Tag: therapy

The perils of positive thinking (1)

Self-help philosophies are big business. The amount of shelf space devoted in bookshops to titles expounding the power of positive thinking is quite astonishing. You all know the kinds of book I have in mind. It is a genre which spans new age and traditional spirituality, applied psychology and business. Alongside the authors are the coaches and therapists, all of whom make a living from doling out lifestyle advice and running therapy sessions and workshops based on the same principles.

On-line the situation is no different. Indeed, many phenomena of this kind have really been boosted by the power of viral marketing. Let us take just one example which is probably familiar to many – “The Secret”, a self-help film produced in 2006 by one Rhonda Byrne. The wikipedia article is here. The central message is that believing in yourself sets in motion a positive dynamic which becomes self-reinforcing, leading to happiness and success – a cosmic law dubbed the “Law of Attraction”. Another classic of this genre is Napoleon Hill’s Think and Grow Rich, an all-time bestseller, published, astonishingly, in 1937 and still hugely influential today.

I first encountered this phenomenon within what was then called the “house church movement” in the 1980’s. This neo-Pentecostal movement was in its origins quite ascetic, but became increasingly, and to my horror, pervaded by quite different notions coming from the American “TV evangelists”. God wanted you to be rich and successful and, if you weren’t, it was only that your faith was insufficient for the task. (This doctrine never sat well with the evangelical precept of saving grace, but seemed subjectively appealing to many because it chimed with their self-doubt and perception that there had to be a “quantitative” element to salvation, a notion of course familiar to Catholics and Orthodox).

In its secular form of the Law of Attraction, I believe it expresses, albeit very crudely, something quite true, but at the same time it misses something equally fundamental.

What is true is expressed in the popular adage “success breeds success” and has been identified by many teachers. Jesus is reported, somewhere in the gospels, as saying “to he who has, more shall be given; but to he who has not, even what he has shall be taken away from him”.

Funnily enough, though, few if any of the real spiritual teachers I can think of ever ended their days in wealth and comfort; and Jesus himself was crucified. So what’s going on? Was Jesus just talking of “spiritual wealth”, perhaps, something quite different from, and perhaps opposed to, worldly riches?

Of course Jesus did indeed call on people to forego worldly riches on occasion, though only when an obstacle to spiritual growth. Still, I do not think that spiritualizing perfectly down-to-earth utterances is a proper hermeneutic. Rather, the “Law of Attraction” itself implies a duality of destinies, paths either up or down, virtuous or vicious circles. Not only does success breed success, but failure begets failure. This duality is found back, equally, in the salvation doctrines of probably all world religions (though it may be a somewhat simplistic framework within which to interpret the soteriology of Buddhism or some nature-religions, paganism, Shamanism and so forth, which also suggests it may have a lot to do with the role of institutionalized religions in legitimizing the established social order).

This “either-or” of destiny implies that there are two communities and two poles to which individuals gravitate – a pole of success and a pole of failure. Strictly speaking, there is a “Law of Attraction” at work at both ends; and the closer you are to one, the more difficult to break out of its gravitational field into that of the other. Between the two, though, there is also a “Law of Repulsion”. Individuals gravitating towards the upper pole find themselves spending more time with others who are on the same path, and separate out from them by a process of reverse osmosis. This process is analogous to the processes of self-organization giving rise to order in the cosmos notwithstanding the tendency to entropy expressed by the second law of thermodynamics. On the side of those to whom fate has been less lucky, who are in the vast majority, envy and anger develop and are directed towards those more fortunate. For this reason, prophets, even if they seed a new level of consciousness in the human spirit, are almost always martyrs.

So much for the Law of Attraction as a law. As a self-help program, however, there is much more to be said; I will return to this in my next post.

Relationship as therapy

“L’enfer,” said Sartre, “c’est les autres” (Huis clos, 1943). And yet, as he recognized, it is a hell we in fact make for ourselves – a hell which results from a lack of any other perspective on ourselves than that furnished by those around and close to us, and an inability to dissociate our own emotional state from theirs. Plenty of us find ourselves in this hell, with no means to escape it. And yet, we continue to seek intimacy and we freely subjugate ourselves to the disciplines of life in community for reasons which frequently cannot be reduced to merely rational, material considerations or the workings of the “Selfish Gene”.

