Psychiatry and the Obstacles to Human Growth

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WE hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created
equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable
Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.
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With these words, the Declaration of Independence of the original 13
colonies of America, a nation to be, launched a challenge in the face
of the values of the colonial Empire of Great Britain. Not only life,
but liberty and the pursuit of happiness were claimed as inalienable
rights for the citizens of this America-to-be.
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Through good times and bad, this nation has grown, raising the standard
of living of its citizens and carrying our values abroad to inspire
literally billions of world citizens. There is much to be proud of
here: security from foreign wars, protection under our laws from the
injustice of arbitrary government, economic opportunity for most, and
political equality.
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At the same time, after 200 years of history, there are signs of
hardening of our national arteries. Modern American society is
profoundly isolating, intensely individualistic, competitive, and
insecure. The United States is classified as a "guilt-based" culture--
one in which the individual is constantly pressured to conform
economically, religiously and socially to beliefs and behaviors
condoned by the majority. Failure to "measure up" or conform creates
feelings of guilt, shame and self-alienation on a massive scale among
those who feel they do not fit this paradigm.
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We also have some of the most serious health care problems in the
industrialized West. We have more people in prison per capita than any
other Western nation. We have a very high incidence of mental and
emotional illness. Our rates of murder, violence against other persons,
and crime rank among the highest. Homelessness is a national scandal,
with many of those living on our streets suffering from untreated
mental illness because we don't provide universal health care. Poverty
stands at 14 percent of our population, with 40 percent of those in
poverty being children. Marital failures are epidemic, with divorce
rates exceeding 50 percent.
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Nevertheless, as Americans we grow up in this climate and, knowing no
other environment, consider it "normal." We even idealize it as "the
best" in the world, pointing proudly at the standard of living most
enjoy and the freedoms we have compared with much of the rest of the
world.
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America is a society in which work provides the primary avenue for
self-fulfillment. We seek realization of our potential through our
work, whether it is in the marketplace or in the home. Our 'Protestant
ethic" idealizes work and scathingly judges laziness and sloth as
morally reprehensible. So we go to work with high expectations and with
much to prove: that we are responsible, competent, dedicated to our
employers' interests, willing to grow and assume greater
responsibility, and resilient enough to deal with the inevitable
conflict of working with other employees. The marketplace for jobs is,
for most of us, life's testing ground for our wills and our ambitions,
where we are challenged to make reality surrender to our dreams and our
needs--to earn what we need and want. Work life in America is, in this
sense, a battleground where we strive to succeed, to exceed others, to
gain wealth, power, recognition, and security.
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The problem is that, in this competitive economy, we are never secure
for long, never satisfied with what we have achieved, and never wealthy
enough to feel safe. No matter what we do, or have done, we are not
able to rest or relax into who we are and live in the present; no
sooner do were fight our way to one victory that we feel that we must
battle on to the next plateau of achievement, wealth, and security. We
find ourselves constantly in a restless quest to "become" something
other than we are now--to get more.
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Then, sooner or later, everyone's fortunes turn downward. We "top out."
Or we find ourselves in an impossible job situation. Then our concern
turns to holding on to what we've got. Now we worry that we might lose
our jobs, our marriages, our lives, our security. When we are not
"winning", we are "losing." There is no rest. There are only the quick
and the dead.
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Our restless striving and struggling to hold on to what we've gained
arises from fear. We miss that fact sometimes, because we distract
ourselves with so much activity or clutter in our lives that we lose
sight of what drives us. But at bottom, fear keeps us from ever being
satisfied and present in our lives. Fear makes us stay in a job when we
should go. Fear keeps us compromising our dreams and our integrity.
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Our sense of "self" rests upon our individual success in 'running this
gauntlet' through school and work life to retirement. Our sense of
worth and value teeters on the outcome of our test of wills. Failure to
run that gauntlet successfully--to wrench what we demand from life,
from others and the environment--results in a collapse of our self-
respect, self-worth, self-confidence, our ability to hold our heads up
in the community and before our families, and our sense of adequacy at
coping with Reality.
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But the work of the past century in psychotherapy suggests that this
need not be the outcome of our lives at all. Work by many psychiatrists
since Sigmund Freud began his work nearly a century ago suggests that
the damage began in childhood in the way we were parented, and then
reinforced by societal values and a ruthlessly competitive economy.
This work to understand our minds and emotions suggests that mental and
emotional health may be achieved only by not allowing our society's
social, religious, and economic values to control our choices about
work and family life. It may well be that "liberty" is not to be found
within the values of American economic, political, social and religious
systems at all, but rather outside those belief systems, within our own
selves.
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In this paper, the work of a number of prominent psychotherapists are
reviewed to understand their views of the non-biological sources of
neuroses and psychosis, the consequences of neuroses for our lives, and
the connection between these distorted viewpoints of self and life with
our social environment.
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Sigmund Freud and "Guilty Man"
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Sigmund Freud, popularly known as the 'Father of Psychiatry', perceived
man as caught between the biological drives of sex and ambition.
Building upon the theories of classical liberal economists and
political scientists such as John Locke, John Stuart Mill, Thomas
Hobbes, Adam Smith and others, Freud hypothesized that man's psychic
needs derived from his biological nature. Therefore, he argued that
under our 'social contract', Man surrenders his individual liberty only
in order to protect himself from the violence of others; man is
essentially an animal, potentially violent, and self-interested. When a
man surrenders his liberty to be and do what he pleases to participate
in the in the marketplace or work place, he expects to be protected
from the violent intentions of others and enabled to meet his
biologically based needs.
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The marketplace and work place, Freud maintained, was not only a
hostile place; it was a truly terrible environment unlikely to meet
most men needs. So as a man goes out into the marketplace or work place
to satisfy his needs, he inevitably encounters failure and frustration
of his needs. As a result, every man must inevitably experience rage at
himself and at others for his inability to meet his needs. Every man
inevitably learns to hate himself for giving himself away to get what
he needs from others.
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According to Freud, man seeks satisfaction of his needs from his base
of biological instincts; the result is the stimulation of his lust
(greed and desire to possess) and anger-- each drive working in
opposing directions--the one demanding pleasure and satisfaction for
oneself and the other blaming others for the failure to get one's needs
met. The two drives are ultimately uncontrollable and incompatible,
resulting in painful feelings of guilt (that he would seek to overpower
others).
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As infants, both of the drives are self-reinforcing. Both emotions are
initially reinforce one another then, resulting in self-love and the
identification of others (e.g. mother father) as 'extensions' of one's
self. But as maturation proceeds and the growing child encounters
frustration of his needs, these drives have to be turned out towards
others, resulting in the loss of self-love and increasing self-hatred.
The growing child realizes that he must do for others instead of
himself, and this causes him to deny his own needs to get approval from
others. This denial of self generates self-hatred, which soon becomes
projected outward towards others and society. Modern man thus becomes
haunted by self-hatred projected onto others, which becomes hatred
towards and violence against others.
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In Freud's theory, Man suffers from his inability to get his needs met
but is controlled by guilt and self-judgment. He is also held in place
by society's moral codes, its rules and laws, and his fear of
annihilation by society's power. He is unable to escape his fate and
unable to meet his needs. This intolerable situation, which Freud saw
as terrible for us all, is a fact of life because reality is
essentially heartless.
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Freud felt that the young must surrender to this reality as they mature
and adjust to living in this unfeeling reality. The price of that
surrender and anger at others, however, is the self-inflicted violence
of guilt and hostility to life itself. Thus, the guilt which is
socially required for individual survival threatens the survival it is
meant to insure.
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Freud was justifiably famous for his recognition of man's unconscious,
conscience, and instincts; and for his recognition of the importance of
man's dreams as revealing man's unfulfilled wishes. Dream
interpretation formed a major part of the therapy patients received
from him. He was perhaps the first to recognize that patients must be
helped to bring the rage and fear experienced helplessly during
childhood into conscious awareness to heal and free them from neurotic
or psychotic behavior. Nearly all neurotic behavior, Freud believed,
could be traced back to sexual fixations upon one's opposite sex
parent. Once aware of the causes of his neurotic fixation, the patient
could integrate the new knowledge into daily living and live a more
acceptable life within the hostile world man has created for himself.
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Alfred Adler and Individual Psychology
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Alfred Adler was a collaborating colleague of Freud's, but broke with
Freud over his insistence upon sexual fixations as the cause of all
neurosis. Adler felt that preoccupation with gaining power over others
was more important as a symptom of adult neurosis than infantile sexual
frustrations. However, Adler is also misunderstood today because he
never gave "power seeking" the central role in his thinking that much
of psychiatry believes.
