Symptoms as lens rather than weakness...

 The last blog entry’s smorgasbord of thoughts in this space seems, on reflection, to be a mangled and over-stuffed stew…not only of information but also of emotion and anxiety. And on reflection, it is the emotions and the consternation and the anxiety and the confusion we are all going through that has to be top of mind.

The street gibberish, ‘suck it up,’ that accompanies so many irritants and frustrations and traumas that, it has become acceptable, tolerable even expected that nothing about the world’s geopolitical situation, all of it outside our individual control and influence, is not worthy of expending emotional energy even on reflection. Detachment, indifference, insouciance, and even hopelessness, are preferable, in most situations, families, and even board rooms and sanctuaries, to elevated anxiety and concern.

It is this conventional ‘wisdom’ that is under severe scrutiny here.

For three-quarters of a century, the West has been lulled into a state of mind that has been characterized by growth, optimism, new technologies, new pharmaceutical discoveries, elevated performances by athletes and entertainers, enhanced sensitivities about ‘human rights’ and equality. Celebrating diversity, acknowledging the colonial wounds, deaths and deprivations that have been inflicted on racial and ethnic and religious minorities has been a central theme of social justice and the pursuit of enhanced equality of opportunity. Access to higher education and the demonstrable reduction of rates of poverty have ear-marked a sense that western society and culture had found a way to move in the direction of what the Americans call a ‘more perfect union’ in reference to their own country.

And while resisting that epithet, most of the rest of us have tended to ride the wave of hope and optimism and the prospect that our children would and could expect to have lives that improved upon those lives of their parents and grandparents. The Cuban missile crisis, the Viet Nam war, and even the Israeli 6-day war, the Middle East conflicts, the Falklands war, the Grenada invasion, Chechnya, Georgia and then War in the Balkans and even the Al Qaeda/Al Shabab attacks, while individually and collectively unsettling, did not seem to have the combined impact that we are not only witnessing and more importantly, actually experiencing these days. WE continue to remain detached, and anxious without either the will or the ability or the opportunity to take action, except for a core or angry anarchists. And their anger seems highly local, narcissistic and nihilistic.

Such elements as the creation of the United Nations, with its multiple social and educational arms reaching out into the depth of trouble spots with aid and care, the exponential rise of the number of philanthropies reaching into the darkest and most desperate social and political emergencies, the democratizing of technology and the real-time access to events taking place around the globe, along with the multiple advances in food production and the relative stability in nuclear weapons development may have contributed to a kind of somnolence, a kind of ‘faux-security’ and even faux-smugness that has accompanied the kind of triumphalism that politicians and mass media generated and propagated for decades. Growing opportunities for trade, on the international level, were another integral component of the rising tide of ‘hope’ and ‘promise’ and human evolution. And all of this rising tide was both engendered and exploded by a mass media whose life-line consisted of corporate and political cash.

Capitalism, even moderated capitalism, needs a culture of optimism, hope, growth and the energies that both prompt and sustain sales, whether those sales be of consumer goods, new vehicles, televisions and computers, or military weaponry or the illicit, criminal infestation of the drug trade and the multi-national cartels as well as the growing human trafficking trade. And, approaching  like a small car riding the wind behind an 18-wheeler, benefiting from the wind-drag, is the spike in entrepreneurialism, that new child of capitalism, a spreading cultural fad, with a life of its own. The business model, now embracing the mega-multi-national corporations, securing components from around the world, for manufacturing and distribution where wages and energy costs offer maximum profits, extends down/out/into the ‘weeds’ of the mom-and-pop descendents, the Etsy’s the Amazons, the Shopify’s, Facebook marketplace and a myriad of others.

Transactions, as opposed to relationships, have become not merely the norm, but the definition of how people relate. And ‘what have you done for me lately?’ and ‘how to climb whatever ladder you choose’ have come to dominate the cultural landscape. Of course, there are still honourable and highly respected social service organs like the Ambulance, the Fire fighters, the police and the librarians and public schools and universities and colleges. Raw personal ambition, under the rubric ‘the end justifies the means,’ led by corporate raw ambition to compete and to win, in what is considered the ethical model of ‘the zero-sum game’ has come to dominate the landscape and the cultural mind-set.

And this methodology, so easily and glibly contained and trained by menus and lists, by cognitive-behavioural conditioning, has now found such a permanent resonance as to be relatively impossible to moderate. It is not that competition, winning and the ‘at all costs’ component of those endeavours is, by definition, evil or unworthy of either respect or retention. It is that, for such a model of not only commerce but also language and perspective to dominate the culture is to risk losing sight and consciousness of a different kind of attitude, perception and value.

In this space, I have referred to Lee Iacoca’s frustration in the 1980’s at not being able to attract the best brains from the Harvard’s and the Yale’s for the auto industry, because they were predominantly choosing Wall Street and the financial services sector, as their path to personal financial wealth. The presidents of both of those universities, in letters to Iacocca, expressed a similar view, not merely a sentiment but an actual apology, summed up in the words, “We have been teaching the wrong stuff” to our undergraduates.” Forty-plus years later, and zillions of algorithms later, with that cataract still exploding, we are, all of us around the world, trying to get out from under the low-hanging cloud of a language and a perspective and culture that values the financial “ends” far above the “human means” to the achievement of those ends.

Although Immanuel Kant  reminded us that we ought not become the means to another’s ends, we have fallen into that trap precisely and almost unconsciously. Means to ends, however, is a reductionism that renders us all ‘functions’ as opposed to persons. And the conjunction of being with doing, measured in terms of profit and loss statements, in both small and mega-corporations, leaves the complexities and the confusions and the interruptions and the hiccups of human nature not only under the microscope of employers but also under the microscope of the medical fraternity.