The ways in which we go about making life a hell for each other, and some of the reasons why, are notably addressed in a debatable but still suggestive branch of psychoanalytic theory called transactional analysis, well known through the books Games People Play (1964), What do you say after you say hello? (1975) and I’m OK, You’re OK (1969). These present rather gross simplifications of character dynamics and certainly do not constitute a complete theory of the underlying psycho-biophysics of emotions (which is still very poorly understood). Nonetheless, transactional analysis captures in terms which are easy for a layman to understand the basic dynamics of emotional interaction in repeated games.

In Games People Play, a number of easily-recognized patterns of interaction in relationships are described, which can be readily observed in our own experience. Many of us know, for instance, the frustration of trying to persuade or encourage someone to do something eminently reasonable or desirable (lose weight, give up smoking, change their job and so on), and being met by an inexhaustible barrage of semi-logical objections to it – that is, objections which adopt the rhetorical form of logical argument but without any substance – which eventually cause us to give up. This is the game Berne called Why Don’t You? Yes But (YDYB). Other common games include those in which the interlocutor is invariably cast as responsible for the interviewee’s misfortunes, those in which self-pity trumps all other considerations, games of entrapment, of emotional blackmail, and so on. Contrary to what Berne believes or cares to admit, however, all of these games are clearly marked by infantile interaction and are easy to interpret in classical psychoanalytic terms. They all constitute a projection onto the interlocutor of motivations and properties attributed to a primal figure such as a parent and the acting out of the interaction in terms of the scripts learnt in childhood to defend against these motivations when they were threatening and to solicit them when they could be reassuring. In other words, they are resistances to the threat to the ego which the interlocutor poses by virtue of his or her otherness.

Although it does not seem to have been widely recognized, the scenarios which arise in a psychotherapeutic and in a relationship setting have a great deal in common. In fact, psychotherapy is essentially relational in nature and relies on transferences of the type referred to in order to decode the nature of the neuroses which derive from the infantile experiences. A psychotherapeutic relationship has, of course, a defined framework and a conscious directionality and motivation which are presumably lacking in most general-purpose relationships. It hopefully also rests on an asymmetry of roles and on a greater emotional maturity on the part of the therapist. The point I would wish to make is, however, that also the general relational context provides ample material and opportunity to decode and self-decode the nature of character neuroses. It does so at less cost and with more ubiquity and it can certainly be advantageous to deal with transferences, resistance and conflict in a relational setting in a way which affirms and develops the authenticity of the participants to the relationship rather than – as appears anecdotally to be the norm – by avoiding conflict and shutting down communication.

From a spiritual point of view we may go further than this. The search for a partner in life and love is the basic spiritual drive which we all share. It is rarely thought of as a drive for therapy but it is homomorphic to this drive because the direction it takes expresses our desire for completeness and self-transcendence, to find Otherness in the Other, l’alterité dans l’autre; to replace neurotically constructed, ego-defensive reality by the base of otherness in which our self finds creative and autonomous expression. Because it is so colored by our prior experiences and insecurities, and by the embedded psychosocial violence which underpins these, the search for a partner no doubt frequently results in the most inappropriate pairings which do nothing to advance the spiritual growth of the partners (or their offspring). Quite on the contrary, such relationships frequently constitute a mutual Faustian pact to avoid confronting ones tortured inner child. Yet we also see from our experience that relationship is the enabler of spiritual growth. The experiences that have helped us grow as individuals all have names and faces attached to them.

In the end it is up to us to allow our relationships and our personal spiritual growth to interact in such a way that they are self-reinforcing; and to be lucid enough to draw conclusions in those situations which have become unproductive for us as human beings and to make decisions in consequence. Regardless, though, of the prospective longevity of a relationship, relationships offer us at all moments the opportunity to learn about our resistances to change and to look beneath them to the elements of our psychic makeup which determine them – provided we can separate what is objective and reasonable in our assessment of the relationship from our subjective emotionality in connection to it. This is not easy because such emotionality takes many forms which are difficult to recognize, especially to ourselves. Emotionality can look very “unemotional” or it can take a disguised emotional form (such as compassion) – the form it takes depends on our character and how we learnt to manage existential threats when we were children. My emotionality is no better than yours, however convinced I may be that I am being reasonable and you are not. Both are windows into the psychic injuries which we have endured. Relationships are not a contest, and the almost universal search for power within them can only frustrate the potential they have to bring healing and self-development. This has, therefore, to be seen for what it is – behavior learnt to defend ourselves from infantile threats that no longer exist, and a violence against the integrality of the very other whom we cherish and seek.