theorising is riddled with metaphor, and this is all for the better!' It's important to note that <i>with that I have absolutely no quarrel.</i> All I ask </span>is that the metaphor user or new sense deployer stop at some point to explain what this new or extended use is. Otherwise we just shan't know what's being talked about.</span></p><p><b><span style="font-family: inherit;">'perception as <i>controlled hallucination</i>'</span></b></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;"></span></p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjQzlrXL8LcSXpGv7UCDz-DnSsAdySfonNfiQD5LkiLeu08itsm9voZcLUiMuNexdZEhlD1K_90NbKTJCJAPf-wTbdL0l_ExaP2QwBuHdWsz04hk7KAO9jO3qm9bW6ngl98rGbum09qZF5UclYUHNiVACmBwgajGTHmJBt-RbztYCeUSUq8kB-tsORe3Q=s2048" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2048" data-original-width="1665" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjQzlrXL8LcSXpGv7UCDz-DnSsAdySfonNfiQD5LkiLeu08itsm9voZcLUiMuNexdZEhlD1K_90NbKTJCJAPf-wTbdL0l_ExaP2QwBuHdWsz04hk7KAO9jO3qm9bW6ngl98rGbum09qZF5UclYUHNiVACmBwgajGTHmJBt-RbztYCeUSUq8kB-tsORe3Q=w163-h200" width="163" /></span></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Hippolyte Taine</span></td></tr></tbody></table><span style="font-family: inherit;">The central claim of Seth's presentation is that hallucination is 'controlled hallucination'; he takes the idea from Frith (who presumably got it from Taine). We arrive at this prima facie extraordinary claim by pushing the above-described hybrid account to its limits. On the one hand we accept a new empirical theory of vision, one which gives pride of place to an array of 'top-down' activity in the striate cortex, and which correlatively diminishes the role of 'bottom-up', relentlessly afferent, neural activity. On the other hand we accept the mapping of such inner activity in the CNS onto that conceptually corrupt epistemological story: which has us stuck in our own heads, which has perception generated within the brain, which somehow either 'identifies' perceptual acts with their most central neurobiological substrates or sees the latter as 'generating' the former. These central processes, recall, are not under the direct control of afferent sensory stimuli. They are brought into causal connection with such stimuli, but what serves to ready one's bodily movement (i.e. ultimately to underwrite one's very understanding of one's environment) has a lot more to do with internally-generated, rather than afferently controlled, neural activity.</span><p></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;">So how do we get to 'controlled hallucination'? Well, having accepted i) the unhelpful philosophical idea that internal neural processes either are or generate perceptual experiences, whilst ii) promoting the valuable empirical idea that perceptual activity is made possible by largely top-down rather than bottom-up neurological processes, we arrive at the idea that actual perceptual experiences exist or arise independently of their objects! It's this odd admixture of epistemology and neuroscience that results in a perfectly legitimate (if radically under-described in 'Being You') neurological story taking on such extraordinary epistemological garb.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEiauu4vk4auYY7Wd11xo4WW8-4xtEb51KhZDSpQmxOyIa15PYtFt2cZf9hSO8NMEPNlpCPXK6IrHAQAmbVUcW6id28yBXIyKvqTsqsbnQiAfTd2DKAp4dsa66XZ3spAb4Chg-Xei6qkS7RGiQE9RihoWRqJqiKiK1MlEmw0LsqgNTEI_P_HtuXRrg3WQA=s1800" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1800" data-original-width="1200" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEiauu4vk4auYY7Wd11xo4WW8-4xtEb51KhZDSpQmxOyIa15PYtFt2cZf9hSO8NMEPNlpCPXK6IrHAQAmbVUcW6id28yBXIyKvqTsqsbnQiAfTd2DKAp4dsa66XZ3spAb4Chg-Xei6qkS7RGiQE9RihoWRqJqiKiK1MlEmw0LsqgNTEI_P_HtuXRrg3WQA=w133-h200" width="133" /></a></span>The truth, of course, is that far from veridical perception being helpfully theorised in terms of hallucination, it is necessarily <i style="font-family: inherit;">that against which hallucination can be understood for what it is</i>. Again, only on an 18th century picture according to which experiences go on somehow 'inside us' could anyone even begin to think of hallucination as the stuff of perception itself. We only have to recall what it is to hallucinate - to have an experience which in some ways if not in all is for one as if one were actually perceiving something<i style="font-family: inherit; text-align: left;"> despite the fact that one isn't</i><span style="font-family: inherit; text-align: left;"> - to realise what a non-starter it is. Perception, considered epistemologically, has to do with our 'openness' to the world, our capacity to 'take in' how things are. Those are epistemological metaphors, mind you: they've nothing to do with subpersonal goings on in the retinae, optical nerve, or striate cortex. There is simply no reason to superimpose the two pictures, any more than there's reason to superimpose the facts about the control of movements by the motor cortex onto a story about acting on intention. (A point Susan Hurley made back in 1998.) Neither the intentions nor the perceptual experiences are 'inside' us; action is not 'output' and sensation is not 'input'; the subpersonal is not the instantiation of the personal.</span></p></div></div></div></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><p></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="https://www.academia.edu/44730225/How_not_to_think_of_perception" target="_blank">Søren Overgaard</a> has <a href="https://cfs.ku.dk/calendar-main/2022/cfs-20-years/" target="_blank">recently</a> made the point that something like a performative contradiction appears to lie at the heart of the 'perception is hallucination' view, just as it famously does for the 'eliminative materialist' and the 'logical positivist' projects. The cognitive scientist, after all, presumably got the evidence for his view by inspecting brain scans, reading papers, etc. But according to Seth he in fact experienced a hallucination of these scans, papers, etc. It is <i>of the essence</i> of hallucination, however, that it provides no actual knowledge of the world about one. So the theory would appear to be based upon no actual evidence. Now clearly this is a rather cheeky objection. But it's important to understand it for the challenge it is, which may be put like this: 'You say perception is hallucination, but obviously, in any ordinary sense of the word, it is not. So please, please, tell us what instead you mean by 'hallucination'!'</span></p><p><b><span style="font-family: inherit;">'chairs aren't red'</span></b></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;">Not content to leave us with the paradox of perception as hallucination, Seth next ventures into the notion that chairs (which ones? ... red ones...) aren't red. We get there by way of some standard-issue and utterly sound observations regarding the context- and light-levels- influenced nature of our perceptual judgements <i>combined, once again, with some decidedly C18th philosophy - this time to do not only with a conception of perception as something happening inside us but also with 'secondary qualities' (colour, sound, etc.) not truly belonging to objects.</i> How now does the story go?</span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;">Seth begins by pointing out that our capacity to judge the colour of objects is enabled not only by our responsivity to light of this or that wavelength, but also by a range of contextual factors including the form of illumination in play. 'Take a white piece of paper outdoors and it still looks white, even though the light it reflects now has a very different spectral composition'. So far, so good: it's not simply that different lighting and contexts can mislead us as to the actual colour of a thing (as assessed by taking it outside into daylight); it's also that we can correctly perceive that something is the same colour even when the wavelength of the light reflected from it alters considerably.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;">From this, however, Seth argues - not against the reductionist notion that wavelength is a happy index of colour, but - that the 'brain infers' the 'invariant property' of 'the way in which the paper reflects light', and that this 'inference' or 'best guess' 'appear[s] in our conscious experience'. We finally arrive at the subjectivist notion that 'colour is not a definite property of things-in-themselves', but instead 'a useful device that evolution has hit upon' to keep track of objects in changing lighting conditions. But how do we get here? How do we get to the idea that colour is a property not of things themselves but is instead 'the subjective, phenomenological aspect' of the 'mechanisms of perception' deployed by the brain to keep track of objects through keeping a bead on the 'way-in-which-they-reflect-light'? </span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;">So far as I can tell, the thought tacitly underlying Seth's theory here owes nothing to science and everything to scientism. It's the thought, that is, that the 'real' properties of things are what's discernible by natural scientific investigation. We can I think see this in such peculiar lines as the following: 'Chairs aren't red just as they aren't ugly or old-fashioned or avant-garde.' But of course, chairs can in fact truly be ugly or old-fashioned or red, so it's obvious he's not using the term 'is' or 'really' in the normal way. With this deviation in play he effectively invites us to simply leave behind our ordinary use of 'real' to distinguish the actual colour of things from the colour they merely appear to have under certain odd lighting conditions or behind a hastily added disguise. But, well, <i>why</i> would we use the word 'real' in this new<span> way? How does it help rather than confound? Which scientific facts about vision are illuminated rather than obscured by such a usage? I must here own that I just can't think of a cogent reason to speak of red chairs not being red.</span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span>Seth arrives at the thought that 'we assume that </span><span>we each see the world in roughly the same way, and most of the time perhaps we do. But even if this is so, it isn’t because red chairs </span><span><span><i>really are red'. </i>Here we're rather back to </span>where<span> we started, with a use of the words 'assume' and 'same way' without a manifest sense in the context of their applications. I </span><i>assume </i>that you and I both see the red chair as red? Well, sure, I typically assume that you've nothing wrong with your eyes. But what does it even mean: to see a red thing as red? (To not be making a mistake about its colour perhaps?) Or: what's even meant by 'same or different way' here? Once again, Seth puts words together in what look to be grammatically well-formed sentences - but we're left with no understanding of what they mean in the particular context of his prose.</span></span></p>Richard Gippshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18001492312162861823noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3184393804521721596.post-3330243255918026292022-03-01T17:32:00.005+00:002022-03-20T08:45:20.212+00:00contra ipseity<p style="font-family: Garamond; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><b><br />A talk</b></p><p style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><b><span style="font-family: Garamond;">12</span><span style="font-family: Garamond; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;"><sup>th</sup></span></b><b style="font-family: Garamond;"> June 2020 St Cats, Oxford / Revised for 1st March 2022, Phenolab</b></p>
<p style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 14px;"><br /></p>
<p style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="text-decoration: underline;"><b>1. Introduction</b></span></p>
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<p style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">a. Psychopathologists tell us of range of distinctly schizophrenic disturbances – Ichstörungen – that we may call ‘self-disturbances’, ‘I disturbances’… even call them ‘ipseity disturbances’ if you want…</p>
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<p style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px 0px 0px 36px;">(a) "My thoughts are not thought by me. They are thought by somebody else"</p>
<p style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px 0px 0px 36px;">(b) "Feelings are not felt by me, things are not seen by me, only by my eyes"</p>
<p style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px 0px 0px 36px;">(c) "This (thing, event) directly refers to me."</p>
<p style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px 0px 0px 36px;">(d) "My thoughts can influence (things, events). This (event) happens because I think it"</p>
<p style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px 0px 0px 36px;">(e) "To keep the world going, I must not stop thinking/breathing, otherwise it would cease to exist."</p>
<p style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px 0px 0px 36px;">(f) "My experience has changed somehow. It is not real somehow such as I myself am somehow not real."</p>
<p style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px 0px 0px 36px;">(g) "Things do not feel real. There is something like a wall of glass between me and everything else."</p>
<p style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px 0px 0px 36px;">(h) "Time has disappeared. … you could say there are bits of time, small pieces, shaken and mingled, or you could also say that there is no time at all." </p>
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<p style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">The English psychopathological lexicon calls some of these ‘passivity / made experiences; depersonalization, derealisation; delusions of reference, delusional perception’.</p>
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<p style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">b. My claim in what follows: The phenomena are what they are, and are articulated by patients the way they are articulated; with all that I naturally have no quarrel! But the theory brought to bear on them by quite a few phenomenological psychopathologists is unhelpful. Unhelpful: <i>not</i> because it's false - but because it's<i> meaningless</i>. So the explanations of the pathology developed using the theory are invalid. (Also, though this is a topic for another day: it's unclear that we should even be after explanations of this kind for psychotic experiences.)</p>
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<p style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">Some key terms from this phenomenological theory: Sense of myness / mineness. Ipseity. Self-givenness (i.e. givenness to self). First-person point of view. First-personal presence. Sense of self-coinciding. Auto-affection. Consciousness’s purely immanent (i.e. non-transcendent) presence to itself. Non-thetic self-consciousness.</p>
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<p style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">A note on ‘self-consciousness’: if one enjoys this simply to the extent that one can make meaningful use of the word "I" in ‘avowals’ or ‘declarations’ of one’s thoughts, feelings, bodily posture, actions, etc…. then, ok, fine! No quarrel!</p>
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<p style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">But if ‘self-consciousness’ is taken to mean ‘consciousness <i>of</i> <i>self’</i> – so that I could be said to properly use the word ‘I’ as above <i>because </i>I'm in some sense ‘conscious of’ my mental and physical states…. Then, <i>not</i> ok, <i>not</i> fine!</p>
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<p style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="text-decoration: underline;"><b>2. Schneider and Jaspers</b></span></p>
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<p style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">How this got going in the Heidelberg school:</p>
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<p style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="text-decoration: underline;">Schneider</span>: </p>
<p style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px 0px 0px 36px;">Because this sense of “me” and “mine” is so elusive a concept to grasp, its disturbances are ill defined and hard to sample. This particularly applies to thinking and somatic experience… Only when the sense of “me” and “mine” is encroached on from without can we grasp at the disturbance.</p>
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<p style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="text-decoration: underline;">Jaspers</span>:</p>
<p style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px 0px 0px 36px;">Self-awareness is [KJ alleges] present in every psychic event. <i>…</i> Every psychic manifestation, whether perception, bodily sensation, memory, idea, thought or feeling carries <i>this particular aspect of ‘being mine’ </i>of having an ‘I’-quality, of ‘personally belonging’, of it being one’s own doing. … If these psychic manifestations occur with the awareness of their not being mine, of being alien, automatic, independent, arriving from elsewhere, we term them phenomena of <i>depersonalization</i>. … In the natural course of our activities we do not notice how essential this experience of unified performance is.</p>
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<p style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">The idea: a putative non-thetic (non-positional - these are Sartrean terms) self-awareness is normally so recessive that it can’t be noticed. But we do notice it in breakdowns, and these reveal to us something about the structure of ordinary (self-)consciousness (an idea also mooted by John Campbell, George Graham & G Lynn Stephens). (Positional Cs: Cs transcends itself, is directed at objects in (i.e. is an ‘intentional’ relation to) the world. Non-pos self-Cs which provides the putative 'sense of mineness’ is not ‘directed at’ anything in this manner; Sartre puts brackets round the ‘of’: my seeing the cat doesn’t contain also an awareness <i>of </i>my seeing, as if my seeing is the intentional object of a further act.) </p>
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<p style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">So what is this <i>sense of mineness</i>? This <i>sense </i>of my thoughts, hand, face, feelings, sensations, <i>as mine</i>?</p>
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<p style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">Well, what are ‘senses’? 26 different senses of ‘sense’ in the OED!</p>
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<p style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">19<span style="font-size: 8.7px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;"><sup>th</sup></span> OED sense: “A faculty, esp. of an intuitive nature, of accurately perceiving, discerning, or evaluating. Frequently with <i>of</i>.”</p>
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<p style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;">I will use the term <i>'</i></span><i>experiential judgements’ </i>here; you can have a sense of: outrage, foreboding, injustice, something being not right, sense of right and wrong, someone standing silently behind us, sense of timing. (En passant: talk of ‘experiential’ is here intended to get away from cogitation. By analogy: I may, as I drive by, judge or misjudge how close your car’s wing-mirror is to mine without ever thinking about it.)</p>
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<p style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">Because they have to do with <i>judgement</i>, it’s essential to such senses that they may be misleading; <i>it’s of their nature to get something right or wrong</i>. My outrage may be misplaced; there may be nobody behind me; my arm may not be raised, my timing be off.</p>
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<p style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">So what then is this alleged sense of mineness that my own thoughts and feelings and postures etc are involved in? Surely I don’t pre-reflectively <i>judge </i>that they are mine? For I can’t get it <i>wrong </i>that they are mine. (Although this is not a helpful formulation – see later.) The cases in which we can get it wrong, that an arm or a gesture is mine, (e.g. in a photo, on a battlefield) involve instead what Sartre called reflective consciousness.</p>
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<p style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;">Now, </span>I can be radically confused. But there are 2 types of confusion. One involves <i>error</i>. But the relevant sort here has instead to do with <i>failing to make sense</i>. </p>
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<p style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">Let me share 3 philosophical 'jokes' which have about them that depth which Wittgenstein said characterises a certain kind of philosophical humour:</p>
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<p style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">1. William James’s correspondent’s anecdote about Baldy:</p>
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<p style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px 0px 0px 36px;">In half-stunned states, self-consciousness may lapse. A friend writes me: "We were driving back from —— in a wagonette. The door flew open and X., alias 'Baldy,' fell out on the road. We pulled up at once, and then he said, 'Did anybody fall out?' or 'Who fell out?'—I don't exactly remember the words. When told that Baldy fell out, he said, 'Did Baldy fall out? Poor Baldy!'</p>
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<p style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">Baldy’s disturbance is manifest not simply in his confusedly calling himself by his own name, as a young child might, but by his falling out of the carriage and knowing that someone had fallen out – but not who! </p>
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<p style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">Far from Baldy’s disturbance showing up a failure to engage in an allegedly normal business of correctly picking oneself out as the subject of one’s own activities, our sense of its absurdity instead shows up the nonsensicality of that very idea. </p>
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<p style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">2. A Sufi tale attributed to Mullah Nasruddin:</p>
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<p style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px 0px 0px 36px;">After a long journey, Nasruddin came at night to the marketplace and lay down to sleep. But so many people were there in the hubbub that he feared not knowing which one was he on waking. To make himself identifiable, he tied a gourd to his ankle, and then went to sleep. His mischievous neighbour, seeing what the Mullah had done, untied the gourd and affixed it to his own ankle. On waking Nasruddin was mightily disturbed and exclaimed: ‘It seems that he is me. But if so, then who now am I?’</p>
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<p style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">Nasruddin’s confusion here, we might say, consists not in his actually taking himself for his neighbour – since it’s not clear to us what that would even mean – but in his confusedly thinking that he so much as needs to identify himself in the first place.</p><p style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><br /></p><p style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">3. Or: a nice story, 25th September 1938, front page of The Oregonian (newspaper), Portland, Oregon: </p><p style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><br /></p><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0 0 0 40px; padding: 0px;"><p style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: left;">Headline: ‘Nope’, he says, Body isn’t his. ‘Charles Keville walked into a temporary morgue and looked at a body which had been identified as his. “Nope”, he said, “that ain’t me”, and walked out again.’ </p></blockquote>
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<p style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">We understand all this - that there’s no such thing as identifying oneself to oneself as oneself - well enough when we laugh at the above ‘jokes’. And we forget it when we’re at our unfunny studies. Even so, the comic provides the truer understanding of human nature than the philosopher. </p>
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<p style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="text-decoration: underline;"><b>3. Is My-ness Just Competence with ‘I’?</b></span></p>
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<p style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">Perhaps having a sense of myness simply involves the ability to self-ascribe thoughts and feelings, to use ‘I’ as a reflexive pronoun, to not confusedly ascribe my own thoughts and feelings to another?</p>
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<p style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">OK, fine. </p>
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<p style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><i>But if</i> we agree to that, we shall also have to agree that reference to an absence of a sense of mineness is now <i>utterly non-elucidatory</i> when it comes to the <i>Ichstörungen</i>. </p>
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<p style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">How so?</p>
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<p style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">Well, if what it is to enjoy a sense of X is to not be in state Y, then we can’t form any clearer an idea of what it is to be in state Y by adverting to the absence of a sense of X.</p>
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<p style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">The psychopathological ambition is, after all, something like this. Gordon says ‘The thoughts in my mind are not mine; they are Humphrey’s thoughts’. How is this so much as possible? Supposed answer: well, Gordon has suffered a disturbed sense of mineness, a disturbance of ipseity. But: what is it to suffer such a disturbed sense? Well, it’s to be disposed to become confused in the way Gordon becomes confused. ... This is a mere virtue dormitiva.</p>
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<p style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="text-decoration: underline;">Anscombe</span> registers this in her 1975 essay ‘The First Person’: </p>
<p style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px 0px 0px 36px;">The … normal state is the absence of … discontinuity, dissociation and loss … [which] can therefore be called the possession of ‘self-feeling’: <i>I record my suspicion that this is identifiable rather by consideration of the abnormal than the normal case.</i> </p>
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<p style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px 0px 0.1px;"><span style="text-decoration: underline;"><b>4. Zahavi, Sass, & Parnas</b></span></p>
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<p style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px 0px 0.1px;"><span><b>Some examples</b> of the phenomenological psychopathologists' claims:</span></p>
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<p style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px 0px 0.1px;">On ipseity:</p>
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<blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0 0 0 40px; padding: 0px;"><p style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px 0px 0.1px; text-align: left;">Parnas & Henriksen: “From a phenomenological perspective, all experience manifests in the first-person perspective as “my” experience—that is, the first-person givenness of experience implies a sense of “mine-ness,” “for-me-ness,” or “ipseity” that transpires through the flux of time and changing modalities of consciousness. … I am always pre-reflectively aware of being myself and I have no need for self-reflection to assure myself of being myself (e.g. I do not need to reflect upon who these feelings or thoughts might belong to in order to know that it is me).”</p></blockquote>
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<p style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px 0px 0.1px;">On psychopathology:</p>