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Adler's central preoccupation was with the mental health of children.
His view was that a person's "life style" was formed during the first
three or four years of childhood. During this period, parental behavior
shaped a child's outlook so profoundly, and sometimes so disastrously,
that the child makes mistakes in understanding life. These mistaken
perceptions or viewpoints about life, once formed, are very difficult
to change once they are in place.
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One of Adler's contributions was the discovery that a child's order of
birth within a family is generally a very powerful indicator of his
neuroses, the formation of neuroses, and the character traits he
adopts. First children are the "only child" and the center of parental
attention until the second child is born. The birth of a second child
"dethrones" the first born and leads to their belief that they have
lost the love of their parents to their younger sibling. The first born
subsequently becomes very power oriented, concerned about authority and
responsibility issues in order to win back the love through achievement
they believe they've lost. They also are very resentful of their
younger sibling.
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Second born children, unlike first born, are never alone and always
feel they are competing with their older, more powerful sibling. These
children try to overtake their older brother or sister and are driven
to outperform them. Should the first born "win the race" to parental
love, second born children may give up the battle, become neurotic, and
feel overwhelmed by life's problems. Or they may become a rebel, act
out constantly, and hold all authority in contempt.
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Last born are the last in the nest, and are often spoiled or pampered
by parents. Last born children may shoot forward into success in life,
or be so shaped by childhood pampering that they become dependent and
expect others to care for them. These latter children may experience a
feeling of helplessness as they enter adulthood and become a 'failure'
in everything they do.
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Parental punishment of a young child can cause the child to adopt the
view that the world is a hostile environment where she is punished for
thoughts, feelings or deeds others disapprove of. This view of the
world can be a frightening event, causing the individual to live in
constant fear of life as she grows in adulthood.
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Adler was also the therapist who coined the phrase "inferiority
complex'--a neurotic condition characterized by being unable to solve
life's problems. However, Adler recognized that feeling inferior was
also a fundamental consequence of being human.
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Babies, small children are dependent on the help of adults. Their
wishes meet resistance from parents and caretakers forcing the little
ones to give in. The experience of weakness and powerlessness awakens a
feeling of inferiority, activating him to strive upward. If this normal
upward striving is prevented through faulty upbringing, then this
inferiority feeling may deepen and lead to an inferiority complex,
which prevents him from successfully solving life's problems.
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The feeling of inferiority stems from three sources, according to
Adler: (1) physical weaknesses, (2) spoiling of a child, and (3)
neglect and abuse of a child. Physical weaknesses, handicaps, vision or
hearing problems etc make a child feel inadequate for dealing with
their world and cause a feeling of helplessness to deal with threats to
well being or self esteem
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Spoiling stems from a mother's over-protectiveness of her child; in
spoiling her children, she fails to help the child find contact with
the world around it and to teach it how to cooperate to get its needs
met from others. Spoiled children, Adler, argues, seldom develop the
social skills they need to get along with others and develop close
relationships. They have been taught dependent behavior, which many are
then unable to outgrow. Such children may later constantly avoid
responsibility, be unable to make critical life decisions, and be
unable to care for themselves throughout their lives. They often make
passive and unreliable employees when asked to support themselves
economically.
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Abused children experience continuous humiliation because their parents
hated, did not like, or ridiculed them as infants and small children.
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These children may psychically withdraw from life, feeling the
hostility of the world and the absence of love. Others may attempt to
compensate for their childhood humiliation by adopting personas of
cleverness, wit, being funny, agreeableness, being charming, and even
sweetness. Witness Dicken's character in Oliver Twist called the Artful
Dodger as an example. But underneath, they cannot escape their vision
of the world as a harsh place nor their own feeling of being hated and
unlovable.
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Superiority complexes, Adler pointed out, are simply another form of
the inferiority complex, in which the neurotic acts supercilious, vane,
competitive, arrogant, snobbish, boastful, domineering, and
hypercritical of others. They often exhibit intense emotions of anger,
a desire for revenge, a claim of superior knowledge or ability, and
hyper enthusiasm to cover their feelings of inferiority.
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Whether these feelings of inferiority manifest as inferiority or
superiority complexes, such people seek power over others to reassure
themselves that they are superior to others. However, he noted that
achievement of power "never satisfies such a person that they can never
be satisfied with what they have achieved. They constantly must prove
anew that they are superior to others and can never rest. This is a
neurotic behavior.
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Treatment of troubled children was Adler's major preoccupation during
his career. He observed that:
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Every human being strives towards a goal. . .As soon as one discovers
the goal a human being has set himself, one can explain his actions.
This method, which Adler called the 'final method', is the opposite of
the method of observation which inquires after the reason for a
behavior, the 'causal method.'
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Adler viewed each individual as a unique personality, unlike any other.
He therefore had no interest in personality categories such as those
developed by Jung and others. Treatment of psychic disturbances had to
proceed by understanding the unity of the personality and the mistaken
perceptions the child adopted during very young childhood.
Adler believed that dreams were not interpreted symbolically, but
should be understood as a means whereby the psyche created "moods" or
feelings to help the patient break his rational justifications of his
perceptual mistakes. In treatment, accepting the patient's reasoning
about how the world is seldom helps the patient, because it holds him
in his suffering state.
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Like Freud, Adler believed that young people must be helped to adjust
to living within society--not to turn their backs on society's values
and ways. He insisted that a human being could not be assessed apart
from her environment and social context. Unlike the Liberal Political
Economy thinkers of his age such as Sigmund Freud, Thomas Hobbes, John
Stuart Mill, or Adam Smith, it was unthinkable to him to consider
mankind's natural state as being outside of society; mankind, he would
say, does not enter into a social contract with others to protect
himself from the violence of others, but because he is a social animal.
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In Adler's treatment regime, the analyst would work to understand the
goals underlying the patient's life, review the childhood experiences
of the patient, and then reveal the mistakes in perception made by the
child in childhood. Once the patient accepts that his point of view is
mistaken, he can adjust to a more normal life.
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Recent work by James Hillman has raised the reputation of Adler in the
initial triumphirite of Freud, Adler and Jung. Hillman argues that
Adler was misinterpreted much of the time, largely because of a
pedantic writing style from which poetic metaphor was misinterpreted
literally.
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Both Freud and Jung based their systems upon shaman-like visions, which
led them to an explanatory structure with self-developmental goals,
such as the movement of neurosis into consciousness, individuation, and
wholeness.
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Adler was doing something different. He based his psychology upon
clinical research. He was a phenomenologist who wanted to understand
consciousness from within itself and without appeal to concepts outside
of it. Whereas Freud and Jung, learning from their inner visions and
psychic experiences, pretended to be objective and scientific,
reasoning how we should live and what life should mean, Adler remained
subjective and hermeneutic.
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Within consciousness, Adler recognized that much that passes for truth
is simply a fabrication or fiction. It is ‘made up or plagiarized.’ So
to him unconsciousness was simply that we are unclear that what we
believe is fiction. Becoming conscious means being clear about the
fantasies driving our thinking and behavior.
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When we ask therefore “What does the soul want?”, Adler would answer
that it asks to become aware of its fantasies! Normal people, Adler
would argue, will accept guiding principles and goals as metaphorical
information. The neurotic, on the other hand, ascribes “absolute truth”
to the metaphor. So for Adler, what makes for madness is literalism!
When religion, for example, is interpreted as poetics or metaphor, it
provides “as if” guidelines which can be used pragmatically to guide
behavior. But when the metaphor is taken, literally, as “the Word” or
“the Truth”, it leads into madness. To be sane, we must recognize our
beliefs as fictions, and see through our hypotheses about Reality as
fantasies.
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Being sane then means learning to live in a Universe of ambiguities,
uncertainties, unknowing. To some minds, this ambiguity of truth is
untenable, unbearable…and so they move towards dogma or fanatical
belief, using authorities, references, experts, holy books, logic,
social values, belief systems, ideology, tradition etc in an attempt to
make the right choices in life. But there is no “making the right
choices” if the hypothesis driving our choices are a fiction.
For most of us, the ego will strive to decide the right answer anyway,
because to make the “wrong choice” leaves one feeling inferior; to make
the “correct choice” leaves one feeling superior. Ego flees from the
unbearable feeling of inferiority or the unbearable tension of
ambiguity.
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To Adler, Mankind’s inability to accept the ambiguity of life,
goodness, rightness leads to madness. In the end, we choose to kill one
another to defend the “correctness” of our point of view.
