Letter to a Young Student
An old man advises a young man.
Published on February 8, 2013
by George Atwood, Ph.D. in Strange Memories
Dear Professor:
I am a 17-year-old student, and I recently ran across your book, The Abyss of Madness. I don’t know much about psychology, but I was able to read and understand your writing. I feel a calling to follow in your footsteps.
I know the road to a career working with severe mental illness is a difficult one, and there has already been discouragement from my family and my teachers about this idea. What people seem unable to understand though is that this work, as you say in your book, opens a window into human existence. As far as I am concerned, no vocation could be more interesting.
I would so appreciate it if you could share any advice you think might be useful for me to keep in mind. I thank you in advance.
Adam
---------------------------
My young friend Adam:
I just received your letter, although I see that you sent it some time ago. I am difficult to reach at this point in my life, on most days preferring solitude. Your note unexpectedly moved me: you remind me of myself more than fifty years ago.
I understand that you are dreaming of a career as a psychotherapist. I see as well that you are looking toward using this work as a way of uncovering the secrets of the human condition. I am letting your request for advice flow over my mind like a waterfall, and will share the thoughts that arise. Here are some of the things you are likely to face in this journey.
Expect opposition that will be fierce and sustained. Are you aware that one of the great difficulties encountered in pursuing the sort of career you are envisioning is the terror of madness itself, something that is everywhere present in our society? Anyone who devotes his life to exploring the inner world of so-called mental illness opens up a territory that most people want to remain closed, for fear of being engulfed by it. We want to believe that sanity rests upon a solid and secure foundation, but looking into the face of madness makes us recognize that this is not the case. The fear of insanity is the primary reason, as far as I have been able to understand it, for the bad treatment and the bad science that have haunted this realm for hundreds of years, down to and including our own time. A deep and enduring line is drawn separating madness from health, “them” from “us.” So anyone exploring madness in search of what makes us all human is a threat from the outset, crossing that all important line and blurring the distinction between the sane and the insane. I recall my own father’s reactions, now so long ago, when I told him of my early interests in this connection:
“Why waste your time on that, George? Those people have something wrong with them. Their DNA is twisted and knotted, and there’s not anything you can do. Go into something useful, like chemistry or physics.”
I am guessing you are hearing something similar from the older generation in your family, and my advice on such discouragement is just this: don’t listen to them. They don’t know what they are talking about, and they are also afraid. My father embraced a completely materialisticphilosophy and ascribed the depressive moods that haunted his life to “too many enchiladas,” or “too many beers last night.” His depressions, which sometimes took on a variety of unpleasant masked forms, were about his young wife’s death, my mother, and about the profound helplessness he also felt as a childhood victim of polio. I don’t know if it would be correct to say he feared madness; but I know he fled from recognizing the sources of his emotional suffering and his materialismhelped him in that flight.
Don’t bother fighting with those who oppose your career choice – that would be a battle destined to be lost. Instead stand by your interests and convictions, and let nothing hold you back.
Here is a second set of thoughts perhaps worthy of bearing in mind. A serious encounter with people suffering with extreme psychological disturbances inevitably confronts us with ourselves, with our owntraumatic histories and all their legacies. It is not possible to journey into the truths of our patients’ lives without being drawn into the truths of our own. I have no knowledge of your personal background, Adam, but I have never known anyone with deep interests in this field who was not a survivor of significant trauma. So whatever your story is, prepare yourself for confronting it in all of its depth and complexity.
Imagine, my young friend, traveling into dark territories of the human soul, places of abuse, of abandonment, of personal annihilation. Visualize the impact of witnessing unbearable conflict and helplessness, of profound decisions to commit suicide, of commitments to starve to death rather than live. Try to picture also though participating in journeys of recovery, wherein life-threatening crises are made to recede and seemingly fatal wounds to the heart are helped to heal. The experience of the clinician who is open to such phenomena is such as to open him or her up as never before, and there is a flooding that then occurs as wave after wave of one’s own personal tragedies come flowing in. The best kept secret of my field is that the healing journey of psychotherapy inevitably and always embraces both participants. If the analyst or therapist is closed off from the possibilities of personal transformation, the challenge of meeting the patient in the space wherein his or her life has foundered will awaken hatred and fear, and the so-called therapy will devolve into a process that freezes rather than liberates.
Imagine also though the fulfillment and joy when one has made a difference that is healing to someone. There is no experience in our professional lives that can compare to this one.
These are my thoughts for today. Write again if the spirit moves you to do so.
George Atwood
I am a 17-year-old student, and I recently ran across your book, The Abyss of Madness. I don’t know much about psychology, but I was able to read and understand your writing. I feel a calling to follow in your footsteps.
I know the road to a career working with severe mental illness is a difficult one, and there has already been discouragement from my family and my teachers about this idea. What people seem unable to understand though is that this work, as you say in your book, opens a window into human existence. As far as I am concerned, no vocation could be more interesting.
I would so appreciate it if you could share any advice you think might be useful for me to keep in mind. I thank you in advance.
Adam
---------------------------
My young friend Adam:
I just received your letter, although I see that you sent it some time ago. I am difficult to reach at this point in my life, on most days preferring solitude. Your note unexpectedly moved me: you remind me of myself more than fifty years ago.
I understand that you are dreaming of a career as a psychotherapist. I see as well that you are looking toward using this work as a way of uncovering the secrets of the human condition. I am letting your request for advice flow over my mind like a waterfall, and will share the thoughts that arise. Here are some of the things you are likely to face in this journey.
Expect opposition that will be fierce and sustained. Are you aware that one of the great difficulties encountered in pursuing the sort of career you are envisioning is the terror of madness itself, something that is everywhere present in our society? Anyone who devotes his life to exploring the inner world of so-called mental illness opens up a territory that most people want to remain closed, for fear of being engulfed by it. We want to believe that sanity rests upon a solid and secure foundation, but looking into the face of madness makes us recognize that this is not the case. The fear of insanity is the primary reason, as far as I have been able to understand it, for the bad treatment and the bad science that have haunted this realm for hundreds of years, down to and including our own time. A deep and enduring line is drawn separating madness from health, “them” from “us.” So anyone exploring madness in search of what makes us all human is a threat from the outset, crossing that all important line and blurring the distinction between the sane and the insane. I recall my own father’s reactions, now so long ago, when I told him of my early interests in this connection:
“Why waste your time on that, George? Those people have something wrong with them. Their DNA is twisted and knotted, and there’s not anything you can do. Go into something useful, like chemistry or physics.”
I am guessing you are hearing something similar from the older generation in your family, and my advice on such discouragement is just this: don’t listen to them. They don’t know what they are talking about, and they are also afraid. My father embraced a completely materialisticphilosophy and ascribed the depressive moods that haunted his life to “too many enchiladas,” or “too many beers last night.” His depressions, which sometimes took on a variety of unpleasant masked forms, were about his young wife’s death, my mother, and about the profound helplessness he also felt as a childhood victim of polio. I don’t know if it would be correct to say he feared madness; but I know he fled from recognizing the sources of his emotional suffering and his materialismhelped him in that flight.
Don’t bother fighting with those who oppose your career choice – that would be a battle destined to be lost. Instead stand by your interests and convictions, and let nothing hold you back.
Here is a second set of thoughts perhaps worthy of bearing in mind. A serious encounter with people suffering with extreme psychological disturbances inevitably confronts us with ourselves, with our owntraumatic histories and all their legacies. It is not possible to journey into the truths of our patients’ lives without being drawn into the truths of our own. I have no knowledge of your personal background, Adam, but I have never known anyone with deep interests in this field who was not a survivor of significant trauma. So whatever your story is, prepare yourself for confronting it in all of its depth and complexity.
Imagine, my young friend, traveling into dark territories of the human soul, places of abuse, of abandonment, of personal annihilation. Visualize the impact of witnessing unbearable conflict and helplessness, of profound decisions to commit suicide, of commitments to starve to death rather than live. Try to picture also though participating in journeys of recovery, wherein life-threatening crises are made to recede and seemingly fatal wounds to the heart are helped to heal. The experience of the clinician who is open to such phenomena is such as to open him or her up as never before, and there is a flooding that then occurs as wave after wave of one’s own personal tragedies come flowing in. The best kept secret of my field is that the healing journey of psychotherapy inevitably and always embraces both participants. If the analyst or therapist is closed off from the possibilities of personal transformation, the challenge of meeting the patient in the space wherein his or her life has foundered will awaken hatred and fear, and the so-called therapy will devolve into a process that freezes rather than liberates.
Imagine also though the fulfillment and joy when one has made a difference that is healing to someone. There is no experience in our professional lives that can compare to this one.
These are my thoughts for today. Write again if the spirit moves you to do so.
George Atwood
Letter to a Young Student: Part 2
An Old Man Continues to Advise a Young Man
Published on February 10, 2013
by George Atwood, Ph.D. in Strange Memories
Dear Professor:
How can I thank you enough for your wonderful letter? I feel reluctant to be asking you to elaborate on the points you raised, because what can I offer you to make your effort worthwhile? Please know I will take whatever you have to say very seriously, and maybe can pass your words along to some of my friends.
Can you tell me something more about the obstacles I am likely to face in committing my life to the study of madness? I think I see that there is a treasure of knowledge to be found in this journey, but what further warnings can you give about the dragons that are likely to appear along the way?
Adam
Dear Adam:
Your talk of dragons is amusing, and strangely helpful as I think about your search for guidance. There are indeed dragons, and some of them breathe fire. I will try to describe further the dangers and difficulties to be faced if you follow the path suggested in your earlier letter.
One dragon is the madness itself, the study of which you apparently have made your destination in life. You may ask though: what really is madness? After spending half a century studying the matter, here is how I would sum it up. Madness is not an illness or disease, it is not a condition existing somehow inside a person, and it is not a thing of any kind having objective existence. Madness is an experience a person may have, one involving in its essential core a fall into nonbeing. Madness is the dissolution of all order and a descent into chaos. It is the greatest catastrophe of subjectivity that can happen to a person. The felt reality of the world disintegrates and the enduring solidity and integrity of one’s sense of selfhood – the ongoing experience of ‘I am’ – becomes tenuous, unstable, and even vanishes. Madness is the abyss and there is nothing more frightening, not even death.
Our minds can generate meanings and images of our deaths: we can picture the world surviving us, and we can identify with those that come later or otherwise immortalize ourselves through our works. We can rageagainst the dying of the light, and we can look forward to reunions with lost loved ones. We can think about the meaninglessness of human existence and its finitude. We can be relieved that all our sorrows will soon be over. We can even admire ourselves for being the only creatures in existence, as far as we know, who perceive their own wretched destiny to be extinguished. The abyss of madness offers no such possibilities: it is the end of all possible responses and meanings, the erasure of a world in which there is anything coherent to respond to, the melting away of anyone to engage in a response. It is much more scary than death, and this is proven by the fact that people in annihilationfear – the terror of madness – so often commit suicide rather than allow themselves to be engulfed by it. Death is a piece of cake compared to the abyss.
The reason I say madness is a dragon has to do with the feelings a clinical observer may have when empathy is extended to such a subjective state. One draws close to a realm in which there are no orienting landmarks, no coherent purposes and desires that point to a future, no organized recollections establishing a continuous past that can be looked back upon. The ordering structures of existence itself collapse, all sense of personal identity becomes erased, and one may fear being pulled out of one’s sanity and into the nothingness. This is the terror of madness, and it affects all those who come into its vicinity.
So, what is one to do? How can we, as explorers of the human soul, enter this dark territory? I think we need a map of that chaos, a picture of the variations we will encounter, and some general guidelines as to how we might respond to the disastrous human situations that are encountered. Also needed will be protections from how we are ourselves perceived. A terrible toll may be taken on the clinician who may be viewed as a persecutor, as a god, or even as a persecuting god. An even greater injury may be inflicted on the patient, someone already in terrible trouble who now faces being seen as insane.
Psychotherapy is a world within the world, one in which patient and therapist gaze into each other’s eyes and see themselves mirrored in ways that may clash profoundly with what they feel is true or most deeply need. The mismatching of such images leads to all manner of difficulties for both parties, often spiraling into chronic impasses and the loss of the possibility of a healing connection.
How, you may ask, can we be shielded against the terror of going mad and against the potential violence to ourselves of the interplay with those who are lost in chaos? What protections can there be that will not operate as well at the expense of the patient? The key lies in one thing only: the power of human understanding. We must understand annihilation states and all the signs and symptoms expressing a person’s struggle with such experiences. We must know the symbols typically used to represent these states of mind, images that are often concretized or reified, i.e., treated as tangible, substantial realities. We must use our understanding then to discover responses to our patients’ crises that will help them refind a personal center and feel included again in the human community. This is the work of clinical psychotherapy research, a field now on the threshold of a new golden age as the older ideas about objectified “mental illnesses” recede and a new emphasis on phenomenology arises. Go forward, Adam, the future is very bright!
Let me offer a thought on objectifying systems of psychiatric diagnosis, which you will inevitably encounter along the path of your dreams. Sometimes these systems turn into dragons themselves. There is nothing wrong with careful studies of the symptoms and signs of psychological disturbances, and with efforts to classify the richly varied phenomena one sees in this field. Ordering principles need to be applied, so that we are not just left adrift in a sea of confusion. A problem arises however when the classifications we impose on the variations that are observed become reified and objectified, turned into mental diseases imagined as existing somehow inside the people we seek to understand. Our patients in extreme distress reify their fantasies, generally in order to substantiate personal realities that have come under assault and are threatened with dissolution. We in parallel often reify our diagnostic concepts, ascribing the chaotic manifestations confronting us to a disease process inside the patient. Such a locating of the problem in the internal, not grounded in any actual scientific knowledge, basically takes the clinician off the hook. He or she is not implicated in what is seen; instead the clinician sits high and dry, observing and classifying from a position of serene detachment, wrapped in a cordon sanitaire. This shields us from feeling responsible for how we are experienced and utterly neutralizes the power of the patient’s attributions to attack or displace our own ways of defining ourselves. The problem is that the clinician is implicated: what people show us depends in part on how we are responding to them: human experience is always embedded in a relational context. If that response organizes itself around an objectifying psychiatric diagnosis, one can expect to see reactions to the distancing and invalidation that is involved. If those very reactions are then ascribed again to the supposed mental illness, the distancing is deepened and the disjunction rigidifies. So learn whatever diagnostic system confronts you my friend, but do not let it become your commanding, reifying viewpoint. Be guided instead by attention to your patients’ experiences and by reflections on your own. We are still at the beginning of exploring this strange and complicated country, and perhaps there are important discoveries you will share in.
I hope these suggestions and ideas are giving something to you Adam. I want you to write again if there are more questions that arise.
George Atwood
How can I thank you enough for your wonderful letter? I feel reluctant to be asking you to elaborate on the points you raised, because what can I offer you to make your effort worthwhile? Please know I will take whatever you have to say very seriously, and maybe can pass your words along to some of my friends.
Can you tell me something more about the obstacles I am likely to face in committing my life to the study of madness? I think I see that there is a treasure of knowledge to be found in this journey, but what further warnings can you give about the dragons that are likely to appear along the way?
