Sunday, March 29, 2015

Co-pilot


As of this writing, we are still getting only cloudlets of similar information on the co-pilot, Andreas Lubitz, who terrified and killed so many people because he felt bad.  The latest sound-bite is that he was “psychosomatic,” or had a “psychosomatic” illness along with depression.  The use of this term suggests that the Europeans see psychosomatic – otherwise known as Somatoform, formerly known as “it’s all in your head” and before that “hysteria” – disorder as a more respectable diagnosis than the Americans do.  Or more accurately, than the nincompoops who created the DSM-5 do.  The new psychiatric manual replaces the well-founded understanding that psychic injury can change the body – causing and worsening physical pain and disorder – with the doctors’ self-soothing insistence that there has to be a germ or a gene somewhere.  The young man who throws up before a job interview?  It can’t be his experience that made him so fragile, because you can’t see “his experience” under the microscope, or prescribe an expensive drug for it.

However, the Europeans aren’t entirely a different breed, as a quick search on the Internet shows.  This doctor -- http://www.eapm2015.com/files/Creed.pdf -- apparently dislikes the idea that “medically unexplained symptoms” “are evidence of an underlying psychiatric disorder” or that they “are persistent, disabling and resistant to treatment.”  Nevertheless, there must be enough authority behind the concept for it to wend its way into the headlines.

Here I only want to look at Lubitz through the mirrored lens of empathy, which will probably always be the best way to attempt to understand the electron clouds of the psyche.  All of us can do this, actually, by looking inward and seeing if there is even the slightest resonating emotional sense when we picture sitting in the cockpit and heading toward a mountain.

Here, I sense, is a man who felt “the world”* of people as an emotional entity or force, not a fact or concept: that thing which he held a grudge against or didn’t care about, or felt had hurt him.  A racial projection and reification, exactly as one would “hate” all Jews or blacks while knowing none of them or maybe a couple of them.  How does a person come not to feel the individuality of others, see them only as a contemptible or predatory fused blur through pain-blurred eyes?  That is the question: What killed his empathy?

Whatever else you’ll read in the coming days, this will be the underlying kernel, though it lacks the sexiness, stigma-drama and outrage potential of the psychological disorders.  Immaturity, emotionality, explosiveness, "generalized anxiety," depression, even sociopathy – none of these suggests grand killing, though all make sense in a man locked inside himself, living in the world while alone, drowning in himself.  Psychosomatic illness would also fit the picture, as it is the consequence of deep pain repressed.  Poisonous emotion cannot get out, goes to vulnerable systems, saturates the body.  Lubitz, never reaching, touching, knowing and releasing his buried core injury, could not feel the pain of others.

I have seen fathers and mothers who know they do not possess the quality of empathy for their child.  They do not love and try to understand his behavior, but feel he is their microcosm, their world that once again serves them injustice.  They will spank him and remove all his enjoyed possessions so he lies on his bed, destitute, with nothing to do, and they feel this is the answer.  Can you empathize with this mother, who is both righteous and crazy?  Can you feel the fog that starts from within her history, spreads and tints the world as contemptible or predatory, comes to curve around to engulf her child?  You are Lubitz, then, on a smaller scale, in a kitchen not an airplane.  And your children – they may grow up to become your co-pilot.

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* Lubitz’s ex-girlfriend says he told her: “People all over the world will know my name” -- http://www.infowars.com/germanwings-plane-crash-people-all-over-the-world-will-know-my-name-andreas-lubitz-told-ex-girlfriend/.


Monday, March 16, 2015

Slapdash profundity #1: The only smart way for an atheist to believe in a Creator that I can think of


If there is a God, she* itself was ruled by necessity at the infinitesimally first moment of thought (like the Big Bang).  Specifically, she was forced to realize that despite any wishes, there can be no such thing as the smallest – reason demands the divisibility of any thing, so there is the infinitely small and smaller and therefore the insane virtual overflow and disintegration of matter; or the largest – there must be something beyond any wall.  This helplessness of infinite proliferation binds thought and matter and the Creator as a three-faceted unity.  None has antecedent power beyond unraveling, unimaginable necessity.  Necessity, if anything, then, is the Creator's God.