The best that psychiatry can do is to lead us all out of our core
beliefs, into acceptance that psychologically we must accept feeling
unwell about ourselves to be well. We must accept our “ordinariness”
rather than our “superiority.” We must accept our equality rather than
our belief that we are better than others. Our perceived inferiorities
may not be literally true, but we feel them nevertheless. We can choose
to see our lives as a tragic-comedy if we like, with ourselves as the
“leading actor.” What matters is surrendering to the idea that Mankind
is an imperfect being in an incomprehensible Universe. Being free of
perfection or of being right, we are free.
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The impetus to resolve the problem of inferiority is the individual’s
path of growth in life and is, in Adler’s terms, its soul purposes. The
urgent need to escape from the feeling of inferiority creates neurosis.
Of course, it is the ego itself which defends the psyche against this
feeling, pushes the psyche into unconsciousness of it, and chooses to
grasp the belief systems which it associates with “rightness”,
“correctness”, “perfection”, “goodness.” So Adler would say the ego can
never lead one out of unconsciousness.
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The primary cause of the damage from these fictions is what Adler calls
the masculine impetus: the need to win, to come out on top, to
compete! In any issue defined by a duality—such as good and bad, right
and wrong, high and low--where both poles are fictions, the whole idea
of winning is a fiction! So is the idea of losing. Instead, winning is
the acceptance of the ambiguity of existence, the absence of
information about winning or losing, right or wrong—because all
existence can only be grasped metaphorically and never literally.
What then drives us to seek the higher, the best, the perfect? Adler
thought this was an innate drive in humanity—a fantasy of the spirit,
so to speak—lodged in a limiting and imperfect shell (the body). We
desire or need a path towards perfection to feel well about ourselves.
We feel a need to be right! So our inferiorities, or weaknesses, create
a path to rigidity acceptance of some code of honor, integrity,
goodness. These needs to “be right” or “get better” are ego goals. But
the Path is a fiction if the inferiority is a fiction and if the
duality of lesser and greater, lower and higher, are fictions.
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What then does the soul want? It wants perfection. But if perfection
too is a fiction, then the need of soul is limited by the fiction that
it is “making progress” by pursuing any goal of perfection, for the
whole idea of progress implies that there is improvement to be made.
Even the soul then has a dualistic perspective.
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Treatment of neurosis stemming from this fictional feeling of
inferiority is to learn not to take the weak aspect literally, not to
harden it into belief or dogma, and to recognize that while the
weakness may have negative effects on one’s life, it might also give
one advantages in some respect. The patient must learn to see life as a
play, so to speak; laughter is almost always appropriate in playing
one’s own part in the drama. Those who choose to drive themselves into
a fanatical attachment to perfection, into hardening beliefs about
being right or being better, are choosing “madness” over sanity,
because they live in their neurosis that the inferiority they are
escaping is literally real. To be sane, we must recognize our beliefs
as fictions and as only rough guidelines for how to live, and to see
through our ‘hypotheses’ about what is good or right as fantasies. It
is these hypotheses which we use to define Reality. To the extent that
society does this, it is insane—just as individuals are.
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A second consequence of this view is not to become fanatical about
one’s perceived spiritual path in life. If one’s spiritual drive is
based on a fictional belief, which the soul has focused upon to correct
in life experiences, a person’s need is to recognize the metaphorical
nature of the weakness underlying the soul’s motivation. Allow it to be
for awhile. One gets the idea that the soul, like man, seeks to
understand itself in the face of ambiguity. It must seek our
ordinariness, life as an exercise in seeing its fantasies as unwellness
—just as we must. It seeks, inevitably, companionship with its mortal
host rather than a relationship between god and subject. And so we work
to come together as equals—mortal and immortal—to live “life” as an
experience in loving one another.
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Carl Jung and the Drive to Wholeness
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Carl Jung was also a colleague of Sigmund Freud and an early member of
the cluster of Austrian psychotherapists who gathered around Freud in
his earlier years of work. After a period of loyal collaboration, Jung
moved away from Freud's emphasis upon ego and the sexual fixations of
the infant to develop a view of individual growth which differed from
Freud's in significant ways.
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Jung was interested in the constant appearance of spiritual images and
symbols in human dreams and felt that these demonstrated the importance
of spiritual issues in human growth and development, especially during
the second half of a man's life. He noted that, from culture to
culture, dreams were strangely paralleled by myths, folk and fairy
tales in the appearance of similar symbols and stories. It became
apparent to him that something was connecting people of all cultures
and historical periods, and that something was 'speaking' to Man
through dreams and myths. To explain these observations, Jung
hypothesized the concept of the collective unconscious.
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The collective unconscious is that portion of the psyche which links
everyone together psychically and is normally outside of the normal
awareness of individuals. Because of his own personal experience with
the unconscious, Jung believed that through the collective unconscious,
any person can access knowledge beyond his or her own personal
experience. In a sense, the concept of the Collective Unconscious
portrays the species of Man as a single organism, bound together at a
level of collective consciousness that is ordinarily 'invisible' to the
individual, but which opens in sleep and during waking hours in
'daydreaming.' At these times, images and symbols can come through to
individual awareness informing the individual of imbalances between
needs at the unconscious level and needs recognized in conscious
awareness.
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Jung thought that mankind is essentially guided through life by
guidance from the collective unconscious by instinctive, patterning
energies called "archetypes." In ancient history, the stories of the
archetypes took the form of the Greek myths and the Indian pantheon of
gods and goddesses and the stories of their adventures. In these myths,
the great stories of human life were told--of heroism and tragedy, love
and hate, and life and death. These myths appeared again in the lives
of individual men and women, as we live our own lives, as the
archetypes "live us." We, in effect, are the ways in which these
energies come into manifestation and live; only we do not realize that
the patterns that guide our instinctive reactions, needs, and behaviors
are collective and species-wide--not individual--in their character.
They encompass not only biological needs, but mental, emotional,
spiritual and sexual needs as well. Moreover, these encounters with the
collective unconscious carry a "numinous" quality to them that
personifies the mystery of life and possesses the character of guidance
from divine sources.
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Man's conscious awareness takes in only a minute fraction of the
causative factors in his existence, according to Jung, and the central
organizing principle in every man's life is the central, organizing,
collective archetype called "the Self," which seems to be deep within
the collective unconscious. Self, to Jung as to many Eastern
philosophies and religions, was the Divine organizing energy creating
the Universe. Jung felt that Mankind's religious experiences are, in
effect, encounters with the collective unconscious.
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One of Jung's greatest contributions and observations was the
realization that there is a natural psychic process guiding each
person's life towards maturity and growth. He saw this central driving
force as often largely unconscious and impersonal; it takes us on our
ride through life whether we want to or not, moving us along towards
maturity and realization of our divine essence. Jung called this
process 'individuation.' The essence of individuation, the natural
process of growth towards maturity during the human life cycle, is the
emergence of the Self within the human personality. This emergence
brings not only maturity, but the ability to relax into who one truly
is, to turn one's back on the values and expectations of society and
follow one's inner values in life.
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The Self was, he maintained, manifested through many of the great
avatars through history, such as Jesus Christ, Krishna, Ramakrishna,
Rumi, Mohammed, Siddhartha Gautama and the great mystic saints of
Christian history. Individuation, Jung believed, leads, ultimately, to
self-realization.
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Jung realized however that only a tiny fraction of Mankind ever reaches
self-realization because individuals become stuck in their maturation
by rigid belief systems, closed symbols, unrealistic personal rules or
laws, the self-rejecting effects of society's values, and neurotic and
psychotic blocks of all kinds. In other words, conforming with society
demands and its values holds us in childhood, in suffering, and in
unconsciousness.
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Neurotic behavior is caused by the presence of unfulfilled needs, or
wishes, which have been repressed. Individual's repress needs because
they become convinced that the fulfillment of those wishes is
impossible, and the pain experienced from not being able to fulfill
those needs causes individuals to 'forget' the need, e.g. to drive it
out of consciousness and into the subconscious. This process begins at
a very young age, driven by the unresponsiveness of parents to the
demands of their children for need satisfaction. Freud and Jung called
these repressed feelings 'complexes.' '
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Jung taught that treatment of these neuroses involved going back to the
sources of the problems and bringing into the patient's consciousness
the precipitating causes. Two methods dominated in his therapy. First,
dream interpretation was probably the most important method for
uncovering the frustrated wishes/needs being expressed at the
Unconscious level of a patient's psyche. And second, active
imagination, guided by word association tests, provided the second
Jungian method of preference for doing this. Dreams, whether sleeping
or waking, come to the dreamer in symbolic form and have to be
interpreted in terms of their symbolic content. Dream interpretation is
therefore a skill that has to be learned.
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As the content of the unconscious becomes understood, the patient
discovers that the repressed frustrated need is a natural and human
need that has been denied, and that the initial cause of the failure of
need satisfaction when he was a child was not his fault. He must then
take responsibility to change his attitudes and behavior to begin
getting that need met.