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<blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;"><p style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">Schizophrenic disturbances of ‘mineness’ (Meinhaftigkeit (Schneider), for-me-ness, ipseity (Sartre)) are disturbances of ‘self-givenness’, disturbances of the ‘first-person/subjective perspective/presence’. </p><p style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 14px;"><br /></p><p style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">Parnas & Henriksen: ““ipseity disorder” … indicates an instability in the normally tacit, taken- for-granted, pre-reflective sense of being a subject of awareness and action, which no longer saturates the experiential life in the usual, unproblematic way”</p><p style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 14px;"><br /></p><p style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;">Dan Zahavi: </span>“whether a certain experience is experienced as mine or not … [depends] upon … the [implicit self-]givenness [the non-thetic/non-positional self-consciousness] of the experience. If the experience is given in a first-personal mode of presentation, it is experienced as <i>my </i>experience, otherwise not.”</p><p style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px 0px 0.1px; min-height: 14px;"><br /></p><p style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px 0px 0.1px;">Dan Zahavi: Talk of “mineness… is not meant to suggest that I own [all my] experiences in a way … similar to the way I possess external objects…” The experiences’ “commonality” has instead to do with “the distinct givenness [or] first-personal presence of experience. … [T]he experiences I am living through are given differently to me than to anybody else.”</p></blockquote>
<p style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px 0px 0.1px; min-height: 14px;"><br /></p><p style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px 0px 0.1px; min-height: 14px;"><b>A dialectical encounter</b>, beginning with my critique<b>:</b></p><p style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px 0px 0.1px; min-height: 14px;"><br /></p>
<p style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px 0px 0.1px;">Error Theory: It means nothing to say that own experiences are <i>given </i>or <i>present </i>to us. This is all just a hangover from an inner consciousness / introspection / acquaintance model of our involvement with our thoughts and feelings, in which they become objects of some kind of inner sense.</p>
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<p style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px 0px 0.1px;">Imagined Response: But it is precisely the point of non-thetic/positional self-consciousness to deny this two-part subject-object relation in self-consciousness. Here we relate to ourselves qua ourselves not qua another.</p>
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<p style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px 0px 0.1px;">Counter: But why talk of self-awareness or self-relating or givenness or presence <i>at all </i>here? Why think that when an object is present to us in our experience of it, the experience is also itself somehow <i>present</i> to us? [[[<span style="font-size: 10px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;">not quite sure what I had in mind here: </span>Why think of self-consciousness as consciousness of/by a self?]]]</p>
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<p style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px 0px 0.1px;">Response: Because without some such presence, how would we know what we think or feel? We would be ‘mind- or self- blind’. </p>
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<p style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px 0px 0.1px;">Counter: Why assume that any kind of awareness or sense <i>of </i>anything is needed to self-ascribe sensations, thoughts, limb positions, etc? Being ‘mind-blind’ could only be a meaningful problem if our self-consciousness were some kind of self-<i>awareness </i>in the first place. (We are neither mind-blind nor mind-present!)</p>
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<p style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px 0px 0.1px;">What then is our diagnosis as to what’s gone wrong - why is the ‘ipseity’ idea so attractive?</p>
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<p style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px 0px 0.1px;">Diagnosis: this idea of inner immanent self-awareness: “is blown up out of a misconstrue of the reflexive pronoun” (Anscombe 1975, 25) </p>
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<p style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px 0px 0.1px;">OK, so that sounds a bit ‘out-there’. How could it all be blown up out of a linguistic 'misconstrue'?</p>
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<p style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px 0px 0.1px;">Well, recall first that the topic is: my alleged sense that <i>I</i> am the subject of my experiences. It is this alleged sense which has gone wrong in the ‘I disturbances’.</p>
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<p style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px 0px 0.1px;">The critical Anscombian thought is that the underlying temptation here is to think that when I say ‘I feel X’, I’m expressing a thought which voices two <i>judgements</i>: <i>that</i> <i>X</i> is what is here felt, and <i>that I</i> am the one to feel X. But this is wrong in both parts: I am not, when I voice (say) my pain, <i>judging</i> that it’s <i>pain</i> that I’m in, nor that <i>I</i> am the one in pain. </p>
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<p style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px 0px 0.1px;">The ‘misconstrue’ has to do with assuming that ‘I’ is a ‘referring expression’: that there is something (self-ascription) that could be succeeded or failed at here, that there is ‘guaranteed success’ in self-reference. But this is just a nonsense: if there’s <i>no such thing</i> as failure, there’s also no such thing as success.</p>
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<p style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px 0px 0.1px;">It is rather to do with the fact that - to now come back to something I mentioned earlier and said then that I’d return to later - and to quote Anscombe (1975, 32): “Getting hold of the wrong object <i>is </i>excluded, and that makes us think that getting hold of the right object is guaranteed. But the reason [it’s excluded] is that there is no getting hold of an object at all.”</p>
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<p style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px 0px 0.1px;">Talk of ‘immunity to error through misidentification’ is an unhelpful way to make a conceptual point – one that borrows the terms of the very kind of thought it’s really trying to reject. As if there actually was some kind of success – a guaranteed success in <i>identification</i>! – here in play.</p>
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<p style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px 0px 0.1px;">Counter-Critique: On ‘I’ not being a referring expression – surely it refers to the one using it?</p>
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<p style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">Counter: Well, the issue isn’t the word ‘refer’. Help yourself to it if you must. But the thing is: that it ‘refers to the one using it’ is a rule <i>that others </i>can use - but it doesn’t at all capture our own use of it. </p>
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<p style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px 0px 0.1px;">Thus we can’t achieve the same with ‘I' as we can with names (so also questionable whether ‘I’s is really a pronoun at all – depending on what we mean by ‘pronoun’). We can imagine peculiar cases, more neurological than psychopathological, in which I’m mistaken about whether, say, <i>Richard Gipps </i>is hungry (perhaps I’ve forgotten my own name). But what we don’t find cogent is the suggestion that I may be mistaken about whether it’s <i>I</i> who is/am hungry.</p>
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<p style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px 0px 0.1px;">Counter-Critique: We are not talking about ‘linguistically-conditioned self-reference’, but about ‘a property of mineness in experience itself’. </p>
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<p style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px 0px 0.1px;">Response: The point of the critique was that precisely such talk of ‘mineness', ‘self-presence’, etc., expresses a philosophical fantasy itself rooted in a misunderstanding of our concepts. Avowal - in the sense of simultaneous expression and self-ascription (e.g. ‘I’m hungry’, ‘I hope it’s nearly the end of the talk’) am in pain - is not grounded in any kind of judgement about who we’re talking about. We aren’t in the business of <i>picking out</i> anything or anyone, in putative pre-reflective <i>judgements of however immanent a sort</i>, when we use the reflexive first-person pronoun. </p>
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<p style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="text-decoration: underline;"><b>5. Conclusion: What Then Are Ichstörungen?</b></span></p>
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<p style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;">So: c</span>onfusional failures of ‘self-consciousness’ either in clear consciousness (delusional passivity experiences etc), or in Baldy type cases, are not confusions of a <i>mis-judgement </i>but of a <i>nonsense </i>sort.</p>
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<p style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">This is what is striking. This is what must be accepted. We get into such confusions. Especially when severely mentally ill. But also when infants, when dreaming, when concussed, etc.</p>
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<p style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">The ‘self-alienation’ these experiences manifest shows itself in the use of a language only apt for alterity (for matters ‘positional’, for judgements proper) in the domain of subjectivity (my ‘living out’ of my experiences).</p>
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<p style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">There’s no need for psychopathological theorists to follow their subjects here – to embed alienated conceptions of subjectivity in their explanations of alienated experience.</p>
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<p style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">The temptation to the question remains: ‘So just what is going on here?’. Well, what I leave you with is the thought that the subject who is experiencing radical self-disturbances is having such experiences as are actually <i>individuated</i> by their disposition to use just the peculiar terms they use. (Jaspers: We're forced to use the words provided by the patients. ... Not, I'd add, because we don't enjoy independent access to their mental goings on, not because we have to make do with second best ... but because the very idea of such access is incoherent, because we have here only the illusion of something better ... and ultimately because the criteria of identity for the experiences in question just are the articulations offered them by their sufferers.)</p>
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<p style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">Don’t think that the patient here is <i>accurately or inaccurately describing</i> their own experiences. If they were sane, still prodromal perhaps, they might say ‘it is for me somehow as if I had a thought that’s not my own’. No: they are not describing, but expressing, and the expression gives the criteria of identity for the content of the confusion.</p>Richard Gippshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18001492312162861823noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3184393804521721596.post-74203241643434646382021-07-23T11:12:00.009+01:002021-07-23T20:09:55.423+01:00does anxiety have a meaning?<p>Does anxiety have a meaning? I now recognise that, when I started out training as a psychologist, a tacit message I then imbibed was that it doesn't. Here's how I learned to think of it: Anxiety is just an aversive experience, an unwanted condition. It has a certain physiological, autonomic, cognitive and sensory character. Its reduction should be the central aim of such treatment as is provided to those who present because of it. In short it's simply something to be got rid of, managed, treated - with mindfulness, exercise, medication, whathaveyou. </p><p>This, sometimes, is surely the right way of thinking about it - think of such anxiety as stems from, say, alcohol misuse, thyroid problems, and some trauma-generated anxiety. CBT, I think, often takes this view: the aim of treatment is to reduce anxiety by altering core beliefs, defusing from fraught thoughts, reinterpreting bodily sensations, etc. The patient may come into therapy thinking their anxiety has a meaning (e.g. "I’m going mad / dying"). The aim of therapy, however, is pretty much to convince the patient that it has no significance, carries no message, at all. It's just a set of bodily sensations and neurobiological activations that are receiving an optional and misinformed interpretation. A psychodynamic therapy may be similar: anxiety is caused by inner conflict - so to achieve the therapeutic goal of reducing the anxiety, address the conflict. Your superego's giving you gyp - so learn to challenge it and develop a gentler self-relation.</p><p>I now think that this way of thinking about anxiety can have considerable costs. What it ignores is the way in which anxiety may be taken<i> to disclose valuable truths about your life and mind, which truths have a significance far beyond their anxiogenic character</i>. A patient recently relayed to me a Joseph Campbell quote:</p><p style="background-color: white; font-family: Garamond; font-size: 16px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"></p><blockquote><p style="background-color: white; font-family: Garamond; font-size: 16px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhQPRfbysP3RO8KGgh4w8fS7lAsYxKuFo31hQdwfiCErSr3wDkUV0jJoZlDOhUi5SkTh84I27h0VnBa6G9CixjIMvjEjVXKAVJX5NX7MMIGu_Csq69bxWv0fdWfhE-yVaB-cusiYuWMaOoE/s500/9780060167189-uk.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="500" data-original-width="289" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhQPRfbysP3RO8KGgh4w8fS7lAsYxKuFo31hQdwfiCErSr3wDkUV0jJoZlDOhUi5SkTh84I27h0VnBa6G9CixjIMvjEjVXKAVJX5NX7MMIGu_Csq69bxWv0fdWfhE-yVaB-cusiYuWMaOoE/w116-h200/9780060167189-uk.jpg" width="116" /></a></div>It is by going down into the abyss that we recover the treasures of life. Where you stumble, there lies your treasure. The very cave you are afraid to enter turns out to be the source of what you are looking for.<p></p><p style="background-color: white; font-family: Garamond; font-size: 16px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"></p></blockquote><p style="background-color: white; font-family: Garamond; font-size: 16px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">On such a view, anxiety is giving us a useful clue as regards our individuation. It's showing us where growth is required. Where is it that I have an inner conflict, which conflict I will do well to transcend not simply because it's anxiogenic, but rather because it is ennobling and mature, dignified and individuating, to do so? Being a divided self is intrinsically undignified; it reduces our capacity for truth telling. It reduces our self-possession, and leaves us liable to being buffeted by fate. To manage the anxiety which stems from inner division we deploy defences that damage or suppress ourselves and others. Anxiety provides valuable information about where the treasures of life, the source of what you're looking for, is. Listen to it, turn toward it whilst understanding what it tells of your as-yet un-met challenges, meet such challenges as become you, thereby living a life more attuned to your noble values. </p><p style="background-color: white; font-family: Garamond; font-size: 16px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><br /></p><p style="background-color: white; font-family: Garamond; font-size: 16px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">Such conflict anxiety is just one form anxiety takes. Another form is existential: my anxiety here constitutes the shaking apart of my insecure self when I'm facing life challenges such as isolation, illness, social socially holding my own, etc. Here too it can provide a valuable signal - that we're not yet fit to face all the facts of life. That we have some resilience to build, some exposure to undergo, a zone of proximal development to expand, facts to face, courage to build, shame to overcome, self-possession to develop, and integrity to muster. </p><p style="background-color: white; font-family: Garamond; font-size: 16px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><br /></p><p style="background-color: white; font-family: Garamond; font-size: 16px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">In what sense, then, does anxiety have a meaning? I think it's clear that the meaning isn't 'intrinsic'. That is to say, the meaning it enjoys is really a function of our living a life in an existential mode. It derives from our living it under the aspect of - to borrow another phrase from Campbell - the hero's journey. It implies we're actually interested in realising ourselves, individuating, become who we can be, growth, strengthening ourselves to better protect others, facing our fears, facing our failings, taking moral courage and making amends where we need to, desisting from letting ourselves and others down in a way which currently produces a diffuse guilty anxiety, and so on. Against such a set of values, anxiety has a valuable meaning for us. It shows us where to look.</p><p style="background-color: white; font-family: Garamond; font-size: 16px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><br /></p><p style="background-color: white; font-family: Garamond; font-size: 16px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">The real tragedy of the view of anxiety with which I started out, then, is not I think a function of anything it has to say about anxiety per se. It's rather the utter absence of an existential perspective that trots along with it, the absence of goals beyond the blandly affective ones of 'feeling better'. And yet it's almost a truism of psychology that 'feeling better' is rarely helpfully set as a goal in life, that hedonism is a dud, and that happiness comes from the pursuit of meaning in life rather than vice versa.</p><p style="background-color: white; font-family: Garamond; font-size: 16px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><br /></p>Richard Gippshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18001492312162861823noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3184393804521721596.post-80085252302821193772021-07-12T11:52:00.011+01:002022-03-09T12:34:12.145+00:00loneliness, love, and dignity<p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 13px;">for a conference on <a href="https://www.lonelinessphilpsych.org" target="_blank">Loneliness in Philosophy and Psychology</a>, </span></p>
<p style="font-family: Times; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;">Bentley University, July 12-15, 2021</p>
<ol>
<li style="font-family: Times; font-size: 16px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><b>Loneliness as felt want of sociality</b>: We often hear that loneliness stands to company as, say, hunger stands to eating. That we’ve a basic human need for sociality, and that loneliness is our experience of the thwarting of this need’s fulfilment. This makes prima facie good sense. It’s best been elaborated by <span style="color: #0000e9; text-decoration: underline;">Roberts and Krueger</span> who offer us a ‘frustrated pro-attitude account’ of loneliness as an ‘emotion of absence - an affective state in which certain [desired] social goods are regarded as out of [one’s] reach’. In this way it’s like ‘grief, yearning, homesickness, unrequited love, nostalgia’. The desired social goods include ‘companionship, moral support, physical contact and affection, sympathy, trust, romance, friendship, and the opportunity to act and interact - and so to flourish - as a social agent.’ </li>
<li style="font-family: Times; font-size: 16px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><b>Critique</b>: It’s true that the lonely person experiences others as out of reach. They feel exiled from sociality. That good which is others' company is now ‘over there between those others’, not ‘here where I am’. Love exists in the lonely person’s world, but it’s just not here where she is, and its absence is painful. Now, where shall we look for the truth-makers for Roberts & Krueger’s account? I suggest they consist at least in part in the phrases which the lonely are inclined to utter. ‘I feel so alone’; ‘I’m all by myself’, ’I feel exiled from humanity’. But now the question arises: what’s the nature of the condition which inspires such avowals? Should we compare them to ‘I feel so hungry’, or instead to what for example the BPD sufferer says: ‘I feel so empty’. ‘Emptiness’ is, for the borderline subject, le mot juste, but it’s not perspicuous to posit a normal sense of fullness which they’re lacking, or to posit an actual void in their body or mind. In other words, what makes something le mot juste needn’t be a matter of it corresponding to a fact which is here being described. Maybe the term ‘empty’ - and perhaps, I suggest, also ‘alone’ - is instead here used with what Wittgenstein called a ‘secondary sense’: a metaphorical use we grasp just through rolling with it once we’ve learned the more clearly normative primary sense of the term. It’s not obvious to me, then, that we can move from an appreciation of the lonely person’s avowals of their loneliness to a descriptive rather than expressive articulation of the state they’re in. Relevant to our critical concern here too may be the fact that two people may be equally aware of the absence of valued others from their life, but only one of them feel lonely. I think we needn’t say that the one who doesn’t feel lonely is out of touch with his true feelings, or that the lonely really do place a greater value on others' company. Consider furthermore that the lonely person may be no more disposed to seek company than the non-lonely (contrast the hungry person’s actions) - so the typical behavioural criteria of pro-attitudes may here not be in play. Finally consider how loneliness is in a certain way more mood than emotion - we don’t follow it with a ‘that’ or a ‘for’ specifying an intentional object (contrast grief, nostalgia etc). Does it really then have as its <i>intentional</i> <i>object</i> the absence of a desired object? [Though in a different sense of 'intentional object' it's perhaps 'directed at' the absent relation between self and other.] Or is the link to others instead through, say, a <i>causal</i> relation to the object’s absence, or to avowals of ‘by-oneself-ness’ which deploy terms with a secondary sense? I don’t claim that loneliness might not be just the state of mind that will kick in when a widower, say, says goodbye to his children and their families when they leave at the end of a visit. Yet if a friend visits who’s also a widower, we can imagine him feeling rather less lonely on this friend’s departure; the sense that ‘life is elsewhere’ is now mitigated. (A further criticism I could make of aspects of Roberts' and Krueger's account is what we might call its articulation of a form of selfhood enacted by a liberal individualist - one who is after the 'goods' of friendship - the 'goods for me'. I engage in friendship because I 'get something out of' it on their view: what's desired is the affective products in me of the friendship, but not participation in friendship simpliciter. As I read it, such a worldview is itself run through with unacknowledged loneliness. This, however, is a question for another day.) </li>
<li style="font-family: Times; font-size: 16px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgk3mz8N7sm1uLVKDVd1rinNf8wrRxdCNHOAkFv7cS1_yTgjwegd3uaAYfNt_p7LtccdqfG9bYdrZeL4WBTjb1XVTGUPOrgZjHvx4vbIFAejRWX3Fpp-Wj6U5P6VbCkC0KbftEL9H3LB9-J/s636/Solitude-Paintings-Usmonov-w636-h600.jpeg" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="530" data-original-width="636" height="167" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgk3mz8N7sm1uLVKDVd1rinNf8wrRxdCNHOAkFv7cS1_yTgjwegd3uaAYfNt_p7LtccdqfG9bYdrZeL4WBTjb1XVTGUPOrgZjHvx4vbIFAejRWX3Fpp-Wj6U5P6VbCkC0KbftEL9H3LB9-J/w200-h167/Solitude-Paintings-Usmonov-w636-h600.jpeg" title="Solitude by Usmonov" width="200" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Solitude by Usmonov</td></tr></tbody></table><b>Love is not here where I am</b>: The principal feature of loneliness I want to draw attention to here is how the lonely person <i>envisages love to be at play in the world… but not here where she is</i>. The consciously lonely feel - I believe - exiled from the place of life and love. And they feel that, <i>by themselves, they are lacking</i>. And the question arises as to <i>why</i> they feel thus. The frustrated pro-attitude account suggests that this sense of lack is simply a function of our social nature. What I want to suggest instead is that the phenomenology of loneliness is often characterised by a sense that the value, the good, the love, now lies not here in my own soul, but unattainably over there with the others. (To recall Kundera and a slogan from the 1968 Parisian student revolt: ‘life is elsewhere’.) In other words, I suggest it’s not simply our <i>inexorable need for sociality</i> that’s thwarted here. Loneliness is rather the product of a <i>particular configuration of the soul</i>. (NB by ‘soul’ I don’t mean anything metaphysical; I have in mind the use of ‘soul’ in such phrases as ‘soul-destroying work’ or ‘soulful glance’.)</li>
<li style="font-family: Times; font-size: 16px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><b>Loneliness as achievement</b>: I’ll say some more about that in a moment. But to make now the first of three clinical points, I’d like to note that, for the mentally ill person, the capacity to feel loneliness is itself something of a psychological achievement. Thus when Frieda Fromm-Reichmann (and I think Harry Stack Sullivan) talked of their more mentally ill patients at Chestnut Lodge as ‘the lonely ones’, I don’t think this was because they - the patients - went around consciously <i>feeling</i> lonely. I think it was rather because they’d so sunk into their loneliness that they had as it were <i>become loneliness itself</i>. I will now try to say what I mean by this. So when you walk past that icon of loneliness, the muttering schizophrenic man on the street, the one with the staring eyes, in his own world, whose addresses and answers are offered to no mortal soul, I hope you’ll agree that we don’t do well to think him consciously suffering his loneliness. For the atmosphere of his loneliness to condense or crystallise out into a discrete affect would take quite some work, work that might indeed utterly overwhelm him. Loneliness after all requires that the space of potential sociality hasn’t been voided. I'm thinking here of an old patient of mine, an admirable young man, whose mental health difficulties prevented him from achieving anything like in life what he was intellectually capable of, such were his preoccupations and compulsions, and how one day he came in wearing nice new clothes, but putting them on and obsessing over them had made him ten minutes late. At first he thought about how he was worried about wearing them out. But gradually he came to understand that he was sad that he had at that time no-one (a lover, a family member, a friend) to appreciate them. He was lost in a loneliness beyond loneliness, a loneliness that couldn’t be felt so which turned instead into obsessional symptoms. 30 minutes into the session, he said "I can feel it now". This needed to happen in my presence - after he’d re-entered the zone of possible human connection - which is the same as the zone of inner ‘connection’ with one’s feelings.</li>