Adam
Dear Adam:
Your talk of dragons is amusing, and strangely helpful as I think about your search for guidance. There are indeed dragons, and some of them breathe fire. I will try to describe further the dangers and difficulties to be faced if you follow the path suggested in your earlier letter.
One dragon is the madness itself, the study of which you apparently have made your destination in life. You may ask though: what really is madness? After spending half a century studying the matter, here is how I would sum it up. Madness is not an illness or disease, it is not a condition existing somehow inside a person, and it is not a thing of any kind having objective existence. Madness is an experience a person may have, one involving in its essential core a fall into nonbeing. Madness is the dissolution of all order and a descent into chaos. It is the greatest catastrophe of subjectivity that can happen to a person. The felt reality of the world disintegrates and the enduring solidity and integrity of one’s sense of selfhood – the ongoing experience of ‘I am’ – becomes tenuous, unstable, and even vanishes. Madness is the abyss and there is nothing more frightening, not even death.
Our minds can generate meanings and images of our deaths: we can picture the world surviving us, and we can identify with those that come later or otherwise immortalize ourselves through our works. We can rageagainst the dying of the light, and we can look forward to reunions with lost loved ones. We can think about the meaninglessness of human existence and its finitude. We can be relieved that all our sorrows will soon be over. We can even admire ourselves for being the only creatures in existence, as far as we know, who perceive their own wretched destiny to be extinguished. The abyss of madness offers no such possibilities: it is the end of all possible responses and meanings, the erasure of a world in which there is anything coherent to respond to, the melting away of anyone to engage in a response. It is much more scary than death, and this is proven by the fact that people in annihilationfear – the terror of madness – so often commit suicide rather than allow themselves to be engulfed by it. Death is a piece of cake compared to the abyss.
The reason I say madness is a dragon has to do with the feelings a clinical observer may have when empathy is extended to such a subjective state. One draws close to a realm in which there are no orienting landmarks, no coherent purposes and desires that point to a future, no organized recollections establishing a continuous past that can be looked back upon. The ordering structures of existence itself collapse, all sense of personal identity becomes erased, and one may fear being pulled out of one’s sanity and into the nothingness. This is the terror of madness, and it affects all those who come into its vicinity.
So, what is one to do? How can we, as explorers of the human soul, enter this dark territory? I think we need a map of that chaos, a picture of the variations we will encounter, and some general guidelines as to how we might respond to the disastrous human situations that are encountered. Also needed will be protections from how we are ourselves perceived. A terrible toll may be taken on the clinician who may be viewed as a persecutor, as a god, or even as a persecuting god. An even greater injury may be inflicted on the patient, someone already in terrible trouble who now faces being seen as insane.
Psychotherapy is a world within the world, one in which patient and therapist gaze into each other’s eyes and see themselves mirrored in ways that may clash profoundly with what they feel is true or most deeply need. The mismatching of such images leads to all manner of difficulties for both parties, often spiraling into chronic impasses and the loss of the possibility of a healing connection.
How, you may ask, can we be shielded against the terror of going mad and against the potential violence to ourselves of the interplay with those who are lost in chaos? What protections can there be that will not operate as well at the expense of the patient? The key lies in one thing only: the power of human understanding. We must understand annihilation states and all the signs and symptoms expressing a person’s struggle with such experiences. We must know the symbols typically used to represent these states of mind, images that are often concretized or reified, i.e., treated as tangible, substantial realities. We must use our understanding then to discover responses to our patients’ crises that will help them refind a personal center and feel included again in the human community. This is the work of clinical psychotherapy research, a field now on the threshold of a new golden age as the older ideas about objectified “mental illnesses” recede and a new emphasis on phenomenology arises. Go forward, Adam, the future is very bright!
Let me offer a thought on objectifying systems of psychiatric diagnosis, which you will inevitably encounter along the path of your dreams. Sometimes these systems turn into dragons themselves. There is nothing wrong with careful studies of the symptoms and signs of psychological disturbances, and with efforts to classify the richly varied phenomena one sees in this field. Ordering principles need to be applied, so that we are not just left adrift in a sea of confusion. A problem arises however when the classifications we impose on the variations that are observed become reified and objectified, turned into mental diseases imagined as existing somehow inside the people we seek to understand. Our patients in extreme distress reify their fantasies, generally in order to substantiate personal realities that have come under assault and are threatened with dissolution. We in parallel often reify our diagnostic concepts, ascribing the chaotic manifestations confronting us to a disease process inside the patient. Such a locating of the problem in the internal, not grounded in any actual scientific knowledge, basically takes the clinician off the hook. He or she is not implicated in what is seen; instead the clinician sits high and dry, observing and classifying from a position of serene detachment, wrapped in a cordon sanitaire. This shields us from feeling responsible for how we are experienced and utterly neutralizes the power of the patient’s attributions to attack or displace our own ways of defining ourselves. The problem is that the clinician is implicated: what people show us depends in part on how we are responding to them: human experience is always embedded in a relational context. If that response organizes itself around an objectifying psychiatric diagnosis, one can expect to see reactions to the distancing and invalidation that is involved. If those very reactions are then ascribed again to the supposed mental illness, the distancing is deepened and the disjunction rigidifies. So learn whatever diagnostic system confronts you my friend, but do not let it become your commanding, reifying viewpoint. Be guided instead by attention to your patients’ experiences and by reflections on your own. We are still at the beginning of exploring this strange and complicated country, and perhaps there are important discoveries you will share in.
I hope these suggestions and ideas are giving something to you Adam. I want you to write again if there are more questions that arise.
George Atwood
Letters to a Young Student: Part 3
An old man continues to hold forth to a young man
Published on February 21, 2013
by George Atwood, Ph.D. in Strange Memories
Dear Professor:
Thank you again for another good letter. Since you asked me to write again if more questions came up, here is one. In your book Abyss of Madness you said that as a young man you thought it possible to discover the secrets of human nature through the study of the most severe mental illnesses. What are the secrets you have discovered after 50 years of this exploring?
Adam
Dear Adam:
I can only say that the ultimate secrets of the human psyche, if such things exist, have not unveiled themselves to me over the course of my career. I think they will remain a Holy Grail for the searcher, a utopian goal inspiring travels into the farthest reaches of madness but never being literally attained. There is however one central discovery that has occurred as a result of my journey: myself. Amid the shattered hearts, the broken minds, the annihilations, it is as if the pattern of my own life was somehow inscribed. Exploring the souls of my patients therefore has led me again and again to the depths and origins of my own lifeworld. Could it be, Adam, that the study of madness presents us all with opportunities to discover who we actually are? Could it also be that the effort to assist those who come to us presents us a chance to heal our own wounds as well?
Perhaps it would be good for me to tell you some more details about my own early experiences in this connection. My first seriously challenging patient, a young woman I met almost 40 years ago, believed with all her heart that she was a part of the Holy Trinity and that she was one with God. Her story is given in the first chapter of Abyss of Madness. She and I, over the tumultuous course of our early relationship, came to anunderstanding of her situation as centrally relating to a catastrophe that had occurred in her childhood: the sudden suicide of her beloved father. I saw how the tragic loss had bisected her youth into before and after, into father and no father. As our shared journey continued and her healing began, I became witness to a gradual smoothing out of the traumaticbifurcation with the emergence of feelings of furious rage, of heartbreaking sorrow, of annihilating invalidation. At some point along the way – I cannot say precisely when – it dawned on me that in looking at her life I was also seeing an image of my own. You see, my childhood also was divided into a before and an after, the separation caused by the sudden death of my mother when I was a young boy. In coming to the tragedy that had disastrously affected my patient’s development, I had been returned to the tragedy of my own. In witnessing her slow healing and recovery, in turn, my own healing – continuing down to the present day – had a chance to begin. The great German philosopher-historian Wilhelm Dilthey famously proclaimed that in the study of persons in the so-called human sciences, all understanding is a matter of “the rediscovery of the I in the Thou.” It follows from this elegant idea, to my mind anyway, that in the discovery of the Thou, we find a mirror in which our own souls are made visible.
Here are some additional thoughts that come forward as I think about your question regarding the secrets of human nature. I shall introduce them by describing the adventures of a young man I knew many years ago. He came to me just before a long psychiatric hospitalization. He said he had discovered the secret, not of human nature, but of the universe as a whole: the key to all of creation. I asked him to tell me about this amazing secret. He said it was revealed to him in a vision in which he saw the interrelatedness of all things. The vision encompassed the whole of the cosmos in a single image, abolishing all separateness and isolation in an overpowering, radiant unity. He had discovered the heart and soul of existence itself, and repeatedly shouted the secret out: “ALL IS ONE, ALL IS ONE, ALL IS ONE!”
I was curious about the personal context of this unifying vision. His life story was a sad one, involving a world in which the center failed to hold. He had been a golden child, a precocious genius who from an early age had shown stunning abilities in both science and the arts. His parentsconsidered him to be a gift from God, filling their otherwise empty lives with a transcendent meaning. Complying with their expectations, the boy grew up with A-plus achievements in every endeavor, and the parents believed they had brought a great man into the world. The breakdown occurred on the eve of his graduation from college, a summa cum laude on the threshold of glorious success in life. One little problem tripped him up: a girlfriend he had become very attached to decided to end their relationship. His love for her, such as it was, expressed a part of him that contained, tenuously, his personal truth. Being a stellar achiever had always come easy and fit perfectly into his parents’ needs. Losing the girlfriend was different; it was a disaster beyond imagining for a boy who had so little he could call truly his own. It was the end of a life that had scarcely begun. Unspeakable agonies followed the loss, a suffering beyond all comprehension in which everything that had seemed together was now torn asunder.
This was when the vision of cosmic oneness supervened. Every atom and subatomic particle, and every galaxy supercluster came together before him, in a vast network of interdependent relations. It was a breathtakingly beautiful tapestry encompassing the totality of all existing things. People in this young man’s social world – family, friends, college teachers – thought he had gone crazy and the decision was made to hospitalize him. What he was doing, however, was putting the world back together again, reconnecting all that had fallen apart.
I will begin with what I have to say about this man with the idea that his vision was utterly, profoundly a true one. He had indeed encountered a secret of the universe, one that has been thoroughly hidden from us in this age of atomism. We think of our own lives as a matter of isolated minds existing alongside each other, little separate unit-selves dropped into the world out of their mothers’ wombs. We imagine our minds as having interiors, filled with all manner of mental contents (thoughts, desires, memories, etc.), but subsisting somehow separately from a surrounding external environment. The estrangement between internal and external is paralleled by a dualism between our bodies and our minds. The universe itself, in turn, we visualize as a vast space populated by all things great and small, some of them causally interacting with one another but each of them having its own separate and solitary existence. We are hypnotized by this alienating and fragmenting atomism, regarding it as just the way things are rather than as the ontology that it is. My young man, propelled by a catastrophic experience of the disintegration of the world, broke through the trance of this philosophy to a sense of the unity of all beings. I found his thinking to be powerful, although at the time I met him he was unable to do much with it other than to cry and shout.
Working with those who dwell in the extreme range of psychological disorder presents us with dramatic signs of the embeddedness of our very selfhood and sense of the reality of the world in contexts shared with other human beings. One sees, for example, how the “symptoms” of so-called mental illness do not emanate from a wholly internal condition afflicting the isolated individual, but instead vary as a function of the response that person encounters from others. When responses felt as objectification and invalidation are supplanted by experiences of being understood and included in the community of others, striking shifts occur in delusions and hallucinations, and chronic annihilation states recede. C.G. Jung, the great psychiatrist, acknowledged this in his famous words: “Schizophrenics cease to be schizophrenic at the moment they feel understood.” We, as clinicians, are therefore implicated in the psychological disturbances we are called upon to treat, and the wounds requiring healing in our patients are matched by the wounds we carry in our own hearts.
But there is more. The universe exists in such a way as to generate the possibility of our own coming into being, and it is as it is in part because we are here to be aware of it. Human beings are implicated in the way in which the world becomes manifest, and at the same time the study of the cosmos is the universe becoming conscious of itself. The observer and the observed, in both the natural sciences and the human sciences, are inseparable from each other, and the constituents of reality, on smaller and smaller scales, turn out to be interdependent, entangled phenomena rather than fully separable units somehow subsisting in ontological solitude.
In other words, Adam, my young man was absolutely right. You might wonder what happened to him. It is sad. He was diagnosed on the basis of the grandiose euphoria he showed: manic-depressive illness was the Dx. The treatment provided to him included multiple hospitalizations, a massive amount of electroconvulsive therapy, and an ever-varying succession of antipsychotic drugs. The last time I saw him, fifteen years into this so-called treatment, he was doing poorly – depressed, confused, unable to work, obese, and… no girlfriend. I wonder what the outcome might have been if someone instead had been able to sit down with him – for a day, or a week, or a year, or a decade – and discuss what it meant that all is one. Is it not possible that good things might have emerged from such conversations?
A final thought regarding the story I have been telling: how is it that this young man, in captivity to his parents but also in a struggle to render a shattered universe whole, was a mirror in which I could find a reflection of myself? When I was a young college student, scarcely beyond your age Adam, I made a discovery of my own that was very similar. In the context of an exposure to Zen Buddhism, it came to me that all dualism is false: every one of the great contrasts in our culture’s history and philosophy – internal/external, matter/spirit, masculine/ feminine, good/evil, freedom/determinism, I/You – were illusory, and our belief in them was a trance from which we needed to awaken. Looking back, I see the philosophy of monistic adualism I then adopted as an early answer to the shattering of my own world, and to the lonely isolation into which I plunged in the aftermath of my mother’s death. I also see it as a precursor to the unifying theories and philosophical ideas in which I have come to believe.
There you are, my friend, and I am hoping these stories and reflections will be of help to you. Please stay in touch.
George Atwood
Thank you again for another good letter. Since you asked me to write again if more questions came up, here is one. In your book Abyss of Madness you said that as a young man you thought it possible to discover the secrets of human nature through the study of the most severe mental illnesses. What are the secrets you have discovered after 50 years of this exploring?
Adam
Dear Adam:
I can only say that the ultimate secrets of the human psyche, if such things exist, have not unveiled themselves to me over the course of my career. I think they will remain a Holy Grail for the searcher, a utopian goal inspiring travels into the farthest reaches of madness but never being literally attained. There is however one central discovery that has occurred as a result of my journey: myself. Amid the shattered hearts, the broken minds, the annihilations, it is as if the pattern of my own life was somehow inscribed. Exploring the souls of my patients therefore has led me again and again to the depths and origins of my own lifeworld. Could it be, Adam, that the study of madness presents us all with opportunities to discover who we actually are? Could it also be that the effort to assist those who come to us presents us a chance to heal our own wounds as well?
