A psycho-libertarian opinion: Our good president (see brief update footnote, 7/25/2016)

Right psychology, as I understand it, sees that one person’s power over another conscious and rationally volitional person is sick.*  This is an area where human psychological health and the moral good are identical.  Deliberate force, whether it is emotional, cognitive or physical, is destructive to the autonomous and "free" workings of the human mind (free will is a phenomenon where appearance is the reality at the behavioral level).  It is, of course, not the only harm that happens to the holistic self.  Trauma can be unintentional force that overwhelms the brain.  Emotional neglect and absence of empathy starve the psyche, which needs experiential, cognitive and emotional stimulation, most especially love.  Deliberate force is not a different category of harm.  It is unique, however, in humankind's assumption that it is right and good.

If I were to force, at the point of a gun or a blackmail letter, someone with only $10 to give most of it to someone who has $100, this would strike us as illegitimate power.  But if I compel someone with a million dollars to give one percent of it to someone who has only five dollars, this would be considered by most people to be a humanitarian and moral act.  The principle involved would be based on emotion, and the emotion would – I will bet any number of paychecks – be informed much less by goodwill toward the poor person than by forcible anger at the rich one.  I propose that as a people, we believe in force because society's individuals – most of us – embody pain and anger.

Force is institutionalized in cultures because its roots in unhealed pain – in "emotional injustice" – are internalized in the individual from early childhood.  And because of this psycho-destined process and our long tradition of it, we have come to see the good society as founded on force against the free mind.  The ideological liberal can be benevolent and “humanitarian,” as in the above example, only because he has a gun and the paper form of it, a law.  The principled conservative can criminalize victimless acts (smoking certain substances, sexual relations) because he has a gun.  Remove the instruments of force, and these lofty ideals would evaporate with the dew.

This is the basis of my argument that the office of president – ultimate enforcer to the nation and the world – is sick, and therefore can never be held by a psychologically sound person.  Anyone aspiring to the position must a priori see individuals, groups, entire populations as the natural objects of coercion.  She must have a principle in her mind based – actively or like a buried splinter or vestigial organ – in neurotic anger and the callousness that forms from it, where it can capriciously ratify force against the heroin addict but not the alcoholic, the prostitute but not the porn star, the head of a private monopoly but not a government monopoly, against oil dictators but not third-world despots, against blacks but not whites.  And, she must so deeply wish to practice this violence and the essential depersonalization of the free spirit, that she seeks the largest possible medium, outside of genocide, for its performance.

This is why I don’t vote.**

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* This is admittedly a purist idea.  Society, very likely, could never be without some legally sanctioned and codified force against some or all of its citizens.  An anarcho-libertarian society is destined to be impossible.  Nevertheless, the concept that force is injurious to the human mind does, I believe, make sense when applied to child-rearing, and underlies Dr. Thomas Gordon's classic Parent Effectiveness Training, which I believe is one of the best guides to parenting.  Respecting the child's mental and emotional processes is the theme behind Gordon's key ideas, which include the well-known "I statement," active listening, "who owns the problem" (adjuring the parent not to interfere in the child's capacity to solve his own problems), and more.

** If you are starving in the wilderness, you may have to eat a pregnant wasp or a pantsuit-wearing caterpillar (http://www.businessinsider.com/un-eating-insects-to-solve-world-hunger-2013-5). I see the upcoming presidential election in this spirit. The thought of contributing, by inaction, to the triumph of an entirely pathological botch, Donald Trump, causes me to compromise my principle of non-involvement. I will be voting.

There's no place like home*

I’ve been wondering if all the shopworn psychology – the pop psych-corrupted “disorder” names and symptoms, all the therapy assumptions and techniques – could be eliminated in favor of an existential approach.  I don’t mean Viktor Frankl’s or Irvin Yalom’s existentialism, which lives in the realm of clinician’s philosophy and client’s intellect.  Rather, a therapy based simply on the question, “Who am I?”, with answers emanating from the oceanic inclusions of the person.

Both people in the room would have to eschew psych thinking, and the client, erasing everything he believes he knows, would sink into the question miles deep, in head silence, before letting a response emerge.  This is because we can read the pieces of our real self – all the elusive and quiddity truths of it – by presenting the body with open-ended questions.  “Who am I?”  “How is my life going right now?”  “What do I care about?”  “What does ‘care’ mean to me?”  The body knows – because it owns – the infinitude of historical feelings that make the facts, far more than our idea-generating, safe-guessing head knows what’s ultimately real.

As we read the body’s archives, we are knowing our psychology, are one with it.  We are knowing physical-emotional history-sensations that are as complexly related to the word “depression” or “love” or “self” or “codependency” as a catalog of chemicals, temperatures, energies and unknowns is to the word “sun.”  When we find feelings of confusion and hurt – that actually did hurt our throat or stomach or eyes – at age six; when we feel in our chest the bleak ’til-Kingdom-come boredom of being under-parented at age four or eight; when we feel love that wants to reach to someone and shame that kills it at age ten; when we feel the emptiness between our eyes of moving away from our unique childhood into awkward and frightening adolescence, and now feel those forces creating the foundation and horizon of our present self; when we see that sensations, with time, have become conclusions – anchors or agitators of attitude and energy – then we become the explanations of ourselves, with no "disorder" labels at all.  We also become the potential solutions to ourselves, because pain found wants and drives its outletting.