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This realization helps the patient to recognize that the experience of
traumatic need frustration is a part of the human experience and that
parents and other significant others also suffer beliefs, attitudes and
behaviors that unintentionally damage their own sense of self. The
patient can then forgive himself for being less than perfect, and
forgive parents and other influencing mentors for making human mistakes
with them. This process of working with one's neurotic complexes to
free the trapped energy in them is called "Owning Your Shadow."
.
The first half of life, Jung hypothesized, is a time of exploration and
exertion of our intent to explore and gain experience. As one
approaches the mid-point of one's life however, people encounter 'mid-
life crises' that cause them to reassess the directions of their lives.
In fact, such crises are common, and are recognized as being the time
when the repressed memories and beliefs pushed long ago into the
personal unconscious gain the power to push back into consciousness so
that they can be resolved.
.
In this time of crisis, many people realize, if they did achieve their
life goals, that their achievements have lost the meaning originally
attached to them. And if their life goals were not achieved,
individuals feel they must search out a new way of living to end the
endless struggle for goals which life is denying them.
.
Also at this time, the individual is becoming increasingly aware of his
or her mortality, and the significance of approaching death begins to
make every remaining moment of life assume new importance. Many ask at
this time in their lives: "Who am I? What do I want at this point of my
life? Where am I going? What is it that makes Life worth living? What
is the source of real happiness? What is the best way to live the
remaining years of my life so that I realize my true potential and
become who I was born to be?
.
This time, then, is the opportunity for the individual to begin what is
known in ancient mythology as The Great Work; the work of going back
and retracing one's life, of owning one's own shadow, of cooperatively
working with the forces of the Collective Unconscious to allow the Self
to emerge within the personality. This is the Quest for the True Self.
.
Viktor E. Frankl and the "Will to Meaning"
.
Viktor Frankl belongs to that branch of psychiatry known as
"existential psychiatry:" a branch of psychotherapy which sought to
understand man's reaction to the apparent meaninglessness of life and
what might be done in therapy to help the individual find meaning in
his suffering. During the Second World War, Frankl was interned in a
German concentration camp; himself a Jew, he worked with other interned
Jews facing starvation, torture and extinction every day. Faced by such
terrible circumstances, few prisoners could understand the value of
living in the midst of so much suffering. Frankl saw man as often
powerless to save himself. Still, Frankl saw that many were able to
find meaning in their experiences and meaning in their lives--even in
the midst of horror and terror.
.
Frankl's treatment technique rested on three pillars: the freedom of
will, the will to meaning, and the meaning of life. "The freedom of
will," he argued, "is not freedom from painful experiences, but rather
freedom to take a stand on whatever conditions might confront one." He
argued against the idea that man's life was determined by fate, for
that would imply that man does not have freedom of will. Man can choose
how to meet his fate. But to do that, he often must "reach beyond
himself" to reach levels of courage, power, and duty that transforms.
In the words of psychotherapist Robert A Johnson,"To find meaning in
our lives and from our suffering, we must serve something greater than
ourselves--whether that something be God, or country, or some idealized
'cause.' This of course is the lesson of the myth of the Fisher King.
It is meeting and surmounting conflict and opposition that transforms--
not simply the intent or desire to be transformed.
.
According to Frankl, the will to meaning is man's need to pursue goals
that result in the realization of meaning in life. The need for meaning
drives Man to pursue goals whose achievement produces happiness,
pleasure and meaning. He finds happiness not by seeking happiness or
meaning in themselves, but by pursuing some reason or purpose with
which he allies himself. In fact, Frankl argues that no one can pursue
happiness itself and achieve it, nor can man seek self-actualization or
self-realization, for seeking those states of consciousness and
transcendence is impossible. Like happiness, he argues, self-
actualization and self-realization are the unintended effects of
success in pursuing challenging life goals--goals that take one through
a purification by fire, suffering, challenge, and ordeal. One may
succeed in pursuing such goals, and realize happiness, power, pleasure,
and self-actualization, or one may fail and not reach such goals in
life. But it is the striving through opposition to achieve difficult
goals that helps man to "reach beyond himself," and through that
striving, achieve power and self-actualization.
.
Those who are concerned about seeking self-actualization itself, he
felt, are concerned about the issue at all because they have failed in
their search for meaning in life. The pursuit of pleasure, power, self-
actualization or peak experiences by human beings are therefore all
inevitably self-defeating, Frankl believed.
.
"A human being strives for success, but, if need be, does not depend on
his fate, which does or does not allow for success. A human being, by
the very attitude he chooses, is capable of finding and fulfilling
meaning in even a hopeless situation. This fact is understandable only
if attitudinal values are higher than creative or experimental values.
The meaning of suffering--unavoidable and inescapable suffering alone,
of course--is the deepest possible meaning."
.
Suffering can have a meaning and give meaning to life if it changes one
for the better.
.
Frankl believed that the number of persons suffering today from a sense
of meaninglessness and emptiness in their lives is huge and spreading.
"No drives nor instincts," says Frankl, "tells such persons what they
must do, and no conventions, traditions, or values tell them what they
should do. Instead, they typically wish to do what other people are
doing, or they do what other people are doing. They fall prey to
conformism or totalitarianism.
.
Boredom and apathy are the results of this existential vacuum of which
Frankl writes. This is not a neurosis, he argues, or if it was, it is a
sociogenic neurosis caused by the existential vacuum plaguing society.
Such sickness is overcome only by extending ones self into causes or
work that forces one beyond ones self. The fact that so many Americans
are plagued by existential despair and depression is itself evidence
that our work does not challenge us or inspire us, does not engage us,
does not offer us a cause for which we are prepared to suffer; it is
only our road to comfort and security. So we cope with our boredom with
our lives and our apathy about anything by repressing the existential
facts of our lives--by driving ourselves into trance, the pursuit of
wealth and unconsciousness.
.
Frankl writes:
.
"One of the forms the will to power takes is what I call the will to
money. The will to money accounts for much of that professional over-
activity which, along with sexual over-activity, functions as an escape
from the awareness of an existential vacuum.
.
Once the will to money takes over, the pursuit of meaning is replaced
by the pursuit of means. Money, instead of remaining a means, becomes
an end. It ceases to serve a purpose.
.
What then is the meaning of money, or for that matter the meaning of
possessing money? Most of those people who possess it are really
possessed by it, obsessed by the urge to multiply it, and thus they
nullify its meaning. For the possession of money should mean that one
is in a fortunate position. One can afford to pay no attention to
money, the means, but rather to pursue the ends themselves--those ends
that money should serve.
.
Logotherapy was the technique Frankl invented to help lead people to
the knowledge that they were in fact pursuing meaning in their lives
and had a meaning. This realization raises the sufferer to a higher
level where they can see that they are not victims but conquerors of
themselves. The technique rests upon man's capacities for self-
transcendence and self-detachment. The patient is encouraged to do, or
to wish to happen, the very things he fears; this is called the
paradoxical intention: intending the very thing one fears and replacing
a pathogenic fear with a paradoxical wish which stops the patient's
neurotic or pathogenic "program" from continuing.
.
Nathaniel Branden and the Disowned Self
.
Branden, like Adler, was one of the those early psychologists focussing
on people's 'impoverished sense of self' as a personal disaster. Unlike
Jung or Freud, Branden's idea of 'self' contain primarily the conscious
and the subconscious portions of the psyche.
.
Branden discovered during his own therapeutic work with patients that
at the root of every suffering patient's problems is that that he or
she did not know who they were. They had lost their 'sense of self' for
some reason. They hated some aspect of their body, mind, or emotional
makeup.
.
Due to traumatic childhood events, patients had pushed away, or
repressed, thoughts, feelings, and actions into their subconscious--
disowned them, denied them, disallowed them, judged them as evil or
wrong or unacceptable. These repressed issues were thereafter avoided
at all costs, even as they matured into adulthood and beyond, in order
to protect their self-esteem. However, even after the precipitating
events, they still refused to face reality, and the reality they sought
to avoid was inside themselves more than it is outside themselves.
.
As people strove to accomplish their goals as adults, they came up
against their own repressed barriers. They formed protective beliefs
by which they could manage their lives. And then they couldn't get past
those beliefs or boundaries erected to protect their feelings. Their
beliefs and comfort boundaries caused them to get 'stuck' in their
growth, their career, their marriages, or their lives; they've built
protections against life that have become self-destructive. Because
people can't stop unconsciously defending their self-image, they stop
flowing with life.
.