<li style="font-family: Times; font-size: 16px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><b>Loneliness and shame</b>: So the question is: what is it for the lonely person to feel exiled from or bereft of love, if this doesn’t only have to do with the simple absence of desired company? The feature of loneliness to which I’d like to draw attention concerns the lonely person’s <i>aliveness to the shame of rejection</i>. So: consider now two people walking toward each other on a country lane. One is smiling in an open way, inviting eye contact. The other is looking down, basically anticipating rejection. We intuitively grasp that the latter, the one who seems enshrouded in shame and a sense of unworthiness, is the lonelier. … Or: think of saying goodbye to a close friend who you don’t often get to see. One person does this and, for sure, feels the pang of missing his friend, the gratitude of having been able to see <i>her</i>; yet he’s right now in touch with wanting the best for <i>her</i>, missing her in her <i>particularity</i>, and so on. He is, we might imagine, despite the keenness of his missing her, not at all lonely. Another also says goodbye to her close friend but instead of focusing clearly on him now lapses instead into a far more diffuse and objectless state, a mood of loneliness, a state of anonymous mourning in which the diverse joys of life are now unavailable. For this latter, lonely, person the very possibility of joy seems to have left with the friend. Clinically speaking we might wonder if she has in some ways been lost to a projective identification with the friend, so that she loses the life in herself when he leaves. Her self-possession is depleted, and love does not travel with her where she goes. Hope too is here taken out of play: the horizon of the future is not willingly populated with potential meaning. Or think now on the difference between two old women, one of whom has lost her loving husband, whilst the other has a husband who shuns her. It’s quite imaginable that the latter will be the more lonely. She feels <i>unwanted</i> by someone who’s there, and not just contingently <i>not wanted</i> because nobody’s there. When “nobody loves me!” is offered as a plaint, it often carries with it a feeling of rejection, unwantedness. The first well-loved widow, however, does not feel exiled from love by her husband’s death. The love still dwells within her; she doesn’t think of herself as unlovable. The fact that she’s not currently loved is but a contingency. Nothing stops her from dwelling in love; she doesn’t imagine that the source of a sense of worth resides in others; she doesn’t see herself as awaiting their bestowing of worth upon her. The lonely person, by contrast, is someone who fears and feels unlovedness, who doesn’t truly know herself as lovable. She needs the love of others to assure herself of her lovability. Contrast someone whose sense of his lovability - his authentic self-confidence and self-worth - is not damaged by experiences of social shunning. When others close their heart to him, he can see it as a function of the other’s defences, rather than chalk it up to his own deficits. Last week, for example, a young man came over to me in the gym and asked if I will spot for him on the barbell bench press for just 3 lifts. He was genial, open, looked me right in the eye, wasn’t after anything beyond what he requested, was quietly confident, polite; he also introduced himself. If I’d refused it wouldn’t have knocked him one bit; the ill grace would all have been on me. This, I think, was not a lonely man.</li>
<li style="font-family: Times; font-size: 16px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><b>Loneliness, the locus of evaluation, and dwelling in love</b>: To borrow a term now from Carl Rogers, the lonely one has an ‘external locus of evaluation’. His sense of value comes from his belief that someone else wants to spend time with him. Here w’e’re at the second of three important therapeutic junctures - of helping someone make a shift from this fragile sense of worth to instead being able to dwell in love, to know it within, to live out of love, to bring it to bear on her interactions, to remain alive to love because of indwelling it and engaging lovingly with anyone or anything that comes along. And a practice to here be recommended, by way of cultivating aliveness to love, is… <i>gratitude</i>. Thanksgiving. Frequent recognition of what is good in life, and thankfulness for the gift of it. She who is able to say of life: ‘This is good’; she who prays prayers of thanks for a life that she didn’t herself muster and couldn’t by herself sustain; who calls to mind and secures there the fact of the earth about her being a blessing, a grace-filled phenomenon; who gives ready thanks for all her friends and health and who sees these as manifestations of grace …. this person is no Pollyanna. What she is instead is already someone who knows love in her heart. Recall here how on each of the 3rd, 4th, 5th and 6th days of creation God looks at what he has made - the land and plants, the heavens, the animals and man - and <i>sees that they are</i> <i>good</i>. This proclamation bespeaks the cultivation or promulgation of a certain attitude. And it is, I’m claiming, an attitude which repels loneliness. It’s the attitude expressed by the look of love. She who’s not lonely knows she is of love, and is able to dwell in love and have love dwell in her. My point here is not of course that loneliness can be understood as a deficit of gratitude. It’s rather that he who’s grateful for life, and who in this way cultivates appreciation for life, <i>who dwells in this as an attitude, who is open to what is of value around him</i> … he comes to enjoy love alive within his heart. And this love alive within him is what’s antithetical to loneliness.</li>
<li style="font-family: Times; font-size: 16px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><b>Dignity</b>: The third clinical moment I want to discuss in relation to loneliness is <i>dignity</i>. What I have in mind here is an attitude, a way of living, which involves knowing clearly what it is you believe to be the right way to live your life - both morally, and in an ethically broader sense, so as to flourish - and living in that way so that you can truly hold your head up high. I spoke just now of he who knows about the goodness of life, who sees life under the aspect of grace i.e. as an unearned gift. What I’m now adding to this is seeing <i>oneself</i> as a dignified part of this life. The person who lives with dignity may be in dire straits, but he lives in such a way that he knows that he at least has done what he can, and with this he can be healthily proud. He manages his affairs, keeps a clean home, does’t let others disrespect him. With this dignity he enjoys a non-corrupt form of self-love. He who lives with this kind of dignity is, especially when that’s paired with the aliveness to love mentioned above, somewhat invulnerable to loneliness. What makes it that way is the self-possession that dignity and an inner aliveness to love afford a life. For the dignified person, for she who’s lovingly alive with gratitude - who sees the world under the aspect of grace - the good, the love, is not ‘over there, between the others’. It is instead here where she is. She’s not going to feel sorry for herself. A beautiful New Testament word may be useful here: Parrhesia - which the Catechism of the Catholic Church defines as “straightforward simplicity, filial trust, joyous assurance, humble boldness, the certainty of being loved.” (In secular terms we may substitute the certainty of being <i>lovable</i>.) The person who embodies Parrhesia doesn’t lose faith in love. Her life is instead relentlessly ‘interpreted by love’ - to borrow the words of the hymn/poem. She looks from love’s vantage; she looks with the look of love. And this vantage, I’m claiming, doesn’t know loneliness.</li>
<li style="font-family: Times; font-size: 16px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><b>Conclusions</b>. Recall now where this talk started - with a questioning of the sufficiency of an understanding of loneliness as a painful emotion marking the absence of a basic human need - companionable others. Against this I offered the observations that loneliness is in many ways more a mood or state of mind than an emotion; and that it in one sense has no clear intentional object: one is not ‘lonely <i>that </i>or <i>of</i>’. Further, the fact that “I’m all by myself” is its natural expressive plaint needn’t, I think, be taken as the last word on loneliness’ meaning. My claim is that whilst friendship is an obvious good in life, and whilst of course we can deeply miss our friends or keenly feel their lack, such a view of loneliness is nevertheless partial. It presupposes, I suggest, a quite particular anthropology, one that looks at human life through the prism of quotidian needs. Against that I suggest that if we ourselves interpret human life by love, then we can gain a deeper reflective access to the being of loneliness, and make clearer sense of such of its ameliorations as don’t prescribe sociality; and make clearer too the place of dignity and self-possession in a character which is less vulnerable to loneliness. Reflection on a point of Roberts’ and Krueger’s is helpful here. They tell us that “someone who is supremely comfortable in their own skin, and who has no craving for social validation and reassurance, will not feel as though much is missing from the solitary life and may consider others to be a distraction or burden.” I think that here some rather separate matters have gotten mixed together. One has to do with having a relaxed confidence in and clear understanding of oneself and one's abilities, especially when presenting oneself to or interacting with other people. I’ve related this to self-possession and Parrhesia, and I think it too is inversely related to loneliness. But I don’t think it has anything to do with not caring about and for others. Far from considering others a distraction or burden, the person who’s very comfortable in her own skin may consider sociality one of life’s supreme blessings. It’s just that, for her, the fact of not now being lovingly engaged with by another doesn’t dent her inner aliveness to love. The anthropology which is immanent within Roberts and Krueger’s treatment of the lonely person is, one might say, of a distinctly ‘postlapsarian’ sort. From my perspective it’s one that risks living unawares in the shadow of our shame, in the threat of unlovability, in the loss of self-possession. By contrast I’ve considered today how loneliness can be ‘interpreted by love’, and in this way be understood as a sense of unlovability related to the loss of dignity, self-possession, and trust in love itself.</li></ol>Richard Gippshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18001492312162861823noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3184393804521721596.post-50734307157688760892021-05-01T22:29:00.003+01:002021-05-01T22:29:46.220+01:00psychotherapy's moral bite: on deactivating the projection of will
<p>What distinguishes the master therapist? I've long suspected that an important aspect of such a therapist is her moral seriousness. By that phrase - moral seriousness - I mean something quite specific. Rather than define it I'd like to first say what I don't mean by it, and to then allow the sense of it to emerge from an example. </p><p>So, what I don't mean is moral shrillness, or moralising, or a failure of empathy, or an absence of the light touch, or an inability to take oneself less than seriously (i.e. a failure of what <a href="https://www.hup.harvard.edu/features/irony-and-humanity/" target="_blank">Jonathan Lear calls irony</a>.) </p><p>And now the example. It's from <a href="https://www.facebook.com/DynamicPsychotherapy/posts/4017389258336737" target="_blank">a recent blogpost</a> by <a href="https://istdpinstitute.com/about-2/" target="_blank">Jon Frederikson</a>; Frederikson is a particularly lucid and thoughtful exponent of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intensive_short-term_dynamic_psychotherapy" target="_blank">ISTDP</a> (Intensive Short Term Dynamic Psychotherapy). One of his trademarks is what ISTDP calls 'deactivating the projection of will':</p><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;"><div class="o9v6fnle cxmmr5t8 oygrvhab hcukyx3x c1et5uql ii04i59q" style="caret-color: rgb(5, 5, 5); color: #050505; font-family: system-ui, -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, ".SFNSText-Regular", sans-serif; font-size: 15px; margin: 0.5em 0px 0px; white-space: pre-wrap; word-wrap: break-word;"><div style="font-family: inherit;">Pt: "I don't want to dig too deep today because I'm in a precarious personal equilibrium." </div></div><div class="o9v6fnle cxmmr5t8 oygrvhab hcukyx3x c1et5uql ii04i59q" style="caret-color: rgb(5, 5, 5); color: #050505; font-family: system-ui, -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, ".SFNSText-Regular", sans-serif; font-size: 15px; margin: 0.5em 0px 0px; white-space: pre-wrap; word-wrap: break-word;"><div style="font-family: inherit;">Th: I have no right to dig into anything you don’t want to dig into. That’s why I have to ask you what you want to dig into that you think would be useful to you.” [Deactivating the projection of will.]</div></div><div class="o9v6fnle cxmmr5t8 oygrvhab hcukyx3x c1et5uql ii04i59q" style="caret-color: rgb(5, 5, 5); color: #050505; font-family: system-ui, -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, ".SFNSText-Regular", sans-serif; font-size: 15px; margin: 0.5em 0px 0px; white-space: pre-wrap; word-wrap: break-word;"><div style="font-family: inherit;">Pt: I don’t want to dig into anything.</div></div><div class="o9v6fnle cxmmr5t8 oygrvhab hcukyx3x c1et5uql ii04i59q" style="caret-color: rgb(5, 5, 5); color: #050505; font-family: system-ui, -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, ".SFNSText-Regular", sans-serif; font-size: 15px; margin: 0.5em 0px 0px; white-space: pre-wrap; word-wrap: break-word;"><div style="font-family: inherit;">Th: It’s your therapy, so you can dig as much or as little as you want. [Deactivate the projection of will.] If we don’t dig into anything, what will be the result for you?</div></div><div class="o9v6fnle cxmmr5t8 oygrvhab hcukyx3x c1et5uql ii04i59q" style="caret-color: rgb(5, 5, 5); color: #050505; font-family: system-ui, -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, ".SFNSText-Regular", sans-serif; font-size: 15px; margin: 0.5em 0px 0px; white-space: pre-wrap; word-wrap: break-word;"><div style="font-family: inherit;">Pt: I won’t get anywhere. </div></div><div class="o9v6fnle cxmmr5t8 oygrvhab hcukyx3x c1et5uql ii04i59q" style="caret-color: rgb(5, 5, 5); color: #050505; font-family: system-ui, -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, ".SFNSText-Regular", sans-serif; font-size: 15px; margin: 0.5em 0px 0px; white-space: pre-wrap; word-wrap: break-word;"><div style="font-family: inherit;">Th: So it sounds like you are at war with yourself: wanting to get somewhere and not wanting to get somewhere. What’s that like to notice that struggle within yourself? [Point out the struggle he faces within himself. There is no struggle between the two of you.]</div></div><div class="o9v6fnle cxmmr5t8 oygrvhab hcukyx3x c1et5uql ii04i59q" style="caret-color: rgb(5, 5, 5); color: #050505; font-family: system-ui, -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, ".SFNSText-Regular", sans-serif; font-size: 15px; margin: 0.5em 0px 0px; white-space: pre-wrap; word-wrap: break-word;"><div style="font-family: inherit;">Pt: "I'm afraid if I connect too much with how exhausted I am, I will just fall down."</div></div><div class="o9v6fnle cxmmr5t8 oygrvhab hcukyx3x c1et5uql ii04i59q" style="caret-color: rgb(5, 5, 5); color: #050505; font-family: system-ui, -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, ".SFNSText-Regular", sans-serif; font-size: 15px; margin: 0.5em 0px 0px; white-space: pre-wrap; word-wrap: break-word;"><div style="font-family: inherit;">Th: That makes complete sense. Would it make sense to look under the exhaustion to see what it might be covering up? [Exhaustion is not something we want to explore since the patient would only become depleted. We might test whether exhaustion is functioning as a defense and invite the patient to look under it.]</div></div><div class="o9v6fnle cxmmr5t8 oygrvhab hcukyx3x c1et5uql ii04i59q" style="caret-color: rgb(5, 5, 5); color: #050505; font-family: system-ui, -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, ".SFNSText-Regular", sans-serif; font-size: 15px; margin: 0.5em 0px 0px; white-space: pre-wrap; word-wrap: break-word;"><div style="font-family: inherit;">Pt: “I don’t want to look at my issues too closely today because I’m balancing lots of things and I feel fragile.” </div></div><div class="o9v6fnle cxmmr5t8 oygrvhab hcukyx3x c1et5uql ii04i59q" style="caret-color: rgb(5, 5, 5); color: #050505; font-family: system-ui, -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, ".SFNSText-Regular", sans-serif; font-size: 15px; margin: 0.5em 0px 0px; white-space: pre-wrap; word-wrap: break-word;"><div style="font-family: inherit;">Th: I have no right to look at any of your issues unless there are issues you want to look at that you think would be helpful to you. That’s why we need to find out what you want to look at that you think will be helpful to you. [Deactivate the projection of will.]</div></div><div class="o9v6fnle cxmmr5t8 oygrvhab hcukyx3x c1et5uql ii04i59q" style="caret-color: rgb(5, 5, 5); color: #050505; font-family: system-ui, -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, ".SFNSText-Regular", sans-serif; font-size: 15px; margin: 0.5em 0px 0px; white-space: pre-wrap; word-wrap: break-word;"><div style="font-family: inherit;">Pt: I feel fragile.</div></div><div class="o9v6fnle cxmmr5t8 oygrvhab hcukyx3x c1et5uql ii04i59q" style="caret-color: rgb(5, 5, 5); color: #050505; font-family: system-ui, -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, ".SFNSText-Regular", sans-serif; font-size: 15px; margin: 0.5em 0px 0px; white-space: pre-wrap; word-wrap: break-word;"><div style="font-family: inherit;">Th: How so? [If the patient is fragile, naturally we want to know so we can assess his strengths and weaknesses. Or the patient may not be fragile. We can’t know unless we assess.]</div></div><div class="o9v6fnle cxmmr5t8 oygrvhab hcukyx3x c1et5uql ii04i59q" style="caret-color: rgb(5, 5, 5); color: #050505; font-family: system-ui, -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, ".SFNSText-Regular", sans-serif; font-size: 15px; margin: 0.5em 0px 0px; white-space: pre-wrap; word-wrap: break-word;"><div style="font-family: inherit;">Pt: I didn’t sleep well last night.</div></div><div class="o9v6fnle cxmmr5t8 oygrvhab hcukyx3x c1et5uql ii04i59q" style="caret-color: rgb(5, 5, 5); color: #050505; font-family: system-ui, -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, ".SFNSText-Regular", sans-serif; font-size: 15px; margin: 0.5em 0px 0px; white-space: pre-wrap; word-wrap: break-word;"><div style="font-family: inherit;">Th: And the fragility? What are the signs telling you that you might be fragile?</div></div><div class="o9v6fnle cxmmr5t8 oygrvhab hcukyx3x c1et5uql ii04i59q" style="caret-color: rgb(5, 5, 5); color: #050505; font-family: system-ui, -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, ".SFNSText-Regular", sans-serif; font-size: 15px; margin: 0.5em 0px 0px; white-space: pre-wrap; word-wrap: break-word;"><div style="font-family: inherit;">Pt: “I’m afraid if I let myself feel how tired I am I won’t be able to go on.” </div></div><div class="o9v6fnle cxmmr5t8 oygrvhab hcukyx3x c1et5uql ii04i59q" style="caret-color: rgb(5, 5, 5); color: #050505; font-family: system-ui, -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, ".SFNSText-Regular", sans-serif; font-size: 15px; margin: 0.5em 0px 0px; white-space: pre-wrap; word-wrap: break-word;"><div style="font-family: inherit;">Th: That makes sense. Shall we look under this tiredness and see what it might be covering up? </div></div><div class="o9v6fnle cxmmr5t8 oygrvhab hcukyx3x c1et5uql ii04i59q" style="caret-color: rgb(5, 5, 5); color: #050505; font-family: system-ui, -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, ".SFNSText-Regular", sans-serif; font-size: 15px; margin: 0.5em 0px 0px; white-space: pre-wrap; word-wrap: break-word;"><div style="font-family: inherit;">Pt: Covering up?</div></div><div class="o9v6fnle cxmmr5t8 oygrvhab hcukyx3x c1et5uql ii04i59q" style="caret-color: rgb(5, 5, 5); color: #050505; font-family: system-ui, -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, ".SFNSText-Regular", sans-serif; font-size: 15px; margin: 0.5em 0px 0px; white-space: pre-wrap; word-wrap: break-word;"><div style="font-family: inherit;">Th: Yes. Would it make sense to look at a specific example where this tiredness comes in, so we could see what it might be covering up? [Invitation to engage in the therapeutic task.]</div></div></blockquote><p>Now Frederikson doesn't describe his intervention in moral terms. He focuses, quite properly, on the character of the defense and the apt means of blocking it in the service of the therapeutic work. But it seems to me that the extract warrants a moral redescription, and that such a description will reveal something important about what's going on.</p><p>The first thing I want to note is that the projection of will is, in a sense, quietly abusive. I don't say this to make a big thing of it - it is often just a little thing - but to highlight an essential aspect of its character. </p><p>So: I come to my therapist's consulting room but then, rather than stay in touch with my wish to know myself better and do the work of therapy, I regress and in effect say 'I want to be here but I don't want to do the work'. Except if it'd actually been said like that, then the patient would at least have been owning the contradictoriness of her action and her thought. Yet instead of owning the contradiction, she secretly disavows her wish to do the work <i>whilst still coming to therapy</i>. The contradiction is a living, rather than a thematised, one.</p><p>The therapist is after all a professional, is someone who does her job because she enjoys exercising her skills. And the patient who says he doesn't want to work in the session is depriving them of the opportunity of actually earning their living by plying their trade. (Imagine going to the dentist and saying, 'oh don't worry I'll pay you for your time, but today I just want to sit and chat'... It's not cool.)</p><p>For a patch of time some years ago, when a couple of patients habitually turned up late and apologised for it, I found myself saying something like 'Well as for me I was very happy reading my book; and I'll still be paid; it's surely only your own time you're wasting.' The reason I'd give myself for saying this was that I wanted to help them see what they were losing because of their actions, as well as to help myself avoid slipping into a 'oh that's quite all right, please don't worry about it', people-pleasing, overly empathic, state of mind. No doubt it was sometimes of help in those ways. But it truly failed in at least five respects. First, in saying it I failed to acknowledge the fact that I do my job because I find it rewarding - not just because it's how I earn my living. In this way what I said was disrespectful to myself: I wasn't noticing that I was being deprived of the opportunity to be the professional I am. (Of course, properly understood, the discussion of the lateness was also precisely an opportunity to engage my professional skills! But y'know, and to make an analogy: being abused by a narcissist is also an opportunity to develop one's self-possession - it doesn't mean we should thank them for it.) Second, by implying that it really was of no more value to me than my book, it devalued the therapeutic work that the patient and I were doing together and potentially also the patient. Thirdly, it failed because it deprived the patient of a chance to have a healthy experience of repentance, an apology being heard, blame being aptly apportioned, and forgiveness being given. (Experiencing true rupture repair, as opposed to competitive grudge-bearing, is majorly important for many patients since their early environment provided them very little opportunity for internalising healthy regulative moral ideals.) Fourthly it tanked because it rather prevented meaningful investigation into the meaning of the lateness. And finally it failed because it was perhaps something of a passive aggressive vengeful devaluation of the patient. I thought I was being morally serious - but, yeah, I wasn't.</p><p>Back to Frederikson on deactivating the projection of will. So, as well as not holding onto her own wish to actually do therapy, and as well as disrespecting the therapist by prima facie depriving her of the opportunity to ply her noble trade, the patient also disrespects the therapist by bending out of shape the moral fabric of their relationship. This projection is in truth a kind of projective identification. The patient not only fails to hold onto his own wish to do the work; he regressively shunts it into the therapist; and now sets up a dynamic in which the therapist is invited to experience herself as opposed to the patient. This is the structural equivalent of going up to an innocent stranger in a bar, nudging them, and then - rather than apologising - acting as if there's now some standing beef between them for which the nudgee is no more responsible than the nudged. The real issue, of course, is what's going on within the nudgee - it's an issue between himself and himself.</p><p>It's precisely here that the therapist's moral seriousness is most required. For what she mustn't do is what I described my past self doing above - or, even worse, just ignore the issue or become pathologically 'understanding'. But rather, in a gentle and firm way, she must implicitly call the patient out on what he's doing, and invite him to re-own what he's projecting. This demands the therapist's full self-possession. She must have spotted the projection in play, been able to stand up to it without getting drawn into an enactment, implicitly let the patient know not only that it's happening but that it's not ok, hold in mind the patient's better self's reason for coming to therapy even whilst he's busy disowning it, actively recall the patient to his better self, openly hand back the covertly passed over baton of the patient's will, not be reactive or dismissive, hold true to a dignified sense of her own value (and in this way manifest that moral value we call self respect), hold morally true to a sense of the value of the work, be aware of the patient's genuine struggles and anxieties without letting this awareness become a spurious exculpation, and invite a reparative - 'depressive' rather than 'paranoid-schizoid' position - dynamic. Being 'the adult in the room' is not, we might say, simply a matter of having a certain psychological maturity. Or rather, it is, but such a maturity must be understood as itself ineliminably a moral maturity.</p><p>I want to end by noting that it's not only master therapists who have (amongst other signal attributes) cultivated and embody what I'm calling 'moral seriousness'. The other professionals who I'm most aware of embodying it are what we might call master school teachers and master social workers. They deal with difficult and in some ways toxic dynamics not by becoming remote, not by morphing into a perversely uninvolved version of the so-called analytic 'blank screen', not by allowing themselves to get sucked into the dynamics or by becoming 'superior' to their charges. Instead they retain dignity and, without being patronising about it, and without minimising the fact of the disrespect in play, and - without removing themselves from the vital, dynamic, respect-constituted character of the relationship - recall their charges to their better selves.</p>Richard Gippshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18001492312162861823noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3184393804521721596.post-54252542753732586422021-01-31T09:46:00.014+00:002021-02-02T14:42:50.094+00:00what's love got to do with it?