Harris's etymological failure

This post is a response to some bad psychology that one of my favorite intellectuals, Sam Harris, has created.  Forced to respond to an ugly misrepresentation of his views slopped on Twitter by contrarian idea-monger Glenn Greenwald and others, Sam cited this excerpt from his book, The End of Faith:

“The power that belief has over our emotional lives appears to be total. For every emotion that you are capable of feeling, there is surely a belief that could invoke it in a matter of moments. Consider the following proposition:

“Your daughter is being slowly tortured in an English jail.

“What is it that stands between you and the absolute panic that such a proposition would loose in the mind and body of a person who believed it? Perhaps you do not have a daughter, or you know her to be safely at home, or you believe that English jailors are renowned for their congeniality. Whatever the reason, the door to belief has not yet swung upon its hinges.

“The link between belief and behavior raises the stakes considerably. Some propositions are so dangerous that it may even be ethical to kill people for believing them. This may seem an extraordinary claim, but it merely enunciates an ordinary fact about the world in which we live. Certain beliefs place their adherents beyond the reach of every peaceful means of persuasion, while inspiring them to commit acts of extraordinary violence against others. There is, in fact, no talking to some people.”

Sidestepping the raw nerve of Harris’s remark that “it may even be ethical to kill people for believing” some propositions, I only want to spotlight his psychological error that effectively co-defines belief (or faith), feeling and action.  In his argument, Harris conflates belief with delusional belief, then conflates a delusional belief with any belief that is so emotionally compelling the believer may feel forced to act on it.

Otherwise put, in order to support his own tendentious (delusional) belief that ideas themselves compel antisocial actions (this is the crux of his argument against Islamic ideology), he posits a neurotic or psychotic straw man as the Muslim Everyman, so ensnared by an emotionally pregnant belief that he must comply, and destroy.

But a believer in a philosophical idea or religious script need not be delusional: One may have questioning insight into the idea or script.  One may have a delusional belief or psychotic experience that remains fallow: A schizophrenic may have “command hallucinations” yet refuse or otherwise fail to comply with the command (to hurt someone or commit suicide, as examples).  And even a delusional person may have insight: I suppose I know that not everyone is untrustworthy, but it sure feels that way.

Many if not most people have very fixed beliefs – delusions – that could be called normative and not crazy.  If I believe I am smarter than I am,* I am delusional as my narcissism may absolutely prevent me from accepting the truth.  If you believe your wife is better looking than she is and you reframe all contrary evidence in a self-serving way, you too are delusional.  The difference between dispassionately accepting all the evidence – however disenchanting it may be – and believing something because it feels right or good, is less a toxic dichotomy that separates the scientist from the fundamentalist, and more a slim and permeable difference whose poles meld together in most people’s human nature.

What Harris most fails is, in effect, the etymology of emotion.  The word reflects the fact that feelings move us, or “move out” in the form of action.  Fear will impel us to run away; love to touch or embrace; hate to fight or disown someone; guilt to apologize or make restitution.  It is feeling, not thought, that causes behavior.  We know, also, that feeling makes thinking, as in the Depressive Personality disordered clients I’ve seen whose unseen pain, emotional starvation has forced them to grow a pessimistic and self-protective philosophy of the world.

From a psychologically sound base, therefore, Harris has reason to rewrite his first sentences: "The power that emotion, specifically emotional pain, has to generate, sicken and potentiate our thoughts appears to be total.  Corrupted feeling, from hateful to manically beautiful, will so often create the defense of a congruent or self-protective thought."

Sam, living on the plane of thought, burying his birthright of body-feeling as the foundation of the Self, may never see these things.  His deeper sight is blocked.  As Fritz Perls said, “Lose your mind and come to your senses.” 


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* I have used these examples in my earlier post, Easy crazy, January 19, 2014.

Intervention tidbit #1: The euthymic defense

Three clients: Two women and a man with depression that came – no doubt at all – from adultified, crazy, starved childhoods.  One girl, placed with father and stepmother after her drug-addicted mother disappeared, was the assumptive black sheep, stepmother’s project, kept outside the children’s circle, tolerated in neglect.  The second girl carried the weight of her methamphetamine-addicted parents’ immaturity, lived in shame, parented her sibling.  The boy’s father, insane but for the credentials, made him sleep with him through his early teens, beat and humiliated him.

They all turned twenty-one, donned the adult mantle, got jobs and relationships.  When you’re looking therapeutically at people like these, you are looking not at symptoms but at time: You are seeing years, themes, covers.  And you are seeing bottom-heavy time, as they are seated more in the past than in the present.  This is why they laugh so often.