Branden talks about how children repress their feelings of helplessness
and anger at their parents when they are unable to get their needs met.
First, he details how parents teach their children to be disconnected
from their own emotional experiences so that they become unable to
feel.
.
To begin with, many parents teach children to repress their feelings. A
little boy falls and hurts himself and is told sternly by his father,
"Men don't cry." A little girl expresses anger at her brother, or
perhaps shows dislike toward an older relative, and is told by her
mother, "It's terrible to feel that way. You don’t' really feel it." A
child bursts into the house, full of joy and excitement, and is told by
an irritated parent, "What's wrong with you? Why do you make so much
noise?" Emotionally remote and inhibited parents tend to produce
emotionally remote and inhibited children--not only by the parent's
overt communications but also by the example they set; their own
behavior announces to the child what is 'proper,' 'appropriate','
social acceptable.' 'Parents who accept the teachings of religion are
very likely to infect their children with the disastrous notion that
there are such things as 'evil thoughts' or 'evil emotions'--and thus
fill the child with moral terror of his inner life… .
.
What the effort at such control amounts to practically is that a child
learns to disown his feelings, which means: he ceases to experience
them.
.
And there are many other ways this loss of self occurs during a child's
growing up years. Branden continues:
.
For the majority of children, the early years of life contain many
frightening and painful experiences. Perhaps a child has parents who
never respond to his need to be touched, held, and caressed; or who
constantly scream at him or at each other; or who deliberately invoke
fear and guilt in him as a means of exercising control; or who swing
between over-solicitude and callous remoteness; or who subject him to
lies and mockery; or who are neglectful and indifferent; or who
continually criticize and rebuke him; or who overwhelm him with
bewildering and contradictory injunctions; or who present him with
expectations and demands that take no cognizance of his knowledge,
needs or interests; or who subject him to physical violence; or who
consistently discourage his efforts at spontaneity and self-
assertiveness.
.
A child does not have a conceptual knowledge of his own needs nor does
he have sufficient knowledge to comprehend the behavior of his parents.
But at times, his fear and pain may be experienced as overwhelming and
incapacitating. And so, in order to protect himself, in order to remain
able to function--in order to survive, it may seem to him--he often
feels, wordlessly and helplessly, that he must escape from his inner
state, that contact with his emotions has become intolerable. And so he
denies his feelings. The fear and the pain are not permitted to be
experienced, expressed, and thus discharged; they are frozen into his
body, barricaded behind walls of muscular and physiological tension,
and a pattern of reaction is inaugurated that will tend to recur again
and again when he is threatened by a feeling he does not wish to
experience.
.
Brandon points to these experiences while growing up as a proximate
cause of the 'loss of one's self'--of one's inability to feel and
experience a sense of self--because so much has been rejected and
pushed into the subconscious. The 'gain' in such repression is that the
individual does not consciously feel or experience the suffering and
pain from denied love, spontaneity, intimacy, acceptance; he
experiences it subconsciously. Consciously, he avoids the subject and
avoids getting hurt again. However, the 'cost' of such repression is
the loss of his ability to experience pleasure as well. In repressing
his pain, he has armored himself against both the pain and the pleasure
of life. And so life becomes a gray road without feeling or vitality or
excitement of any kind. He feels as though he is slowly dying in a gray
meaningless landscape.
.
"Self-esteem has two interrelated aspects: a sense of personal efficacy
and a sense of personal worth. It is the conviction that one is
competent to live and worthy of living.
.
The conviction that one is competent to live means: confidence in the
functioning of one's mind; confidence in one's ability to understand
and judge the facts of reality (within the sphere of one's interests
and needs); intellectual self-reliance. The conviction that one is
worthy of living means: an affirmative attitude toward one's right to
live and to be happy; a self-respect derived from the conviction that
one practices the virtues one's life and happiness require.
.
Self-esteem is a basic need of man, a cardinal requirement of his
mental health and psychological well-being. There is no value judgment
more important to man than the estimate he passes on himself.
.
This estimate is ordinarily experienced by him, not in the form of a
conscious, verbalized judgment, but in the form of a feeling, a feeling
that can be hard to isolate and identify because he experiences it
constantly: it is a part of every other feeling. It is involved in his
every emotional response.
.
An emotion is the product of an evaluation. It reflects an appraisal of
the beneficial or harmful relationship of some aspect of Reality to
oneself. Thus, a man's view of himself is necessarily implicit in all
of his value-responses. Any judgment entailing the issue: "Is this for
me or against me?" entails the view of the "me" involved. His self-
evaluation is an omnipresent factor in man's psychology.
.
The nature of his self-evaluation has profound effects on a man's
thinking processes, emotions, desires, values and goals. It is the
single most eloquent key to his behavior.
.
One of the tragedies of human development is that many of a person's
most self-destructive acts are prompted by a blind, misguided (and
subconscious) attempt to protect his sense of self--to preserve or
s.trengthen his self-esteem.

When a person represses certain of his thoughts and memories, because

he regards them as immoral or humiliating, he disowns a part of
himself--in the name of protecting his self-esteem.
.
When a person represses certain of his emotions, because they threaten
his sense of control or conflict with his notion of "strength" or
"maturity" or "sophistication," he disowns a part of himself--in the
name of protecting his self-esteem.
.
When a person represses certain of his desires, because he cannot
tolerate the anxiety of wondering whether or not he will attain them,
an anxiety that makes him feel helpless and ineffectual, he disowns a
part of himself--in the name of protecting his self-esteem.
.
When a person represses certain aspects of his personality which seem
incompatible with the standards of his "significant others," because he
has tied his sense of personal worth to the approval of those
"others", he disowns a part of himself--in the name of protecting his
self-esteem.
.
When a person represses certain of his legitimate needs, because their
frustration leaves him feeling impotent and defeated, he disowns a part
of himself--in the name of protecting his self-esteem.
.
When a person represses his capacity for spontaneity and self-
assertiveness, because he wants to be certain that his responses always
conform to the "moral ideals" laid down by his particular authorities,
he disowns a part of himself--in the name of protecting his self-
esteem.
.
Do such attempts succeed? They do not. Self-esteem cannot be built on a
foundation of self-alienation. The consequence of such attempts is the
sabotaging of one's ability to enjoy life, the inner sense of some
nameless fraudulence and self-betrayal, the anxious need always to be
on guard against dark, frightening forces which might erupt from the
limbo of one's denied self to threaten the structure of one's
existence--and the subversion of one's self-esteem.
.
When a young child represses a pain that he experiences as intolerable,
he does so not only because pain is intrinsically a dis-value, but also
because it threatens his sense of control, it causes him to feel
impotent and incapable of functioning; it nullifies his sense of
efficacy. In later years, his block against re-confronting the pain
serves the same purpose as in childhood; to maintain his equilibrium to
protect his sense of efficacy, of control, of self-esteem.
.
Men destroy themselves every day--in the name of assuring their
survival. Neurosis might almost be defined as the attempt to protect
one's self-esteem and assure one's survival by self-destructive
(reality avoiding) means.
.
[Regaining one's self-esteem in the face of the often overwhelming
power of the conditioning we all have been subjected to growing up is]
the psychological result of a sustained policy of commitment to
awareness, by which is meant:
.
•a will to understand the facts of reality, as they relate to one's
life, actions and needs:
•a respect for facts, and a refusal to seek escape from facts, including
the facts of one's inner experience;
•a policy of being guided by one's awareness of reality when one acts,
so that one does not take actions or pursue goals that require or
entail the subversion of consciousness, the restriction or
evasion of awareness, the betrayal of knowledge, reason or honest
conviction
.
The "self" one is esteeming is one's mind--one's mind and its
characteristic method of functioning, of dealing with reality. All life
is a process of interaction between organism and environment, and
successful life for man is that which has awareness as the cutting edge
of his motion through the world.
.
This way of relating to reality produces that sense of efficacy, of
power and worth which is the meaning of self-esteem."
.
These repressed energies are carried into adulthood, creating suffering
because they continue to influence behavior of people in ways they are
unaware of.
.
The repression of emotions, which begins in childhood with the denial
of pain, frustration, fear and rage, extends in later years to more and
more areas of one's emotional life, resulting in a progressively
deepening sense of self-estrangement.

A person denies his need to find human beings he can respect, admire
and love--and then superimposes on himself the unreal personality of a
cynic. A person denies his loneliness--and then withdraws from people
behind an artificial front of indifferent remoteness. A person denies
his need for self-esteem--and then proceeds to seek it in the bodies of
an endless procession of women. A person denies his longing for
beauty--and then affects a vulgarity aimed at proving his
'practicality' and 'realism.' A person denies his pain--and then losses
his sensitivity and buries his perceptiveness beneath a brutal
blindness to the pain of others, including those he professes to love.