<div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;"><b>A talk for a Confer London webinar on </b></div><div style="text-align: center;"><b><br /></b></div><div style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.blogger.com/#"><b>Psychotherapeutic Forms of Love</b></a></div><div style="text-align: center;"><b><br /></b></div><div style="text-align: center;"><b>30th January 2021</b></div><br /><b>Introduction </b><br /><br />Patients come to therapy voicing all sorts of problems. Sometimes they talk about, say, anxiety or depression or hypomania, sometimes about relationship and work difficulties. But all going well, I suggest, what they’ll be met with in therapy is the opportunity to engage in a form of interaction which leaves them with a greater trust in their lovability, a greater clarity regarding what it is to love and be loved, and a greater capacity for loving. Because of this they shall hopefully become able to direct a new, sympathetic, gaze on their own emotional experience, under which gaze it becomes more readily conscious and more manageable. They also become more accountable to themselves as well. And because of all of this, their presenting problems remit. <br /><br />Now the claim I’ll work to make intelligible today is this: that the active force in true therapy is love. The suggestion is that by understanding what this does and doesn’t mean, we can deepen our understanding both of love and of therapy. <br /><br /><b>Can Love be Paid For? </b><br /><br />Now therapy is, directly or otherwise, paid for. But don't we arrive at an immediate contradiction here - for isn’t it the case that true love can’t be bought? In a paper on whether psychotherapy is a form of prostitution, philosopher Rupert Read suggests <br /><blockquote>that therapy is to genuine loving friendship (‘agape’) as prostitution is to erotic love (‘eros’). The therapist is selling herself, or some simulacrum of herself; the client is being cheated if this fact is played down or veiled. </blockquote>Therapy may look like something which it makes sense to pay for if it’s dressed up as something technical - as if the patient is merely consulting for the therapist’s skill or knowledge. But Read’s point is that real therapy isn’t aptly articulated in such terms - for therapy requires us to be genuinely loving toward our patients. What’s really mutative in it is, he suggests - and with certain caveats I agree with him - is something rather ordinary and commonplace: it’s a truly caring form of attention. But at the same time, the very idea of therapy as a transaction seems to cancel what’s important in that: <br /><blockquote>Prostitution is relatively direct and ‘clinical’, or at worst is the selling of a fantasy of a relationship. Is psychotherapy, too, not a more subtle selling of such a fantasy? The therapist doesn’t - mustn’t - literally kiss their client; but I, for one, find the ‘metaphorical kiss’ which the therapist gives their client in return for ‘love money’ perhaps more repulsive than the paid attentions - the literal sex - that a prostitute gives their client’.</blockquote><blockquote>What I am asking is simply whether ‘mutuality’ - and the kind of I-thou meeting which … is so vital to the success of … therapy - is possible at all, given the asymmetry introduced by money. </blockquote>One response would be to bite the bullet, but to compare therapy with surrogacy rather than prostitution. That is, just as a sex therapist may use a surrogate to help a patient gain their confidence, without crippling shame, before they can move onto genuine sexual relationships, so too might a therapist play the role of a surrogate for someone who has been having what we might call love troubles. The patient can now experiment with expressing himself fully for the first time, to see whether or not his habitual latent expectation - that he will be met with rejection if he shows his true emotional face - will be confirmed or disconfirmed. Perhaps he’s paying for tolerance for when he lashes out or hides away. <br /><br />The surrogacy analogy conveys something of value, but I think it neither fully deactivates Read’s concern nor does justice to the therapeutic situation. We could say instead that the patient is paying for skill - skill in formulation, and skill in defence deactivation, skill in asking the right question, willingness to stand up to the patient’s self-deception (contrast his friends), etc. - i.e. the skill of identifying and clearing the ground so that real human-to-human connection becomes possible. On this view, the love - despite it being the real mutative ingredient - isn’t what’s paid for; what’s paid for is the psychological ‘mine clearance’ or defence deactivation - so that the love can then shine through and do its work. <br /><br />Well, the defence I just gave is perhaps a little too tidy, since the mine clearance must itself be done lovingly. Even so it’s surely a fact that, despite it being the therapist’s love that is what’s mutative, you can’t buy that love. And I can’t coherently decide to love you because you’re paying me. I can’t love you for 50 minutes each day or week. Instead: I do the work I do because it’s my vocation. I do need payment from somewhere, or else I can’t practice. I also have a sense of the value of my training, skill and time. I keep temporal boundaries around the session because that’s the best way to practice therapy and because it’s in my patient’s interest - not because they've only paid for 50 minutes worth of love, whatever that would mean. They pay for my time and expertise. And I need to earn a living. Therapy is a truly unusual situation. Yet one of the things a successful therapy can do is help us get more realistic about our relation to money, to appreciate what it is and isn’t - as we come to a clearer understanding of our own worth. <br /><br /><b>Freud</b><br /><br />So what is this love that I’ve been talking about, and what is it’s significance for psychotherapy? Those looking to provide a historical warrant for such a focus on love sometimes appeal to Freud’s judgement that in psychoanalysis ‘the cure is effected by love’. I was really struck by this when I first read it, as I was when I read Bettelheim’s humanising recommendations regarding the arcane terminology of ‘ego’, ‘superego’ and ‘id’ (into ‘I’, ‘above-I’, ‘it’). But let’s look at what Freud really said. Here he is in a 1906 letter to Jung: <br /><blockquote>Transference provides the impulse necessary for understanding and translating the language of the unconscious; where it is lacking, the patient does not make the effort or does not listen when we submit our translation to him. Essentially, one might say, the cure is effected by love. And actually transference provides the most cogent, indeed, the only unassailable proof that neuroses are determined by the individual’s love life.</blockquote>Here, too are some minutes of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society from around the same time: <br /><blockquote>There is only one power that can remove the resistances, the transference. The patient is compelled to give up his resistances to please us. Our cures are cures of love. There would thus remain for us only the task of removing the personal resistances (those against the transference). To the extent that transference exists — to that extent can we bring about cures; the analogy with hypnotic cures is striking.</blockquote>What we seem to find here is in fact the rather dismal view that a patient will only change to please a therapist who they’ve idealised. The ‘love’ of which we hear, here, is in short nothing but the ‘positive’ transference. That is, it’s a defensively motivated form of relating which requires an unrealistic idealised sense of the therapist along with a diminishment of the patient’s self-possession. Far from this providing a paradigm of therapeutic action I suggest it represents the floundering of early psychoanalysis to find its way into genuinely therapeutic activity. <br /><br /><b>Beck </b><br /><br />A similar conception of love can be found in the writings of other therapists. For example Aaron Beck, the founder of cognitive therapy, once wrote a self-help book for couples called ‘Love is Never Enough’. What did he mean? He meant that the kind of idealising infatuation with the beloved which often characterises the state of ‘having fallen’ or ‘being’ ‘in love’ with someone is not enough to keep a relationship together. Early on we might think we’ve found our ‘soul mate’ - we yearn to be with them and imagine that simply being with them will solve all our problems. The underlying fantasy here is one of merger: there will be no difference between us any longer; we’ll live in perfect harmony since we’ll simply live out out a state of magical rapturous fusion. <div><br />This reminds me of that tale from Plato’s Symposium where Aristophanes tells of how the earth originally had two-headed four-legged and four-armed creatures who hoofed about the place doing cartwheels. They got too big for their boots, so Zeus split them in half creating the male and female humans we find today. Aristophanes says: <br /><blockquote><a href="https://www.blogger.com/#" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjYFgCfOslmcX6601MXjeMDOgw9_aJTjl0iJprfP687AL1zuLLjeUOGpSYk87BaLbE9_hcb7nTG95yQ7ZFmL21loh12YHNN0CG_jC1SSHhwhQ275ZLLg00jlJdPDScg_LTZ45rv18lRc5Ea/w200-h180/human.jpg" /></a>Do you desire to be wholly one; always day and night to be in one another's company? For if this is what you desire, I am ready to melt you into one and let you grow together, so that being two you shall become one, and while you live live a common life as if you were a single man, and after your death in the world below still be one departed soul instead of two—I ask whether this is what you lovingly desire, and whether you are satisfied to attain this?'—there is not a man of them who when he heard the proposal would deny or would not acknowledge that this meeting and melting into one another, this becoming one instead of two, was the very expression of his ancient need. </blockquote>In short, this is a story of love which has us seeking for our ‘other half’. But as Beck tells it, and as we all actually know, this fantasy is an expression of an ‘infatuation program’ which cannot make for genuinely happy relationship. What else is needed? Well, we need he says to develop realistic attitudes concerning what our partners actually think, want, know, understand, need, and feel. We need, in short, to recognise them in their separateness from us - to recognise that we don’t magically know what they are thinking and needing, and so we need to ask them. <br /><br />At this point I shall simply comment that what Beck claims is needed in addition to actual love is just what I will claim later is what love actually is - namely a genuine attention to the other in her separateness from ourselves. <br /><br /><b>Rogers</b> </div><div><br />In his 1912 paper "Recommendations to Physicians Practising PsychoAnalysis" Freud writes that he <br /><blockquote>cannot advise my colleagues too urgently to model themselves during psychoanalytic treatment on the surgeon, who puts aside all his feelings, even as human sympathy, and concentrates his mental forces on the single aim of performing the operation as skilfully as possible. </blockquote>This advice famously contrasts not only with aspects of his own practice but with the attitude of, amongst others, Ferenczi (1932) who wrote that <br /><blockquote>if the patient notices that I feel a real compassion for her and that I am eagerly determined to search for the causes of her suffering, she then suddenly not only becomes capable of giving a dramatic account of the events but also can talk to me about them.</blockquote>It also contrasts markedly with the approach of Carl Rogers who from the 1940s offered the world his client- or person-centred therapy. In the extract I’ll now read, Rogers approvingly quotes a colleague’s description of how the word <br /><blockquote>“love”, easily misunderstood though it may be, is the most useful term… to describe a basic ingredient of the therapeutic relationship. … [A]s a therapist I can allow a very strong feeling or emotion of my own to enter the therapeutic relationship, and expect that the handling of this feeling from me by the client will be an important part of the process of therapy for him. [T]herapeutic interaction at this emotional level, rather than interaction at an intellectual … level, regardless of the content concerned, is the effective ingredient in therapeutic growth. … In terms of the therapeutic situation, I think this feeling [our deepest need to be met with as a person ourselves] says to the client, I have a real hunger to know you, to experience your warmth, your expressivity - in whatever form it may take - to drink as deeply as I can from the experience of you in the closest, most naked relationship which we can achieve. I do not want to change you to suit me: the real you and the real me are perfectly compatible ingredients of a potential relationship which transcends, but in no way violates, our separate identities.</blockquote>Here and elsewhere (see Client-Centred Therapy 1951 p.160ff.) Rogers fundamentally agrees with other humanistically minded psychologists - such as Gordon Allport (1950, p. 80) - that “Love is incomparably the greatest psychotherapeutic agent”. We also find such an understanding in object relations theorists such as Harry Guntrip (1953) who talked of a “kind of parental love . . . agape . . . [which] is the kind of love the psycho-analyst and psychotherapist must give the patient because he did not get it from his parents in sufficient measure or in a satisfactory form.” And we will come to all this soon. But what I want to note for now is how Rogers consistently sentimentalises love. That is to say, he turns it into a feeling or emotion. The third condition of effective therapy - positive regard, which he also calls love - is talked of by Rogers in terms of what the therapist experiences: "the counselor is experiencing a warm, positive, acceptant attitude toward what IS the client.” Or: “I am describing … a feeling which is not paternalistic, nor sentimental, nor superficially social and agreeable.” <br /><br />Now we do of course sometimes have important ‘loving feelings’ - but we can’t infer from this that love is itself a feeling. Love, unlike feelings, is known by its fruits, and primarily manifests not in a feeling but in an attitude we have to the other. Whilst hate is an emotion, love is no more an emotion than is courage (see Dilman, Love); it ‘engages’ our emotions, rather than itself being one of them; and unlike actual feelings it doesn’t have discrete start and end points in time. <br /><br />We’ll get to this attitude soon enough, but I want to pause a moment to describe a well-known difficulty with Rogers’ notion of ‘unconditional positive regard’. The difficulty is primarily with the unrealistic nature of an unconditionally positive regard. The inevitable human truth is that one may at times be morally repulsed or annoyed or bored by one’s patient. How then could our regard be unconditionally positive - especially if we’re to meet Rogers’ own second condition of effective therapy - namely an inner honesty or ‘congruence’ between our own inner and outer states. This difficulty may, I think, in part be mitigated by thinking on the fact that the regard, and not the positivity, is what's supposed to be unconditional. And in part it’s mitigated when we understand that positive regard isn’t to do with always feeling positive about or accepting of what someone’s doing or saying, but rather is “a feeling which is not paternalistic, nor sentimental, nor superficially social and agreeable. It respects the other person as a separate individual, and does not possess him.” Rogers tells us that this is well described as “a kind of love for the client as he is, providing we understand the word love as equivalent to the theologian's term agape, and not in its usual romantic and possessive meanings.” But it is just here I think that Rogers’ words work against him. For the theologian’s agape (or caritas - ‘charity’) isn't the name of a feeling; instead it’s the very form of the virtues (Catechism §1827). It’s fruits are ‘joy, peace and mercy’. It ‘demands beneficence and fraternal correction’, it ‘is benevolence’, it ‘fosters reciprocity and remains disinterested and generous’; it is ‘friendship and communion’ (Catechism §1829). Once we understand that ‘love’, properly understood, isn’t the name of a feeling, then I think we can better understand how we can meaningfully be called to love someone to whom we do not currently feel loving feelings. Perhaps it will even be in the sternness of our rebuke that our love for them most shows itself. <br /><br /><b>What then is Love? </b><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><a href="https://www.blogger.com/#" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh7taSMwHb1Hz6hhUt6P6tcXKEpXhIX_-E5BuKBWTgDVv62g6mJ1EMG0cQP612o-DXa9ER9hyphenhyphen1FUynQ0Y0K_GK2nyrDBUPszP-KAXXkDtU6BC97WpYg-2foaWyiBLvC0tWzipES46OyfRKx/w200-h200/4KRPJ_N08162-74-1.jpg" /></a>How, then, shall we understand love? In what follows I will stress three aspects of it. First, it’s a mode of attention. Second, it involves relating without intrusion. Third, it reveals to us the humanity of the other. But before we go further, let’s contemplate an image of love. Here is Donatello’s Virgin and Child - it’s known as the Borromeo Madonna. I would like to draw your attention to the gentleness, tenderness, the holding, the co-presence to each other - the confelicity - of this mother and child. I want to start with the image because it’s easy for verbal description to become abstract, to lose sight of love’s particularity and significance. It’s easy for discussion of love to be shaped by our defences against love and the vulnerability required to know it. It’s easy for talk of love to itself become unloving. To become only a form of thought which tries to hold something to account, rather than a form which is receptive, which gets itself out the way. Perhaps I’ll share a little episode from my life last week as well. I went on a walk with my oldest friend. Just an hour or so; we’re lucky to live near one another. He is a minister, and so one might say his job is to try to remain on a morally serious love trip at all times. At any rate, we had a great conversation, friendly, personal, respectful, intellectually very interesting. But then, when we parted, he turned back and shouted down the road ‘I love you Rich!’ I have to say it hit me with quite some force. And when it hit me thus I realised, too, that despite the gentle thoughtful respectful friendliness of our talk, even here there was a guardedness. The very fact that something was blown away by his exclamation showed up the walk and talk as not everything between friends that they absolutely could be. At any rate, my point is that we perhaps live much of our lives, and this is if we’re lucky, in the state of mind that I was in when on the walk. And that, because of this, our really holding true to our understanding of what’s most important in life - namely: love - all too readily becomes dulled.<br /><br /><b>Attention <br /></b><br />This brings me now to attention, the first aspect of love I want to discuss. The 1930s French existentialist Louis Lavelle described love as ‘a pure attention to the existence of the other’ (‘La charité est une pure attention à l’existence d’autrui’). The idea of love as attention has however primarily been associated with Simone Weil. I want to stress that hers is a moralised notion of attention: it’s an attention that involves getting oneself out of the way so that one can truly, receptively, take in the other in all his particularity: <br /><blockquote>Attention consists of suspending our thought, leaving it detached, empty, and ready to be penetrated by the object… Above all our thought should be empty, waiting, not seeking anything, but ready to receive in its naked truth the object that is to penetrate it. (Waiting for God, p. 111-2) </blockquote>We can bring this form of attention into clearer view by contrasting it with how we relate to another when we stand back and think about his character. Describing someone as ‘a character’ is another way in which we refuse to pay loving attention to them. Here is how the Danish theologian K E Løgstrup puts it: <br /><blockquote>In love and sympathy there is no impulse to give an account of the other person’s character. We do not construct a picture of who he or she is. …We have not made a conscious effort, for the simple reason that nothing about the other has made us wary of them. … On the other hand, if we are not in sympathy with the other person, but there is some tension between us because there is something in the other that we are uncertain about or view with irritation, dissatisfaction, or antipathy, then we begin to construct a picture of the other’s character. We see in him or her a complex set of dispositions, because we are wary of that person. … But in being together with the other person, the picture normally breaks down; their personal presence annihilates it. (The Ethical Demand p. 13) </blockquote>I now want to offer a particular example. It’s curious in its way, because it doesn’t involve interpersonal love. But perhaps this can even help - in just the same way that we’re sometimes more able to feel pathos in stories of the heroism or friendship of animals than of people. It comes from W H Vanstone’s book Love’s Endeavours, Love’s Expense. Vanstone, a clergyman, is visited by two bored boys from his parish asking him for ideas of what to do in the winter half-term break. And he gives them the uninspired task of making a model of a waterfall they’d all visited in the Irish countryside the previous summer. They set about their task without enthusiasm. But over four days they really got into it, becoming oblivious to mealtimes and their own tiredness, utterly giving themselves to the task. <br /><blockquote>Having expended to the full their own power to make, they became the more attentive to what the model itself might disclose. The two boys became vulnerable in and through that which, out of virtually nothing, they had brought into being. … For the self-giving built into the model I could find no simple word or name but love. … I had actually seen the activity of love - the concentration, the effort and the unsparingness of self-giving that are involved in love. … Love aspires to reach that which, being truly an ‘other’, cannot be controlled. The aspiration of love is that the other, which cannot be controlled, may receive: and the greatness of love lies in its endless and unfailing improvisation in hope that the other may receive. </blockquote>Essential to this attention, then, is getting oneself out of the way so that the other may truly be seen for who she is. A lovely example of this is given by Iris Murdoch in The Sovereignty of Good: <br /><blockquote>A mother, whom I shall call M, feels hostility to her daughter-in-law, whom I shall call D. M finds D quite a good-hearted girl, but while not exactly common yet certainly unpolished and lacking in dignity and refinement. D is inclined to be pert and familiar, insufficiently ceremonious, brusque, sometimes positively rude, always tiresomely juvenile. M does not like D’s accent or the way D dresses. M feels that her son has married beneath him. Let us assume for the purposes of the example that the mother, who is a very ‘‘correct’’ person, behaves beautifully to the girl throughout, not allowing her real opinion to appear in any way. … Time passes, and it could be that M settles down with a hardened sense of grievance and a fixed picture of D, imprisoned … by the cliché: my poor son has married a silly vulgar girl. However, the M of the example is an intelligent well-intentioned person, capable of self-criticism, capable of giving careful and just attention to an object which confronts her. M tells herself: ‘‘I am old-fashioned and conventional. I may be prejudiced and narrow-minded. I may be snobbish. I am certainly jealous. Let me look again.”</blockquote>Essential to such attention is looking at something justly. <br /><br /><b>Relating without Intrusion <br /></b><br />I’ve described love as a form of attention, one in which the self gets itself, and its categorical cognition, out the way so it may truly and openly encounter the other. An important part of this is its restraint on impingement. Love truly is a desire for unity with the other, but this is not unity under any old description; it’s a unity which honours the independent existence of the relata. It is by way of articulating this that Michael Balint offers us the idea of the analyst’s ‘non-impinging, abiding presence’ - and Donald Winnicott famously talks of the importance, for the child, of developing the capacity to be alone in the presence of the other. The example I’d like to give, to make this vivid, comes from R D Laing - and it concerns the opposite of this kind of love which lets the other be. <br /><br />Consider Maya Abbott, a ‘tall, dark, attractive woman of twenty-eight’ who has spent 9 of the last 10 years in a psychiatric hospital. Laing and Esterson interview her together with her parents. Maya has a diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia; she feared her father was poisoning her; she experiences herself as a machine rather than a person; she lacks a sense of her motives and intentions and actions belonging together. She feels her thoughts are controlled by others, and believes that her voices, rather than she herself, did her thinking for her. She lives away from home during the war, and when she comes back aged 14 her parents experience her as changed. She objects to her father’s proximity; she objects to the lack of opportunities for autonomy she is offered. Her mother objects to her ironing without supervision, although she’s been working in a laundry for a year without mishap. ‘Mr and Mrs Abbott regarded their daughter’s use of her own ‘mind’ independently of them, as synonymous with ‘illness’, and as a rejection of them.’ Mrs Abbott says ‘you see Maya is er - instead of accepting everything - as if I said to her, er, ‘Black is black’, she would have probably believed it, but since she’s ill, she’s never accepted anything any more.’ Until she was 18 Maya ‘took refuge … in books from what she called her parents’ intrusions.’ ‘When Maya said that her parents put difficulties in the way of her reading, they amusedly denied this. She insisted that she had wanted to read the Bible; they both laughed at the idea that they made this difficult for her, and her father, still laughing, said ‘What do you want to read the Bible for anyway? You can find that sort of information much better in other books.’ Her parents, she said ‘did not think of her, or ‘see’ her as ‘a person’, ‘as the person that I am’. She felt frightened by this lack of recognition, and hit back at them as a means of self-defence. … Maya insisted that her parents had no genuine affection for her because they did not know, and did not want to know, what she felt, and also that she was not allowed to express any spontaneous affection for them, because this was not part of ‘fitting in’.’ Her father ‘often laughed off things that I told him and I couldn’t see what he was laughing at. I thought it was very serious. Even when I was five, when I could understand, I couldn’t see what he was laughing at. … If I told him about my dreams he used to laugh it off and tell me to take no notice. They were important to me at the time - I often got nightmares. He used to laugh them off.’ When the family were all interviewed together, Maya’s ‘mother and father kept exchanging with each other a constant series of nods, winks, gestures, knowing smiles, so obvious to the observer that he commented on them after twenty minutes of the first such interview. They continued, however, unabated and denied.’ When she reaches puberty Maya starts to wonder about her parents’ intercourse, and to masturbate. ‘She tries to tell them about this, but they told her she did not have any thoughts of that kind. She told them she masturbated and they told her that she did not. …when she told her parents in the presence of the interviewer that she still masturbated, he parents simply told her that she did not!’ Maya says that she is trying to cultivate her ‘self-possession’: ‘If I weren’t self-possessed I’d be nowhere, because I’d be mixed up in a medley of other things. … Mother is always … trying to teach me how to use my mind. You can’t tell a person how to use their mind against their will.’ ‘She would feel that her mother and father were forcing their opinions on her, that they were trying to ‘obliterate’ her mind. Laing and Esterson report mother telling them of ‘a ‘home truth’ a friend had given her recently about her relation to Maya. She said to me… ‘Well, you can’t live anyone’s life for them - you could even be punished for doing it’ - And I remember thinking, ‘What a dreadful thing to think’ but afterwards I thought she might be right. It struck me very forcibly. She said to me ‘You get your life to live, and that’s your life - you can’t and mustn’t live anybody’s life for them’ And I thought at the time, ‘Well, what a dreadful thing to think.’ And then afterwards I thought, ‘Well, it’s probably quite right’. This insight, however, was fleeting.’ <br /><br />When we read the other case studies in Laing & Esterson’s book we find similar experiences of intrusion, combined with failures to offer recognition, which are experienced by the children as thwarting their ability to grow up. Parents can’t understand that their own preferences are not shared by their child. Feelings too painful or ego-alien for adults to realise are denied as genuinely pertaining to the child. A child will tell her mother that she felt that she was given no confirmation as a real person, but the mother simply says ‘well I do wish you’d expressed your needs more’ and then continues to talk in a way that makes it clear she’s not interested in what her daughter’s inner needs really are. Now the claim I’m making here is that such failings are essentially failings of love. I’m not saying that failures in love uniquely cause mental illness; perhaps having somewhat obtuse / intrusive parents who provide but a modicum of recognition would cause only insignificant developmental problems for many children. Nor am I saying that these parents are particularly to blame for their difficulties in love. But what I am saying is that such failures give us a clear example of what mature love is not. Such love is trying to understand someone in her own terms. It’s getting yourself out of the way in your appreciation of the other. It makes room for them with their own preferences, values and understandings. It doesn’t tell other people, or pretend to know, what they think. <br /><br /><b>Disclosing Particularity </b><br /><br />The final aspect of love to which I want to draw your attention is its power to disclose the other in her irreplaceable particularity. Again an example will take us further than a thesis. In his A Common Humanity, Raimond Gaita tells of the power of love to make the humanity of another fully visible. The tale he tells is from the early 1960s. Gaita is a 17 year old ward assistant in a psychiatric hospital. The patients are judged incurable. If they soil themselves they stand in showers whilst assistants mop them. Nobody visits. ‘They had no grounds for self-respect insofar as we connect that with self-esteem’. Many clinicians treated them brutishly. Some psychiatrists Gaita admired talked of the patient’s ‘inalienable dignity’. (Their colleagues believed them fools.) He admits that ‘it probably didn’t help their cause for the psychiatrists to speak of the inalienable dignity of the patients. … Natural though it is… it is, I believe, a sign of our conceptual desperation and also of our deep desire to ground in the very nature of things the requirement that we accord each human being unconditional respect.’ Dignity is, in fact, alienable. But then: <br /><blockquote>One day a nun came to the ward . … everything in her demeanour towards [the patients] - the way she spoke to them, her facial expressions, the inflexions of her body - contrasted with and showed up the behaviour of those noble psychiatrists. She showed that they were, despite their best efforts, condescending, as I too had been. … I felt irresistibly that her behaviour was directly shaped by the reality which it revealed. … Whatever religious people might say, as someone who was witness to [her] love and .. claimed in fidelity to it, I have no understanding of what it revealed independently of the quality of her love. … the quality of her love proved that [the patients] are rightly the objects of our non-condescending treatment, that we should do all in our power to respond in that way. </blockquote>The aspect of Gaita’s narrative to which I wish to draw attention concerns love’s disclosiveness. The nun’s love reveals the patients in their irreplaceability; it reveals the fact that we are ‘precious beyond reason’. ‘Love is the perception of individuals’, as Iris Murdoch puts it (The Sovereignty of Good). We can understand this, I think, by calling to mind either our friends or our patients. Perhaps you might try this right now with just one or two patients. Bring to mind someone’s distinctive face, and in particular how he animates his face and how he inhabits his body, how he comes into or leaves the consulting room. His tone of voice. Recollect him struggling in his distinctive way, and recollect the way he uses words, and the distinctive enthusiasms he has, the kinds of things he finds funny. Recall his distinctive vulnerability, and how he shares of himself from that vulnerable state. In short, bring to mind what Christopher Bollas calls his ‘idiom’, his ‘style of life’ that transcends his defences. And then bring to mind another patient, and the different way she is herself. Can you enjoy them in their differences? Can you want the best for them in their particularity? <br /><br />The point of this way of seeing people, i.e. as individuals, is not to do with enjoying their diversity. The presence of diversity should presumably of itself no more be celebrated than its absence. But what reflection on, say, cultural differences does is sensitise us to the wondrous value of the domain of culture per se. And so too with individuals. We can sensitise ourselves in recollection to the wondrousness of our friends, or patients, by drawing to mind all their distinctive ways of being themselves. We might say ‘One of the things I really love about David is the way he uses humour to redeem the pains of life without deflecting from them’. This doesn’t mean of course that what we really love is not David but rather his sense and use of humour. Lovable David is not just a congeries of lovable traits. It rather works like this: thinking of him in his distinctiveness can help us acknowledge him in his singularity, and help avoid other (here irrelevant or occlusive) forms of apprehending him - e.g. that he has a certain group identity. His singularity has to do not with his atypicality but simply with his being an individual. Seen in this way David is not a worker (who could be replaced), but an irreplaceable individual. And ‘love' is the name of the attitude that makes this manifest. <br /><br />Going naturally along with this revelation of the other in her true humanity and irreplaceable particularity is, I believe, wanting the best for her. Here we’re back to Rogers’ positive regard. Again, wanting the best for someone may show itself in our feelings, but it needn’t; it can rather be a resting, default, background attitude. And as we all know, much of the more ‘technical’ work of therapy consists in pealing back the negative transference (and the positive transference which can hide an underlying negative transference) so as to arrive at the patient’s fears that one doesn’t, in truth, really want the best for him. That one doesn’t really respect him. And once these layers of transference are peeled back, the patient can hopefully ‘internalise’ this wanting the best for him into a relaxed and non-selfish attitude of wanting the best for himself. <br /><br /><b>Therapeutic Conclusions <br /></b><br />To know oneself lovable is the greatest balm we can ever receive. Recall Raymond Carver’s poem ‘Late Fragment’: <br /><br /></div><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;"><div>And did you get what </div><div>you wanted from this life, even so? </div><div>I did. </div><div>And what did you want? </div><div>To call myself beloved, to feel myself </div><div>beloved on the earth. </div></blockquote><div style="text-align: left;"><br />But psychotherapists have - often for good reasons - not infrequently shied away from seeing therapy as a place where such knowledge of belovedness - or perhaps better: of belovedness’s possibility - can be attained. These reasons have to do with the shallow understandings of love that persist both inside and outside the therapeutic community. I hope that by here adumbrating love - not as a feeling, and certainly not as infatuation, but instead - as a non-intrusive disclosive justice-doing attention to an other in her infinitely precious particularity - I’ve helped to make clear how it need not be foreign to a truly therapeutic encounter. And if we accept, as we surely must, that therapeutic learning is essentially experiential; and if we accept that a difficulty in conceiving of love’s possibility for oneself is intrinsically related to mental suffering; then I think we may also see how love is not only not foreign, but in fact essential, for the work of therapy itself. <br /><br />In his book <i>The Love Cure</i>, John Ryan Haule tells us that ‘Love alone effects the cure because love is the only way we humans have for taking one another seriously.’ The patient ‘has been longing for a love that will find him amidst the tumult and elucidate his experience as his own, as proceeding from the self he has yet to find.’ I think this right, except to say that whilst the patient has long needed such a love, the need may well not have registered in consciousness for the longing to have developed. Carver tells us that he wanted to feel himself beloved on the earth. Yet the knowledge that this was what we wanted may have come late to him. For a long while he seems to have shied away from it for a long while into drink and other distractions. And Tina Turner’s questions ‘What's love got to do … with it? … Who needs a heart when a heart can be broken?’ perfectly express a reluctant, begrudging, acknowledgement that it’s love that mends our brokenness. And this is why I want to end by saying that, as psychotherapists, one of our principal tasks is to hold true to this knowledge. To hold true to, live out of, and evangelise for, the knowledge that it’s only the look of love that can disclose us, to ourselves, and to one another, in our utter particularity, as unique centres of value, as having every right to walk this earth. <br /><br /><b>Afterthoughts</b><br /><br />It came to me during the Q&A that missing from the above is a really important aspect of therapeutic learning. What is missing is the therapist’s loving acceptance of the patient’s love for the therapist. For what a patient may lack, as much as anything, is the sense that his or her own love for others would be something they would welcome. You walk past someone on an empty street or country path. Will one of you look up, with a warm smile, and greet the other? Who will do it first? Will either? Or will these passers by simply be locked in their own worlds, unwilling to risk the shame that comes when a gesture of love is unwelcome? The courage to offer the look of love - a look which in its turn begets love and warmth - requires a trust in one’s own lovability. With that trust in place such a look can be offered, and when it isn’t returned the one who looks and smiles will believe not that they themselves are not lovable, but that the other is sadly too mired in shame, loneliness, or hurt to come out of themselves. <br /><br />Something else that I would do well to think more on is the way in which love begets itself within the individual, and the way it need not always be directional, inwards or outwards. There are practices that cultivate this in religion for example: one prays to love that one’s love may increase, and this prayer is itself an act of love, and it begets further love. A new ethic, a new 'regime' within the self, emerges, one that trusts in love’s value for disclosing what is of importance in life. A conference guest also reminded me of St Augustine’s ‘<a href="https://www.blogger.com/#">Love, and do what you will</a>’. We might see that as a call to trust in love as that which reveals what matters in life - as a rallying cry for the aforementioned regime change. <br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="BLOG_video_class" height="134" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/oGpFcHTxjZs" width="162" youtube-src-id="oGpFcHTxjZs"></iframe> <iframe allowfullscreen="" class="BLOG_video_class" height="135" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/LlDdkLfyxxc" width="162" youtube-src-id="LlDdkLfyxxc"></iframe></div><br />
<b>References</b><span style="text-align: left;"> </span><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><span style="text-align: left;">Aaron Beck. Love is Never Enough. </span><br style="text-align: left;" /><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><span style="text-align: left;">Ilham Dilman. Love: It’s Forms, Dimensions and Paradoxes. </span><br style="text-align: left;" /><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><span style="text-align: left;">Niklas Forsberg. Iris Murdoch on Love. In </span><a href="https://www.blogger.com/#" style="text-align: left;">The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Love</a><span style="text-align: left;">. </span><br style="text-align: left;" /><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><span style="text-align: left;">Raimon Gaita. A Common Humanity: Thinking about Love and Truth and Justice. </span><br style="text-align: left;" /><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><span style="text-align: left;">John Ryan Haule. The Love Cure. </span><br style="text-align: left;" /><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><span style="text-align: left;">Iris Murdoch. The Sovereignty of Good. </span><br style="text-align: left;" /><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><span style="text-align: left;">Plato. Symposium. </span><br style="text-align: left;" /><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><span style="text-align: left;">Rupert Read & Emma Willmer (2000). Psychotherapy - a form of prostitution? British Gestalt Journal 9: 2. 30-36. </span><br style="text-align: left;" /><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><span style="text-align: left;">Carl Rogers. Client Centred Therapy. </span><br style="text-align: left;" /><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><span style="text-align: left;">Daniel Shaw (2003) On the Therapeutic Action of Analytic Love. Contemporary Psychoanalysis, 39:2, 251-278. </span><br style="text-align: left;" /><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><span style="text-align: left;">W H Vanstone. Love’s Endeavour, Love’s Expense: The Response of Being to the Love of God.</span><br />Richard Gippshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18001492312162861823noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3184393804521721596.post-10589219819060387142021-01-16T12:55:00.007+00:002021-01-16T13:03:12.199+00:00gaslit: narcissistic perversions of thesoul's moral fabric<p style="text-align: center;"><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Talk given to Applied Section Meeting of the</span></span></p><p style="text-align: center;"><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">British Psychoanalytical Society - </span></span><span style="font-family: inherit;">9th December 2020</span></p>
<p style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 13px;"><span><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;"><b></b>(Pulling </span></span><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">together</span><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;"> various previously blogged thoughts regarding narcissism and narcissistic abuse.)</span></span></span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 13px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></p>
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><b><span style="font-family: inherit;">Abstract </span></b></p>
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 13px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><b></b><br /></span></p>
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Gaslighting is often portrayed in terms of blame-shifting and lying, but in reality also involves far more subtle manipulations that aren't straightforward to describe. The survivor movement provides a rich repertoire of concepts to help the sufferer of narcissistic abuse think about and resist what they fell into. And psychoanalysis comes to our aid with its theory of the intrapsychic and interpersonal forms of projective identification. This talk considers what philosophy has to add. In particular we'll see what light a phenomenological perspective can shed on the (apt or spurious) allocation, within an intimate relationship, of moral properties of culpability and woundedness. We’ll also see how Wittgenstein’s ‘private language’ arguments help us understand how the narcissist sustains his illusion of self-ratifying unaccountability. In such ways we may formulate more clearly what it is for the narcissist to bend out of shape the soul’s moral fabric - both his own and those of the people in close relationship with him.</span></p>
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<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><b><span style="font-family: inherit;">Introduction </span></b></p>
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 13px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></p>
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Let me begin by saying something about the kind of ‘application’ that I’m engaged in, in this ‘Applied’ rather than ‘Scientific’ meeting. My application isn’t of psychoanalytic ideas to matters outside the clinic, but rather of some philosophical thought from outside the clinic to what we find within. What I want to talk about are two aspects of narcissism, one concerning matters intrapsychic, the other having a more interpersonal focus. These correspond in some ways, I think, to two different aspects of projective identification: one a personal unconscious phantasy, the other an intersubjective process. I don’t claim that one is more fundamental than the other; a better way to think of them may be as 2 different angles on the same narcissistic process.</span></p>
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 13px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></p>
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Today I’ve no ambitions to provide a general theory of narcissism. Psychoanalysis already has plenty of those. Instead I’m particularly concerned with that kind of narcissistic abuse that goes by the name of ‘gaslighting’. And what I want to focus on is the gaslighter’s means by which they <i>queer the moral pitch</i> of their interaction with their victim. This gaslighting not only warps the abuser’s own mind’s moral fabric but, as it always occurs in interaction with another, also warps the moral fabric, the morale, of the other’s mind. </span></p>
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<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><b>Whence ‘Gaslighting’?</b><br />
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The original inspiration for today’s psychological use of the term ‘gaslighting’ comes from the 1939<span style="background-color: white;"> play </span><i>Gas Light</i>, penned<span style="background-color: white;"> by the playwright Patrick Hamilton - who <a href="https://thecritic.co.uk/the-man-who-invented-gaslighting/">himself suffered considerable characterological complications</a>. An American film, starring Ingrid Bergman and Charles Boyer, was made in 1944. The play’s setting is the home of newlyweds Jack and Bella in 1880s London. Jack disappears from the flat each night, not telling Bella where he’s going. In fact he’s going to the flat upstairs to look for the missing jewels of a murdered woman. While up there, his turning on the gas lights causes the lighting in the whole block to dim; Bella notices this and also hears his footsteps through the ceiling. In a maddening way Jack convinces her she’s seeing and hearing things. ‘Gas lighting’ was then put to psychopathological use in 1969 by psychiatrists Barton & Whitehead, who documented examples of wives inventing stories of their husband’s violent behaviour in order to get them psychiatrically detained. More recently - perhaps driven by Robin Stern’s (2007/2018) book on hidden manipulation, <i>The Gaslight Effect</i> - the phrase has taken a more psychological turn, and is now used to describe certain forms of narcissistic abuse and the unwitting cooperation with that - especially by such abused subjects as we now, following Donna Savery (2018), call ‘echoists’. It’s the notion of <i>lying</i> to undermine another’s stability and morale that’s captured in most contemporary definitions; here’s a representative one from Wikipedia:</span><br />
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<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px 0px 0px 14.2px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaslighting">Gaslighting</a> is a form of psychological manipulation that seeks to sow seeds of doubt in a targeted individual or in members of a targeted group, making them question their own <b>memory, perception, and sanity</b>. Using persistent denial, <b>misdirection, contradiction, and lying</b>, it attempts to destabilize the victim and delegitimize the victim's <b>belief</b>. <b>Instances</b> may range from the denial by an abuser that previous abusive <b>incidents</b> ever occurred up to the staging of bizarre <b>events</b> by the abuser with the intention of disorienting the victim.</span></p>
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<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">The internet has been a major source of supportive and illustrative literature on gaslighting, with excellent websites (e.g. the <a href="https://narcissistfamilyfiles.com">Narcissist Family Files</a>) springing up, often created by survivors of narcissistic abuse. Here we find thousands of moving stories of people who, coming across the online literature and videos, realise that they’ve been caught in a malignant folie à deux, perhaps even for several decades, finally understanding why they’ve been so exhausted and demoralised, and finally restoring something of their self-possession. Of course we also find here plenty of narcissistic characters looking to blame their ex-partners for their woes! But what we come across should, I suggest, be compelling enough for us to distrust such adages, sometimes commonplace in psychotherapeutic circles, as “the responsibility for conflictual difficulties in relationships is always 50:50” - at least, until we’ve ascertained that our patient doesn’t belong to that segment of the population unlucky enough to be in a relationship with someone whose narcissistic traits are more prominent than average. In short, gaslighting is a very 21st century topic, one that relied on the internet to take off, and one that’s found its way into popular culture. The (Dixie) Chicks, for example, recently released their first new song in 14 years - ‘<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sbVPcPL30xc">Gaslighter</a>’ - in which lead singer Natalie Maines calls out her ex-husband’s abusive behaviour.</span></p>
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 13px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></p>
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">A particularly interesting feature of this online literature has been the development of a <i>new language</i> to aid in the symbolisation, and hence thoughtful resistance, of such abuse. Thus we now have not only ‘gaslighters’ or narcissistic abusers, <span style="background-color: white;">‘empaths’ and ‘codependents’, but a whole new rhetoric of manipulation: ‘supply’ (the term in fact originates with Fenichel, 1938) consists of those the narcissist either idealises and emulates or instead abuses to prop up their own esteem; ‘hoovering’ is the attempt to suck old disillusioned supply back within the narcissist’s dominion; ‘enablers’ are those in the family who don’t question the narcissist’s inflated self-image; 'flying monkeys’ are such enablers as are tasked with doing the narcissist’s dirty work; the ‘scapegoat’ is, for example, a child onto whom is projected all a narcissistic parent’s toxic shame (contrast the idealised ‘golden child’); strategies of ‘divide and conquer’ involve setting up an environment of competition and terror in which people try to avoid the narcissist’s attack but at each other’s expense; ‘fauxpologies’ are those spurious sorry-sayings such as ‘I’m sorry you are so sensitive’; ‘I’m sorry you think I’m such a disappointment as a mother’, ‘I’m sorry to have made you angry’ (rather than being sorry for what was said, in response to which anger might well have been the apt response); ‘smear campaigns’ involve systematically discrediting those who’ve seen through the narcissist’s mask, or those who are envied or resented. Strategies for dealing with such abuse include 'going gray-rock’, i.e. disengaging and making yourself dull and non-reactive to antagonism, despite constant attempts to get under your skin. The language is, I think, particularly important: by naming what’s going on it allows for an empowering restoration of thinking and self-possession, and aids the refusal of intrusive and controlling projections. (Needless to say, the language can itself get abused: </span>‘You’re gaslighting me!’ has itself now become a classic gaslighting manoeuvre.)</span></p>
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 13px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></p>
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">In what follows I’ll argue that, c<span style="background-color: white;">ontra the emphasis we find in common definitions of gaslighting, definitions which stress the narcissist’s perpetuation of falsehoods regarding determinate external facts, what’s often more pernicious in gaslighting are distortions to the less determinate contours of the inner life, particularly to our sense of our own moral qualities and worth. I’ll suggest too that such distortions are often provided not so much by overt misrepresentation but by the selective use of attention, by silence, subtly dismissive uses of gesture, tetchy vocal tone, selective ignoring, tacit accusations, the gradual cultivation of distorted expectations, and so on.</span></span></p>
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<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><b><span style="font-family: inherit;">Gaslighting and the Indeterminacy and Holism of the Mental</span></b></p>
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 13px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></p>
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Here’s an example of a <i>somewhat</i> subtle use of gaslighting, one that relies on acts of omission rather than of commission: </span></p>
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<span style="background-color: white;">[<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mpX76Env1-A&t=161s">kris777</a>] When I was in my late teens, my mother had about 10 of her closest friends over for a party right after Christmas. I was sitting among them (the only one of my mother's children present) enjoying the banter when all of a sudden, my mother grabbed everyone's attention and asked "would you all like to see what my children gave me for Christmas?" They all chimed in "absolutely"!! And I knew she was about to pull one of her classic gaslighting moves as she's done it so many times. She doesn't realize she has a tell (a certain tic in her facial muscles) when she's about to go full on narc. She walked over to the tree and grabbed two gifts - the one my brother got her and the one my sister got for her. She showed both as her friends ooohhhhed and awwed over them, and then she went and put them back under the tree. Her two closest friends' eyes got very wide and puzzled but neither would look over in my direction. I did not take the bait. I knew she wanted me to spout off so that she could humiliate me in front of the group and say she just forgot about my gift - I guess she forgot she has 3 children. It was beautiful though the way her move completely backfired as everyone got very quiet and uncomfortable as I sat completely silent.</span></span></p>
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 13px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></p>
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Kris777’s mother engages here in an act of omission which, precisely because it isn’t so readily ostensible, can - if called out - be more readily defended. (In fact it likely won’t just be defended but, under the cover of the plausible deniability that such acts offer, turned into an opportunity to push a demoralising counter-accusation of over-sensitivity or presumptuous judgementalism.) </span></p>
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 13px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></p>
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Now, our everyday psychological vocabulary - I mean that regarding beliefs, desires, feelings, intentions and the like (I’ll call them all ‘thoughts’) - doesn’t reference individual behaviours: there’s no one-to-one correlation between particular actions and thoughts; one and the same behaviour can properly be said to express different thoughts depending on its context. And this context extends not only to other aspects of one’s thinking and the present situation but also reaches back in time to include aspects of the history of one’s interactions. (Philosophers call this the ‘holism of the mental’.) Because of this, such gaslighting as aims to distort the other’s judgement regarding his own and the gaslighted person’s thoughts has far more wriggle room than that which aims to distort our present grasp of particular facts in external reality. And what shall count as the right circumstances against which to read any particular stretch of behaviour as expressive of this or that thought will always be a matter of<i> judgement</i>. (I’ll come back to that shortly.) What exactly, for example, is the context in which <i>that</i> raised eyebrow shall count as non-accusatory surprise, or as a warranted or unwarranted accusation? Does that context obtain here, or not? And who’s to say?</span></p>