Perhaps it would be good for me to tell you some more details about my own early experiences in this connection. My first seriously challenging patient, a young woman I met almost 40 years ago, believed with all her heart that she was a part of the Holy Trinity and that she was one with God. Her story is given in the first chapter of Abyss of Madness. She and I, over the tumultuous course of our early relationship, came to anunderstanding of her situation as centrally relating to a catastrophe that had occurred in her childhood: the sudden suicide of her beloved father. I saw how the tragic loss had bisected her youth into before and after, into father and no father. As our shared journey continued and her healing began, I became witness to a gradual smoothing out of the traumaticbifurcation with the emergence of feelings of furious rage, of heartbreaking sorrow, of annihilating invalidation. At some point along the way – I cannot say precisely when – it dawned on me that in looking at her life I was also seeing an image of my own. You see, my childhood also was divided into a before and an after, the separation caused by the sudden death of my mother when I was a young boy. In coming to the tragedy that had disastrously affected my patient’s development, I had been returned to the tragedy of my own. In witnessing her slow healing and recovery, in turn, my own healing – continuing down to the present day – had a chance to begin. The great German philosopher-historian Wilhelm Dilthey famously proclaimed that in the study of persons in the so-called human sciences, all understanding is a matter of “the rediscovery of the I in the Thou.” It follows from this elegant idea, to my mind anyway, that in the discovery of the Thou, we find a mirror in which our own souls are made visible.
Here are some additional thoughts that come forward as I think about your question regarding the secrets of human nature. I shall introduce them by describing the adventures of a young man I knew many years ago. He came to me just before a long psychiatric hospitalization. He said he had discovered the secret, not of human nature, but of the universe as a whole: the key to all of creation. I asked him to tell me about this amazing secret. He said it was revealed to him in a vision in which he saw the interrelatedness of all things. The vision encompassed the whole of the cosmos in a single image, abolishing all separateness and isolation in an overpowering, radiant unity. He had discovered the heart and soul of existence itself, and repeatedly shouted the secret out: “ALL IS ONE, ALL IS ONE, ALL IS ONE!”
I was curious about the personal context of this unifying vision. His life story was a sad one, involving a world in which the center failed to hold. He had been a golden child, a precocious genius who from an early age had shown stunning abilities in both science and the arts. His parentsconsidered him to be a gift from God, filling their otherwise empty lives with a transcendent meaning. Complying with their expectations, the boy grew up with A-plus achievements in every endeavor, and the parents believed they had brought a great man into the world. The breakdown occurred on the eve of his graduation from college, a summa cum laude on the threshold of glorious success in life. One little problem tripped him up: a girlfriend he had become very attached to decided to end their relationship. His love for her, such as it was, expressed a part of him that contained, tenuously, his personal truth. Being a stellar achiever had always come easy and fit perfectly into his parents’ needs. Losing the girlfriend was different; it was a disaster beyond imagining for a boy who had so little he could call truly his own. It was the end of a life that had scarcely begun. Unspeakable agonies followed the loss, a suffering beyond all comprehension in which everything that had seemed together was now torn asunder.
This was when the vision of cosmic oneness supervened. Every atom and subatomic particle, and every galaxy supercluster came together before him, in a vast network of interdependent relations. It was a breathtakingly beautiful tapestry encompassing the totality of all existing things. People in this young man’s social world – family, friends, college teachers – thought he had gone crazy and the decision was made to hospitalize him. What he was doing, however, was putting the world back together again, reconnecting all that had fallen apart.
I will begin with what I have to say about this man with the idea that his vision was utterly, profoundly a true one. He had indeed encountered a secret of the universe, one that has been thoroughly hidden from us in this age of atomism. We think of our own lives as a matter of isolated minds existing alongside each other, little separate unit-selves dropped into the world out of their mothers’ wombs. We imagine our minds as having interiors, filled with all manner of mental contents (thoughts, desires, memories, etc.), but subsisting somehow separately from a surrounding external environment. The estrangement between internal and external is paralleled by a dualism between our bodies and our minds. The universe itself, in turn, we visualize as a vast space populated by all things great and small, some of them causally interacting with one another but each of them having its own separate and solitary existence. We are hypnotized by this alienating and fragmenting atomism, regarding it as just the way things are rather than as the ontology that it is. My young man, propelled by a catastrophic experience of the disintegration of the world, broke through the trance of this philosophy to a sense of the unity of all beings. I found his thinking to be powerful, although at the time I met him he was unable to do much with it other than to cry and shout.
Working with those who dwell in the extreme range of psychological disorder presents us with dramatic signs of the embeddedness of our very selfhood and sense of the reality of the world in contexts shared with other human beings. One sees, for example, how the “symptoms” of so-called mental illness do not emanate from a wholly internal condition afflicting the isolated individual, but instead vary as a function of the response that person encounters from others. When responses felt as objectification and invalidation are supplanted by experiences of being understood and included in the community of others, striking shifts occur in delusions and hallucinations, and chronic annihilation states recede. C.G. Jung, the great psychiatrist, acknowledged this in his famous words: “Schizophrenics cease to be schizophrenic at the moment they feel understood.” We, as clinicians, are therefore implicated in the psychological disturbances we are called upon to treat, and the wounds requiring healing in our patients are matched by the wounds we carry in our own hearts.
But there is more. The universe exists in such a way as to generate the possibility of our own coming into being, and it is as it is in part because we are here to be aware of it. Human beings are implicated in the way in which the world becomes manifest, and at the same time the study of the cosmos is the universe becoming conscious of itself. The observer and the observed, in both the natural sciences and the human sciences, are inseparable from each other, and the constituents of reality, on smaller and smaller scales, turn out to be interdependent, entangled phenomena rather than fully separable units somehow subsisting in ontological solitude.
In other words, Adam, my young man was absolutely right. You might wonder what happened to him. It is sad. He was diagnosed on the basis of the grandiose euphoria he showed: manic-depressive illness was the Dx. The treatment provided to him included multiple hospitalizations, a massive amount of electroconvulsive therapy, and an ever-varying succession of antipsychotic drugs. The last time I saw him, fifteen years into this so-called treatment, he was doing poorly – depressed, confused, unable to work, obese, and… no girlfriend. I wonder what the outcome might have been if someone instead had been able to sit down with him – for a day, or a week, or a year, or a decade – and discuss what it meant that all is one. Is it not possible that good things might have emerged from such conversations?
A final thought regarding the story I have been telling: how is it that this young man, in captivity to his parents but also in a struggle to render a shattered universe whole, was a mirror in which I could find a reflection of myself? When I was a young college student, scarcely beyond your age Adam, I made a discovery of my own that was very similar. In the context of an exposure to Zen Buddhism, it came to me that all dualism is false: every one of the great contrasts in our culture’s history and philosophy – internal/external, matter/spirit, masculine/ feminine, good/evil, freedom/determinism, I/You – were illusory, and our belief in them was a trance from which we needed to awaken. Looking back, I see the philosophy of monistic adualism I then adopted as an early answer to the shattering of my own world, and to the lonely isolation into which I plunged in the aftermath of my mother’s death. I also see it as a precursor to the unifying theories and philosophical ideas in which I have come to believe.
There you are, my friend, and I am hoping these stories and reflections will be of help to you. Please stay in touch.
George Atwood
Letter to a Young Student, Part 4
An old man carries on further to a young man
Published on March 9, 2013
by George Atwood, Ph.D. in Strange Memories
Dear Professor:
I was very interested in your personal stories and in the clinical experiences you described. I sense from your book and from your letters that you have found joy in being a psychologist and psychotherapist. My family members tell me that my planned career is a recipe for misery and that I am out of my mind. Tell me more about the rewards of your work and what they mean to you. Say something also about the suffering that might be involved in this career, which everyone keeps warning me about. Thank you so much.
Adam
Dear Adam:
Once again I am going to let your questions flow over my mind, and I hope the thoughts that come forth will help you. The intensive psychotherapy of severe mental illness, so-called, offers two intertwining opportunities. On the one hand, one has a chance to give help to a fellow human being who is in trouble, perhaps the deepest psychological trouble that there is; on the other hand, one encounters phenomena that are at the far extreme of human experience, showing fundamental issues of all our lives with extravagant clarity and drama. This is the heart and soul of psychoanalysis, ever since it first appeared in the thinking of Sigmund Freud. Psychoanalysis is and always has been an approach to the healing of the wounded soul, and also an exploring of the depths of human existence and human nature. When I was your age, now so many years ago, I saw these twin pathways of the psychoanalytic enterprise, and I could not hold back from making a total commitment to the work. Is there anything that could possibly be as interesting or as important?
You ask, Adam, about the rewards of working in my field, and about the suffering that is also sometimes involved. Regarding the latter, here is what comes to mind today. To engage with people in the extremes of psychological disorder is to cast oneself into the chaos – it means to embark upon a journey without an outcome that is certain, often with harrowing developments along the way, always requiring a commitment that is absolute.
Sometimes this journey eventuates in a healing and a thriving; in other instances all our efforts may fail and we are consigned then to bear witness to someone’s devastation. Therein lies the suffering, in the knowledge that nothing is assured and that catastrophe is always at hand. On the other side, our commitment, being absolute, means there also is hope for healing and recovery, and there is something utterly wonderful about pursuing this hope with nothing held back. If things do not work out, and perhaps there is a suicide or some other incontrovertible disaster, we die a thousand deaths. If on the other hand a better way is found, the Phoenix rises from the ashes, and one then has the sense of having participated in the sacred.
During my college years I had a professor who repeatedly warned his students away from pursuing individual psychotherapy as a career. “How many people can you hope to help in a lifetime,” he asked, “twenty-five or thirty as a maximum, right?” It was his idea that our field should devote itself to the prevention of psychological disorders, through various social engineering programs based on behaviorist principles of reward andpunishment. I found his thoughts bleak and very depressing, because he was attacking the dream that brought me into psychology in the first place. I was too young and inexperienced to be able to offer much of a coherent response, but I knew I disliked what he was saying intensely. I now think that individual psychotherapy is itself the single most powerful preventive measure one could possibly find, because it has become apparent to me that giving help to one person can save the whole world. Psychological disorders arise out of personal histories of traumaticexperience, histories that are in turn embedded in complex intergenerational cycles. Traumas that remain unprocessed, that perhaps are not even recognized as having happened, are inevitably passed on to the next generation, and the next; and so it goes, as chains of historical causation reach across the years and even the decades and the centuries.
Consider Adam the potential then that lies within even a single instance of individual psychotherapy that works out well, as the incomparable power of human understanding is brought to bear on a life that otherwise might have unfolded as just another destructive link in the historical sequence. The chain is broken, and rather than darkness being delivered down upon one’s descendants, an illumination is bequeathed as the effects of the healing are transmitted instead. What my teacher failed to take into account is that healing is contagious, radiating into the human surround and having repercussions that flow indefinitely into the future. What an ass he was! And yet, we could ask what were his traumas, and why did he imagine he could fix them by his vast program of behaviorist engineering? As I meditate upon these questions, a picture of his unacknowledged despair comes into view. Behaviorism was like that: an intellectual movement turning toward the purely physical but predicated ultimately on the loss of hope for human connection.
And then there are the discoveries that may occur as we follow up in pursuit of what your family is calling this “recipe for misery.” Your relatives are utterly, profoundly wrong, Adam, and you should not listen to them. Suffering will find you if you make this journey, but so will joy.
I will give a single example. This is about the famous actress, Patty Duke. Imagine the following: as young woman she set off on a mission to rescue America from foreign influences, which she believed had infiltrated the highest offices of our government. A disastrous attempt to physically remove foreign intruders from the White House in Washington DC was followed up by a devastating depression. Then it emerged that her earliest years were ones of enslavement to the entertainment industry: her parents surrendered her to television agents who made her a nationally acclaimed star, but at the price of a stolen childhood. Finally, as an adult, she was diagnosed with manic-depressive illness and medicated to stabilize her violently shifting moods. An autobiography was eventually written, describing her development and her breakdowns (A Brilliant Madness). This record of the journey of her soul, however, had a peculiar feature: half of the chapters, interposed between those that she herself authored, were written by a science journalist representing medical psychiatry and chronicled her evolution as a victim of a biologically based mental illness. Her account thus oscillated between two positions: one being that of telling her story as she experienced it and in her own words, and the other involving a surrender to invasive medical authority. The chapters written embodying the psychiatric viewpoint were like the invaders in the White House, whereas in her own chapters her soul shines forth in freedom – or tries to. The early life history of enslavement to the agendas of others, the delusion about foreign infiltrators in the government, and the strange structure of the autobiography display a repeating thematic pattern, centering around a heartbreaking, often losing battle to establish the integrity and inviolability of her own unique selfhood. The disparate elements here interrelate and form a tapestry that is beautiful, in its sad order and symmetry.
Human lives are like that: they display an invariant organic structure, once apprehended in sufficient depth. I am not saying all our worlds are organized around the battle for self-integrity, as is the story in my example; I am saying that our individual life histories leave unique signatures on our personal universes. My life exhibits such patterns, and yours too Adam, and so does everyone’s. A sense of intense satisfaction accompanies the recognition of these unifying themes, as initially disparate elements become woven together and apparent chaos gives way to crystallizing order. There is joy in the unveiling of such things. In extending the ideas on which these analyses draw to the larger field of human existence as a whole, we recognize that the themes of the individual lives we encounter belong to a network of possibilities shared by us all.
I hope all is well with you my young friend. Stay in touch.
George Atwood
I was very interested in your personal stories and in the clinical experiences you described. I sense from your book and from your letters that you have found joy in being a psychologist and psychotherapist. My family members tell me that my planned career is a recipe for misery and that I am out of my mind. Tell me more about the rewards of your work and what they mean to you. Say something also about the suffering that might be involved in this career, which everyone keeps warning me about. Thank you so much.
Adam
Dear Adam:
Once again I am going to let your questions flow over my mind, and I hope the thoughts that come forth will help you. The intensive psychotherapy of severe mental illness, so-called, offers two intertwining opportunities. On the one hand, one has a chance to give help to a fellow human being who is in trouble, perhaps the deepest psychological trouble that there is; on the other hand, one encounters phenomena that are at the far extreme of human experience, showing fundamental issues of all our lives with extravagant clarity and drama. This is the heart and soul of psychoanalysis, ever since it first appeared in the thinking of Sigmund Freud. Psychoanalysis is and always has been an approach to the healing of the wounded soul, and also an exploring of the depths of human existence and human nature. When I was your age, now so many years ago, I saw these twin pathways of the psychoanalytic enterprise, and I could not hold back from making a total commitment to the work. Is there anything that could possibly be as interesting or as important?
You ask, Adam, about the rewards of working in my field, and about the suffering that is also sometimes involved. Regarding the latter, here is what comes to mind today. To engage with people in the extremes of psychological disorder is to cast oneself into the chaos – it means to embark upon a journey without an outcome that is certain, often with harrowing developments along the way, always requiring a commitment that is absolute.
Sometimes this journey eventuates in a healing and a thriving; in other instances all our efforts may fail and we are consigned then to bear witness to someone’s devastation. Therein lies the suffering, in the knowledge that nothing is assured and that catastrophe is always at hand. On the other side, our commitment, being absolute, means there also is hope for healing and recovery, and there is something utterly wonderful about pursuing this hope with nothing held back. If things do not work out, and perhaps there is a suicide or some other incontrovertible disaster, we die a thousand deaths. If on the other hand a better way is found, the Phoenix rises from the ashes, and one then has the sense of having participated in the sacred.