A person denies his anxiety--and then finds himself locked in a self-
made tomb of passive rigidity. A person makes himself thoroughly
invisible--and then agonizes over the fact that no one sees or
understands him. A person extinguishes one part of his personality
after another--and then feels horror when he looks inward and finds
only a sterile void.
.
The crisis, Branden observes, comes as the individual begins to feel
like he is falling apart mentally or emotionally, as the pressures of
the energies of the repressed parts of his self begin to intrude into
his outer life and things begin to fall apart in the form of job
losses, break-ups of one's marriage, breaking down of one's
relationship to one's children, drug or alcohol addiction, chronic
depression episodes, psychotic episodes and so on.
.
An individual is often driven into treatment by crisis instead of pre-
emptively through an act of choosing to discover why he does not have a
sense of himself, why he does not know who he is, why he does not know
what he wants, or why he does not know where he is going. In treatment,
if asked why he is not able to get his needs met, he may blame the
environment or his parents for his 'failures', or refuse to revisit the
causes of his childhood frustration and anger, or he may resist
ferociously assigning blame and instead take all the blame on himself
masochistically. He may take refuge in religion to escape the gray,
barrenness of his life. He may be so repressed that he disavows any
responsibility for what has happened to him and fully believes it.
.
Brandon pointedly argues that in his experience the persons in therapy
are no more neurotic or maladjusted that those who never come to
therapy.
.
Treatment involves helping the patient to recognize that his disorder
is a defense mechanism to avoid remembering and re-experiencing the
pain he experienced during childhood, and re-experience the repressed
thoughts, memories and feelings. Ordinarily, this requires the patient
to revisit his youth to re-experience the environment, mistreatment,
and trauma initiating his repression.
.
Once the patient recalls that feeling originally causing his
repression, the therapist can work logically to help the patient to
understand how his repression is continuing to affect his view of the
world and how he is defending himself from being hurt again. This is
often terrifying to the patient, who may refuse to stop avoiding the
source of his fear and suffering. This underscores the fact that
undertaking this kind of work, or entering therapy, is not only an act
of desperation but of courage as well. At this point, the work has the
possibility of restoring the sense of self, the self-confidence to
change one's beliefs, attitudes and patterns of behavior in the world.
The patient begins working towards the time he can take full
responsibility for what happens to him in his life.
.
Heinz Kohut's Self Psychiatry and the Tragic Man
.
More recently, a branch of psychiatry known as 'Self Psychology" has
emerged from the work of psychiatrist Heinz Kohut to contradict the
Freudian viewpoint. Kohut, initially a Freudian, departed from his
support for Freud's biological arguments that man is naturally
solitary. He came instead to argue that the maturation process involves
a tension between two poles of the 'self.' One 'pole' is that of
ambition (Freudian), which drives the individual to achieve in life to
meet her needs. The other 'pole' is that of 'the idealizing self',
which helps the individual to experience herself as okay even when
needs are frustrated because she is supported through intimate
emotional support from an idealized 'other'--such as a mother or father
figure who is able to share their strength and objectivity. Ideally,
the infant and growing child will realize full and unconditional love,
understanding and support from both parents as she grows and tests
herself against the world.
.
In childhood, the infant goes through a healthy 'narcissistic stage' in
which she is very exhibitionistic and sees the world as an extension of
herself. Attempting to meet her needs in this totally safe playground,
she experiences occasions in which her needs become frustrated. As
extensions of herself, she sees her parents as parts of herself whose
purpose is to satisfy her needs. The parents, however, come to a point
that they refuse the child's demands, and the child expresses her
frustration and rage through crying.
.
Parents witnessing infant anger consider it a tantrum and punish the
child whenever this happens. The child experiences shock at first that
a part of itself would strike out at it to refuse its demand. It learns
from repeated punishment, however, that expressing anger at her need
frustration brings punishment from a part of itself it had previously
totally trusted: first, the she feels helpless to manifest her needs in
a family environment which has suddenly become threatening. Second, she
has been told that she is 'bad' for speaking up for herself--even for
having these needs in the first place.
.
She is now fearful of her self and her environment, not knowing what is
safe and what is not. Here, the infant begins to learn that her parents
are not a part of herself, and the shock of this separation through
punishment reverberates as fear, loneliness, and loss of intimacy for
years.
.
Several dynamics are now in play that may prove difficult for the
growing infant.
.
First, the infant begins to see her environment as unresponsive to her
needs; the world--and other people--may begin to appear hostile to her
and her happiness. Secondly, a dynamic is established that produces
guilt in the infant every time she asks others to meet her needs;
instead, she should be thinking about the needs of others and putting
her own needs second or after those of her significant others. Third,
her natural anger at not being able to express or effect her own needs
is stifled and turned within. She is angry at others, but because of
guilt and the threat of punishment, is not allowed to express this
anger. Fourth, she begins to see herself as someone whose needs are not
as important as others, as not being loved enough by her parents to
help or show her how to meet those needs. She somehow is now not worthy
of their love, and she begins to lose respect for herself. She turns
his anger inward at herself for being too weak to speak up for herself,
too unworthy to receive the love of her parents, too unimportant for
society to care whether she gets the things out of life she needs or
not.
.
This is the beginning of the process described by Heinz Kohut as the
'disintegration of the self.'
.
As the child grows, around the age of 6, 7 or 8 years--normal
development would have the child develop an idealized view of his or
her father or mother, and from this idealization, take on the goals and
values they represent to her. These values serve as a rudder in early
life to give her resiliency, direction, and emotional support as she
encounters the inevitable disappointments to her budding ambitions.
Gradually, the emotional support from this 'idealized other' is
supposed to be 'internalized', so that the maturing youngster builds an
internal structure of emotional support and so that she can sustain the
inevitable cyclic frustration of needs and hopes in life.
Unfortunately, modern society all too frequently fails to provide those
significant 'idealized others' so badly needed during the maturing
process. Parents sometimes refuse to be idealized or to provide the
unconditional, non-judgmental emotional support so badly needed in
growing up.
.
Traditional religious beliefs are described by Kohut, Branden, White
and Weiner, and many others as 'self-destroying' in that their effect
is to create a propensity among believers to judge their selves--or
some part of the self--as sinful, evil, or bad. Guilt and fear,
alienation from the self, and self-hate follow. Through their religious
beliefs, many psychiatrists believe, parents instill in their offspring
the guilt and fear they themselves have of the World.
.
They react to the demands of their children seeking need satisfaction
in exactly the way the world treats their own efforts to satisfy their
needs: with indifference, punishment for 'acting out', and lack of
empathy. Early psychiatry viewed child raising in this way; attempting
to bring the child face to face with hostile reality quickly and not
soften the blow. After all, they reasoned, the Real World is a tough
place, and the sooner the child accepts that and conforms, the better
it will be for the child. Today, psychiatry accepts that, while reality
may be harsh, it is easier to bear when one experiences closeness,
intimacy, and love from other humans. Through such support, the
harshness of life becomes endurable.
.
Life itself will test each child; the parents do great harm, however,
by bringing the harshness of the world and a lack of empathy and
nurturing into their training of their children.
.
As the young grow outward away from the parents into the isolation
characterizing much of modern life, they continue to encounter
traumatic frustration of their needs. Not having the emotional support
or stability of idealized values to hold them together, their selves
'fragment' and their behavior grows increasingly self-destructive. Self
psychologist Gary Greif, in his book The Tragedy of the Self, expresses
this point of view as follows:
.
Destructive human behavior reflects people's experience of
disintegration from insufficient human support. This proceeds in
stages, and is accompanied not only by violent acts, but also by such
experiences as anxiety, fury, arrogance, empty depression and
hopelessness. At high levels of selfobject frustration (i.e. not being
able to find empathetic support from caring individuals), the self
experiences the threat of losing all vitality and of totally
disintegrating, generating the experience of coming apart at the seams
and breaking up into fragments, culminating in losing all will to live,
causing terror at the prospect of self annihilation. A self lacking
adequate selfobject sustenance will be weak, fragmented and beset by
conflicting urges.
.
This experience is literally one of terror and of coming apart for
some, of an inability to cope with reality. Those afflicted by these
symptoms, which include most of us to a greater or lesser degree, Kohut
refers to as Tragic Man.
.
Once fragmented, the individual's ability to cope with life is
impaired, and without psychiatric support, often cannot put himself
back together again. Continued suffering without relief will lead to a
flight from reality into addictions, religious excess, withdrawal, and
depression. Once they reach the point of disintegration characterized
by psychotic or borderline behavior, they are beyond the reach of self
psychology therapy and often have to be institutionalized or cared for
outside the marketplace.