I work a number of approaches (prescribed and serendipitous) with these individuals – here-and-now relationship problems, hard-hitting insight (which may turn into abreaction) about their past, efforts at ever-deepening diagnosis, and trying to create the warm and confidential “room of truth.”  But there comes a time when the analytical eye must open and what may have seemed the flimsiest of defenses reveals itself to be one of the most profound, obstructing all real progress.  This is the euthymic, or fake happy, character.

Therapists who don’t know this yet, please understand that the client who laughs and smiles when nothing is funny or happy is not a real, grounded person lightening a tough moment of therapy or history.  She is not just leaving the serious plane for a moment of distraction, relief or reward.  And she is certainly not seeing the humor or light in a dreadful but survived situation.  This at-the-ready laugh exists as a constant, a shadow on the mind at all times.  It is the fist to the head by a guard permanently watching and frightening the person away from any emotionally truthful moment.  The client whose character is euthymic has probably never lived on his ground, and is resisting falling to it whenever the slightest stimulus – internal or external cue – manifests.

The frenetically intelligent man wonders why his estranged wife tortures him with her changeable convictions.  He wonders why she doesn’t like him anymore, but gives him another chance, voices hope and failure at the same time, cries then trashes him.  It does seem very mystifying, deserving of my sympathy, until we picture her being unconsciously baffled by his euthymic character that mystifies, in warm and bright colors, his own craziness, going back to his father’s bed and shame.  She sees a sincerely good guy who poisons her.  She breathes in his euthymia and his dystopia, believes them both, and her confusion at it is sent underground.

When I intervene, it’s to pause and ask him to listen to his laugh, see his smile that doesn’t belong there.  I say that this isn’t merely behavior, it is character, a character of running.  I may ask him to look at the instant impulse behind it, then feel the smile and the self-mesmerizing that makes it.  And more, feel the whole character of fake happy.  Where does it come from?  Who would you be without this costume?  Who are you with your wife?

These clients know but do not know their truth.  They had to escape in some way as children, I suppose through "positive thinking" and a thousand other defenses.  And now they are unreal, painting darkness with a smile, craziness and mourning with a laugh.

The radical grain

I’m sometimes envious of psychotherapists whose clients voice the deep Delphic, poetical-scatological, Freudian-perverse stuff in sessions – the demonic bowels-of-life matter which most people don’t whisper for more than a moment in the privacy of their Self.  My appointments feature much less Nabokov and Burroughs, more Seinfeld-type soul.  What do I lack, or what am I doing wrong that keeps the spiritual smeared feces, guttural emotions, incestuous urges locked away?

On rare occasion, though, an individual will reveal something outside the range of normal experience or common theory.  Two individuals in therapies thirteen years apart described suffering identity questions – “Who am I?”  “Why am I not Abraham Lincoln?” – at age three.  So absurd yet so believable.  I could vaguely picture being in that place – a girl standing on a bathroom stool looking in the mirror – feeling detached from herself in reality and principle so early in life.

Another absurdity presented was a middle-aged man’s disclosure that he dreads, and feels deathly wrong to be in, the world itself.  His xenophobia was both microscopic and universal: Being alive in Life felt like a calamity of imminently worsening torture.  His thoughts: “I am the living dead in a live world.  I can’t join anything because I am curled up in a dying womb.  I am screaming yet silent, ripping my mind out yet calm.  The night is beautiful and like death.  I am impossible, this is impossible.”  He was not suicidal.

How did this happen?  What if he is not alone in this state, what if more than a few people feel this way but have not identified the feeling and therefore do not know it is the seat of their psychic structure?  How does the way they are living reflect it?  We talk with them, work with them, are married to them.  Does this say anything about the world, or even about God?

I believe it says, if even one soul is in that place, that ‘the world is in a grain of sand’* and the grain is the imprinted trauma of a birth or early life.

I want to get across that he did not say he felt “dead inside.”  Gilligan writes of maximum security prisoners who, the metastatic endpoint of horrific child abuse, felt non-human:

“Some have told me they feel like robots or zombies, that they feel their bodies are empty or filled with straw, not flesh and blood, that instead of having veins and nerves they have ropes or cords.”**

Shengold, describing “soul murder,” says:

“What happens to the child subject to soul murder is so terrible, so overwhelming, and usually so recurrent that the child must not feel it and cannot register it, and resorts to a massive isolation of feeling, which is maintained by brainwashing (a mixture of confusion, denial, and identifying with the aggressor).  A hypnotic living deadness, a state of existing ‘as if’ one were there, is often the result of chronic early overstimulation or deprivation.”***

And people do claim emotional emptiness or deadness.  My client felt alive in quiet, in isolation, in the starry night above the skyline, and with his music or his food, but in the light of day and activity he was an error.  The sense of this brings to mind the denizens of planet Krikkit in Douglas Adams’ novel Life, The Universe and Everything from his Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series.  The people did not know they were intolerant of existence until the shock of discovery that there was a universe beyond their dust cloud-obscured sky.  After which, everything but them had to be destroyed.