During my college years I had a professor who repeatedly warned his students away from pursuing individual psychotherapy as a career. “How many people can you hope to help in a lifetime,” he asked, “twenty-five or thirty as a maximum, right?” It was his idea that our field should devote itself to the prevention of psychological disorders, through various social engineering programs based on behaviorist principles of reward andpunishment. I found his thoughts bleak and very depressing, because he was attacking the dream that brought me into psychology in the first place. I was too young and inexperienced to be able to offer much of a coherent response, but I knew I disliked what he was saying intensely. I now think that individual psychotherapy is itself the single most powerful preventive measure one could possibly find, because it has become apparent to me that giving help to one person can save the whole world. Psychological disorders arise out of personal histories of traumaticexperience, histories that are in turn embedded in complex intergenerational cycles. Traumas that remain unprocessed, that perhaps are not even recognized as having happened, are inevitably passed on to the next generation, and the next; and so it goes, as chains of historical causation reach across the years and even the decades and the centuries.
Consider Adam the potential then that lies within even a single instance of individual psychotherapy that works out well, as the incomparable power of human understanding is brought to bear on a life that otherwise might have unfolded as just another destructive link in the historical sequence. The chain is broken, and rather than darkness being delivered down upon one’s descendants, an illumination is bequeathed as the effects of the healing are transmitted instead. What my teacher failed to take into account is that healing is contagious, radiating into the human surround and having repercussions that flow indefinitely into the future. What an ass he was! And yet, we could ask what were his traumas, and why did he imagine he could fix them by his vast program of behaviorist engineering? As I meditate upon these questions, a picture of his unacknowledged despair comes into view. Behaviorism was like that: an intellectual movement turning toward the purely physical but predicated ultimately on the loss of hope for human connection.
And then there are the discoveries that may occur as we follow up in pursuit of what your family is calling this “recipe for misery.” Your relatives are utterly, profoundly wrong, Adam, and you should not listen to them. Suffering will find you if you make this journey, but so will joy.
I will give a single example. This is about the famous actress, Patty Duke. Imagine the following: as young woman she set off on a mission to rescue America from foreign influences, which she believed had infiltrated the highest offices of our government. A disastrous attempt to physically remove foreign intruders from the White House in Washington DC was followed up by a devastating depression. Then it emerged that her earliest years were ones of enslavement to the entertainment industry: her parents surrendered her to television agents who made her a nationally acclaimed star, but at the price of a stolen childhood. Finally, as an adult, she was diagnosed with manic-depressive illness and medicated to stabilize her violently shifting moods. An autobiography was eventually written, describing her development and her breakdowns (A Brilliant Madness). This record of the journey of her soul, however, had a peculiar feature: half of the chapters, interposed between those that she herself authored, were written by a science journalist representing medical psychiatry and chronicled her evolution as a victim of a biologically based mental illness. Her account thus oscillated between two positions: one being that of telling her story as she experienced it and in her own words, and the other involving a surrender to invasive medical authority. The chapters written embodying the psychiatric viewpoint were like the invaders in the White House, whereas in her own chapters her soul shines forth in freedom – or tries to. The early life history of enslavement to the agendas of others, the delusion about foreign infiltrators in the government, and the strange structure of the autobiography display a repeating thematic pattern, centering around a heartbreaking, often losing battle to establish the integrity and inviolability of her own unique selfhood. The disparate elements here interrelate and form a tapestry that is beautiful, in its sad order and symmetry.
Human lives are like that: they display an invariant organic structure, once apprehended in sufficient depth. I am not saying all our worlds are organized around the battle for self-integrity, as is the story in my example; I am saying that our individual life histories leave unique signatures on our personal universes. My life exhibits such patterns, and yours too Adam, and so does everyone’s. A sense of intense satisfaction accompanies the recognition of these unifying themes, as initially disparate elements become woven together and apparent chaos gives way to crystallizing order. There is joy in the unveiling of such things. In extending the ideas on which these analyses draw to the larger field of human existence as a whole, we recognize that the themes of the individual lives we encounter belong to a network of possibilities shared by us all.
I hope all is well with you my young friend. Stay in touch.
George Atwood
Letter to a Young Student, Part 5
This is about the struggle to become grounded as a psychotherapist.
Published on April 21, 2013
by George Atwood, Ph.D. in Strange Memories
Dear Professor:
Here I am writing again. I have spoken to two people who teach at my local college recently and I was surprised to find that they too discouraged my plans for the future, working with the severely mentally ill. They were not behaviorists, but they reminded me of the professor you described in your last letter, the one who didn’t believe in psychotherapy and tried to persuade you to give up your dream for your life. So my question is: how does one survive such opposition, which I am beginning to see is pervasive?
There is something else. I am an introverted, shy person, and embarking on a career in psychology sometimes scares me. You seem so self-assured, and your book The Abyss of Madness describes one situation after another that you were able to meet head-on. What brought you to where you are, and how did you find your footing?
Adam
Adam my young friend:
You are raising a number of questions, some of them easier than others to answer. I will once again give you what I can.
You are right, first of all, to feel concern about the opposition you will face in your studies. I have tried to understand the resistance in our field that you are already beginning to encounter, and here are some further thoughts on the matter. As I tried to say in an earlier letter, there is the terror of madness itself. Psychologists, far from being immune to this terror, are among its principal victims. Many of them are in the grip of afear that the center will not hold, and the objectifications for which academic psychology has been so famous over the last one hundred years – or infamous – have served to provide an illusory solidity to the subject matter of our field that otherwise can appear like an insubstantial, chaotic wind.
I am guessing that the teachers you consulted are subscribers to psychology’s goal of creating itself on the model of the sciences of material nature. The vision they hold is of a quantitative, experimentaldiscipline, emulating the physics of the nineteenth century, one that seeks to illuminate all the variables of the human world in a grand framework of explanatory causal relationships. Our field has spent the last hundred years and more in pursuit of this impossible dream. Although signs of change are abundantly upon us, the legacy of such failed, scientistic thinking has remained central in our institutions of higher learning down to the present day.
Here is what I advise: do not be intimidated or demoralized by the resistance you will face. Search and study that which advances your cause, and avoid what you can of those things that stand in your way. Be resolute, and give yourself to the explorations with all your strength. There will be so-called authorities warning you away from your endeavors – listen to their words, understand their thinking, and then put them all aside. They are the forces of reaction, trying to preserve a vision of human existence as something we can analyze and control. The future of psychology rests in the hands of those who can bring a new perspective to the work, one focusing on the complexities of subjective life. If you pursue the course of study you are contemplating, Adam, the future rests with you.
Regarding your feelings of uncertainty and insecurity, I am afraid I have little to offer. Each of us has to pass through difficult events in our unfolding lives, and I am sure there will be moments you will face that attack your inner confidence, that confront you with all you do not know, perhaps that seem to offer proof your career choice was an appalling error in judgment. If I appear to be someone who has found his footing, my friend, it is only because I have had countless experiences of having lost it. No one escapes the trials of becoming, and especially no one who chooses psychotherapy as a vocation.
Let me tell of a hard moment in my younger years, one that came close to ending my career even as it had just barely begun. My story concerns a particular incident with someone who had turned to me for help. Please know there were numerous other challenging incidents I will not recount, and so this one stands for them all.
While working at a clinic, still during the period of my early training, I was assigned a patient suffering from an arrested grief reaction. She was a 37 year-old woman whose husband had been killed on the street in a random encounter with a gunman. A dark depression enveloped her for the next six months after the death: sleeplessness, angry protestations directed at God, endless weeping. Finally her exhausted relatives brought her to our clinic, and she and I began our work together.
I saw her 3 times a week for a long period, talking to her about the tragic murder and all her husband had meant in her life. She cried and cried, and then she cried some more. Nothing good seemed to come from all this, however; it just went on and on for days and weeks and months. I was so young and inexperienced, only 24 years old at the time, that I did not know what to do for her other than to listen and be supportive, and I certainly did not perceive the danger that she was in. Finally, after exhausting me as well as her relatives with her bottomless despair, a change in her mood and behavior slowly began to appear. She came to our appointments dressed more nicely, she said she was sleeping more soundly and refreshingly, her appetite had returned, and she spoke of a number of occasions of actually enjoying life again. Although I did not see the basis for this apparent improvement in her condition, I remember feeling relieved as her depression now seemed to be lifting, and wondered if I was an even better psychotherapist than I had thought. Maybe all you need to do, said I to myself, is offer sympathy andunderstanding, and people just heal!
I was at a staff meeting on a Monday morning early, expecting to see this patient shortly afterward and perhaps work toward discharging her from her treatment now that she was feeling so much better. As I listened to the other psychologists boringly drone on about management issues in our clinic, my thoughts returned to this patient. Then I remembered something I had read about years earlier: that in cases of severe depression, an apparent improvement in mood is often a prelude to suicide. The book in which this correlation had been noted presented the idea that in the early stages of recovery, energy begins to return to the patient but there is enough of the depression left to create a kind of window of vulnerability, a period in which self destruction may then occur. This thought was accompanied by a sensation of ice water pouring down my back, as I realized how closely my patient’s emotional situation matched up with the well-known correlation of early improvement and the danger of suicide. I had been aware of this phenomenon but had not thought of applying my knowledge to my own patient! I raced out of the staff meeting, hoping to see that this woman had arrived and was waiting for her appointment with me. Her relatives were the ones I found instead, and the expressions on their faces were dark and disturbing: I was told she had overdosed on a massive amount of sleeping medication – some of which I had personally helped her obtain – and she was in critical condition in the hospital and not expected to live.
An odd thing then transpired: I had a talk with God. At that time in my life I mostly considered myself to be an atheist, but I have found over the years that when the going gets exceptionally rough I tend to speak to the Almighty. I said: “God! If she dies, it will have been my fault, and I will rescind my decision to pursue a career as a therapist. If she lives, perhaps with your assistance, I will give it a further try.” As it worked out, she did live, although there were many days of high anxiety. I saw her in the hospital soon after she awoke from her coma, and as I walked into her room, these were her precise words: “Dr. Atwood, Dr. Atwood – it’s not your fault!” I of course knew that it was, because she had given the signs and I had failed to read them. The reason she had seemed so much better was that she had secretly planned her death, looking toward a joyful reunion with her murdered husband in the afterworld. I thanked God for her survival, and then resumed my former atheism. You might wonder what happened later to this poor woman: I don’t know – her family took her to a private psychiatric institution and I lost track of her. I like to hope that she found her way to a new life.
I was deeply affected by this experience, becoming, for a period, positively paranoid when seeing sudden recoveries from depression. I was able on two subsequent occasions to avert suicide attempts in similar contexts; but there were also false positives. In one of these, I allowed a hospitalized woman to convince me she had improved and I signed her release papers discharging her from our inpatient service, with the understanding there would be an outpatient follow-up the next week. After she had gone home, however, I became frightened I had been fooled again and had shockingly, unforgivably set the stage for her suicide. I called her at her apartment – the phone rang and rang, with no answer. My panic escalating, I traveled to her home and knocked on the door. No response. I thought I smelled the faint odor of gas, and imagined she wasunconscious if not already dead inside. There was no choice: I broke the lock on the door and entered the apartment. It was seriously embarrassing, because it turned out she had been at the movies with a boyfriend. My patient was forgiving once she understood I had been trying to save her life; she did though need me to pay for the damage I had caused.
We must have such hard experiences in order to get our bearings in working with severe emotional disturbances, because otherwise we will be blindsided by all that can occur. At the same time, human beings will always find a way to surprise us no matter how much we have seen, and so our footing will never be entirely secure. Your sense of my solidity and self-assurance, Adam, is very substantially an illusion.
And then there are the good things that happen, the experiences that serve to increase our faith in ourselves and the path we have chosen for our lives. Imagine entering a situation with someone who at first appears to be hopelessly lost in insanity. No avenue of proceeding offers itself, and so a search commences for a way of being with the person that will be healing in regards to all that may have gone wrong. A great struggle ensues, one that goes on and on, until finally – perhaps after months of discouraging developments, occasionally even after years – one comes to a point at which everything attempted seems to make the situation even worse. Despair begins to invade the work, one wants to tear one’s hair out, and yet somehow giving up can never be an option. The ship may be going down, but there is no alternative except to ride that ship all the way to the bottom. Finally, a shift occurs, and it does so in one transforming moment: a new understanding appears, a new mode of responding is found, and the most prominent symptoms of the person’s madness recede and even vanish. Two accounts of such moments are given in the first chapter of The Abyss of Madness, both involving a process of recovery from longstanding delusional preoccupations. In one of these the patient had believed she was the earthly embodiment of the Holy Spirit and awaited her ascension into Heaven for everlasting life. The other case was of a young woman who for years had thought she was under the assault of deadly rays from the eyes of her enemies, intrusive vibrations that petrified the neural tissues of her brain and brought on an unbearable sense of becoming inert and dead. Both people, after a very long and arduous period of building a relationship with me, emerged from their dreamlike states and were able to substantially heal from thetraumatic annihilations of their early years. Obviously time was needed to consolidate the breakthroughs, and there were back and forth movements that had to be followed closely; but the work became easy and a joy. Anyone who has participated in these therapeutic adventures learns thereby what is possible, and he or she will never see the phenomena of the most severe psychological disturbances in the same way again.
So, Adam, there will be the bad and the good, and what you must do is commit yourself to the journey and let yourself learn from everything that transpires. Seek out people you can trust, and let them guide you when you feel you are losing your way. Find teachers that can show you the ropes in beginning your work, and take everything they will have to offer. Turn away from the voices of discouragement and open your heart to the resurgence of phenomenology and humanism that is taking place in our field.
George Atwood
Here I am writing again. I have spoken to two people who teach at my local college recently and I was surprised to find that they too discouraged my plans for the future, working with the severely mentally ill. They were not behaviorists, but they reminded me of the professor you described in your last letter, the one who didn’t believe in psychotherapy and tried to persuade you to give up your dream for your life. So my question is: how does one survive such opposition, which I am beginning to see is pervasive?
There is something else. I am an introverted, shy person, and embarking on a career in psychology sometimes scares me. You seem so self-assured, and your book The Abyss of Madness describes one situation after another that you were able to meet head-on. What brought you to where you are, and how did you find your footing?
Adam
Adam my young friend:
You are raising a number of questions, some of them easier than others to answer. I will once again give you what I can.
You are right, first of all, to feel concern about the opposition you will face in your studies. I have tried to understand the resistance in our field that you are already beginning to encounter, and here are some further thoughts on the matter. As I tried to say in an earlier letter, there is the terror of madness itself. Psychologists, far from being immune to this terror, are among its principal victims. Many of them are in the grip of afear that the center will not hold, and the objectifications for which academic psychology has been so famous over the last one hundred years – or infamous – have served to provide an illusory solidity to the subject matter of our field that otherwise can appear like an insubstantial, chaotic wind.
I am guessing that the teachers you consulted are subscribers to psychology’s goal of creating itself on the model of the sciences of material nature. The vision they hold is of a quantitative, experimentaldiscipline, emulating the physics of the nineteenth century, one that seeks to illuminate all the variables of the human world in a grand framework of explanatory causal relationships. Our field has spent the last hundred years and more in pursuit of this impossible dream. Although signs of change are abundantly upon us, the legacy of such failed, scientistic thinking has remained central in our institutions of higher learning down to the present day.