I think we have to admit that when we strip away all imagination and hope, human consciousness is lost about every aspect of existence.  All of our experience – logic, reason, perception – says “no!” and “absurd!” to directionless endlessness, directionless timelessness, to the existence of stuff itself.  Why do the rudiments of nature work incessantly – move?  How can the basic quiddities of nature not be what (where) they are?  It seems as plausible to me that each quark or particle of dark matter is a universe the size of ours, and inside it is a universe of particles, each a universe the size of ours.  Could this go on forever?  I think it has to.

Of course, to reify or deify “thought” is imagination.

But it’s not so crazy to suggest that the ultimate incomprehensibility of the universe – true whether we existed or not – has some explanatory element behind it.  Maybe the explanatory element is not a man (or a woman) with a beard, but some fact that gives everything rest – a nature, a cushion, on which all the endless particles and time can sleep in stillness when they need to.  Like a loving mother, or father.

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* (for convenience).


Tuesday, March 10, 2015

Rule of psychological gravity


It occurred to me that if I were going to be reading the sort of psychology that I write, I would only want to do it in small doses, and when in an odd moment – a narrow window – of moody introspective openness. Then, I’d want to go back to my Amazon Prime, Ben ‘n’ Jerry’s, green tea, email, a little news, Amy’s organic macaroni* with an avocado in it. Back, that is, to the merry-go-round of distractive sweets.

Though I know there are pathological hard workers out there, those who must do, achieve and run to feel OK about themselves, I wonder if many more of us adhere to the Rule of Psychological Gravity:

Four paragraphs are better than full articles. Energy bars are better than exercise. Frying is better (faster) than baking. Lying is better than sitting. Listening to music is better than thinking. Procrastinating is better than doing. Unconsciousness is better than awareness.

This binary logic is misleading: I really mean a tumbling domino hierarchy, where

Any contemplated behavior might bring to mind an easier one, and that one considered could be nudged by an even easier one, and on and on. Novel, to short story, to Facebook to tweet, to nap. Stoney’s harsh beer to smooth vanilla porter to marijuana to masturbation and fantasizing.

I work six days a week, and am typically at my office from 8:30 a.m. to 8:30 p.m. I get into the work deeply. But I’ll admit that many clients have no interest in depth process; rarely do they present as desperate; rarely am I drawn to save their life. Ultimate life-changing work is rare disturbing liqueur – maybe once a month or less. Those clients who need a hug, to collapse in the arms of the first “parent” to see and contain them, don’t want to face that fact and so it doesn’t happen. Therefore much of what I do is like a working vessel sailing in a sea of wide horizon: The boat is circumscribed, but floats in a vista, a turquoise and pretty place.

Is there something about adult nature that prefers some component of anesthesia? This wouldn’t just be regressive, because children usually want more active and exciting fun. More like disengagement, sleep and comfort. Not the instinctual id’s pleasure principle, because I think this gravity is both depressive and pleasure-seeking. If it is depressive, then there is both the “life instinct” and the “death instinct” fused together in the adult psyche that gets up every morning to go to work.

We are certainly an odd contraption. I offer my clients their history, their depth, their colorful seriousness. And I also try to be entertaining, pleasure-giving.

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* Update.  The Pessimistic Shrink is safe from the Amy's macaroni listeria scare that one may read about in today's (3/24/15) news.