Lionel Tiger’s work, entitled, The Manufacture of Evil, often referenced here, has left a lasting imprint on this mind and heart. He argues that with the rise and precision of the manufacturing industry, and the elevated degree of precision expected and demanded of our machines, North American culture, at least, has fallen into the trap of demanding that human beings conform to a similarly high degree of perfection, precision and ‘quality control’…and all of this cultural and anthropological thrust directly contravenes biology and nature. Perhaps the take-over of morality and ethics based on the industrial model has taken place seemingly imperceptibly or perhaps there were individuals and organizations eager to grasp this ‘holy ring’ of perfection in their pursuit of their religious, ethical or even corporate goals.  Were there battlements erected to slow or to mitigate this wind-storm or even if they were, were they strong enough to resist this tidal wave of ‘instrumentation’ of human beings?

Some time ago, I had a face-to-face conversation, at my request, with an oncology surgeon, about the subject of treating each patient, (and doctor, and hospital staff person) as a “soul”….Reputed writers, far more wise and experienced than this scribe, have developed the notion of the pursuit of ‘soul.’

In an interview with Scott London, James Hillman, as recorded and reported on scott.london, we read these words:

London: Symptoms are so often sees as weaknesses.

Hillman: Right, so they set up some sort of medical or psychotherapeutic program to get rid of them, when the symptoms may be the most crucial part of the kid…..

But when the medical becomes scientistic; when it becomes analytical, diagnostic, statistical, and remedial; when it comes under the influence of pharmacology and HMO’s--limiting patients to six conversations and those kind of things—then we’ve lost the art altogether, and we’re just doing business; industrial, corporate business. ….I think we’re miserable partly because we have only one god, and that’s economics. Economics is a slave-driver. No one has free time; no one has any leisure. The whole culture is under terrible pressure and fraught with worry. It’s hard to get out of that box. That’s the dominant situation all over the world.

(The interview was adapted from the public radio series, ‘Insight & Outlook’.)

One of the obstacles to a perspective that reaches beyond the ‘transactional’ or the purposeful, or the ‘utilitarian’ or the functional, is that we have come almost to believe that everything has a direct and empirical and measureable cause. Both cause and effect are seen in literal terms, leaving out the possibility that our imaginal perspective might have a different possibility. Amid our conventional dynamic, the individual/act/word/ decision is good or bad, normal or abnormal, and those constraints are boxed into either medical or legal containers, both needing treatment and change.

Hillman’s proposition that a different perspective, one embracing a ‘soul’ for both the observer and the observed, contains and exhibits an opportunity to ‘see’ the psychology from the perspectives of one of more myths, or gods or goddesses, in whose voice and pattern the individual is embraced. Through such a lens, we might become a voice/actor of some voice derivative from our whole human culture. Such a metaphoric, even metaphysical, neo-platonic perspective does not seek instant remediation, instant treatment; nor is it based on a foundational principal that whatever symptom is being exhibited is by definition, the problem.

We are neither machines, nor are we reducible to the kind of instrumental measurement and diagnosis and precision expected of and demanded by a culture deeply immersed in such expectations.

Paul DeFatte, writing on Facebook in a piece entitled, Complexio Oppositorim (4/11/11) writes this:

Ego-bound persons quite naturally (and naively) seek to fix the problems and to resolve the tensions out of which soul is generated. The ego seeks to make things comfortingly manageable by translating everything into the literal and concrete terms with which it is familiar and which are natural to its standpoint. Unsurprisingly, most of us are unwitting ‘soul-killers’. In ‘acting out’* instead of ‘acting in,’* we slacken or collapse altogether the inner tension required for the lyre string to produce its piercing note. In repressing, on the other hand, we retreat from the tension (of the tuning peg) needed to provide the basis for music that will never be possible otherwise.

Can and will we be able to take our ‘tight-fisted’ literal, obsessive perspective and release our literal and metaphoric ‘fingers’ from such a lens and open to a more healthy, more compassionate and even more potentially ethical perspective?

There are some hopeful, green, spring-like shoots peeking through the asphalt of conventional cognitive-behavioural reductionistic psychology of the last several decades. Can this garden attract more gardeners, more fresh water and more sunlight?

**DeFatte quotes James Hillman’s Alchemical Psychololgy, p.36-7, earlier in the same piece:

Thou shalt not repress/Thou shalt not act out…On the one hand, fire (alchemically understood) will act out. It cannot be concealed…Fire insists of being visible. It does not want to be repressed…It will smolder long after the flames have died. On the other hand, desire may not be released straight into the world. The work is spoiled, say the alchemists, by direct heat. Do not let flames touch the material. Direct fire scorches, blackens the seeds…Do not act out; do not hold in.  paradox. And a double negative that suggests a via negative, a de-literalizing cancellation of both commandments. A mercurial escape from the exhausting oscillation between them. Instead of holding in or acting out, act in,. Cook in the rotundrum#, as one vessel was called, referring both to a container and to the roundness of the skull. Hold the heart inside the head by warming the mind’s reveries. Imagine, project, fantasize. Think.

#Rotundrum: psychologically, the symbol of wholeness and the archetype that expresses itself in mandala form, a pattern of order which, like a psychological view-finder marked with a cross  or a circle divided into four, superimposed on the psychic chaos so that each content falls into place and the weltering confusion is held together by the protective circle. (from ARAS.org,  The Archive for Research in Archetypal Symbolism)