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 13px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></p>
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white;">We also do well to note that even utterly competent and perfectly knowledgeable observers can differ on the moral or psychological meaning of certain gestures. </span>We sometimes encounter expressions which to one person look to be of annoyance, to another, mere indifference, and for which consulting the subject in question may provide no clear answer. We may take ourselves to be motivated by entirely selfless ambitions; another finds a sliver of selfishness there - and <i>sometimes</i> there can - I suggest - simply <i>be no fact of the matter</i> as to who here is right. Was he being annoying or just insistent? Was it thoughtless or merely casual? Uncertainty here can, as Wittgenstein (1980, §657) suggests, be “constitutional… not a shortcoming. It resides in our concepts that this uncertainty exists…” And this ‘constitutive indeterminacy of the mental’, as philosophers call it, also provides a cover of plausible deniability for gaslighters to work under.</span></p>
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 13px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></p>
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white;">I don’t think, however, that reference to acts by omission, to holism, and to indeterminacy fully explains how the gaslighter is able to ply his or her shifty trade. Consider for example the following description of gaslighting as <i>ambient</i> abuse (it’s by YouTube presenter Sam Vaknin, himself a narcissist who’s written a lot about the condition):</span><br />
</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></span></p>
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px 0px 0px 14.2px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="text-decoration: underline;"><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mpX76Env1-A&t=161s">ambient abuse</a></span><b> </b>is the stealthy, subtle, underground current of maltreatment that sometimes goes unnoticed even by the victim herself until it's too late. Ambient abuse penetrates and permeates everything, but is difficult to pinpoint and identify. Gaslighting is vigorous, equivocal, atmospheric and diffuse, hence its insidious and pernicious effects. It is by far the most dangerous kinds of abuse there is. ... Ambient abuse yields an irksome feeling, a kind of disagreeable foreboding, a premonition, a bad omen; it's in the air. In the long term such an environment erodes the individual's sense of self-worth. </span></p>
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 13px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></p>
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">How shall we understand this ‘stealthy’, ‘subtle’, ‘ambient’ and ‘atmospheric’ narcissistic abuse?</span></p>
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 13px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></p>
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><b><span style="font-family: inherit;">Distorting the Foundations of Judgement</span></b></p>
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 13px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></p>
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Let’s continue to deepen our understanding of gaslighting by picking up the above-mentioned matter of <i>judgement</i>. The word has varied meanings. Philosophers sometimes use it very broadly, to stand for any determinations we make. However we often use it in a more restricted sense, one having to do with practical wisdom and manifesting in what we term ‘judgement calls’. Invoking this latter sense we might say that the need for judgement can sometimes be obviated through the use of checklists, criteria, necessary and sufficient conditions, definitions, and so on. A trainee psychiatrist, for example, might rely on an operationalised diagnostic scheme. By so doing she can, when making her diagnosis, avoid calling on her judgement (in the restricted sense). Such judgement, however, cannot be avoided for long. For example our psychiatrist will hardly be able to avoid it when determining whether one of her patient’s beliefs truly does count as a delusion. And here her ability to exercise good judgement is not something other than her grasp of the meaning of words (like ‘delusion’): she shall count both as knowing what ‘delusion’ means, and as having good psychiatric judgement, if she picks out only those mental states which competent psychiatrists pick out as delusions.</span></p>
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 13px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></p>
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Now, to initially and ongoingly calibrate our judgement regarding ordinary moral and mental matters we rely on interaction with our families, teachers, peers and psychoanalysts. Our calibration consists both in conforming our judgement to that of others and, when enough of that has happened and we’ve developed sufficient mental apparatus of our own, in testing our judgement by also exploring our disagreements with them. (Part of what’s insidious about gaslighting is that, obtaining largely within couples, it involves isolating the victim from alternative sources of calibration; now that she can’t see her friends, her skewed judgement goes quite unchecked.) And what I want to stress here is that these skews to judgement needn’t involve anything so flagrant as buying into out-and-out lies about what <i>facts</i> obtain - about what was and wasn’t said or done. It’s at least as often, or as well, in judgements about the<i> meaning</i> of such facts that these skews are here introduced.</span></p>
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 13px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></p>
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Many of our morally significant interactions involve our ongoing sense of when we’re to blame and, correlatively, when we’re being wronged. The determination of this is always contextual - both situational and historical - and typically relies on judgement. What after all shall count as being over-sensitive, and what instead as a reasonable standing up for oneself? When is and when isn’t one’s forgetting a culpable matter? (NB a typical verbal trick of the narcissist is to spuriously push for non-culpability merely on the basis of unintendedness, conveniently ignoring that we are also responsible for what we should have thought, but didn’t think, about. Another is to substitute commiserative for apologetic meanings of ‘sorry’.) What counts as showing apt consideration, and what instead counts as taking up a perverse invitation to jettison one’s self-possession and instead be possessed by the other? What counts as an understandable tired tetchiness that should be tolerated by another, and what as someone's failure to take apt care for his relationship? What shall be taken as disrespectful, and what as relaxedly casual?</span></p>
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 13px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 13px;"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgYjvNfhT06J8cvA1XGlmWYvABAGR9HfSsZsKJhDjFLjGTMtqWvCRADpj2mHm8Qdpr1lsQpGb7fN7etyArWQwUHszbY3Xszz_6h6FKai_lRNaT6XvEwZtGM9hFPbOLH8CBAur_eJV5U4wT2/s566/Screenshot+2021-01-16+at+12.56.58.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="466" data-original-width="566" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgYjvNfhT06J8cvA1XGlmWYvABAGR9HfSsZsKJhDjFLjGTMtqWvCRADpj2mHm8Qdpr1lsQpGb7fN7etyArWQwUHszbY3Xszz_6h6FKai_lRNaT6XvEwZtGM9hFPbOLH8CBAur_eJV5U4wT2/s320/Screenshot+2021-01-16+at+12.56.58.png" width="320" /></a></div><br /><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span><p></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 13px; text-align: center;"><br /></p>
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">If the persons in a couple have well-formed moral sensibilities, they will often enough agree as to what counts as the violation of reasonable behavioural norms. If they were to ‘graph’ the domain of their responsibilities for the moral upsets obtaining within their relationship, enough of their plots will coincide for meaningful moral discourse to be possible.</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"> </span></p>
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">If however we here encounter a relationship between a narcissist and someone who buys into the narcissist’s tacit revaluation of moral values, we find them accepting a new moral reality, one in which the narcissist shirks responsibility and projects blameworthiness. In this new reality, new rules have tacitly been introduced; the narcissist has subtly queered the pitch of the distribution of responsibility and blame, and distorted the moral fabric of her victim’s soul. But still, how does she get away with such distortions to judgement?</span></p>
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 13px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><b></b><br /></span></p>
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><b><span style="font-family: inherit;">Our Embodied ‘Understandings of Being’</span></b></p>
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<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">I want to approach this question by thinking on the French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s understanding of the unconscious. And to get going with this we’ll need to understand 2 concepts which Merleau-Ponty develops from Husserl and Heidegger. </span></p>
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 13px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></p>
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">The first is that of the ‘lived body’. Whilst Freud offers us an unconscious of individually repressed ideas, the French philosopher Merleau-Ponty offers us a <i>bodily unconscious</i>. The body in question is not the body qua mere organism, not that which is studied by anatomy and physiology, but rather the <i>body as lived</i>. This notion, taken over from Edmund Husserl, has to do with the body: as the coordinated site of sensation and instinct, as a largely perceptually invisible locus of our perceptual points of view, as the sensate receiver and explorer of the world, and as a structure of habit and know-how with well-practiced motor sequences and perceptual Gestalten sedimented into it. It’s with and in our lived bodies that we automatically grasp how close or far to stand to others. We who aren’t beset by autistic disability or schizophrenic illness can readily coordinate our gestures and come into communicative synchrony with others. And only with this subconscious intercorporeal synchrony in place can we make ready sense of one another’s actions and utterances. In this way the lived body provides a recessive foundational background which all our explicit communicative acts presuppose. </span></p>
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 13px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></p>
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">The second concept which is relevant here is Martin Heidegger’s notion of the ‘clearing’. Heidegger invites us to eschew the problematics that arise from thinking of human understanding as self-contained and inner, as something we could enjoy and bring to bear on a world utterly external to it. Instead he wants us to think of ourselves as consisting primarily of being-in-the-world - as always-already situated in a world of which we’re a part. We are, in the terms of the metaphor, ourselves a part of the world’s woods and thickets, but within these our culture, including our language, and our own personal histories create a ‘clearing’, and within that clearing matters can show up for conscious consideration. What can show up there depends, however, on the clearing’s structure. What Merleau-Ponty was interested in were cases where something which we might expect someone to encounter <i>within</i> their clearing has instead become part of their being’s very fabric. Rather than rely here on the usual metaphors for repression, Merleau-Ponty thinks in terms of ‘generalisation’: what once showed up within the visual field instead now becomes part of the field’s invisible boundary, constraining what can be seen. On this view the unconscious is, as it were, the water the fish is always swimming in without realising it, or an invisible ‘atmosphere’ (to use another of Merleau-Ponty’s terms) or unconscious mood with which we’re utterly identified, which utterly surrounds us and which we can’t help but breathe.</span></p>
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 13px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></p>
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">To bring these two concepts together now: it’s with and in our lived bodies that we encounter the world, and what’s visible of that world depends upon the ‘set’, so to say, of that body. Consider how sometimes in therapy or analysis you sometimes think, after eventually arriving at a valid formulation, that in some inchoate sense you’d known what the problem was from the way the patient walked in the door on his first visit to your consulting room. Or think of how the transference functions as an invisible force field utterly constraining the way the patient relates to you. On his way up to your door he sometimes slips from one mode of functioning into another quite regressed one, one now constraining the thoughts available to him. The disturbance is contained in his lived body’s habitual postures - postures of deference or shame, fear or awkwardness, for example. Because the patient <i>is</i> this body, is as it were enclosed within what Reich called his ‘character armour’, the way it structures his encounters isn’t visible to him. Psychopathology, on this view, involves the fixation, into the general structure of the clearing, of that which would better be placed as a discrete moment in the living of a life. And psychotherapy, amongst other health-giving relationships, involves the remobilisation and diversification of these structures through a disidentificatory process of symbolising them.</span></p>
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 13px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></p>
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">The third concept I want now to introduce is that of intercorporeality. Different cultures have different ways of inhabiting the body, different forms of gesture, different codes regarding eye contact, what counts as warmth and what as flirting, and so on. Such cultural mores sediment themselves invisibly into the lived body, just as accents do into our voices. Let’s focus on such moral emotions as guilt, shame, penitence, forgiveness, warmth, love, confidence, diffidence, open-heartedness and so on. These attitudes not only have their characteristic embodiments - the downward eyes of shame, the expansive motions of open-heartedness, the stride of healthy confidence, and so on - but are ongoingly entrained in us through our interactions with others. Their ongoing entrainment in us is sometimes explicit - as when a parent says ‘Now go and apologise to her!’ - but is often conducted implicitly. Subtle shifts in tone and pitch, fleeting facial micro-expressions, a bodily stance that is slightly less or more welcoming or shunning, the placing of pauses in discourse - these all contribute to the co-regulation of our moral interactions. Our lived bodies constantly find their complementary levels in relation to one another. Together we spontaneously enact - bodily, linguistically and epistemically - our correlative moral sensibilities. My concernful voice correlates with your wounded posture; your sudden move toward me with my flinching away. And we unreflectively understand together when it is that, say, looking into the other’s eyes constitutes openness, and when instead it amounts to presumptuous interrogation or intrusion. Or what tone of voice, what prosody, shall count as innocent and what as suggestive of reproof. This corporeal co-regulation provides the bedrock on top of which our words sit and in relation to which they have their meaning. And, to finally get back to our principal concern, it provides the entry point through which such projective identification as is interpersonally efficacious takes its effects: I can think of a few patients who fairly mastered the art of the projection of a sense of personal uselessness through, say, the slight arching of a single eyebrow or an in-drawing of breath. </span></p>
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 13px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></p>
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">The claim on the table, then, regarding narcissistic abuse is that it often consists not only in such manipulations as are lies, nor only in manipulating the terms of explicit moral judgement, but also in distorting the whole paralinguistic, bodily, context in which all such judgement is situated. The deep habit structure of our intercorporeal lives is perverted. It is our openness to the automatic co-regulation of moral sensibility that allows in the narcissist’s warping of the mind’s moral fabric - i.e. that projectively bends out of shape our soul - i.e. bends out of shape our morale and our moral self-understanding. The indrawn breath, proximity and distance, vocal tone, bodily openness and closedness, and facial micro-expressions, may all be used to set the scene for the perverted morality tale which then plays out in the lives of the narcissist and her victim. Just as the natural corollary of another’s sadness is our own pity, or of their anger is our fear, so too is an automatic taking up of the demoralised stance of shame the near-inevitable outcome of the war of attrition waged in part by implicit accusations. This is then sustained by the victim learning to walk on eggshells, to avoid triggering the narcissist’s avowed disappointment, accusations and rage. His skill at walking on these eggshells is far greater than he himself realises: his ‘understanding of Being’ itself, as Heidegger puts it, has shifted (Dreyfus & Wakefield, 2014); he now dwells in an invisible-to-him atmosphere of unconscious shame, discouragement, and guilt. When a victim of narcissistic abuse who has escaped, and begun to recover, has to see his abuser again, his whole demeanour, gestures, posture, tone, automatically shrink back down. And from the vantage of this alternatively configured lived body, a whole different world comes back into view for him.</span></p>
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 13px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></p>
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><b><span style="font-family: inherit;">The Intrapsychic Situation</span></b></p>
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 13px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></p>
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">So far what’s been discussed is the interpersonal situation: how gaslighting takes its pernicious effect on the narcissist’s victim. I now wish to think about what it is that happens alongside this within the mind of the narcissist. A common way of understanding narcissism is that it involves excessive self-love, grandiosity and superiority (covering over painful shame and inner fragmentation). This, I think, is rather like the idea that gaslighting primarily involves lying about facts. It’s not necessarily wrong, but doesn’t illuminate the underlying structural situation.</span></p>
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 13px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></p>
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Consider the following exchange I witnessed on the Oxford-to-London commuter bus:</span></p>
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 13px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></p>
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px 0px 0px 14.2px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Every morning a preening young man would talk loudly, at length, and obnoxiously to his boyfriend on the phone. A fellow passenger had had enough and – pointing to the window sign requesting passengers to keep mobile conversation quiet, short and to the essential – asked if he might limit his conversation to the advantage of his fellow passengers. The young man quickly flew into a rage, and exclaimed to her ‘Who are <i>you</i> to tell <i>me</i> what’s <i>too</i> loud or <i>too</i> long or <i>in</i>essential?!’, and returned to his obnoxious conversation. (So thought-stopping was this furious response that the complainant did not think of the correct answer: ‘I’m a member of the general public’.)</span></p>
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 13px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><b></b><br /></span></p>
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">We recognise this as a paradigm of narcissism. But what, considered intrapsychically, does this narcissism consist in? Is it just that he thinks himself superior to others? That rather suggests we think his narcissism results from his having an intelligible but false thought. But this, I think, fails to do justice to the character of his exclamation, the implication of which seemed to me to be that <i>his fellow passenger’s negative appraisal traduced his universal right to that sovereign self-determination which is constitutive of personal dignity</i>. And this in its way was of a piece with his aim which appeared to be to queer the moral pitch of the interaction, spuriously projecting his own blameworthiness into those who would judge him.</span></p>
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 13px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></p>
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">What this man seemed to be claiming was that only <i>he </i>could possibly know whether <i>his </i>actions reflected a valid imperative – not because his fellow passenger didn’t, as a contingent matter of fact, have access to the relevant facts about his life situation, but rather simply because <i>she was not he</i>. But what exactly is awry with his thought? In what follows I suggest that we can arrive at an answer to this by considering an aspect of the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein’s deliberations on the very idea of a ‘logically private’ language.</span></p>
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 13px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></p>
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">The ‘private language arguments’ are contained in §§243-315 of Wittgenstein’s <i>Philosophical</i> <i>Investigations</i>. In them we find Wittgenstein inviting us to try to ‘imagine a language’ (§243) which ‘describes my inner experiences and which only I myself can understand’ (§256), a language to be set up by giving ‘myself a kind of ostensive definition’ for a sensation term ‘S’ by concentrating ‘my attention on the sensation – and so, as it were, point[ing] to it inwardly’ (§258). (It’s because only I<i> could</i> <i>possibly</i> understand that which only I experience that it’s called a ‘logically private’ language.)</span></p>
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 13px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></p>
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">In arguing that we have here only the illusory fantasy of an actual language, Wittgenstein first reminds us of an important feature of genuine sensation language. This is that, if it feels to me like I’m in pain, then I jolly well am in pain. Or, to put it better, there simply is no appearance/reality distinction in play when we’re talking about our conscious inner experiences. This just is what it means for us to be ‘authorities’ regarding our own mental states. This authority is extremely important to us: we rightly complain about intrusion into this sovereign aspect of our lives. (I’m reminded of a couple who visited for dinner before lockdown. I asked what they wanted to drink. One told me ‘a beer please’, but the other somehow had different ideas for his partner. After some squabbling the first, with patience and good humour, said ‘Well Richard, the problem is that <i>I’ve</i> decided what I want; it’s just that <i>he</i> hasn’t yet decided what I want!’ The joke made clear the patent absurdity of the idea of someone else knowing better what we want when our mind is already made up.)</span></p>
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 13px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></p>
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Whilst such inner sovereignty is of course extremely important, Wittgenstein points out that the inapplicability of the seems/is, appearance/reality, distinction here means that we can’t do such things as dream up our own logically private languages to describe what we’re inwardly feeling. For meaningful language is essentially normative - which is to say, its uses are evaluable as correct or incorrect. If, however, there’s no such thing as me using a term <i>wrongly</i> within my own mind, then there’s also no such thing as me using it <i>correctly</i> here (see §258). (This, by the way, is why it’s important that genuine psychological language always has a double aspect: on the one hand we may use it inwardly to authoritatively ascribe thoughts, sensations, wishes, etc. to ourselves; on the other hand, there are observable patterns of behaviour which anchor these psychological states and which function as criteria for the ascription of them to us by others.)</span></p>
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 13px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></p>
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">In the text Wittgenstein’s inner interlocutor attempts various strident formulations against himself and in support of the idea of a ‘logically private language’. He tries to insist such things as that, still, here, he can</span></p>
<ul>
<li style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;"></span>‘<i>believe </i>that this is the sensation S again.’ (§260); </span></li>
<li style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;"></span>‘I can (inwardly) undertake to call THIS ‘pain’ in the future.’ (§263); </span></li>
<li style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;"></span>I can give myself ‘a subjective justification’ (§265); </span></li>
</ul>
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 13px;"><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: inherit;">To which his better self responds with a thoughtful irony:</span></p>
<ul>
<li style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;"></span>‘Perhaps you <i>believe</i> that you believe it!’</span></li>
<li style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;"></span>‘The balance on which impressions are weighed is not the <i>impression </i>of a balance’;</span></li>
<li style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;"></span>‘to imagine … justifying [isn’t to] justify.. [what’s] imagined’, etc. (§§259-267).</span></li>
</ul>
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 13px;"><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: inherit;">In Wittgenstein’s practice of philosophy, it is the </span><i style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: inherit;">illuminating comparison</i><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: inherit;"> which does much of the work in helping us be freed from compelling illusions. To help us break loose from the fantasy that we could enjoy both sovereign invulnerability to error at the same juncture as we can make substantive truth claims he offers the example of a particular design for a self-driving steamroller he once saw, one in which:</span></p>
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px 0px 0px 36px; min-height: 13px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></p>
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px 0px 0px 14.2px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">the inventor’s mistake is akin to a philosophical mistake. The invention consists of a motor inside a hollow roller. The crank-shaft runs through the middle of the roller and is connected at both ends by spokes with the wall of the roller. The cylinder of the petrol-engine is fixed onto the inside of the roller. At first glance this construction looks like a machine. But it is a rigid system and the piston cannot move to and fro in the cylinder. (<i>Philosophical Grammar</i> §141; see also <i>Zettel</i> §248 and <i>Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology,</i> volume 1, §397.)</span></p>