Here is what I advise: do not be intimidated or demoralized by the resistance you will face. Search and study that which advances your cause, and avoid what you can of those things that stand in your way. Be resolute, and give yourself to the explorations with all your strength. There will be so-called authorities warning you away from your endeavors – listen to their words, understand their thinking, and then put them all aside. They are the forces of reaction, trying to preserve a vision of human existence as something we can analyze and control. The future of psychology rests in the hands of those who can bring a new perspective to the work, one focusing on the complexities of subjective life. If you pursue the course of study you are contemplating, Adam, the future rests with you.
Regarding your feelings of uncertainty and insecurity, I am afraid I have little to offer. Each of us has to pass through difficult events in our unfolding lives, and I am sure there will be moments you will face that attack your inner confidence, that confront you with all you do not know, perhaps that seem to offer proof your career choice was an appalling error in judgment. If I appear to be someone who has found his footing, my friend, it is only because I have had countless experiences of having lost it. No one escapes the trials of becoming, and especially no one who chooses psychotherapy as a vocation.
Let me tell of a hard moment in my younger years, one that came close to ending my career even as it had just barely begun. My story concerns a particular incident with someone who had turned to me for help. Please know there were numerous other challenging incidents I will not recount, and so this one stands for them all.
While working at a clinic, still during the period of my early training, I was assigned a patient suffering from an arrested grief reaction. She was a 37 year-old woman whose husband had been killed on the street in a random encounter with a gunman. A dark depression enveloped her for the next six months after the death: sleeplessness, angry protestations directed at God, endless weeping. Finally her exhausted relatives brought her to our clinic, and she and I began our work together.
I saw her 3 times a week for a long period, talking to her about the tragic murder and all her husband had meant in her life. She cried and cried, and then she cried some more. Nothing good seemed to come from all this, however; it just went on and on for days and weeks and months. I was so young and inexperienced, only 24 years old at the time, that I did not know what to do for her other than to listen and be supportive, and I certainly did not perceive the danger that she was in. Finally, after exhausting me as well as her relatives with her bottomless despair, a change in her mood and behavior slowly began to appear. She came to our appointments dressed more nicely, she said she was sleeping more soundly and refreshingly, her appetite had returned, and she spoke of a number of occasions of actually enjoying life again. Although I did not see the basis for this apparent improvement in her condition, I remember feeling relieved as her depression now seemed to be lifting, and wondered if I was an even better psychotherapist than I had thought. Maybe all you need to do, said I to myself, is offer sympathy andunderstanding, and people just heal!
I was at a staff meeting on a Monday morning early, expecting to see this patient shortly afterward and perhaps work toward discharging her from her treatment now that she was feeling so much better. As I listened to the other psychologists boringly drone on about management issues in our clinic, my thoughts returned to this patient. Then I remembered something I had read about years earlier: that in cases of severe depression, an apparent improvement in mood is often a prelude to suicide. The book in which this correlation had been noted presented the idea that in the early stages of recovery, energy begins to return to the patient but there is enough of the depression left to create a kind of window of vulnerability, a period in which self destruction may then occur. This thought was accompanied by a sensation of ice water pouring down my back, as I realized how closely my patient’s emotional situation matched up with the well-known correlation of early improvement and the danger of suicide. I had been aware of this phenomenon but had not thought of applying my knowledge to my own patient! I raced out of the staff meeting, hoping to see that this woman had arrived and was waiting for her appointment with me. Her relatives were the ones I found instead, and the expressions on their faces were dark and disturbing: I was told she had overdosed on a massive amount of sleeping medication – some of which I had personally helped her obtain – and she was in critical condition in the hospital and not expected to live.
An odd thing then transpired: I had a talk with God. At that time in my life I mostly considered myself to be an atheist, but I have found over the years that when the going gets exceptionally rough I tend to speak to the Almighty. I said: “God! If she dies, it will have been my fault, and I will rescind my decision to pursue a career as a therapist. If she lives, perhaps with your assistance, I will give it a further try.” As it worked out, she did live, although there were many days of high anxiety. I saw her in the hospital soon after she awoke from her coma, and as I walked into her room, these were her precise words: “Dr. Atwood, Dr. Atwood – it’s not your fault!” I of course knew that it was, because she had given the signs and I had failed to read them. The reason she had seemed so much better was that she had secretly planned her death, looking toward a joyful reunion with her murdered husband in the afterworld. I thanked God for her survival, and then resumed my former atheism. You might wonder what happened later to this poor woman: I don’t know – her family took her to a private psychiatric institution and I lost track of her. I like to hope that she found her way to a new life.
I was deeply affected by this experience, becoming, for a period, positively paranoid when seeing sudden recoveries from depression. I was able on two subsequent occasions to avert suicide attempts in similar contexts; but there were also false positives. In one of these, I allowed a hospitalized woman to convince me she had improved and I signed her release papers discharging her from our inpatient service, with the understanding there would be an outpatient follow-up the next week. After she had gone home, however, I became frightened I had been fooled again and had shockingly, unforgivably set the stage for her suicide. I called her at her apartment – the phone rang and rang, with no answer. My panic escalating, I traveled to her home and knocked on the door. No response. I thought I smelled the faint odor of gas, and imagined she wasunconscious if not already dead inside. There was no choice: I broke the lock on the door and entered the apartment. It was seriously embarrassing, because it turned out she had been at the movies with a boyfriend. My patient was forgiving once she understood I had been trying to save her life; she did though need me to pay for the damage I had caused.
We must have such hard experiences in order to get our bearings in working with severe emotional disturbances, because otherwise we will be blindsided by all that can occur. At the same time, human beings will always find a way to surprise us no matter how much we have seen, and so our footing will never be entirely secure. Your sense of my solidity and self-assurance, Adam, is very substantially an illusion.
And then there are the good things that happen, the experiences that serve to increase our faith in ourselves and the path we have chosen for our lives. Imagine entering a situation with someone who at first appears to be hopelessly lost in insanity. No avenue of proceeding offers itself, and so a search commences for a way of being with the person that will be healing in regards to all that may have gone wrong. A great struggle ensues, one that goes on and on, until finally – perhaps after months of discouraging developments, occasionally even after years – one comes to a point at which everything attempted seems to make the situation even worse. Despair begins to invade the work, one wants to tear one’s hair out, and yet somehow giving up can never be an option. The ship may be going down, but there is no alternative except to ride that ship all the way to the bottom. Finally, a shift occurs, and it does so in one transforming moment: a new understanding appears, a new mode of responding is found, and the most prominent symptoms of the person’s madness recede and even vanish. Two accounts of such moments are given in the first chapter of The Abyss of Madness, both involving a process of recovery from longstanding delusional preoccupations. In one of these the patient had believed she was the earthly embodiment of the Holy Spirit and awaited her ascension into Heaven for everlasting life. The other case was of a young woman who for years had thought she was under the assault of deadly rays from the eyes of her enemies, intrusive vibrations that petrified the neural tissues of her brain and brought on an unbearable sense of becoming inert and dead. Both people, after a very long and arduous period of building a relationship with me, emerged from their dreamlike states and were able to substantially heal from thetraumatic annihilations of their early years. Obviously time was needed to consolidate the breakthroughs, and there were back and forth movements that had to be followed closely; but the work became easy and a joy. Anyone who has participated in these therapeutic adventures learns thereby what is possible, and he or she will never see the phenomena of the most severe psychological disturbances in the same way again.
So, Adam, there will be the bad and the good, and what you must do is commit yourself to the journey and let yourself learn from everything that transpires. Seek out people you can trust, and let them guide you when you feel you are losing your way. Find teachers that can show you the ropes in beginning your work, and take everything they will have to offer. Turn away from the voices of discouragement and open your heart to the resurgence of phenomenology and humanism that is taking place in our field.
George Atwood
Letter to a Young Student: Part 6
The Future of Psychotherapy
Published on June 5, 2013
by George Atwood, Ph.D. in Strange Memories
Dear Professor:
Your letters are so good and I want to thank you for them again. The last one, fifth in the series, showed your fallibility and vulnerability, and I appreciate that very much. It makes me feel that it is all right to struggle and even fail, along the pathway toward what I hope wiil become success.
In The Abyss of Madness and also in your letters, you have repeatedly spoken of a bright future for our field, even a new golden age of psychotherapy. I wonder if you can offer some further guidance to those of us who will be trying to contribute to this new era? What are the most important questions we will need to answer, and what are the directions of study we will need to pursue? What will be the themes of this new psychology in the 21st Century?
Adam
Dear Adam:
Your questions ask me to reach into the future. I will answer by trying to describe some of the currents that I see flowing in and beneath our lives, and I hope to be led to some worthwhile ideas about where our field might be going. This letter is going to be a long one.
Our time is one of immense loss. What I am speaking of is the progressive falling away of traditional answers to the question of the ultimate, as the solid foundations that once gave our lives meaning disappear in a whirlwind of available facts and diverse contexts and perspectives.
Our gods have died, long since, and we are bereft in the aloneness of our finitude.
Our time is also though one of great possibility. As the strictures of reassuring faith have dissolved, we have been cast into an open space, one that can only be filled in by our own creativity. Anxiety and uncertainty are inevitable companions in this journey, but so is the joy of anticipating what is to come. I want to imagine an emerging worldview that has been preparing itself for more than one hundred years, and that is already having important consequences for our field. Three features seem to me salient in this new way of interpreting the meaning of human existence: Interdependence, Self-reflection, and Responsibility.
1. A person is of his or her world, natural and social. The world that we experience is part of our very being, making us who and what we are. That constitutive world, at the same time, is what we make of it. A new mindset of radical interdependence is appearing, within which these statements do not stand in contradiction to each other.
2. Reflective awareness of the many contexts that shape our lives has in our time become pervasive, meaning that we are aware of the embeddedness in our personal existence of all our beliefs and values: philosophical, religious, political, scientific. One might say that the age of absolutes standing outside the circle of reflection is over. The yearning for ultimate answers and eternal foundations, however, seems likely to be a part of who we are forever.
3. Recognizing that all human beings are siblings in the same darkness, we are at last embracing the idea that we are our brothers’ and sisters’ keepers. We have also taken up the task of being guardians of the Earth and all its living creatures. I foresee a world in which these responsibilities are considered sacred. You may wonder how I can be so sanguine, in an age of terrorism and fanaticism. I regard these things as the death throes of religious ideologies that are giving way to a new humanism.
What are the implications of this new worldview for the fields of psychology and psychiatry? Here are a few thoughts on the matter.
The theme of interdependence leads to a reconceptualization of what it means to be an individual person. One might say: there is no such thing as a person. I am obviously not claiming that people don’t exist; it is rather that their existence is not one of being an isolated object, subsisting in a state of ontological separateness and solitude. The new worldview opens us to seeing our irreducible relatedness to our worlds and to others. This changes everything in how one understands so-called psychopathology. I will illustrate what I am saying with a clinical story.
A woman, 24 years old, was brought to a hospital by her father and mother after she had been arrested for trying to break into a well-known country musician’s home. I happened to be on the clinical staff and so met this young person. She was mute, and scarcely moving. The word “catatonia” was used by two of our psychiatrists, engaging in diagnostic deliberations at the time, but I have never thought much of such labels. I sat quietly by her side on a daily basis in the first weeks of my work with her, hoping she would eventually begin to speak to me. Finally she did, telling of a secret world in which she had lived for several years. This world was ruled by a famous country music star, and contained a large number of other figures who regularly talked to her in the mornings and in the nights. They were like the chorus in a Greek tragedy. A love affair had developed between her and the star, conducted via telepathy, and she had been able for a long time to function in her world (she had been a part-time student in college) while dwelling much of the time in the secret realm.
Disaster came when she finally made an effort to have physical contact with her lover. The police had arrested her when she went to his actual home. The voices of the chorus, originally loving and sweet, had in the meantime turned increasingly critical and aggressive. Such idealized delusional companions often turn into persecutors, and the imaginary realm that has been found then becomes an unbearable hell. This patient was very similar to Joanne Greenberg, who wrote a classic work in the literature of madness: I Never Promised You a Rose Garden. Joanne also inhabited a secret world, initially a place of magic and love but then that turned dark and monstrous. Read this book, Adam, if you have not already done so.
Traditional psychiatric thinking would understand this story as involving a dreadful mental illness that erupted in this woman’s young life, an illness it calls schizophrenia.
This was the diagnosis she was given during the period of her hospitalization. When looked upon within the new worldview, however, the symptoms of this so-called illness are no longer seen as emanating solely from a pathological condition somehow existing inside of her; instead, they are understood as having meaning within complex relational and historical contexts, as significantly relative to what had happened and was still happening in her social world.
Her emotional history, as I came to understand it in the long course of our contacts, centered around a theme of abiding loneliness. This context, unseen as such by members of her family of origin, was one in which she had accommodated herself to parental expectations and needs, becoming a child fulfilling their dreams through stellar academic achievements. The parents’ marriage had at the same time been a bloody chaos of tension and hostility: repeatedly, the mother and the father had fought physically and threatened to abandon each other. She had tried, with all her might, to be a shining manifestation of hope for familial cohesion, always sensitive to her mother and father, moving back and forth between them, forever striving to make them proud and happy.
The extremity of this young girl’s commitment to pleasing her parents and forestalling the disintegration of her family began at some point to lead to a division in her subjective life: on the one side were her harmonizing accommodations; on the other was an unarticulated and yet intensifying sense of hurt and of her own abandonment. There was no real recognition or validation of her pain by anyone, and therefore nowhere to go with her emerging suffering. This was the setting, following a series of separations and other changes in her living situation, in which she found her true love during her late teen years. Listening to his songs of loss and alienation, of broken hearts and searing loneliness, she saw her own experiences set to music: she had found a twin, a soul mate whose feelings precisely mirrored her own. Appearing recurrently in her dreams and reveries, his presence suddenly one day became utterly real and she immersed herself in their shared affection, magically expressed through mental telepathy. Catastrophe occurred when she finally tried to establish physical contact with him.
Perhaps Adam you would be interested in what happened in this young woman’s life. I worked closely with her for many years, helping her to find words for her deep feelings of isolation and loneliness, and helping her as well to resist the siren-call of her lover and the chorus of voices associated with him. That is what is needed in such cases: patience, devotion, and understanding. I don’t want to make it sound easy; it wasn’t. There were a great many back and forth movements with respect to the secret world, and there were dangerous suicide attempts in the first years of our contacts. I suffered greatly with how close she came to ending her life. But it eventually worked out well enough. She brought herself together finally and found new ways to connect with others, expressing in her life a wonderful creative spirit.
I have told this little story to illustrate what I think will become commonplace in our field within the worldview I have been talking about. This young woman’s psychological disturbance, her “schizophrenia” if you will, is here seen as a set of reactions embedded in her life in her family, and related to her trauma history and to the absence in her background of validating recognition. Her illness was not, from this standpoint, a pathology afflicting her from within; it was a personal disaster brought on by complex transactional patterns inhering in her relationships over time to all those who were important to her, both real and imagined.