Picture a fear of being awake in the real world.  Every neighborhood feels strange; every scene, like a rapist has pulled you out of a bed.  Your smiles are fake, your words are pretentious ghostwriting for no one.  Anxiety is depression, depression is fear, and absurdity is the gift before you were born.

Human psychology is remarkable.

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* Paraphrasing William Blake’s Auguries of Innocence.  “To see a world in a grain of sand / And a heaven in a wild flower. / Hold infinity in the palm of your hand / And eternity in an hour.”

** James Gilligan, M.D., Violence, Vintage Books, 1997, p. 33.

*** Leonard Shengold, M.D., Soul Murder, The Effects of Childhood Abuse and Deprivation, Fawcett Columbine, New York, 1989, p. 25. 

Mindfulness, or "Look inside. There's a bunny . . . . ."

I believe that the practice of “mindfulness” – which Primal Therapy’s Janov calls “booga booga”* and atheist-neuroscientist Sam Harris should call “woo woo” but doesn’t – is a fool’s anesthesia.  It’s foolish to think that applying statistics to mysticism or Buddhism is science.  It’s foolish to believe that pulling thinking away from your deeper, organic and historical feeling self is “awareness.”  It’s foolish to believe that some delimited or protracted emotional numbness can bring real healing in a complex injured system, or that symptom change is the same as healing.  Or that stress (physical tension) is reduced rather than shoved deeper down by the process of mental force.

Mindfulness is a species of suppression.  Possibly the long-term practice of mindfulness is the equivalent of repression, the holistic thwarting of our energies known to cause and increase** pain and disease.  And of course, to curtail one’s experience of life.

People have come to canonize mindfulness from the mere aura of it.  Psychotherapy has, asleep, breathed the vapors and fallen in: This practice must be unquestionably, beautifully right in its fusion of intellectuality – the adult's first great escape from feelings and childhood – to an obscure aroma of personal acuity, wisdom of the ages, temperance and the pretension of philosophical-mindedness.  But mindfulness is none of these things.  It is unplugging the heart, with eyes wide shut.  It is diverting your experience of some inner wrongness and looking at the bunny outside the window.  No excuse that its grandfather-in-spirit, meditation, bequeathed it the genetics of distraction – the essence of human neglect – in its apotheosis of The Breath.***

And it stupefies me that people can write so, so, so much about meditation and mindfulness, how they can expatiate into a thousand contiguous left fields about breath and the pristine, arid awareness where love, heart and pain have been blanched out.  Look at Sam Harris and Dan Harris’s near-endless conversation about meditation – http://www.samharris.org/blog/item/taming-the-mind – which includes this high-cortical obfuscation by Sam:

And this is why training the mind through meditation makes sense – because it’s the most direct way to influence the mechanics of your own experience.  To remain unaware of this machinery – in particular, the automaticity of thought – is to simply be propelled by it into one situation after another in which you struggle to find lasting fulfillment amid conditions that can’t provide it.

The best I can translate this: ‘Our thinking, which is automatic and somehow intrinsically problematic, will propel us into situations where we struggle but cannot be fulfilled.  It therefore makes sense to doctor the way we receive and experience existence.’  This entitled packet of assumptions is poignant evidence that even a rigorous mind such as Dr. Harris’s must blow smoke when it bypasses feeling as the meaning and source of our thoughts and sees intellect as plow, field and crop in one, as both question and answer.  In that emasculated view, if our thoughts are the problem, fewer thoughts – not expressed feeling – must be the solution.

Psychotherapy should, at least high among other goals, want to help people heal from their psychic injuries and emotional pain.  It can’t, then, continue to maintain mindfulness on its cloudy pedestal.  To constrain and “influence the mechanics” of a mind whose history needs to be heard, held, helped by a caring other is to do harm.  This should be a simple fact that we can all feel.

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* http://cigognenews.blogspot.com/2011/10/on-mindfulness-therapy-or-mindless.html, from Janov’s Reflections on the Human Condition.

** Please see the psychosomatic literature (and my post, “Down Boy, Damn You” -- http://pessimisticshrink.blogspot.com/2014/06/down-boy-damn-you.html), Freud’s writings, and anything by Arthur Janov.

*** Some references to The Breath: http://breathmeditation.org/the-breath-of-life-the-practice-of-breath-meditation, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e0rSmxsVHPE, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4sXBEfIXUno.