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 13px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></p>
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Other examples of this fatal ‘rigidity’ are provided by someone saying: ‘ “But I know how tall I am!” and laying his hand on top of his head to indicate it!’ (<i>Philosophical Investigations</i> §279). Or: another man pushes on a car dashboard to try to make the car go faster (<i>Blue Book</i> p. 71); yet another tries to give himself a gift by passing it from one hand to another (<i>Philosophical Investigations</i> §268); a final chap buys ‘several copies of the morning paper to assure himself that what it said was true’ (<i>Philosophical Investigations </i>§265). Wittgenstein uses these absurd examples to make clear how the would-be private linguist’s case is just as absurd: here too there’s a normatively fatal non-independence of the ‘inner standard’ for S from the ‘inner judgement’ that here we meet with an S again. Again, if whatever you want to say is to count as correct, then the very idea of correctness, of your words actually having meaning, is lost. No work gets done: the steamroller or car stays where it is, the news is not corroborated. </span></p>
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 13px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></p>
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Let’s return this discussion now to our young man on the bus. Implicit in his challenge – ‘Who are <i>you</i> to tell <i>me</i> what is <i>too</i> loud or <i>too</i> long or <i>in</i>essential?!’ – is, I suggest, a wish to achieve two incompatible things at once: 1. On the one hand he wishes to be counted as having correctly grasped the meaning of the terms: ‘too loud’, ‘too long’, ‘inessential’. The communication is after all predicated on him and his interlocutor sharing an understanding of the meaning of the terms – otherwise his challenge should itself be pointless. 2. On the other hand, he wishes to be treated as the unchallengeable and sole judge of what here is to count as ‘too loud’, ‘too long’ etc. Whatever he judges to be essential or inessential is to count as such. In short, he wishes to still have his normative cake even whilst popping it down the cakehole of his own subjectivity. </span></p>
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 13px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></p>
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">This too was just what we found with our private linguist. He wanted to be able to inwardly institute, and accord with, actual norms for the correct use of ‘S’, but also to continue to enjoy his inviolable first-person authority regarding his suffering of S. He refused to accept that the coin which has first person authority (of his avowals of S) as one of its faces must have an availability to appraisal (of the correctness of his use of ‘S’) as its other. It is this fantasy of normative self-sufficiency and yet inviolability – of being able to purchase the goods of normative warrant without handing over some of his first-person authority – which – I’m suggesting – constitutes a key structural element of the intrapsychic heart of narcissism.</span></p>
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 13px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></p>
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><b>Conclusions</b> </span></p>
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 13px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></p>
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">How should we understand the relationship between these two, inter- and intra- personal, aspects of narcissism? Recall the diagram presented above which described the interpersonal situation where a narcissist creates an illusory skew in her partner’s understanding of his own moral character: </span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhiHHxSdT30D7_a_WgDgwsklKfj7nNUte5VOdHDiKCTlMj_DenmP8YmnSDaO1iqyQb0YFjUMH5UygJMrcUrGVjAovTHDjcUdVMMLVklOh4IbdFQxwCmEnSTkQ6owPpf-Ev_EiK6KgAlfO_1/s568/Screenshot+2021-01-16+at+12.57.13.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="256" data-original-width="568" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhiHHxSdT30D7_a_WgDgwsklKfj7nNUte5VOdHDiKCTlMj_DenmP8YmnSDaO1iqyQb0YFjUMH5UygJMrcUrGVjAovTHDjcUdVMMLVklOh4IbdFQxwCmEnSTkQ6owPpf-Ev_EiK6KgAlfO_1/s320/Screenshot+2021-01-16+at+12.57.13.png" width="320" /></a></div><br /><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><br /></p><p></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><br /></p>Set alongside this now a representation of the skew in the narcissist’s illusory intrapsychic distribution<br />of authority and accountability:<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 13px; text-align: center;"><br /></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 13px; text-align: left;"><br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiDFPb9ZL8zT5Jr8JBlZxXEXAxoHlDf6TsNtpD-p66co0wqm9TxTnb7INeK-jagELcwiVCd9Cur12ufkJP_gA0-DfyoDV3pcvzErnhW4wG3hDyKcqmKqU-26JzgJaJa0OsebOD0NxLwCEtC/s692/Screenshot+2021-01-16+at+12.57.20.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="404" data-original-width="692" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiDFPb9ZL8zT5Jr8JBlZxXEXAxoHlDf6TsNtpD-p66co0wqm9TxTnb7INeK-jagELcwiVCd9Cur12ufkJP_gA0-DfyoDV3pcvzErnhW4wG3hDyKcqmKqU-26JzgJaJa0OsebOD0NxLwCEtC/s320/Screenshot+2021-01-16+at+12.57.20.png" width="320" /></a></div><br /><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 13px; text-align: center;"><br /></p><p></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 13px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">In both cases we find a narcissistic subject bending the meaning of words, actions, expressions out of shape to hide her culpability and accountability. But it should also become clear how the perverted sense of authority aids the skewed representation of moral culpability. The young man on the bus found it outrageous that anyone else should presume to have a say as to what should count as too long, loud or inessential a conversation for him. We might describe his attitude as one which in fact sets its face against the very idea of a </span><i style="font-family: inherit;">fellow </i><span style="font-family: inherit;">passenger. In such ways we see how truly corrupt narcissistic abuse is: it bends out of shape the narcissistic subject’s own soul, trashing his conscience and devaluing his relationships. And it bends out of shape the soul of his victim, covertly demoralising her through its insidiously enacted revaluation of her moral self-understanding.</span></p>
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 13px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></p>
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Above I discussed something of Wittgenstein’s inner battle against the illusions of a ‘private language’. These were not, I believe, restricted to his philosophical life. For he was often preoccupied by his own unholy desire for utterly secure admiration or for an inner security quite beyond this world - a longing which, I believe, can be traced to the emotional impoverishment of his childhood, and an impoverishment which left him believing that only displays of genius could secure the affection of others. I have developed this theme <a href="https://www.britishwittgensteinsociety.org/twenty-third-british-wittgenstein-society-lecture-2">elsewhere</a>; there’s no time to develop it further here. Instead I shall simply illustrate it with an example from one of his dreams; this one is from 28.1.1937:</span></p>
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 13px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></p>
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px 0px 0px 14.2px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">I stood with Paul & Mining [his pianist brother Paul and elder sister Hermione] … as if on the front platform of a streetcar …Paul told Mining how enthusiastic my brother-in-law Jerome was about my <i>unbelievable</i> musical gift; the day before I had <i>so wonderfully</i> sung along in a work of Mendelssohn …. it was as if we had performed this work among ourselves at home and I had sung along with <i>extraordinary</i> expressiveness and also <i>with especially expressive gestures</i>. Paul and Mining seemed to completely agree with Jerome’s praise. Jerome was said to have said again and again: “What <i>talent!</i>” … I held a withered plant in my hand with blackish seeds in little pods that had already opened and thought: if they were to tell me what a pity it is about my unused musical talent, I will show them the plant and say that nature isn’t stingy with its seed either and that one shouldn’t be afraid and just throw out a seed. All of this was carried on in a self-satisfied manner. – I woke up and was angry or ashamed because of my vanity. … <i>May I not become completely base and also not mad! May God have mercy on me.’</i> (PPO pp.163-4)</span></p>
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 13px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></p>
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">To end, to provide another helpful metaphor for the narcissistic wish, and to show something of the inner emancipation from this narcissistic defence which Wittgenstein achieved during this time, we may contrast the above dream with another dream of his, recorded 10 weeks later (11.4.1937). The image he presents (and which is also drawn on by Nietzsche in <i>Beyond Good & Evil</i>)<i> </i>is taken from the Narrative of Baron Munchausen’s Marvellous Travels - a famous 18th century work of fiction by Joseph Raspe (himself an inveterate swindler who based his tales on the self-aggrandising stories of an actual Baron Munchausen - who in turn wasn’t best pleased by the satire). In one such tale the Baron is out riding and, finding himself stuck in a swamp, pulls upwards on his own hair to extricate both himself and his horse from the quagmire. The dream, which is just a fragment, consists of Wittgenstein exhorting himself to trust in what is not of his own making, and to relinquish the narcissistic fantasy of (as we might put it) suckling at one’s own breast:</span></p>
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 13px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></p>
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px 0px 0px 36px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"> <i>“But let us talk in our mother tongue, and not believe that we must pull ourselves out of the swamp by our own hair; that was – thank God – only a dream, after all. To God alone be praise!”</i> (PPO p. 243).</span></p>
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 13px; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"> </span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhdQfOEpbsXeQGtlEu-OrmGz_g7ZpkZ2e70yp4ZtaNnacMJDyp_cPPU-08mpI6WRwqzk7gzClMS7oyUEPGuMwbBgLGtT3lw11RFzAC422JfXvHApqCJXuH4y-6yaP-L5Dub8Z0T0NPS_Oiv/s1432/Screenshot+2021-01-16+at+12.59.57.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1432" data-original-width="1102" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhdQfOEpbsXeQGtlEu-OrmGz_g7ZpkZ2e70yp4ZtaNnacMJDyp_cPPU-08mpI6WRwqzk7gzClMS7oyUEPGuMwbBgLGtT3lw11RFzAC422JfXvHApqCJXuH4y-6yaP-L5Dub8Z0T0NPS_Oiv/s320/Screenshot+2021-01-16+at+12.59.57.png" /></a></span></div><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span><p></p>
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 13px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></p>
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 13px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></p>
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><b><span style="font-family: inherit;">Reading</span></b></p>
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 13px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></p>
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Russell Barton & J. A. Whitehead (1969). The Gas-Light Phenomenon. <i>The Lancet,</i> 293 (7608): 1258–60.</span></p>
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 13px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></p>
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Hubert Dreyfus & Jerome Wakefield (1988/2014). From Depth Psychology to Breadth Psychology: A Phenomenological Approach to Psychopathology. In Hubert L. Dreyfus & Mark A. Wrathall, <i>Skillful Coping: Essays on the Phenomenology of Everyday Perception and Action. </i>Oxford University Press.<br />
</span></p>
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Otto Fenichel (1938). The Drive to Amass Wealth. <i>Psychoanalytic Quarterly</i>, 7:69-95.</span></p>
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 13px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></p>
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Thomas Fuchs (2019). Body Memory and the Unconscious. In Richard Gipps and Michael Lacewing (Eds.), <i>The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy and Psychoanalysis</i>. Oxford University Press. </span></p>
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 13px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></p>
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1945/2013). <i>The Phenomenology of Perception</i>. Routledge.</span></p>
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 13px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></p>
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Rudolph Erich Raspe (1785). <i>The Adventures of Baron Munchausen</i>.</span></p>
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 13px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></p>
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Donna Savery (2018). <i>Echoism: The Silenced Response to Narcissism</i>. Routledge.</span></p>
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 13px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></p>
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Robin Stern (2007/2018). <i>The Gaslight Effect: How to Spot and Survive the Hidden Manipulation Others Use to Control Your Life</i>. Harmony Books.</span></p>
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 13px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></p>
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Ludwig Wittgenstein (1980). <i>Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology, vols I & II. </i>Blackwell.</span></p>
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 13px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></p>
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Ludwig Wittgenstein (1958). <i>Philosophical Investigations. </i>Blackwell.</span></p>
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 13px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></p>
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Ludwig Wittgenstein (1967). <i>Zettel. </i>Blackwell.</span></p>
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 13px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></p>
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Ludwig Wittgenstein (1980). <i>Philosophical Grammar</i>. Blackwell.</span></p>
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 13px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></p>
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Ludwig Wittgenstein (2003) <i>Public and Private Occasions</i>. Rowman & Littlefield.</span></p>Richard Gippshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18001492312162861823noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3184393804521721596.post-58421174803410629272021-01-13T16:52:00.013+00:002021-01-14T20:30:39.342+00:00ian mcgilchrist - a review of a talkA review of a talk by Iain McGilchrist to the Oxford Psychotherapy Society on 9th Dec 2020 in which he set forth a highly compressed version (“this will be like drinking from a fire hose I imagine”) of key themes from his 2009 work The Master and His Emissary on the divided brain and the making of the western world.<div><br /><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: right;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhfev-Irqq5aS8Fg289tPUBJvWKPX0YgA-TY1kwiyNyhVjfOVT4qr8NNRbr98EyvzmnHR4Q7k-K-Tnz92rE7DdqZUXo04m1fx3qDKjpvapZkPqMvVpx6AHUQ05kEplL1JCTqV8dhvkgc1PK/s450/master-1.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><img border="0" data-original-height="450" data-original-width="450" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhfev-Irqq5aS8Fg289tPUBJvWKPX0YgA-TY1kwiyNyhVjfOVT4qr8NNRbr98EyvzmnHR4Q7k-K-Tnz92rE7DdqZUXo04m1fx3qDKjpvapZkPqMvVpx6AHUQ05kEplL1JCTqV8dhvkgc1PK/w200-h200/master-1.jpg" width="200" /></span></a></div>He set the scene by describing how, when working as a fellow in English at All Souls, Oxford, he’d written an earlier book called ‘Against Criticism’ (1982). Because our appreciation of literature is, he argued, utterly particularistic, implicit, contextual and embodied, it’s of little value to subject literary texts to forms of dismantling analysis and explication which end the textual flower by picking it. Having thereby deconstructed his own profession he perhaps rather had to move on - as it happened to medicine, psychiatry and neuroscience. Here too he elaborated his own romantic take on the venerable theme of man’s two natures or souls - the one involved in an implicit, situated, whole-registering, mode of attention and relation, the other in details-oriented, categorising, relationships to the world.<br /><p></p>McGilchrist’s thesis has him weaving back and forth between matters of human life and culture on the one hand and matters neurological - especially to do with hemispheric differences - on the other. Research on the brain’s functional asymmetry has not always been considered reputable, he noted, and if we consider the kind of left versus right brain bromides we find on the internet, on self-help and management courses, etc., this would, he said, be a fair assessment. It’s interesting to consider how many of these largely misleading claims we therapists have unwittingly absorbed: <p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: Garamond; font-size: 16px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 18px;"><br /></p><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" style="border-collapse: collapse;">
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<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 10px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">details oriented</p>
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<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 10px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">facts rule</p>
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<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 10px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">imagination rules</p>
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<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 10px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">words and language</p>
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<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 10px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">symbols and images</p>
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<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 10px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">present and past</p>
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<td style="border-color: #000000 #000000 #000000 #000000; border-style: solid; border-width: 1.0px 1.0px 1.0px 1.0px; border: 1px solid rgb(0, 0, 0); height: 14px; padding: 4px; width: 232px;" valign="top">
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 10px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">present and future</p>
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<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 10px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">maths and science</p>
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<td style="background-color: #f2f2f2; border-color: #000000 #000000 #000000 #000000; border-style: solid; border-width: 1.0px 1.0px 1.0px 1.0px; border: 1px solid rgb(0, 0, 0); height: 14px; padding: 4px; width: 232px;" valign="top">
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 10px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">philosophy and religion</p>
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<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 10px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">comprehension of meaning</p>
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<td style="border-color: #000000 #000000 #000000 #000000; border-style: solid; border-width: 1.0px 1.0px 1.0px 1.0px; border: 1px solid rgb(0, 0, 0); height: 14px; padding: 4px; width: 232px;" valign="top">
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 10px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">intuition of meaning</p>
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<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 10px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">knowing</p>
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<td style="background-color: #f2f2f2; border-color: #000000 #000000 #000000 #000000; border-style: solid; border-width: 1.0px 1.0px 1.0px 1.0px; border: 1px solid rgb(0, 0, 0); height: 14px; padding: 4px; width: 232px;" valign="top">
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 10px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">believing</p>
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<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 10px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">pattern perception</p>
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<td style="border-color: #000000 #000000 #000000 #000000; border-style: solid; border-width: 1.0px 1.0px 1.0px 1.0px; border: 1px solid rgb(0, 0, 0); height: 14px; padding: 4px; width: 232px;" valign="top">
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 10px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">spatial perception</p>
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<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 10px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">knowing names</p>
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<td style="background-color: #f2f2f2; border-color: #000000 #000000 #000000 #000000; border-style: solid; border-width: 1.0px 1.0px 1.0px 1.0px; border: 1px solid rgb(0, 0, 0); height: 14px; padding: 4px; width: 232px;" valign="top">
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 10px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">knowing functions</p>
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<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 10px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">reality based</p>
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<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 10px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">fantasy based</p>
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<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 10px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">forms strategies</p>
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<td style="background-color: #f2f2f2; border-color: #000000 #000000 #000000 #000000; border-style: solid; border-width: 1.0px 1.0px 1.0px 1.0px; border: 1px solid rgb(0, 0, 0); height: 14px; padding: 4px; width: 232px;" valign="top">
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 10px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">presents possibilities</p>
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<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 10px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">practical</p>
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<td style="border-color: #000000 #000000 #000000 #000000; border-style: solid; border-width: 1.0px 1.0px 1.0px 1.0px; border: 1px solid rgb(0, 0, 0); height: 14px; padding: 4px; width: 232px;" valign="top">
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 10px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">impetuous</p>
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</table><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: Garamond; font-size: 16px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 18px;"><br /></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: Garamond; font-size: 16px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 18px;"><br /></p>In their place McGilchrist’s scientifically evidenced alternative focused principally on the different forms of attention which the two hemispheres support. Some extracts:<br /><br /><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" style="border-collapse: collapse;">
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<td style="background-color: #afb3b2; border-color: #000000 #000000 #000000 #000000; border-style: solid; border-width: 1.0px 1.0px 1.0px 1.0px; border: 1px solid rgb(0, 0, 0); height: 14px; padding: 4px; width: 232px;" valign="top">
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 10px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><b>The Left Hemisphere…</b></p>
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<td style="background-color: #afb3b2; border-color: #000000 #000000 #000000 #000000; border-style: solid; border-width: 1.0px 1.0px 1.0px 1.0px; border: 1px solid rgb(0, 0, 0); height: 14px; padding: 4px; width: 232px;" valign="top">
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 10px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><b>The Right Hemisphere</b></p>
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<td style="border-color: #000000 #000000 #000000 #000000; border-style: solid; border-width: 1.0px 1.0px 1.0px 1.0px; border: 1px solid rgb(0, 0, 0); height: 36px; padding: 4px; width: 232px;" valign="top">
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 10px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">Attends to what is known, to specifics, to what’s familiar. Places in pre-existing categories. Looking for prey.</p>
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<td style="border-color: #000000 #000000 #000000 #000000; border-style: solid; border-width: 1.0px 1.0px 1.0px 1.0px; border: 1px solid rgb(0, 0, 0); height: 36px; padding: 4px; width: 232px;" valign="top">
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 10px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">Has a broader attentional field to capture and understand the new in context. Looking out for predators.</p>
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<td style="background-color: #f2f2f2; border-color: #000000 #000000 #000000 #000000; border-style: solid; border-width: 1.0px 1.0px 1.0px 1.0px; border: 1px solid rgb(0, 0, 0); height: 59px; padding: 4px; width: 232px;" valign="top">
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 10px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">Prefers and generates sense of certainty. Black and white. Quantities.</p>
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<td style="background-color: #f2f2f2; border-color: #000000 #000000 #000000 #000000; border-style: solid; border-width: 1.0px 1.0px 1.0px 1.0px; border: 1px solid rgb(0, 0, 0); height: 59px; padding: 4px; width: 232px;" valign="top">
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 10px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">Open to possibility. ambiguous, ambivalent, symbols and energies. Qualities. ’God and poetry, love and sex’ all lose meaning if not taken up in a contextualised and particular and embodied manner.</p>
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<td style="border-color: #000000 #000000 #000000 #000000; border-style: solid; border-width: 1.0px 1.0px 1.0px 1.0px; border: 1px solid rgb(0, 0, 0); height: 36px; padding: 4px; width: 232px;" valign="top">
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 10px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">Aims at fixity. Isolates what’s attended to from its context, holding it still.<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>‘</p>
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<td style="border-color: #000000 #000000 #000000 #000000; border-style: solid; border-width: 1.0px 1.0px 1.0px 1.0px; border: 1px solid rgb(0, 0, 0); height: 36px; padding: 4px; width: 232px;" valign="top">