------------------------------------
A great task facing us in the years ahead will be the thorough phenomenological redescription and reconceptualization of severe psychological disorders, and then a corresponding development of psychotherapeutic approaches embodying the new understandings that are attained. Great strides in this project have already occurred, and so we will not be starting from scratch. Among the many geniuses on whose phenomenological and clinical contributions one can build, I would list: Jung, Tausk, Federn, Winnicott, Sullivan, Fromm-Reichman, Binswanger, Searles, Laing, DesLauriers, Kohut, Stolorow, and Brandchaft, among others. Read these gifted thinkers and clinicians, Adam, and apply what you learn in the life you pursue.
Let me suggest some ideas that are more specific in regards to the most meaningful directions of our field in the coming decades. If I had another thirty years to live and to work, something which is not likely, I might throw myself into the following sorts of things. Maybe some interesting variations on what I will describe will inspire you, Adam.
1. So-called schizophrenia
An influential book appeared in 1911: Eugen Bleuler’s Dementia Praecox or the Group of Schizophrenias. In addition to introducing the term “schizophrenia” to our world, this work attempted to describe and provide examples of widely differing forms of the most extreme psychological disturbances that exist. It is worth reading even today for its rich accounts of madness in its many variations, although the work does suffer from some serious limitations from our present vantagepoint. The clinical descriptions are framed within a broadly Cartesian, intrapsychic frame of reference, locating the disturbances being considered inside the patients who are then pictured in isolation from their worlds. The presentations, in addition, tend to be restricted to the patients’ symptomatology in the present moment, leaving out of account the complex histories in which their symptoms are embedded and have meaning. Finally, the book is written almost entirely from the perspective of the medical model, viewing psychological disturbances as disease processes occurring in the mind.
I think Adam that a very wonderful project, one that would require a great many years of devotion, would be the modern counterpart to Bleuler’s classic study. This would involve even more detailed descriptions and examples of madness in its many forms and variations, with the focus however always being on the subjective states that are involved. Such a phenomenological emphasis would then be accompanied by a life-historical perspective, from which the overt symptom-pictures are cast in relation to the personal backgrounds of the people concerned. There would only be one way to accomplish the immense task I am suggesting: the collaboration of a number of dedicated clinicians and thinkers. It would be required that there be long-term commitments to the patients being studied, so that the inquiry into their worlds have a grounding in deep explorations of history and also include the nature of the healing processes that can be achieved.
Bleuler proposed that the heart of what was known in his time as dementia praecox consisted in various splitting processes occurring in the mind: hence the term, schizo-phrenia. These included the disintegration of the logical associations of thought, the splitting of cognition from its associated affects, the dividing of positive and negative emotions, and the separating off of a private reality from contact with the externally real. My own view is that future phenomenological studies of patients in this range will show how these various features can be significantly understood as secondary to a sense of personal annihilation. This means that the primary disturbance would be seen in the shattering or even erasure of the experience of personal selfhood. Also central would be the dissolution of the sense of the realness of the world and the disintegration of all that we ordinarily experience as substantial and enduring. The most prominent visible symptoms of these disturbances, such as one sees in hallucinations and delusions, in this context appear as restitutive or reparative reactions, efforts to reunify all that has fallen apart and resolidify all that has melted away.
Another clinical story comes to mind that relates to the sort of understanding I am thinking of. Consider this brief account, Adam, as standing for a thousand that I could provide. One of my patients from many years ago came to me after a long period in a psychiatric hospital. Twenty one years old at the time, she described herself as having always been in “pieces,” having separate and distinct “selves” that floated about in a strange space, without there being a common center. There was a sexual self, a religious self, a political self, a comical self, a professional self, and a social self. Each of these entities embodied an area of her interests and capabilities, but they were like islands suspended in the sea with no land bridges between them. It was interesting to me that a delusion haunting her during the many months of her hospitalization was a belief she was part of a world-revolution aiming to dissolve traditional nation-states and establish a universal government based on the power of all-embracing love. Out of her own personal fragmentation, it seemed, was arising a dream of world unity. She had been told by her doctors her diagnosis was that of schizophrenia, and, confused about what this meant, studied Bleuler’s derivation of the term from the Greek words for “split” and “mind.” She told me a better translation, still respecting the etymology but connecting more closely to her own familiar self-experience, would be: “torn soul.” I found her statement, obviously rooted in her feeling of being in pieces, to be one of the most astute things I have ever heard on this subject, and I told her so. We worked together for several decades and got along very well.
So-called bipolar disorder
In The Abyss of Madness, I made the claim that the most important frontier for present-day clinical psychoanalytic research is that of the psychotherapy of bipolar disorder, also known as manic-depressive illness. Of course these terms are medical-diagnostic designations, embedded in a Cartesian, objectifying worldview. How the patients so diagnosed will appear under a phenomenological lens remains to be seen, and what innovations in our approach to them will come forth are still to be defined.
A fabulous insight into the experiential core of a great many of the patients showing an oscillating pattern of mania and depression was given to us by Bernard Brandchaft, in his book Toward an EmancipatoryPsychoanalysis. He saw a problem again involving a sense of personal annihilation, wherein the manic episode expresses a transitory liberation from annihilating ties to caregivers, whereas the depression that ensues represents the reinstatement of those ties. A division has occurred between accommodative and individualizing trends in these patients’ personalities: on one side of this division, there is a compliant surrender to authority and the installation within the patient’s selfhood of others’ purposes and expectations; on the other side is a glorious overthrow of such captivity and the embrace of shining freedom. The magical emancipation, of course, cannot last, because there is nothing and no one to support it, and so it collapses into a dark despair. Here would be my questions for those who seek pathways of psychotherapy with such patients in the future. Can an experience be facilitated that establishes a new center, one in which compliance and rebellion are somehow integrated? Can the empathy of the clinician become a medium in which previously aborted developmental processes can be reinstated? Can a deep understanding of what is at stake for the patient finally make a constructive difference to his or her destiny in the continuing nightmare of bipolarity?
The great psychoanalyst, Frieda Fromm-Reichman, in 1954 published a now-classic clinical study: Its title was: “An intensive study of twelve cases of manic-depressive psychosis.” A generalization arising from this study was the notion that such patients were, in their families growing up, treated as extensions of their caregivers rather than as independent beings in their own rights. I would like to see a modern counterpart to this work, tracing carefully the subjective worlds and histories of bipolar patients and exploring the outer limits of our efficacy as therapists in arresting their destructive patterns and stabilizing their lives. The key to success in such a project will be in the new understanding flowing from Brandchaft’s insight, one highlighting the patients’ needs to find pathways of emancipation from enslaving accommodation that do not lead into the structureless chaos of the manic episode.
An amazing example of the twin-sides of bipolarity is given in another classic of the literature of madness: Kay Jamison’s An Unquiet Mind. This author tells the story of her extended resistance as a young woman against her doctor on the issue of her taking mood-stabilizing drugs. Back and forth their arguments went, with her trying to defend her right to a life free of medical intrusions, and with her psychiatrist telling her she had a biologically-based mental illness that absolutely required medications in order for her to be able to function. Finally, with the greatest reluctance, Kay agreed to begin on a course of taking regular doses of lithium. However, when she went to the pharmacy to pick up her prescription, she suddenly was seized by a terrifying vision. She saw, in her mind’s eye, vast numbers of poisonous snakes approaching her vicinity and foresaw how these dangerous creatures would strike at her and all those she cared about, filling their bodies with lethal toxins. So she purchased, along with her lithium, all the snake-bite kits the pharmacy had available, hoping to use the kits to save herself and as many people as she could.
Let me tell you, Adam, my theory of what this delusion about snakes symbolized. The poison carried by these imagined creatures, about to be injected into Kay herself and the unsuspecting public, represented the diagnostic authority of her doctor, to which she was in the process of capitulating. The theme of at first fighting back willfully but then caving in and surrendering appears also in her early family life, which she describes as having been a battle against oppressive control. The side of this woman tending toward compliant surrender was accepting into her self-definition the medical attributions she had earlier resisted; the side of her wanting to protect her self-integrity from invasion and usurpation armed itself with antidotes to snake venom. There is a parallel between Kay’s desperate purchase of the life-saving snakebite kits and Patty Duke’s attempt to drive imagined foreign agents out of the White House, which is briefly described in Letter # 4. Remarkably, neither of these women appears to have had any awareness of such symbolic connections. It has been my sense that so-called bipolar patients often seem to live in a world of utter concreteness, rendering subjective life strangely opaque.
Possibly this opacity arises out of the absence in the patients’ families of origin of validating responsiveness to the child’s unique world of experience.
Madness and Creative Genius
Another favorite subject of mine, one that I hope will be taken up in our field in coming years, pertains to creativity and its complex relationships to madness and trauma. It is my view that the events and circumstances of our lives that hurt us most deeply, sometimes that even take us into an experience of personal annihilation, are implicated as also being among the factors leading to great achievements of creative imagination.
I taught an advanced seminar at my college for a long time, a class in which each year we would select a person for study showing great creativity but also signs of madness. A generalization unexpectedly emerged from the long series of analyses that took place: in almost every case there was evidence of a profound, irreconcilable conflict in thepersonality of the creator, one that threatened to lead to fragmentation and madness but that seemed to be integrated by the acts of creation. The specific content of the division varied from instance to instance, but the presence of such a duality seemed not to. As you know, Adam, four such divided geniuses are described and discussed in the final chapter of The Abyss of Madness: Soren Kierkegaard, Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, and Ludwig Wittgenstein.
I would be very interested in a much more inclusive exploring of major figures in art, philosophy, and science in order to see just how truly general this apparent pattern is. It would also be important to study carefully how it is that the creative activity brings the warring trends in the creator’s soul into a unity. I am thinking that a thorough understanding of such matters could lead to innovative psychotherapeutic approaches with people otherwise fated to lives of paralysis and despair. Would it not be a beautiful development in our field, Adam, if ways could be found to transform delusions and hallucinations into works of art?
I shall offer a single instance of the analyses conducted in my college seminar, that of the great German poet Rainer Maria Rilke. If you have not read this gentleman’s works, Adam, I recommend studying two of them: Duino Elegies and Sonnets to Orpheus. Rilke’s writings abound with a concern with spirits and ghosts. He was himself inhabited by the soul of a sister who died, a short period before he was born. His mother, broken-hearted by her loss, raised her son to be the dead child’s reincarnation. Consider his name, as it was given to him by his mother: Rene Karl Wilhelm Josef Maria Rilke. The name “Rainer,” which one normally associates with him, does not appear in this sequence. It is a masculinization of “Rene,” originally given as his first name. He changed it under the influence of his muse and lover, Lou Andreas Salome.
Rilke’s given names form a sequence of male designations bounded at the beginning and the end by female ones. His mother, having lost her daughter, enclosed his name, and his soul, in a vision of a resurrected female. She dressed him in girl’s clothes, encouraged his playing with dolls, and interpreted his early interests in drawing and watercolors as essentially feminine preoccupations. Born a boy, he was raised from birth to be a girl.
The soul of the dead sister took up residence inside the young boy. Although the female spirit never became the whole of him, she did alternate in his experience with the male child he also became. Sometimes her presence was felt as a mystical mask he would put on; the problem arose when this mask began to melt into his face and displace his identity as a boy. Or was it the girl he was raised to be whose identity was displaced by the mask of a boy? At other times, the alien spirit erupted from within, draining away all vitality and pursuing its own independent agendas. This spirit might have been, again, the girl emerging from within the boy, or the boy erupting from the depths of the girl his mother saw him as being. With Rilke, it is always both/and, and never either/or. The key to the genius of his poetry lies in his ability to embrace both sides of his androgenous nature, and this ability also shielded him from madness.
In the journey of the creator, there is almost always a division within the soul, one that – left unaddressed – carries the possibility of madness within its depths. The act of creation provides a pathway in which the division can be transcended and unified, and is a protection against psychological destruction. There are countless examples one can find in the life histories of artists, philosophers, and scientists. The need to bring together that which has been torn asunder establishes an everlasting tension, one that leads to a spiraling of creativity. This is a theme one could spend a lifetime studying.
These are my thoughts for now, Adam, and I hope you will find something of interest in them. Write again, my friend – your questions open the doorway to thoughts I might never have otherwise come to.
George Atwood
Your letters are so good and I want to thank you for them again. The last one, fifth in the series, showed your fallibility and vulnerability, and I appreciate that very much. It makes me feel that it is all right to struggle and even fail, along the pathway toward what I hope wiil become success.
In The Abyss of Madness and also in your letters, you have repeatedly spoken of a bright future for our field, even a new golden age of psychotherapy. I wonder if you can offer some further guidance to those of us who will be trying to contribute to this new era? What are the most important questions we will need to answer, and what are the directions of study we will need to pursue? What will be the themes of this new psychology in the 21st Century?
Adam
Dear Adam:
Your questions ask me to reach into the future. I will answer by trying to describe some of the currents that I see flowing in and beneath our lives, and I hope to be led to some worthwhile ideas about where our field might be going. This letter is going to be a long one.
Our time is one of immense loss. What I am speaking of is the progressive falling away of traditional answers to the question of the ultimate, as the solid foundations that once gave our lives meaning disappear in a whirlwind of available facts and diverse contexts and perspectives.
Our gods have died, long since, and we are bereft in the aloneness of our finitude.
Our time is also though one of great possibility. As the strictures of reassuring faith have dissolved, we have been cast into an open space, one that can only be filled in by our own creativity. Anxiety and uncertainty are inevitable companions in this journey, but so is the joy of anticipating what is to come. I want to imagine an emerging worldview that has been preparing itself for more than one hundred years, and that is already having important consequences for our field. Three features seem to me salient in this new way of interpreting the meaning of human existence: Interdependence, Self-reflection, and Responsibility.
1. A person is of his or her world, natural and social. The world that we experience is part of our very being, making us who and what we are. That constitutive world, at the same time, is what we make of it. A new mindset of radical interdependence is appearing, within which these statements do not stand in contradiction to each other.
2. Reflective awareness of the many contexts that shape our lives has in our time become pervasive, meaning that we are aware of the embeddedness in our personal existence of all our beliefs and values: philosophical, religious, political, scientific. One might say that the age of absolutes standing outside the circle of reflection is over. The yearning for ultimate answers and eternal foundations, however, seems likely to be a part of who we are forever.
3. Recognizing that all human beings are siblings in the same darkness, we are at last embracing the idea that we are our brothers’ and sisters’ keepers. We have also taken up the task of being guardians of the Earth and all its living creatures. I foresee a world in which these responsibilities are considered sacred. You may wonder how I can be so sanguine, in an age of terrorism and fanaticism. I regard these things as the death throes of religious ideologies that are giving way to a new humanism.
What are the implications of this new worldview for the fields of psychology and psychiatry? Here are a few thoughts on the matter.
The theme of interdependence leads to a reconceptualization of what it means to be an individual person. One might say: there is no such thing as a person. I am obviously not claiming that people don’t exist; it is rather that their existence is not one of being an isolated object, subsisting in a state of ontological separateness and solitude. The new worldview opens us to seeing our irreducible relatedness to our worlds and to others. This changes everything in how one understands so-called psychopathology. I will illustrate what I am saying with a clinical story.