If this idea isn’t clear, see its contrast with Yalom's existential approach:

Imagine this scene: three to four hundred people, strangers to each other, are told to pair up and ask their partner one single question: “What do you want?” over and over and over again.

Could anything be simpler?  One innocent question and its answer.  And yet, time after time, I have seen this group exercise evoke unexpectedly powerful feelings.  Often, within minutes, the room rocks with emotion.  Men and women – and these are by no means desperate or needy but successful, well-functioning, well-dressed people who glitter as they walk – are stirred to their depths.  They call out to those who are forever lost – dead or absent parents, spouses, children, friends: “I want to see you again.”  “I want your love.”  “I want to know you’re proud of me.”  “I want you to know I love you and how sorry I am I never told you.”  . . .  “I want the childhood I never had.”  “I want to be healthy – to be young again.”  . . . “I want my life to mean something.”

. . . . “So much wanting.  So much longing.  And so much pain, so close to the surface, only minutes deep.  Destiny pain.  Existence pain.  Pain that is always there, whirring continuously just beneath the membrane of life.”**

I believe that Yalom is wrong, very wrong.  These people, so plaintive and profound, are not crying from “existence” or “destiny pain,” but from actual, deep, unhealed injuries, probably with labyrinthine roots reaching to their childhood.  Imagine if this were not a ripened adult but a fourteen- or seventeen-year-old boy grieving, “I want to know you’re proud of me.”  Contrary to Yalom’s wise philosophizing, no therapist should abandon the young man on a cushion of resignation or contemplation, as if it were right that he should have to be worthy of their pride.  Within his supplication, in the body’s vault is the imprint of his father’s icy rage when he brought home a grade report that was imperfect.  Within his grievance pool is the sudden gutting of his self-value and its replacement by fear of abandonment; fear of shame, death of a bond, a giving of love that evaporates, sense of impossibility, questioning of love, a new dark energy that replaces the happy one, an akathisia-like pushing for success to banish failure.  And later in his life, a sense of meaninglessness or of running nowhere, of covert aloneness that can’t be described to anyone.

In this body continent is found the truth as it was lived, and as it is being lived: answers that come from all time, telescoped.  You can feel the currents shift, your earth move, the past instantly awaken, the answers summoned to the surface when you ask your inner feeling the cosmic questions.  Who, in that deeply rooted home, would want to escape back to the hackneyed labels and explanations of psychology?  Psychology is the personal self that, like love, must be touched to know it.  A session that stays in that touching place, then, can be quiet yet travel very far.

And so today I asked a 19-year-old to fall into the question: “Who am I?”

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* See the related post, Rabbit Hole, at http://pessimisticshrink.blogspot.com/2015/01/rabbit-hole.html. 

** Irvin D. Yalom, Love’s Executioner and other tales of psychotherapy, Basic Books, 1989.  Prologue, p. xi.

In-house #4: The self

I wonder how many clients say to their therapist – “I don’t know who I am,” or “What if I find out that there’s no real self in there?”  One reason I wonder this is my pride – or is it fear? – that the kind of work I do might bring up these questions in people who would otherwise never think of them.  Not long ago a highly successful young man got the feeling that he is living on autopilot, with the controls set by unknown forces.  More recently a new mother described her sense of being detached from all the “happy” people around her, of being “just there.”  From there, we found our way to understandings about the out-of-sync-ness a child may sense when his organic feelings have been submerged.  With the passage of time he becomes more distant from his home, his inchoate self.  He is more an outcast lost in the present world.

I think that this phenomenon – the compromised existence of Self – is the essence of psychopathology.  Its cosmic-ness, its gravity undermine all psychiatric categories.  It effectively replaces them.  Anxious and depressed people have lost, or never had, the spontaneous, active and loved self.  Anorexic girls are building an identity of sick specialness and defiance to replace a failed self.  The self of codependent caregivers is a reflection of others.  The domestically violent man – really a little boy – stalks and clings to, owns and needs the identity of mother and woman grafted into his selfless soul.  Personality disorders are conceived in the first three years of life, the failure of "the psychological birth of the human infant."*  Alcohol chemically paints an empty self; chocolate or binged food fills it; vaporous intellect – the kind that condones priestly pedophiles or supports pseudo-science or racism – replaces it.  Money and material things substitute for self-ego.  Hyper- or indiscriminate sexuality soothes the pain of the child’s absence of love; the absence starved the self.  “Man’s search for meaning”** is the search for a prosthetic meaning core, because the real core – the nurtured self – was ungrown in childhood.

We can “do” therapy to the various presenting problems.  But the more we look for their sources, the more necessarily we’ll run into the dissipated fog of a self, the youngster who lost interests, who lost initiative but for defiance, who fell into the parents’ pool of sickness and neediness, their requests and expectations.  And if we go there – the essential wound needing to be addressed – we’re in a place as abysmal as our own self, and we’re holding a tenuously created person who can’t be let go, at least not without assurances that he is built upon something real.

When a client says to you, “I don’t know who I am,” understand that he is identifying nonexistence as stunning as it would be if the universe suffered nonexistence instead of existence.

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* Margaret Mahler's seminal book.

** The title of Viktor E. Frankl's well-known book.