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 10px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">‘The right hemisphere appreciates that nothing is static; it is constantly flowing; and all that differs is the rate at which it is flowing.’</p>
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<td style="background-color: #f2f2f2; border-color: #000000 #000000 #000000 #000000; border-style: solid; border-width: 1.0px 1.0px 1.0px 1.0px; border: 1px solid rgb(0, 0, 0); height: 14px; padding: 4px; width: 232px;" valign="top">
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 10px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">‘The left sees parts…’<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span></p>
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<td style="background-color: #f2f2f2; border-color: #000000 #000000 #000000 #000000; border-style: solid; border-width: 1.0px 1.0px 1.0px 1.0px; border: 1px solid rgb(0, 0, 0); height: 14px; padding: 4px; width: 232px;" valign="top">
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 10px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">‘…whereas the right sees the whole’</p>
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<td style="border-color: #000000 #000000 #000000 #000000; border-style: solid; border-width: 1.0px 1.0px 1.0px 1.0px; border: 1px solid rgb(0, 0, 0); height: 14px; padding: 4px; width: 232px;" valign="top">
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 10px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">Attends using singular sense modalities.</p>
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<td style="border-color: #000000 #000000 #000000 #000000; border-style: solid; border-width: 1.0px 1.0px 1.0px 1.0px; border: 1px solid rgb(0, 0, 0); height: 14px; padding: 4px; width: 232px;" valign="top">
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 10px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">Attends in many modalities together.</p>
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<td style="background-color: #f2f2f2; border-color: #000000 #000000 #000000 #000000; border-style: solid; border-width: 1.0px 1.0px 1.0px 1.0px; border: 1px solid rgb(0, 0, 0); height: 35px; padding: 4px; width: 232px;" valign="top">
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 10px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">Only understands what has been made clear.<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span></p>
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<td style="background-color: #f2f2f2; border-color: #000000 #000000 #000000 #000000; border-style: solid; border-width: 1.0px 1.0px 1.0px 1.0px; border: 1px solid rgb(0, 0, 0); height: 35px; padding: 4px; width: 232px;" valign="top">
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 10px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">Understands implicit meaning; the metaphor that poetry, dreams, and symbols rely on; jokes; irony; shades of meaning; body language.</p>
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<td style="border-color: #000000 #000000 #000000 #000000; border-style: solid; border-width: 1.0px 1.0px 1.0px 1.0px; border: 1px solid rgb(0, 0, 0); height: 14px; padding: 4px; width: 232px;" valign="top">
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 10px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">re-presenting<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>… as with a map’</p>
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<td style="border-color: #000000 #000000 #000000 #000000; border-style: solid; border-width: 1.0px 1.0px 1.0px 1.0px; border: 1px solid rgb(0, 0, 0); height: 14px; padding: 4px; width: 232px;" valign="top">
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 10px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">presencing . …. of the terrain’</p>
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</table><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: Garamond; font-size: 16px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 18px;"><br /></p>On the neurological side McGilchrist told of how, with his research, he’d set out to answer 3 questions: why do our brains come in two halves?, why are they so sparely interconnected (only 2% of neurones are connected by the corpus callosum, most of which perform inhibitory functions)?, and why are they asymmetric (left hemisphere broader at the back, right at the front)? But more prominent in his talk, and perhaps of more interest to the psychotherapist, were his thoughts on the relation between the different functions of these hemispheres and different forms of personal and cultural life. There was much that was rich in the talk that I shall now just touch on briefly. For example McGilchrist proposed that thought was largely independent of language. It seemed to me, though, that the the criteria for the proper ascription to humans of thoughts of anything above the sort we attribute to animals essentially involve what the person would say or write, or how they would respond to speech or writing, and so I remained unconvinced. (Someone may have a stroke, lose his speech, yet still think - but he had previously learned to speak, and our continuing intelligible ascription to him of thought turns on what he would communicate were he still able so to do.) Also troubling to me was McGilchrist’s constant personalisation of the brain (see the quotes in the above table or, say, ‘As something new is presented to the brain, the right hemisphere becomes very active in trying to understand it and take a grasp of it. But as soon as it becomes familiar to the left hemisphere it pigeonholes it and puts it into a category’). Does this commit the mereological fallacy, I wondered - the fallacy, that is, of attributing to a part of something (the brain) what can only be coherently attributed to the whole (the person)? In the end, though, I thought it is but a harmless and charming metaphor, one meaning something like ‘the right hemisphere is causally necessary for you to understand and take a grasp of something’. But leaving these quibbles aside, the principal topic of interest was, I thought, the question of the different modes of attention enabled by the different sides of the brain, and the forms these take in our cultural and therapeutic lives.</div><div><br /></div><div>McGilchrist’s own (shall we call them counter-enlightenment or romantic) sympathies were much on display in his take on what ‘would’ happen ‘were’ culture to become dominated by left hemisphere modes of attention. To paraphrase: ‘We’d lose the broader picture. Knowledge would be replaced by information, tokens or representations. Skill, judgement and common sense would be deprecated and replaced by knowledge and inferential rationality. Abstraction, reification, measurability, utility and the kind of algorithms and management styles beloved of bureaucrats would take over. Justice would be reduced to mere equality. The sense of individual uniqueness would be lost as categories and groups take over. Art would become merely conceptual, full of distorted and bizarre perspectives. Language would become diffuse, lacking in concrete referents. Hubris would prevail.’ Clearly he was inviting us to consider that we already live in a left hemisphere-dominant world, rather than the world he - and no doubt many of us - would prefer, which is to say, one sustained by a mode of attention and cultural life deploying both hemispheres but under the general control of the right. (The right here being the ‘master’, the left the ‘emissary’, from the title of his book.) Regarding all of this I, naturally, also cheered. However I found myself with a suspicion that part of my enthusiasm stemmed from an illusion - one in myself, that is, and perhaps in other listeners (I’m not saying it’s McGilchrist’s) - that the data he summarised for us regarding the brain added even an iota of support for this thesis. The thesis - that our world deprecates valuable modes of attention, and vaunts others which, left unconstrained, make our lives banal - stands or falls entirely on its own cultural merits; neuroscience cannot itself pronounce on such matters of value.<br /><br />What, then, is the value of McGilchrist’s neuropsychological investigation into lateralisation? As psychotherapists we may of course sometimes encounter patients with neurological disorders or injury. For that, however, we shall probably do well to call on an understanding of functional localisation that’s got rather more than 2 categories - left and right - in it! No, the real boon of McGilchrist’s scheme, I suggest, is the way it fine-tunes our attention precisely to the two modes of attention outlined above. How often it is that one such form tacitly asserts itself as dominant when the other is required, to such ill effect! As therapists we’re naturally sometimes aware of when we or our patients can’t see the woods for the trees, perseverate on details, refuse to dwell in uncertainty, and so on. But are we sufficiently aware of how systematic such attentional hijacks can be? And had we considered how easily certain personal and cultural activities and practices may be misunderstood when they’re construed in such terms as only properly articulate quite different practices? To borrow now from Piaget, might we say that forms of attention which are best understood in terms of accommodation (i.e. our receptive openness to reality which helps us bend to its shape by developing new forms of thought) might get wrongly understood in terms of assimilation (i.e. our attempt to place what we encounter within one of our pre-understood categories)? So that, to use a nice pair of concepts offered by McGilchrist, praying now gets assimilated, as it were, to preying? Or, to spell it out: So that a communicative mode characterised by attempts at receptive openness to what’s beyond our control shall be reflectively misapprehended as - and perhaps even corrupted in practice by being turned into - a mode of attention which aims to dictate the terms on which fate shall meet us? This, I thought, was the truest boon of McGilchrist’s schematism, and the fact of the brain’s functional lateralisation but a pleasing sidenote, albeit one which provides a plausible candidate for a causal condition of possibility of our two-souled nature. <br /><br />Another distinction McGilchrist drew was, à la Martin Buber, between I-Thou and I-It modes of relating. If I understood him rightly, the former - involving as it does an openness to another in his or her particularity, rather than a mode of attention that allocates him or her to a type - belongs with our right hemisphere functions, the latter with the left. These reflections do not, to my recollection, occur in his The Master and his Emissary. Perhaps they will find their place in the 1500(!) page sequel he informed us he’s written. At the end of his talk a particularly striking phrase concerning the former was left ringing round one or both or my hemispheres. McGilchrist attributed it to the rather obscure 1930s French existentialist Louis Lavelle: ‘La charité est une pure attention à l’existence d’autrui’ (‘Love is a pure attention to the existence of the other.’) As a dictum for capturing something essential to the ethic of true therapeutic listening, I think we could do rather worse.</div>Richard Gippshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18001492312162861823noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3184393804521721596.post-66863566974713637992020-12-23T22:14:00.038+00:002023-03-17T11:09:47.544+00:00sanity, madness, the family... and the kettle
<p><a href="https://www.researchgate.net/publication/318232129_Where%27s_the_problem_Considering_Laing_and_Esterson%27s_account_of_schizophrenia_social_models_of_disability_and_extended_mental_disorder" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;" target="_blank"><img class="n3VNCb" data-noaft="1" height="200" jsaction="load:XAeZkd;" jsname="HiaYvf" src="https://i1.rgstatic.net/publication/318232129_Where's_the_problem_Considering_Laing_and_Esterson's_account_of_schizophrenia_social_models_of_disability_and_extended_mental_disorder/links/595e49c9a6fdccc9b17fd123/largepreview.png" style="margin: 0px; width: 126px;" width="126" /></a>In <i><a href="https://www.researchgate.net/publication/318232129_Where%27s_the_problem_Considering_Laing_and_Esterson%27s_account_of_schizophrenia_social_models_of_disability_and_extended_mental_disorder" target="_blank">Where's the Problem?</a> </i>Rachel Cooper offers us, amongst other things, a reading of a central aspect of Laing & Esterson's classic <i><a href="https://archive.org/stream/sanitymadnessfam00lain#page/38/mode/2up" target="_blank">Sanity, Madness and the Family</a>. </i>Much of her paper is concerned with evaluating the idea that mental disorders are or are not 'in' the individuals diagnosed with them. I want to leave off discussion of philosophical psychiatry's curious use of that preposition for another time; for now the focus shall be on her reading of Laing & Esterson (hereafter: Laing). In that reading - which I believe to be both wrong and wrongheaded in almost every detail - Cooper mentions a patient called Maya Abbott - the first reported in Laing's book; we shall return to consider her case in more detail after first presenting Cooper's argument. Suffice it for now to say that she's a 28 year old only child who has mainly stayed in a psychiatric hospital during the last 10 years, and who was evacuated to live away from her parents during WWII. Her diagnosis is 'paranoid schizophrenia'; she believes others can read her thoughts and are constantly discussing her.</p><p><b>Cooper's Argument</b></p><p>As I detail Cooper's reading I'll number her key claims:</p><p></p><p></p><p style="text-align: left;"></p><ol><li>Laing offers us an 'account of schizophrenia' and claims that 'schizophrenia is not 'in' the diagnosed patients.' </li></ol>'When the interviewers go to Maya's home ... they notice that her mother and father seem to be winking and nudging each other, as if they were seeking to pass messages to each other. In discussion, it emerges that Maya's parents have developed the idea that she can read their thoughts. They seek to test this, and wink and nudge each other as cues. However ... when Maya asks them what they are doing, they deny that anything strange is going on.'<br /><ol start="2" style="text-align: left;"><li>'Maya's ideas appear delusional when she is considered outside of her family environment. However, when she is seen with her family, it makes sense that Maya would have the odd ideas that she does.'</li></ol><p>As a conceptual tool to evaluate claims that mental disorders are located 'in' individuals, Cooper offers us the kettle analogy:</p><p></p><ol start="3"><li>'How in general do we locate a problem when a complex system fails to function? ... Take... a kettle that has been plugged in but fails to boil water. The problem might lie in the kettle, or it might be a problem with the socket. How does one locate the problem? ... We try plugging the kettle into another socket. If we then get hot water, we conclude that the kettle is okay. Conversely, if we can get a different kettle to work in the original socket then we conclude that the socket is working.'</li></ol><p style="text-align: left;"></p><div style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://archive.org/stream/sanitymadnessfam00lain#page/38/mode/2up" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;" target="_blank"><img alt="Sanity, Madness and the Family By R. D. Laing" class="img-fluid" height="200" src="https://productimages.worldofbooks.com/0140211578.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" width="126" /></a></div>Her reconstruction of Laing's alleged argument that Maya's schizophrenia is not 'within' her goes as follows:<p></p><p></p><ol start="4"><li>i. 'Laing and Esterson first speak to the woman in isolation from her family. She appears deluded... They then speak to the woman in her family context. ... In the family context, the woman no longer appears irrational; rather, the problem appears to be with her wider family. The tacit reasoning going on here, I suggest, is that Laing and Esterson think that they themselves would do no better if forced to live with the woman's family. ...[I]f the patient were replaced by a test 'normal' subject there would still be a problem. Thus, they conclude the problem is not within the woman.'</li></ol><p>Cooper finds this reconstructed argument invalid:</p><p></p><ol start="4"><li>ii. 'The possibility they fail to rule out is that there is a problem both with the patient's family and also within the patient. Before concluding that there is no problem with the patient, we also need to consider whether she would do okay in some other environment (as we should only conclude that the kettle is functioning if we can find some socket in which it works). ... The information [Laing] provide suggests that the diagnosed women do not actually do very well when placed in a different setting. Maya ... had [after all] been hospitalised for nine of the preceding ten years.'</li></ol><div>Just to clarify what she takes Laing to argue and not argue, Cooper notes:</div><p></p><ol start="5"><li>'If one thought that schizophrenia could be caused by dysfunctional family situations (in the sense that problematic family dynamics could cause internal cognitive dysfunction in an otherwise potentially normally developing child), then schizophrenia would also count as an environmentally caused disorder. Note that Laing and Esterson's ... claim is not that schizophrenia is caused by families but located in individual patients (they explicitly state that their claim is not 'that the family is a pathogenic variable in the genesis of schizophrenia'), but that schizophrenia is not a condition to be located within patients at all.'</li></ol><p><b>Critique</b></p><p>Let's go through these key points one by one:</p><p></p><ol><li>Whilst Cooper says that in <i>Sanity, Madness...</i> Laing offers us an account of schizophrenia, one arguing that 'it is not 'in' the diagnosed patient', in fact he explicitly <i>denies</i> this. First off, he tells us that he's <i>not</i> offering an account of schizophrenia, doesn't 'accept it as a fact' or 'adopt it as a hypothesis', does not 'assume its existence' and 'propose[s] no model for it'. (I quote here from the Preface to the 2nd edition.) When he talks of her 'illness', the inverted commas around the term signify that the perspective from pathology has here been 'bracketed'. Laing's social-phenomenological study looks at the family relationships enjoyed and suffered by individuals who are <i>diagnosed as</i> suffering schizophrenia; whether the diagnosis is apt or valid is not his concern. Second, he explicitly denies that it makes sense to attribute psychopathology such as schizophrenia to a family system: 'The concept of family pathology is... a confused one'.</li></ol><p></p><ol start="2"><li>Cooper tells us that Laing found Maya to appear delusional only when interviewed alone, but that when set in the context of her family's strange behaviour, her odd ideas make sense (i.e. are presumably, by implicatur (see her 'However'), not to be taken as delusional). But Laing doesn't deny that Maya 'has queer experiences' and 'act[s] in a queer way'. He doesn't deny (or assert) that she suffers delusions. He says that he has seen many of the patients, perhaps Maya too, both when they were 'acutely psychotic, and apparently well'. But in this study he simply 'brackets off' such psychopathological considerations. And most importantly, Maya's ideas are not presented by Laing as <i>rationally </i>intelligible responses to her parents' strange behaviour. Instead they are presented as <i>emotionally </i>intelligible responses to her parents' intrusions. </li></ol><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;"><p></p><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjdD6uX8kbo1BjQ01YePd0DJrmGdXpTFWKnKQC9ubGP5cixdIUONPT0gZiMRiuhSICY_cEmUW7nq2LIv4F6_Kf8FyfEeW_-Pyg7G7aHA3U2VNn6p_FbVPcQxvUy-jQwGdlveAWhj7IZ_cOr/s252/7364065.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="252" data-original-width="189" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjdD6uX8kbo1BjQ01YePd0DJrmGdXpTFWKnKQC9ubGP5cixdIUONPT0gZiMRiuhSICY_cEmUW7nq2LIv4F6_Kf8FyfEeW_-Pyg7G7aHA3U2VNn6p_FbVPcQxvUy-jQwGdlveAWhj7IZ_cOr/w150-h200/7364065.jpg" width="150" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">r d laing</td></tr></tbody></table><p></p></blockquote>I want to hammer this home a bit since, it being Laing's central contribution to psychiatry (for which we've to thank his own desperately intrusive mother), we should get it right. The narrative regarding the parents' interactions with Maya is one of an utter <i>existential stifling</i> that prevents her from developing a well-functioning mind. Her father always sits too close; she isn't given room to express and enjoy her own preferences; she struggles to individuate and achieve autonomy; the Abbotts regard Maya's 'use of her own mind', her attempts at 'autonomy' and 'self-possession', as synonymous with her 'illness'; it's her 'illness', her 'selfishness' and her 'greed' that makes her 'difficult', they say. She shouldn't 'want to do things for [her]self'. Maya complains, and Laing affirms in his observations, that her parents do not 'see her as the person I am'. Her father just 'laughs off' what she tells him of her own experiences (her preferences, opinions, night-time dreams), disturbing experiences that she desperately needs to be taken seriously and psychologically contained. In short she's consistently <i>invalidated</i> rather than offered <i>recognition</i>. Laing's claim <i>isn't</i> that Maya's behaviour can be seen as sane / not delusional in the family context. It is that, in this context, her psychodevelopmental difficulties in becoming her own person, knowing and having her own clear thoughts, make perfect psychosocial sense. Her father's mind is experienced by her as so intrusive that she can't develop a clear sense of her own. Her 'delusions' thematise this existential struggle. She lacks the ego strength to trust her own mistrust of her parents' sincerity; because she cannot trust her own mistrust, she cannot develop a stable mind. At puberty she's troubled by her sexual thoughts, and tries to express this to her parents; they simply deny to her that she has thoughts of this kind. And 'when she told her parents in the presence of the interviewer that she still masturbated, her parents simply told her that she did not!' There are <i>many</i>, <i>many</i>, more examples like this in the book.</p><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;"><p>To reiterate the main point: Laing's claim isn't that Maya can be seen as <i>not delusional</i> and hence as<i> rationally intelligible</i> in the context of her parents' intrusions. It's rather that Maya's preoccupations and disturbances, whether or not we call them delusional, are<i> emotionally, psychologically, and developmentally intelligible </i>in that context.</blockquote><p></p><ol start="3"><li>And now for the kettle! Striking about this rather peculiar analogy for a person's existence is the non-diachronic nature of the relationship between the kettle and the socket. The kettle just carries its fault around inside it, quite independently of its past and ongoing relationship with the socket. But here it's surely the <i>contrasts</i> between people and kettles that are (perhaps unsurprisingly!) more illuminating than the similarities. For as Laing writes, 'The relationships of persons in a nexus are characterised by enduring and intensive face-to-face reciprocal influence on each other's experience and behaviour.' Laing doesn't go into it in this book (but see his second book <i>Self and Others</i> - that came after <i>The Divided Self</i> and before<i> Sanity, Madness</i>...), but he fully accepts the idea that internalised object relations enduringly structure the psyche. In short, Maya's parents' intrusiveness doesn't just affect her when she's with them; it's<i> internalised into her psychic structure</i>; they continually dwell in and distort her internal world. It's not only when she's with her father that she can't find her <i>own</i> voice. She has so struggled with individuation that her mind is still engulfed by his even when they're apart. To make the peculiarly inhuman analogy work, we'd need first to envisage rechargeable battery-powered kettles. These kettles work autonomously (at least for a while) so long as they've had a healthy enough link up to a power supply in the past. Absent that, and they just don't have sufficient power in their cells to boil the water. And here's the painful predicament, as Laing understands it, that's faced by Maya and all the other patients about whom he writes: in order to individuate they first need to receive recognition and containment from a parental figure. If this relationship is damaging to their selfhood, they withdraw from it in self-protection. But this withdrawal also cuts them off from the possibility of ever internalising what they need. By shutting their mouths they take in no poison, yet also starve to death.</li></ol><p></p><ol start="4" style="text-align: left;"><li><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi70kZmU60HQXB5yuYpwIgXMCzgAWeMFevj4reaqCRw4O6r5FbAacCwEGUdqg3CKrTI5NhVX3FJUMBwwpFvAMJ4p2o1W87N9qY04_GkL1DggPpz38_kMkeBbPjsjyecbGr6F_3Es9ELeJ-T/s2000/alessi-plisse%25CC%2581-cordless-electric-kettle-black-uk-plug-p4594-18153_zoom.jpg" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2000" data-original-width="2000" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi70kZmU60HQXB5yuYpwIgXMCzgAWeMFevj4reaqCRw4O6r5FbAacCwEGUdqg3CKrTI5NhVX3FJUMBwwpFvAMJ4p2o1W87N9qY04_GkL1DggPpz38_kMkeBbPjsjyecbGr6F_3Es9ELeJ-T/w200-h200/alessi-plisse%25CC%2581-cordless-electric-kettle-black-uk-plug-p4594-18153_zoom.jpg" width="200" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">not a refrigerator mother</span></td></tr></tbody></table>I think enough has now been said to make clear why Cooper's reconstruction of Laing's tacit reasoning is inapt. His thought isn't 'If I were now in this family I too would say and do such things'. It's rather 'If I'd grown up in this family, I too might never have been able to develop a self-possessed mind. I too might be inwardly riven; I too may have shut down my motivation; I too could have been fated to become but a 'ghost in the weed garden'.'</li><p></p><li>And finally, recall Cooper's suggestion that Laing's refusal to 'locate' schizophrenia in Maya amounts to his instead locating it in the family. It should by now be clear that this is wrong in two or three respects. First, Laing brackets considerations of 'schizophrenia' in this study. Second, he straight out declares that the 'concept of family pathology is... a confused one'. He takes it that, whatever 'schizophrenia' is, if indeed it is anything at all, it's an <i>individual</i> pathology. But, third, what he's instead interested in, in this often misunderstood book, is the maddening character of certain families. Or, well... perhaps all families are, to some degree, maddening in this way, he suggests. (It's notable that <i>Sanity, Madness...</i> was the first of two projected volumes. The second was to be on families which didn't have a child labelled 'schizophrenic' ... but Laing found these families too deadly dull to continue his research.) Perhaps, one might think, some children are more sensitive than others to intrusion, and so need a more sensitive parent to help them develop a solid sense of self. Perhaps many children would have been able to hold their own and develop enough ego structure even in the midst of such an intrusive and non-recognition-providing family as Maya had. And perhaps Maya would also have struggled even in a family with just average levels of parental failures in recognition provision. Such quantitative concerns are, however, simply not Laing's. What he wanted to do was instead to make the thought and behaviour of those diagnosed 'schizophrenic' intelligible to us by setting them in the context of their family dynamics. </li></ol><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;">And, in my view, in this he succeeded.</blockquote><ol start="4" style="text-align: left;"><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p></ol>Richard Gippshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18001492312162861823noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3184393804521721596.post-58235850063121099652020-12-20T10:50:00.001+00:002020-12-20T10:50:06.552+00:00relational psychiatry<p> I've posted <a href="http://criticalpsychiatry.blogspot.com/2020/12/relational-psychiatry-chainsaw-analogy.html" target="_blank">my latest piece</a> on Duncan Double's 'Relational Psychiatry' blog instead of here. In it I articulate different senses of relationality and urge that we don't weaken relational thinking in psychiatry by conflating them.</p>Richard Gippshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18001492312162861823noreply@blogger.com0