A woman, 24 years old, was brought to a hospital by her father and mother after she had been arrested for trying to break into a well-known country musician’s home. I happened to be on the clinical staff and so met this young person. She was mute, and scarcely moving. The word “catatonia” was used by two of our psychiatrists, engaging in diagnostic deliberations at the time, but I have never thought much of such labels. I sat quietly by her side on a daily basis in the first weeks of my work with her, hoping she would eventually begin to speak to me. Finally she did, telling of a secret world in which she had lived for several years. This world was ruled by a famous country music star, and contained a large number of other figures who regularly talked to her in the mornings and in the nights. They were like the chorus in a Greek tragedy. A love affair had developed between her and the star, conducted via telepathy, and she had been able for a long time to function in her world (she had been a part-time student in college) while dwelling much of the time in the secret realm.
Disaster came when she finally made an effort to have physical contact with her lover. The police had arrested her when she went to his actual home. The voices of the chorus, originally loving and sweet, had in the meantime turned increasingly critical and aggressive. Such idealized delusional companions often turn into persecutors, and the imaginary realm that has been found then becomes an unbearable hell. This patient was very similar to Joanne Greenberg, who wrote a classic work in the literature of madness: I Never Promised You a Rose Garden. Joanne also inhabited a secret world, initially a place of magic and love but then that turned dark and monstrous. Read this book, Adam, if you have not already done so.
Traditional psychiatric thinking would understand this story as involving a dreadful mental illness that erupted in this woman’s young life, an illness it calls schizophrenia.
This was the diagnosis she was given during the period of her hospitalization. When looked upon within the new worldview, however, the symptoms of this so-called illness are no longer seen as emanating solely from a pathological condition somehow existing inside of her; instead, they are understood as having meaning within complex relational and historical contexts, as significantly relative to what had happened and was still happening in her social world.
Her emotional history, as I came to understand it in the long course of our contacts, centered around a theme of abiding loneliness. This context, unseen as such by members of her family of origin, was one in which she had accommodated herself to parental expectations and needs, becoming a child fulfilling their dreams through stellar academic achievements. The parents’ marriage had at the same time been a bloody chaos of tension and hostility: repeatedly, the mother and the father had fought physically and threatened to abandon each other. She had tried, with all her might, to be a shining manifestation of hope for familial cohesion, always sensitive to her mother and father, moving back and forth between them, forever striving to make them proud and happy.
The extremity of this young girl’s commitment to pleasing her parents and forestalling the disintegration of her family began at some point to lead to a division in her subjective life: on the one side were her harmonizing accommodations; on the other was an unarticulated and yet intensifying sense of hurt and of her own abandonment. There was no real recognition or validation of her pain by anyone, and therefore nowhere to go with her emerging suffering. This was the setting, following a series of separations and other changes in her living situation, in which she found her true love during her late teen years. Listening to his songs of loss and alienation, of broken hearts and searing loneliness, she saw her own experiences set to music: she had found a twin, a soul mate whose feelings precisely mirrored her own. Appearing recurrently in her dreams and reveries, his presence suddenly one day became utterly real and she immersed herself in their shared affection, magically expressed through mental telepathy. Catastrophe occurred when she finally tried to establish physical contact with him.
Perhaps Adam you would be interested in what happened in this young woman’s life. I worked closely with her for many years, helping her to find words for her deep feelings of isolation and loneliness, and helping her as well to resist the siren-call of her lover and the chorus of voices associated with him. That is what is needed in such cases: patience, devotion, and understanding. I don’t want to make it sound easy; it wasn’t. There were a great many back and forth movements with respect to the secret world, and there were dangerous suicide attempts in the first years of our contacts. I suffered greatly with how close she came to ending her life. But it eventually worked out well enough. She brought herself together finally and found new ways to connect with others, expressing in her life a wonderful creative spirit.
I have told this little story to illustrate what I think will become commonplace in our field within the worldview I have been talking about. This young woman’s psychological disturbance, her “schizophrenia” if you will, is here seen as a set of reactions embedded in her life in her family, and related to her trauma history and to the absence in her background of validating recognition. Her illness was not, from this standpoint, a pathology afflicting her from within; it was a personal disaster brought on by complex transactional patterns inhering in her relationships over time to all those who were important to her, both real and imagined.
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A great task facing us in the years ahead will be the thorough phenomenological redescription and reconceptualization of severe psychological disorders, and then a corresponding development of psychotherapeutic approaches embodying the new understandings that are attained. Great strides in this project have already occurred, and so we will not be starting from scratch. Among the many geniuses on whose phenomenological and clinical contributions one can build, I would list: Jung, Tausk, Federn, Winnicott, Sullivan, Fromm-Reichman, Binswanger, Searles, Laing, DesLauriers, Kohut, Stolorow, and Brandchaft, among others. Read these gifted thinkers and clinicians, Adam, and apply what you learn in the life you pursue.
Let me suggest some ideas that are more specific in regards to the most meaningful directions of our field in the coming decades. If I had another thirty years to live and to work, something which is not likely, I might throw myself into the following sorts of things. Maybe some interesting variations on what I will describe will inspire you, Adam.
1. So-called schizophrenia
An influential book appeared in 1911: Eugen Bleuler’s Dementia Praecox or the Group of Schizophrenias. In addition to introducing the term “schizophrenia” to our world, this work attempted to describe and provide examples of widely differing forms of the most extreme psychological disturbances that exist. It is worth reading even today for its rich accounts of madness in its many variations, although the work does suffer from some serious limitations from our present vantagepoint. The clinical descriptions are framed within a broadly Cartesian, intrapsychic frame of reference, locating the disturbances being considered inside the patients who are then pictured in isolation from their worlds. The presentations, in addition, tend to be restricted to the patients’ symptomatology in the present moment, leaving out of account the complex histories in which their symptoms are embedded and have meaning. Finally, the book is written almost entirely from the perspective of the medical model, viewing psychological disturbances as disease processes occurring in the mind.
I think Adam that a very wonderful project, one that would require a great many years of devotion, would be the modern counterpart to Bleuler’s classic study. This would involve even more detailed descriptions and examples of madness in its many forms and variations, with the focus however always being on the subjective states that are involved. Such a phenomenological emphasis would then be accompanied by a life-historical perspective, from which the overt symptom-pictures are cast in relation to the personal backgrounds of the people concerned. There would only be one way to accomplish the immense task I am suggesting: the collaboration of a number of dedicated clinicians and thinkers. It would be required that there be long-term commitments to the patients being studied, so that the inquiry into their worlds have a grounding in deep explorations of history and also include the nature of the healing processes that can be achieved.
Bleuler proposed that the heart of what was known in his time as dementia praecox consisted in various splitting processes occurring in the mind: hence the term, schizo-phrenia. These included the disintegration of the logical associations of thought, the splitting of cognition from its associated affects, the dividing of positive and negative emotions, and the separating off of a private reality from contact with the externally real. My own view is that future phenomenological studies of patients in this range will show how these various features can be significantly understood as secondary to a sense of personal annihilation. This means that the primary disturbance would be seen in the shattering or even erasure of the experience of personal selfhood. Also central would be the dissolution of the sense of the realness of the world and the disintegration of all that we ordinarily experience as substantial and enduring. The most prominent visible symptoms of these disturbances, such as one sees in hallucinations and delusions, in this context appear as restitutive or reparative reactions, efforts to reunify all that has fallen apart and resolidify all that has melted away.
Another clinical story comes to mind that relates to the sort of understanding I am thinking of. Consider this brief account, Adam, as standing for a thousand that I could provide. One of my patients from many years ago came to me after a long period in a psychiatric hospital. Twenty one years old at the time, she described herself as having always been in “pieces,” having separate and distinct “selves” that floated about in a strange space, without there being a common center. There was a sexual self, a religious self, a political self, a comical self, a professional self, and a social self. Each of these entities embodied an area of her interests and capabilities, but they were like islands suspended in the sea with no land bridges between them. It was interesting to me that a delusion haunting her during the many months of her hospitalization was a belief she was part of a world-revolution aiming to dissolve traditional nation-states and establish a universal government based on the power of all-embracing love. Out of her own personal fragmentation, it seemed, was arising a dream of world unity. She had been told by her doctors her diagnosis was that of schizophrenia, and, confused about what this meant, studied Bleuler’s derivation of the term from the Greek words for “split” and “mind.” She told me a better translation, still respecting the etymology but connecting more closely to her own familiar self-experience, would be: “torn soul.” I found her statement, obviously rooted in her feeling of being in pieces, to be one of the most astute things I have ever heard on this subject, and I told her so. We worked together for several decades and got along very well.
So-called bipolar disorder
In The Abyss of Madness, I made the claim that the most important frontier for present-day clinical psychoanalytic research is that of the psychotherapy of bipolar disorder, also known as manic-depressive illness. Of course these terms are medical-diagnostic designations, embedded in a Cartesian, objectifying worldview. How the patients so diagnosed will appear under a phenomenological lens remains to be seen, and what innovations in our approach to them will come forth are still to be defined.
A fabulous insight into the experiential core of a great many of the patients showing an oscillating pattern of mania and depression was given to us by Bernard Brandchaft, in his book Toward an EmancipatoryPsychoanalysis. He saw a problem again involving a sense of personal annihilation, wherein the manic episode expresses a transitory liberation from annihilating ties to caregivers, whereas the depression that ensues represents the reinstatement of those ties. A division has occurred between accommodative and individualizing trends in these patients’ personalities: on one side of this division, there is a compliant surrender to authority and the installation within the patient’s selfhood of others’ purposes and expectations; on the other side is a glorious overthrow of such captivity and the embrace of shining freedom. The magical emancipation, of course, cannot last, because there is nothing and no one to support it, and so it collapses into a dark despair. Here would be my questions for those who seek pathways of psychotherapy with such patients in the future. Can an experience be facilitated that establishes a new center, one in which compliance and rebellion are somehow integrated? Can the empathy of the clinician become a medium in which previously aborted developmental processes can be reinstated? Can a deep understanding of what is at stake for the patient finally make a constructive difference to his or her destiny in the continuing nightmare of bipolarity?
The great psychoanalyst, Frieda Fromm-Reichman, in 1954 published a now-classic clinical study: Its title was: “An intensive study of twelve cases of manic-depressive psychosis.” A generalization arising from this study was the notion that such patients were, in their families growing up, treated as extensions of their caregivers rather than as independent beings in their own rights. I would like to see a modern counterpart to this work, tracing carefully the subjective worlds and histories of bipolar patients and exploring the outer limits of our efficacy as therapists in arresting their destructive patterns and stabilizing their lives. The key to success in such a project will be in the new understanding flowing from Brandchaft’s insight, one highlighting the patients’ needs to find pathways of emancipation from enslaving accommodation that do not lead into the structureless chaos of the manic episode.
An amazing example of the twin-sides of bipolarity is given in another classic of the literature of madness: Kay Jamison’s An Unquiet Mind. This author tells the story of her extended resistance as a young woman against her doctor on the issue of her taking mood-stabilizing drugs. Back and forth their arguments went, with her trying to defend her right to a life free of medical intrusions, and with her psychiatrist telling her she had a biologically-based mental illness that absolutely required medications in order for her to be able to function. Finally, with the greatest reluctance, Kay agreed to begin on a course of taking regular doses of lithium. However, when she went to the pharmacy to pick up her prescription, she suddenly was seized by a terrifying vision. She saw, in her mind’s eye, vast numbers of poisonous snakes approaching her vicinity and foresaw how these dangerous creatures would strike at her and all those she cared about, filling their bodies with lethal toxins. So she purchased, along with her lithium, all the snake-bite kits the pharmacy had available, hoping to use the kits to save herself and as many people as she could.
Let me tell you, Adam, my theory of what this delusion about snakes symbolized. The poison carried by these imagined creatures, about to be injected into Kay herself and the unsuspecting public, represented the diagnostic authority of her doctor, to which she was in the process of capitulating. The theme of at first fighting back willfully but then caving in and surrendering appears also in her early family life, which she describes as having been a battle against oppressive control. The side of this woman tending toward compliant surrender was accepting into her self-definition the medical attributions she had earlier resisted; the side of her wanting to protect her self-integrity from invasion and usurpation armed itself with antidotes to snake venom. There is a parallel between Kay’s desperate purchase of the life-saving snakebite kits and Patty Duke’s attempt to drive imagined foreign agents out of the White House, which is briefly described in Letter # 4. Remarkably, neither of these women appears to have had any awareness of such symbolic connections. It has been my sense that so-called bipolar patients often seem to live in a world of utter concreteness, rendering subjective life strangely opaque.
Possibly this opacity arises out of the absence in the patients’ families of origin of validating responsiveness to the child’s unique world of experience.
Madness and Creative Genius
Another favorite subject of mine, one that I hope will be taken up in our field in coming years, pertains to creativity and its complex relationships to madness and trauma. It is my view that the events and circumstances of our lives that hurt us most deeply, sometimes that even take us into an experience of personal annihilation, are implicated as also being among the factors leading to great achievements of creative imagination.
I taught an advanced seminar at my college for a long time, a class in which each year we would select a person for study showing great creativity but also signs of madness. A generalization unexpectedly emerged from the long series of analyses that took place: in almost every case there was evidence of a profound, irreconcilable conflict in thepersonality of the creator, one that threatened to lead to fragmentation and madness but that seemed to be integrated by the acts of creation. The specific content of the division varied from instance to instance, but the presence of such a duality seemed not to. As you know, Adam, four such divided geniuses are described and discussed in the final chapter of The Abyss of Madness: Soren Kierkegaard, Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, and Ludwig Wittgenstein.
I would be very interested in a much more inclusive exploring of major figures in art, philosophy, and science in order to see just how truly general this apparent pattern is. It would also be important to study carefully how it is that the creative activity brings the warring trends in the creator’s soul into a unity. I am thinking that a thorough understanding of such matters could lead to innovative psychotherapeutic approaches with people otherwise fated to lives of paralysis and despair. Would it not be a beautiful development in our field, Adam, if ways could be found to transform delusions and hallucinations into works of art?
I shall offer a single instance of the analyses conducted in my college seminar, that of the great German poet Rainer Maria Rilke. If you have not read this gentleman’s works, Adam, I recommend studying two of them: Duino Elegies and Sonnets to Orpheus. Rilke’s writings abound with a concern with spirits and ghosts. He was himself inhabited by the soul of a sister who died, a short period before he was born. His mother, broken-hearted by her loss, raised her son to be the dead child’s reincarnation. Consider his name, as it was given to him by his mother: Rene Karl Wilhelm Josef Maria Rilke. The name “Rainer,” which one normally associates with him, does not appear in this sequence. It is a masculinization of “Rene,” originally given as his first name. He changed it under the influence of his muse and lover, Lou Andreas Salome.
Rilke’s given names form a sequence of male designations bounded at the beginning and the end by female ones. His mother, having lost her daughter, enclosed his name, and his soul, in a vision of a resurrected female. She dressed him in girl’s clothes, encouraged his playing with dolls, and interpreted his early interests in drawing and watercolors as essentially feminine preoccupations. Born a boy, he was raised from birth to be a girl.