Sunday, March 1, 2015

Thoughting


Attention! David Brooks* is the archetype of the person who believes he lives primarily and essentially on the ground of ideas, of thought; who believes that knowledge and life lessons are what actually motivate us, rather than our history-planted inner feelings and sensations. Such a sad, ignorant delusion! Picture yourself in the “good drowning” of the beginning and romancing phase of a relationship. There is often a combination of inebriation and delusion, where your true inner self is washed away by a golden wave and you find yourself living and sending out the energy of your unreal, hoped-for, fantasy best. You become powerful and moving, happy, deep, funny, leap-walk against gravity as on the moon, with winsome peremptory energy. You are no longer – right then – aware of your more in-the-dirt baseline of irritability or depression, your childhood drag, and won’t be until after the commitment phase and the post-climactic. The world is wonderful, she (or he) is your manna. It may have occurred to you, most fleetingly, that you had long been starved, because now you are filled: All your needs from birth to now are met.

Will you, in that place, be superimposing Jane Austen’s antiquated polished percep­tiveness upon the face and charac­ter of your new partner? Considering pro’s and con’s of desirability from English 101? Let us for God’s sake hope not. You would be a ventriloquist’s dummy, a program, a severed head. Pathetic, deplorable, brainwashed intellectuals!

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* “The biggest way most colleges fail is this: They don’t plant the intellectual and moral seeds students are going to need later, when they get hit by the vicissitudes of life. If you didn’t study Jane Austen while you were here, you probably lack the capacity to think clearly about making a marriage decision. If you didn’t read George Eliot, then you missed a master class on how to judge people’s character. If you didn’t read Nietzsche, you are probably unprepared to handle the complexities of atheism—and if you didn’t read Augustine and Kierkegaard, you’re probably unprepared to handle the complexities of faith.” https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/05/commencement-address-too-honest-have-been-delivered-person/611572/.

I have a big problem with thinking. There is just so much wrong with it. Clients with no good ideas – chronic worrisome, poisoned thoughts with no value but to enervate. Grotesque reductionism of complex feelings and needs: “I have a right to know everything and control my daughter’s life: I’m her mother.” The pseudo-reality of ideas, always ipso facto seeming to have a veneer of legitimacy, yet they’re the convoluted metamorphic stuff, debris and mountains, first thrown up from our underground magma – the body’s historical feeling. If you really want to know Self, shut down your thinking and feel the surge and the sludge beneath. You won’t find prejudice – racial or gender hatred; or simple labels like depression or anger or Borderline. You won’t find your philosophical mission statement or religious obduracy. You won’t find intellectualized disregard of your daughter’s personhood – the raison d’être of one client’s mother’s blog. You won’t find the “guilt” so many people claim from their childhood roots, because the feeling knows you did nothing wrong, that “guilt” was your parents’ cruel words and your accepting them because you needed love, because a six-year-old – if she has a chance at all – can’t reject her parents.

What you will find is heavy, foundational feeling states from childhood, and if you have a drill and a microscope, even deeper ones from a toddler’s or infant’s life. You will find adolescent or adult fusion-feelings – lighter but more dramatic – evolved from the earlier ones, because you’re not a different person from your child.

I’ll admit that it’s old age and ripened neurosis that have made me so weary of the constant diarrhea flow of thoughts that people spout day to day, year to year, generation to generation. All this helium! Regal political flatulence. Religious reframing of murder. Eight-hundred-page novels about people who would need therapy to know themselves. The world of popcorn heads floats away into the timeless sky, forever. And all the “racing” thoughts that circle in the head, infesting anxious or cognitive people.

Watching a client, I sometimes see his thinking itself as the problem: long-winded soliloquies full of “I guess” or “I’m probably” or “maybe it’s” or “I keep getting suspended because I’m impulsive because I’m ADHD” – utterly meaningless fudge, a floating Disney World. I want to – and sometimes do – say “Stop! Stop generating these thoughts.  Find your body.” People live on the wordy top floor of their tower.  Well below them is their ground, and below that the basement, then the dungeon. They may sense that where they stand or run is not the ground, but thought is the only flashlight they wield to look beneath them.

So what that we can’t – or shouldn’t – reach the bottom, the chains lying at our foundation? Living in the clouds is poison, too. My feeling is the deeper we go, the more gravity of ourselves we feel. We re-own our substance, remember and reclaim our utter unique. I wonder how many people remember that person.