.
Therapy for self-fragmentation of those with lesser disorders can
repair the damage by reactivating the causes of fragmentation and
aiding the sufferer to work through the selfobject needs whose
frustration caused the fragmentation in the first place. Most of us
cannot afford professional assistance and must do this on our own to
repair the damage. Unfortunately, many of those in pain cannot identify
what has happened to them and only know that they are 'inadequate' and
not able to cope with the harshness of the 'real world.'
.
While alive, Kohut was severely critical of the modern social and
economic system in the West as being incapable of supporting the
realization of the self and blames it for enormous suffering and
psychic fragmentation of individuals caught in its web. His student,
Gary Greif argued as follows:
.
While we value individual fulfillment, and often proclaim it our
highest value, out of a fear of being destroyed we readily submit to
limits on realizing this value. We adopt the stance that true
individual fulfillment consists in independence, fundamentally from one
another. The demands of work reinforce our desire to be guarded
emotionally, and are in turn reinforced by this desire. Competing
against one another to obtain and keep employment, we consider our
ability to retain employment a sign that we are independent and
individually fulfilled. We are therefore not inclined to rebel against
social and economic forces which require that our human self needs take
second place. Goods and services provided by the marketplace and work
not only do not entice us beyond commitment to this defensive and
restricted individuality, they appear to validate it as concrete
symbols of success. Our economic world, reflecting and encouraging self
deprivation and fragmentation by subordinating self needs to the
demands of economic competition, increases our propensity for violence
and our consequent need to further subordinate our self needs.
.
Buddhist Psychology
.
The Indian Prince, Siddhartha Gautauma, born 2500 years ago went on a
quest to seek spiritual understanding. Experimenting with many sects
and teachings, he reached the point where he wondered whether any of
the teachings worked. He finally sat down under a tree in what is now
the country of Nepal determined to await 'enlightenment,' and one
morning as the planet Venus rose in the early morning sky, he
experienced a transcendent awakening. At that moment, he became 'the
Buddha'--the One Who Is Awake. For the next 40 years, he taught the
psychology of awakening to all who sought him.
.
What he taught then is as fresh and true today and it was all those
years ago: The Four Noble Truths
.
The First Noble Truth: That suffering is a part of life, but that we
suffer because we struggle to keep that which can't be kept. Nothing is
permanent in this world; pleasure cannot be sought and suffering cannot
be avoided. Therefore, detachment from the world of the senses and
attunement to the basic goodness of Creation is the path to happiness.
.
The Second Noble Truth: Suffering is made worse because of our fear and
sense of ego. We believe that we are a permanent, unchanging self
living in a separate changing Universe. In fact, we do not exist as a
separate being at all and are simply a perspective of the One Life
having no permanence.
.
The Third Noble Truth: There is a way for us to free ourselves from our
suffering and use it to enrich our lives. That way is through the
control of attachment to the phenomenal world.
.
The Fourth Noble Truth: The path to the cessation of suffering is
called, in Buddhism, the 'Middle Way'--avoidance of the extremes of
either the indulgence of the senses or self-mortification--is the path
to freedom.
.
The Middle Way is also called the Eightfold Path. Practice of the
Eightfold Way brings the ability to perceive reality as it is--
Enlightenment--rather than as we, in our suffering, fear and
defensiveness, insist it is or ought to be.
.
•Right Understanding
•Right Intentions
•Right Speech
•Right Action
•Right Livelihood
•Right Effort
•Right Mindfulness
•Right Concentration
.
The Buddha taught a psychology of waking up--of living free of
illusions about ourselves and life. Each individual must take
responsibility for raising him or herself from his unconscious or
habit-dominated way of living; the Buddha never taught that there was a
personal God who intervenes in our lives to fix things for us or
rescues us from our pain. In fact, the records we have about him
indicated that he was free of religious zeal entirely. According to the
Buddha, we are all responsible for our own choices, and if we choose to
live in pain all our lives, then that is the way we are left to live.
.
Disciplining the mind to stop the constant stories and 'pain tapes' we
run each day is a fundamental task in that awakening process.
Disciplining the mind therefore is the key to stepping out of pain.
Once the mind has been trained to 'Mindfulness,' it can comprehend and
control the dominance our emotions exert over our self-images,
attitudes, worldviews, and behaviors. Buddhists use meditation as their
primary technique to first, train their minds to stay alert, and then
to learn to watch their thoughts, their emotions and their bodily
sensations, so that they can become conscious of what they are feeling
and 'remember' the causes of their psychic pain. Gradually as they
practice mindfulness, they begin to apply the meditation technique to
all of life, becoming ever more aware of environment, body, mind,
emotions, feelings, senses and levels of consciousness available to the
human being. This is the awakening process. Awakening therefore does
not refer to some superconscious enlightenment experience, but to the
awareness of the web of social rules, beliefs, and forbidden thoughts
or actions that we unconsciously live by.
.
Buddhists have also learned that it never works to punish or condemn
yourself for your failings, your weaknesses, your "bad thoughts" or
even ill deeds. We all may be 'sinners' but to awaken, we must learn to
forgive ourselves for being less than perfect and accept that our
harshest judge is ourselves. Condemning ourselves only serves to drive
us deeper into suffering. Instead, we begin to learn to accept
ourselves with incredible gentleness and caring for those lost,
hurting, and despised parts of ourselves. We become ever kinder towards
ourselves and others.
.
Westerners raised to feel guilt, shame, and anger at ourselves for not
living up to our expectations and goals find this very difficult at
first, but soon discover that reclaiming the denied and despised parts
of ourselves is a kind of salvation no other religion, philosophy or
teaching has brought. Reclaiming those repressed and disliked parts of
ourselves helps us to accept ourselves the way we really are as
ordinary people trying to learn how to live. We learn how to learn with
our fear of living and dying. We learn how to release our anger at
others and to love ourselves. We learn how to recognize the basic
Goodness of the Earth and Life. Often it is the way we behave under the
influence of illusionary thoughts and emotions that creates the
conditions of our life. Freedom brings the ability to see that we are
causing our own troubles and problems and that reality is something
quite different than we believe it to be.
.
Buddhism eventually became a religion in China and India, evolving a
priesthood, monasteries, an emphasis upon meditation and guru-disciple
relationships to support the huge numbers of religious seekers hoping
to experience 'enlightenment.' However, its gentle psychology remains a
powerful means by which anyone can seek freedom from the stress,
anxieties, and psychic pain in which modern man lives.
.
The Indian monk, Bodhidharma, traveled to China 1500 years ago to
practice and teach a more experientially-based version of Buddhism,
called Zen (meaning 'meditation'). Zen traveled to Japan, where it took
on a distinctively Japanese character before migrating to the United
States, where it became less structured and some might say, a more
rebellious form of spiritual discipline. In America, less concerned
about the voluminous literature and teaching of Buddhism, Zen advocates
awakening through mindfulness of the direct experience and appreciation
of life.
.
Unlike the mainstream schools of Buddhism, Zen adopted a non-dualistic
philosophy. Zen accepts that it is a mistake to separate good from bad,
me from you, spirit from matter, because in fact, there is no
difference. The human being, they perceive, does not exist in
separation from all else, and it is only our perception that we exist
as separate, mortal beings that create the fact of fear and all the
suffering that that emotion brings to us each day. All that exists,
Buddhism says, is the One Life, the One Mind, the One Body, and each
human is simply a point of view within a field of conscious energy. Our
life force is the energy of that field, our minds are that mind, our
bodies are the vibrating energy of that field. Our deaths are nothing
more than the changing of form--not the end of consciousness. Nothing
happens when we die. Nothing happens when we are born. The One Life is
just changing form. There is therefore no reincarnation of an
individual.
.
There is an eastern mythology that individual goes through countless
births and deaths, not only as humans, but as animals, insects, and
other Earthly forms; that the only way to stop this cycle of births and
deaths is to take up the Dharmic path taught by the Buddha and to break
the karmic pattern of attachment to life on earth. Tibetan Buddhism
teaches, for example, that being born human represents a precious
opportunity for each of us because it is the only avenue to escape the
great Law of Cause and Effect (the Law of Karma) that keeps us bound to
the Earth over enormous periods of Time. The process of escaping the
seemingly endless process of being reborn over and over by practicing
the Dharma may itself take many lives to accomplish. Finding a Teacher,
or Guru, is seen as being enormously important because Guru and
Disciple become bound together through time and continue to help one
another progress on the Path.
.
