2 March 2024
To summarize, through the examination of selected concepts from Heraclitus, Aristotle, and the Stoics (e.g., Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, and Seneca) we are building a set of attributes I believe are common to the human soul. There is also a duality, or opposition, emerging simultaneously. That duality is roughly characterizable as acceptance-reason-tolerance-order versus expectation-control-intolerance-chaos. We now take a very long jump in history from Roman times to the Enlightenment which is often identified as the Age of Reason. That age was described as “…an interlacing pattern in which the ‘facts’ of history, the creations of the arts, the discoveries of science and the speculations of philosophy reacted upon each other and in turn affected men’s attitudes to history, the arts, science, philosophy and religion” (Hampson, 1968/1976 p. 10).
Significantly, in early 2024, the jurist-activist Robert Badinter, a French national, died and was commemorated thusly: “Robert Badinter, who spearheaded the drive to abolish France’s death penalty, campaigned against antisemitism and Holocaust denial, and led a European body dealing with the legal fallout of Yugoslavia’s breakup, has died. He was 95. French President Emmanuel Macron hailed Badinter, a revered human rights defender and former justice minister, as a ‘figure of the century’ who ‘never ceased to advocate for the ideas of the Enlightenment’” (Charlton, 2024).
Within the Enlightenment context, Johann Friedrich Herbart (1776-1841) promulgated the idea that the human mind has conscious and unconscious parts (Atkinson & Tomley, 2012). Although the significance and proportion of those parts is under constant debate, the bipartite idea itself has met with overwhelming approval and acceptance. The importance of the conscious/unconscious duality is hard to overstate: if each of us has portions of self, masked from our awareness, there emerges a subtlety of understanding (and treatment) that brings the art back into the empirical reaches of psychotherapy. That is, it is the job of each soul—and each practitioner working with that soul—to attempt the mutually supportive integration of these two realms of awareness. While this duality could and has led to the writing of entire volumes, our takeaway is simply the recognized existence of these two simultaneously interactive realms which, to the best of our knowledge, are born and die with soul or mind-body (more on this below, p. x).
To continue this selective survey of ideas, affecting conceptions of the self, Franz Brentano (1838-1917) ought be recalled as a thinker and as a teacher of at least two other thinkers, Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) and Edmund Husserl (1859-1938), both of whom changed our understanding of what constitutes human being. Husserl did this through his explorations of existential phenomenology which has been handily clustered into six attributes namely, 1) A focus on lived experience and meanings; 2) The use of rigorous, rich, resonant description; 3) A concern with existential issues; 4) The assumption that body and world are intertwined; 5) The application of the ‘phenomenological attitude’; and, 6) A potentially transformative relational approach (Finlay, 2011, pp. 15-16).
My take on phenomenology is fledgling and wary. I see phenomenology as one of the strands of evidence-based interpretation. One does phenomenology by temporarily abandoning everything one knows about a dataset. That dataset could be insects, stars, or the transcribed text of a holocaust survivor. What is asked of the phenomenological researcher is that she brackets her knowledge or judgment long enough to observe the dataset as a unique phenomenon or existent. (Finlay, 2011, cited in the preceding paragraph, doesn’t use bracketing but describes the same practice as applying the phenomenological attitude.) The idea is to know the data on its own terms. Paradoxically, the nearest canonical tool to bracketing is Coleridge’s willing suspension of disbelief. The willingness to disbelieve can easily lead to those things most feared—like coercion and groupthink. But…responsibly managed, bracketing can also lead to some fascinating interpretive and objective observations.
* * *
My intellectual life began sitting across from my father in our living room. Until his words slurred, I was thrilled to argue ideas with him in a challenging but loving fashion. He was not against seeing things interpretively but had enormous respect for real-life examples. My intellectual evolution next accelerated through the intervention of two superb high school English teachers who also encouraged interpretive thinking, not as wild speculation but rather textually based and referenced interpretation. It is through that early interpretive lens that I see qualitative research and, indeed, believe it has every bit as much to offer humanity as randomized controlled trials, the gold standard of quantitative research. Phenomenology is one of the modes of qualitative work with Brentano and Husserl some of its founders.
Freud, the other student of Brentano, added considerably to our understanding of the human psyche. Along with Carl Jung, and others, at different times of his life, Freud recognized and then denied the simultaneous existence of both a life instinct (Eros) and a death instinct (Thanatos) within the soul (Gay, 1988).
Importantly, Freud linked the existence of Thanatos with an observed tendency, within his patients, to repeat the same cycle of behaviours in different contexts until they had worked through and understood the basal elements of that repeated behaviour. Freud labelled this tendency a repetition compulsion defined as “…in psychoanalytic theory, an unconscious need to re-enact early traumas in the attempt to overcome or master them” (American Psychological Association, 2023, p. 1). Gay (1988) noted that Freud returned to his belief in the existence of Thanatos in 1919, the year following the end of WWI.
A near parallel to the repetition compulsion is the stuck point, a concept elaborated by Resick, Monson, & Chard (2017, pp. 87-88, 98). Their work is in aid of treating post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and, as the reader will note, the American Psychological Association’s (APA) definition of the repetition compulsion includes early trauma as a causal factor. Stuck points keep clients living lives of fear and increasing isolation based on a series of harmful and intrusive thoughts and emotions.
To be continued next week.
Dan Chalykoff is a Registered Psychotherapist (Qualifying). He works at CMHA-Hamilton and Healing Pathways Counselling, Oakville, where his focus is clients with addiction, trauma, burnout, and major life changes. He writes to increase (and share) his own evolving understanding of ideas. Since 2017, he has facilitated two voluntary weekly group meetings of SMART Recovery. Please email him (danchalykoff@hotmail.com) to be added to or removed from the Bcc’d emailing list.
References
American Psychological Association. (2023, April 7). APA Dictionary of Psychology: repetition compulsion. https://dictionary.apa.org/repetition-compulsion
Atkinson, S., Tomley, S. (Eds.). (2012). The psychology book: Big ideas simply explained. Dorling-Kindersley Limited.
Charlton, A. (2024, 13 February). Robert Badinter, 1928-2024. National Post/The Associated Press.
Finlay, L. (2011). Phenomenology for therapists: Researching the lived world. Wiley-Blackwell.
Gay, P. (1988). Freud: A life for our time. W. W. Norton & Company.
Hampson, N. (1968/1976). The Enlightenment. Penguin Books.
Resick, P. A., Monson, C. M., & Chard, K. M. (2017). Cognitive Processing Therapy for PTSD: A comprehensive manual. The Guildford Press.
Comments