Some students of original Buddhist sutras argue, however, that the
Buddha never taught reincarnation and that his entire focus was upon
freeing the individual from the tyranny of social conventions so that
we could be free from the double bind "in which each individual is
called upon to take two mutually exclusive courses of action and at the
same time is prevented from being permitted to comment on the paradox."
Alan Watts describes the famous double bind each of us finds ourselves
in as follows:
.
Society gives us the idea that the mind or ego is inside our skins and
that it acts on its own apart from society. This is not true. We do not
exist as individuals. Nevertheless, we are to play the game of life as
though we were and as though this game of life was serious, which it is
not. Believing it is serious and that our survival is at stake, we
experience fear. Furthermore, while we define ourselves as independent,
we must not be so independent that we fail to submit to the rules which
define us. Thus, we are held responsible to the group for our actions.
The rules of the game confer independence and take it away at the same
time, without revealing the contradiction.
.
The only solution is to recognize that we are each not separate beings
at all but that each of us is inseparable from all mankind. Life is not
a problem, yet our perception that it is a constant problem keeps us in
fear and anxiety, producing neurosis and all forms of mental illness.
The only solution is to stop seeing our life and death as a problem and
live in the present, accepting life as it is. Fear is not a reason to
flee reality; it is only the energy of uncertainty and death. Buddhists
therefore practice familiarizing themselves with the fact of their
deaths so that when the time for their death comes, they can be fully
conscious and go into it as though it were the ultimate adventure.
.
The double bind can lead to a form of schizophrenia in which the
anxiety of this contradiction in life leads many people into a
withdrawal from 'social reality.' In other words, not being able to
escape the double bind can lead to mental illness--conditions which
society views as madness, psychotic behavior, and mass neurosis.
.
To release the double bind, Buddhism had to release the idea of
individual responsibility to a judgmental God--had to let go entirely
of the idea of a God which made human-like judgments of individuals--
and focus on the deleterious effects of society's rules.
.
"The schizophrenic withdrawal affects a minority, and occurs in
circumstances where the double-bind imposed by society in general is
compounded by special types of double-bind peculiar to a special family
situation. The rest of us are in differing degrees of neurosis,
tolerable to the extent to which we can forget the contradiction thrust
upon us, to which we can 'forget ourselves' by absorption in hobbies,
mystery novels, social service, television, business, and warfare. Thus
it is hard to avoid the conclusion that we are accepting a definition
of sanity which is insane, and that as a result our common human
problems are so persistently insoluble that they add up to the
perennial and universal 'predicament of man', which is attributed to
nature, to the Devil, or to God himself."
.
Conclusions
.
While the American economic, religious and political freedom is
recognized as the leading cultural paradigm of the world, its excesses
of individualism have imposed heavy burdens on our personal health and
happiness. Since the birth of psychiatry, leading psychiatrists have
identified the many sorts of damage imposed upon self-esteem, mental
and emotional health by our parents, teachers, religious leaders, and
employers, and some have even believed that our modern economic system
depends upon armored, neurotic workers to support its needs. We are all
neurotic. Those who cannot bear the pain, isolation and self-repression
that comes with living within our system become its dropouts. Even
those of us who choose to live within this system of values,
requirements and laws suffer. Normally however, people accept the
popular myth that this social reality is normal and desirable; it is
just that we personally don't measure up.
.
The truth is our social, religious, political and economic system is
ruthlessly self-destroying through self-alienation, self-denial, self-
judgment, self-hate, repression, guilt, shame, and self-blame.
Repressed, these self-destroying choices are projected outward as hate
and suspicion of others, a sense of lonely separation from other
people, the loss of intimacy and relationship even within our families,
the stifling of human growth and fulfillment, as psychic, mental and
emotional illness, violence, and even war.
.
Only a few are able to disregard these cultural and societal values and
live according to inner derived values. Kohut calls such individuals
'tragic heroes' because, living true to themselves, they typically
experience social opposition and rejection for defying community
standards and morality." He writes:
.
Self-fulfillment is not necessarily moral, and true creativity--which,
I believe, always requires the full participation of the nuclear self--
is not necessarily a matter of conscientious work. The tragic hero may
be moral in the usual sense of the world; our values and ideals may
coincide with his. But he may also be a great sinner, a man who steps
beyond the bounds of the morality of his times and his society. The
question is not whether the hero is a sinner or saint; the question is
whether, in that segment of his life curve that is portrayed in the
tragic drama or novel, the innermost pattern of the hero's self is
struggling for expression and ultimately reaches its goal.
.
Tragic or not, the archetype of the Hero is perhaps Mankind oldest
story. Each of us in our personal lives must go out into the Unknown to
face our own dragons, our own inner demons. As Joseph Campbell wrote in
his timeless The Hero With a Thousand Faces:
.
Whether we listen with aloof amusement to the dreamlike mumbo jumbo of
some red-eyed witch doctor of the Congo, or read with cultivated
rapture thin translations from the sonnets of the mystic Lao-tse; now
and again crack the hard nutshell of an argument of Aquinas, or catch
suddenly the shining meaning of a bizarre Eskimo fairy tale: it will be
always the one, shape-shifting yet marvelously constant story that we
find, together with a challengingly persistent suggestion of more
remaining to be experienced than will ever be known or told.
.
This story, repeated a million million times throughout history, brings
the hero face to face with the dragon whose name is "Thou Shalt!" To
reach the Pearl without Price, to reach the Golden Apples of the Sun,
the hero must defeat this dragon. Or turn back. Most turn back. Only
the bravest go forward to death or transformation. Only the bravest
brave the rejection of society and live their lives of solitude and
self-acceptance.
.
The unanswered question of course is where does the journey lead? There
are many answers and Ways by which one might travel, but all require
that we ask the question: Who am I?
.
Who does one become if not who one already is? Since our much of our
unknown self lies beneath the 'waters' of the unconscious, these parts
of us must be brought into the light of consciousness, and integrated.
This is a work of self love; it might take a lifetime--more than a
lifetime to complete. We may see ourselves differently at the end of
our journey. But that doesn't mean that we are different, for we
already were acting out the agony of the self unconsciously. First, we
must let go of the web of beliefs, ethics, lures, lies, and rules
imposed by society and our former conscience. Holding on to these
patterns keeps us from being open to Reality as it is. This is often
the hardest of all steps, because these conscious and unconscious
beliefs make us feel safe. We believe that we know reality, we know
what is expected of us, and we know what to be and do. The trouble is
we don't. Almost all we believe is untrue. The real truth is we are
reality itself. As the ancients said time and time again, We are That!
.
Perhaps by journey's end, we will know who we were all along; perhaps
at last we can accept who we are and even love That. We accept who we
are, without guilt or striving to become something or someone else. We
accept our physicality as natural and even sacred. We learn to
appreciate and live life happily. We choose simplicity over complexity
and intimate relationships over the pursuit of wealth, power, or
dominion. We accept our destiny as written in our Books of Life. Here
on the earth is where we dance our dreams awake.
.
1 Hertha Orgler, Alfred Adler: The Man and His Work (New American
Library: New York, 1963).
2 Adler, p. 26.
3 James Hillman, Healing Fiction (Spring Publications, Inc.: Putnam,
CT, 1983).
4 Viktor Frankl, The Will to Meaning pp. 31-38.
5 Ibid., p. 41.
6 Ibid., p 75.
7 Ibid., p. 83.
8 Ibid., p. 96.
9 Nathaniel Branden, The Disowned Self, pp. 7-8.
10 Ibid., pp. 8-9
11 Brandon defines 'repression' as "a involuntary, subconscious
avoidance mechanism involving a flight from inner thoughts, memories,
and feelings of pain, fear, frustration, helplessness, or rage.
12 Such repressions do not simply disappear when rejected, but
accumulate in the "personal unconscious", building energy and power,
until they begin signaling the conscious individual through dreams and
neurotic or dysfunctional behavior in everyday life that an imbalance
exists between his conscious and unconscious mind. Such repressed
energies represent the cause of enormous suffering in our everyday
lives.
13 Ibid., pp. 70-72..
14 Ibid., p. 26.
15 Clive Erricker, Teach Yourself Buddhism (Teach Yourself Books,
McGraw Hill: 1995).
16 Alan W. Watts, Psychotherapy East & West (Ballantine Books: New
York, 1961).
17 Alan W. Watts, Psychoherapy East & West (Ballantine Books: New York,
1961).
18 From Greif - p. 112.
19 Joseph Campbell, The Hero With a Thousand Faces , p. 3.
20 Hillman, James, Healing Fiction (Spring Publications, Inc.: Putnam,
CT,1983), p. 110.
21 Greif, Gary The Tragedy of the Self (University Press of America:
2000).
22 Search, 3, p. 170.