The soul of the dead sister took up residence inside the young boy. Although the female spirit never became the whole of him, she did alternate in his experience with the male child he also became. Sometimes her presence was felt as a mystical mask he would put on; the problem arose when this mask began to melt into his face and displace his identity as a boy. Or was it the girl he was raised to be whose identity was displaced by the mask of a boy? At other times, the alien spirit erupted from within, draining away all vitality and pursuing its own independent agendas. This spirit might have been, again, the girl emerging from within the boy, or the boy erupting from the depths of the girl his mother saw him as being. With Rilke, it is always both/and, and never either/or. The key to the genius of his poetry lies in his ability to embrace both sides of his androgenous nature, and this ability also shielded him from madness.
In the journey of the creator, there is almost always a division within the soul, one that – left unaddressed – carries the possibility of madness within its depths. The act of creation provides a pathway in which the division can be transcended and unified, and is a protection against psychological destruction. There are countless examples one can find in the life histories of artists, philosophers, and scientists. The need to bring together that which has been torn asunder establishes an everlasting tension, one that leads to a spiraling of creativity. This is a theme one could spend a lifetime studying.
These are my thoughts for now, Adam, and I hope you will find something of interest in them. Write again, my friend – your questions open the doorway to thoughts I might never have otherwise come to.
George Atwood
Letters to a Young Student, Number 7
Concerning paranormal phenomena
Published on July 12, 2013
by George Atwood, Ph.D. in Strange Memories
Dear Professor,
In your last letter you described a young woman whose delusional love affair with a music star was conducted via mental telepathy. I don’t think your point was about the telepathy itself, but I found myself wondering what your thinking is on the whole question of the paranormal. I have been interested in this since I was a young boy. Is telepathy something you consider possible and real? What experiences have you had, if any, that bear on this issue?
Adam
Dear Adam:
Your questions, once again, are engaging and I will try to answer them. I too have always had an interest in the strange world of the paranormal. After many years of study and a lifetime of thought on the matter, I have come to just one glorious conclusion: lt is elusive. Things happen to us that are uncanny, seeming to indicate the existence of hidden dimensions of experience that are not encompassed by ordinary understanding. Every effort to reliably demonstrate the reality of these dimensions seems to meet with failure, however, and every attempt to rationally conceptualize what might be involved runs up against a wall of unknowing. All we are left with is a collection of apparent synchronicities, lacking firm verification that any of them are more than just coincidence.
I recall a conversation on this topic with one of my college professors more than fifty years ago – I was like you, Adam, and I had asked for his views on parapsychological phenomena. This professor was a so-called physiological psychologist, whose research involved surgical lesioning of certain centers in the brains of white rats, and then testing the animals for various deficits in learning and memory. His answer, given with an ugly look of impatience and contempt: “Psychology has 1000 problems in need of study, and that is number 999 on the list!” I remember wondering what then would be the 1000th problem on his list (witchcraft?), but I saw there was no point in continuing the discussion with this close-minded, unpleasant gentleman. If the paranormal has no reality, then obviously it is not something one can study; but if something is there, then I would say that it would be a very important problem in the effort to understand human existence.
1.
Let me tell a story that illustrates the sort of personal experience I have had that is relevant to this theme. It is the story of a synchronicity. One day years ago I received a strange letter from a friend, a psychoanalytic psychiatrist who lived in California. I was living on the east coast, 2500 miles away. There had been no contact between us for more than a decade, and yet here he was suddenly reaching out to me. These were his exact words, at the beginning of his letter:
“Dear George – I haven’t talked to you in a long time but just recently you have been on my mind. I don’t know what it is, but is something going on with you? Thoughts about you keep coming to me and I am worried something might be wrong.”
Something was indeed wrong in my life at that time. For the previous two weeks, I had been suffering with a tragedy that had happened in my family. One of my cousins, a young man in his 20s, had drowned off the coast of South Carolina. He and two others, in the employ of a company involved in offshore oil drilling, had been making ocean-depth measurements and been caught in a sudden storm. The line they were using for the measurements became wrapped around their boat’s propeller when they tried to return to shore, and there was no way to survive in the high waves that engulfed them. Their bodies were not found until more than a month later, when they washed up on the coast of Florida. My cousin was identified by the wedding ring he was still wearing.
I had love for this young man, and his death was horrifying and I have never gotten over it. I found myself picturing what it was like to have been on that doomed boat as the storm arose and the situation turned hopeless. Obsessing about the struggle with the entangled line as the wind grew stronger, I visualized being swept into the water and the life vests being ripped away by the violence of the waves. Then came the exhaustion, the choking, the terror, until finally, darkness and nothingness. A weird empathic identification with my cousin’s final moments of life consumed my days and nights in the aftermath of the catastrophe, and this was the subjective context of the arrival of my friend’s letter. My heart was broken and I kept reliving what had occurred, as I imagined it, with an almost hallucinatory clarity.
There is more. I was impressed by my friend’s seeming attunement to my distress, but at first regarded it as mere coincidence. Then I noted his use of certain words in the second paragraph of his letter, quoted below (italics added).
“I would have written or called before now, George, but I have been in the midst of family demands that were taking all my time. My niece and her three young children visited from Indonesia, and their arrival was like atidal wave. It has been so long since my own kids were young that I had forgotten how consuming child care can be. It felt like I was drowning. They have gone home now so I am no longer inundated, finally having the time and focus to write to you. Let me know how things are my dear old friend.”
After reading over his letter a few times, I saw the imagery he was using to describe the impact of the family visit as precisely matching the content of my obsessions with my cousin’s death. A feeling took hold, accompanied by a sense of awe, that my friend had unconsciously read my mind and that the correspondences I had noted were paranormally real. Without his recognizing it consciously in any way, I thought, he had used metaphors grounded in a telepathic resonance.
Here are some reflections on this experience. Beneath the excitement I felt in discovering the parallels between my identificatory reactions in mygrief and his choice of words to describe the pressures of his relatives visiting, I became aware that I passionately, almost desperately wanted the telepathy to be real. I thought to myself: “Yes, that’s how it works! A subtle resonance occurs and parallel sets of images arise, and the whole thing occurs unconsciously!” I stared at the words he had used, again and again: drowning, tidal wave, inundated, which seemed almost to glow in his handwritten letter to me.
But why was it so emotionally important that this correspondence of imagery be more than just coincidental? Why was I so fascinated by the use of just a few words? An answer to this question then came into my mind. If the apparent telepathy were real, it would show there is an uncanny connection between people, a level of experience at which the separateness of human beings is nullified. I had been in the agony of separation and loss, struggling to avert its finality by empathically projecting myself into my cousin’s deadly situation. A rip in the fabric of my universe and in time itself was mystically, magically repaired by an impressive experience of thought transference across the North American continent. I have observed that paranormal occurrences are very often reported alongside concurrent experiences of loss and trauma that disrupt the temporal continuity of our lives and shatter the certainties organizing our worlds. Dwelling on such psychical connections between separated events, I realized, weaves the pieces of a world that has been torn apart into a restored unity.
But does the discovery of a motive for believing in the reality of the paranormal say that the connections involved lack all intrinsic genuineness? The noting of synchronicities belongs importantly to the phenomenology of trauma, having a reparative function; but should we for this reason discount the reports as wish fulfillments? Is it possible that the subjective states brought about by extreme trauma sometimes open us up to something that is inaccessible in our normal, everyday lives? Is it conceivable that telepathic connections are commonplace, but that we only discover their existence when we are affected by disruptions in our worlds? I do not know the answers to these questions and I see no way to find them. It seems to me advisable, nevertheless, to keep an open mind on this matter.
2.
During my student days and for a few years after receiving my doctorate, I was sporadically involved in parapsychological research. I ran small experiments, trying to demonstrate the existence of telepathy, clairvoyance, and psychokinesis. Although these efforts very occasionally resulted in suggestive trends in the data, none of the tentatively established effects could be reproduced in further studies, and I eventually gave up on such investigations. I also devoted a fair amount of time to thinking about the paranormal, searching for a way of conceptualizing the phenomena involved. Here too I came up against a wall: No matter how hard I tried, I was unable to identify even the most rudimentary beginnings of a way of making sense of this field. A search of the very considerable literature of psychical research that has accumulated over the last 130 years also came up empty. All one has, when everything has been said and done, is a collection of unexplained, irreproducible correspondences.
My interest in parapsychology shifted as I saw there was no way open to pursue this field of study in literal terms. I became fascinated instead with the experience of the paranormal, the subjective sense that something outside the bounds of ordinary life is occurring. Leaving aside considerations about objective validity, I asked what are the psychological conditions under which these strange and interesting effects are felt to occur? What are the psychological purposes or functions served by the belief in such capacities and events? What are the driving needs people may have that make them embrace the reality of telepathy, psychokinesis, clairvoyance, and precognition? I suppose in a way I was searching for the meaning of my own interests in this issue.
In the early years of my work at my college I taught a graduate seminar that addressed these questions through the methodology known as the intensive, in-depth case study. We found a series of individuals who claimed they possessed extrasensory perception and reported contact with a level of existence transcending the dimensions of ordinary, everyday life. My graduate students conducted a number of detailed, in-depth interviews with these persons, gave them projective tests, collected their dreams, and had them write extensive autobiographical essays. Included in this inquiry was a thorough exploring of the various paranormal happenings in which they believed. Our goal was to illuminate the psychological meaning and purpose of the paranormal by studying it in the context of the worlds and histories of people who had experienced it to an unusual, extreme degree.
I will describe just one of the people we studied. Remember, Adam, our focus was solely on the phenomenology of parapsychological events, not on their objective validity. In our relationship with our subjects we never questioned the truth of what was recounted, asking only for descriptions of all that had been felt to occur. A young woman, one of the first to become the focus of our seminar, reported a variety of extraordinary events and capabilities that extended back to her earliest memories ofchildhood. These centrally included strange journeys, in which her mind or soul traveled outside of her body, around her community and even around the world. She explained that her ability to travel in a disembodied state had been given to her by loving ghosts, who appeared in her bedroom when she was 4 years old. These were the spirits of ancestors who had died long before she was born. The ghosts, as their first action after informing her they had come to give her needed instruction, was to lift her out of her body and then accompany her in flight through the night sky. They showed her the way to various destinations, most importantly to a site she called “the Field,” a peaceful expanse of grass and trees where no one could find her and she would be safe from all dangers. The journeys also included visits to mausoleums in the Ukraine, where many of her relatives had been interred in years and centuries past. Their ghosts welcomed her on these international excursions.
This woman’s journeys outside her body were the nucleus of a secret world to which she belonged, a realm free of actual living human beings and populated instead by the spirits of the dead. Her secret life was replete with paranormal events and capabilities. She described being able to inhabit the bodies and minds of living people and immediately experience everything they were doing and that was happening to them. She claimed to have telepathic powers, abilities to read others’ thoughts by looking into their eyes. As a young child, additionally, she had been able to move small objects purely as an act of psychokinetic will. When asked about the most significant events of her formative years, she spoke at length about the many ghosts with whom she had communed from an early age. She was attending a community college at the time of her participation in our study, but her inner heart was invested in her secret world of companionship with spirits far removed from actual human contact. At the same time, it became apparent to us that her joining our study was an effort to come out of her isolation and reestablish links to the world of living people.
What was the personal, historical context of this amazing story? Her childhood history had been one of profound abuse and trauma, including years of sadistic beatings at the hands of both parents and also major medical illnesses and great trauma associated with devastating surgery experiences. Her young life had been under attack, from without and within, from the time of her earliest memories; and she had survived by cultivating a hidden life of special abilities and nurturing spirits. The paranormal occurrences and powers counteracted a killing lonelinessassociated with her secret world and served as well to magically restore a sense of agency and control over a nightmarish situation of relentless victimization and helpless suffering.i
The other subjects in our studies were not as extreme as this one, but they shared in common with her childhood experiences of disruptive trauma and loss. In all the cases the paranormal events served a purpose of overcoming shattering separations and undoing personal erasure by cultivating a sense of being in possession of special powers.
The traumas all of these people endured were such as to bring their childhoods to sudden and early ends, replacing whatever security they had known in their first years with utter desolation and loneliness. Again and again we saw the paranormal as repairing fractured worlds and restoring broken connections to others.
You might wonder what happened to the young woman I have just described, as she disclosed a formerly secret world with nothing held back. I don’t want to go into the details in this letter, Adam, but suffice it to say that we saw she received the help it turned out she was seeking. She eventually healed significantly from her long history of trauma and did very well in her life.
3.
C.G. Jung undertook the task of interpreting paranormal events, and he was led to his famous essay, “Synchronicity: an acausal connecting principle.” I studied his thinking closely years ago, and found it had only very limited content. Jung suggested that there is a meaningful connectedness between certain events we experience that is not covered by the category of causality, and that is pretty much all he said. Where does one go with such a negative description?
Jung was a true believer in the paranormal, and he described a number of experiences belonging to this realm in his autobiography Memories, Dreams, Reflections. One can ask then about the psychological meaning of his convictions in this regard. I would answer that Jung was another one preoccupied with overcoming an otherwise killing loneliness and healing a profound sense of personal disunity. If the events of this world form a network of acausal connecting links, then ultimately no one and nothing exists in absolute isolation. The universe, and all its creatures, instead form a unitary, organic whole. Jung’s focus in his theories of the archetypes of the collective, transpersonal unconscious served these same purposes for him. My friend Robert Stolorow and I explored this theme and its developmental origins in Jung’s early life in our first book,Faces in a Cloud.
Of course identifying the emotional purposes served by a set of ideas in no way invalidates those ideas taken in their own terms. What if Jung was right, and there is an acausal connectedness to events that becomes manifest in the paranormal? He suggested that the events in question exist in the sphere of meaning, rather than purely in the physical world of cause and effect. A challenge may be implicit in his very tentative formulations: To rethink the relation between mind and matter, between the subjective and the objective. If we can imagine the development of an embracing philosophy of science that overcomes this essential Cartesian binary, perhaps we can also picture the discovery of new ways of thinking about these phenomena that would be worth something.
The world to me is a more interesting place if telepathy and other parapsychological processes are real. When you ask if I believe in their validity, however, I have to say that I simply do not know. I hope this very limited response is not disappointing.
Write again Adam. I am continuing to enjoy these letters.
In your last letter you described a young woman whose delusional love affair with a music star was conducted via mental telepathy. I don’t think your point was about the telepathy itself, but I found myself wondering what your thinking is on the whole question of the paranormal. I have been interested in this since I was a young boy. Is telepathy something you consider possible and real? What experiences have you had, if any, that bear on this issue?
Adam
Dear Adam:
Your questions, once again, are engaging and I will try to answer them. I too have always had an interest in the strange world of the paranormal. After many years of study and a lifetime of thought on the matter, I have come to just one glorious conclusion: lt is elusive. Things happen to us that are uncanny, seeming to indicate the existence of hidden dimensions of experience that are not encompassed by ordinary understanding. Every effort to reliably demonstrate the reality of these dimensions seems to meet with failure, however, and every attempt to rationally conceptualize what might be involved runs up against a wall of unknowing. All we are left with is a collection of apparent synchronicities, lacking firm verification that any of them are more than just coincidence.
I recall a conversation on this topic with one of my college professors more than fifty years ago – I was like you, Adam, and I had asked for his views on parapsychological phenomena. This professor was a so-called physiological psychologist, whose research involved surgical lesioning of certain centers in the brains of white rats, and then testing the animals for various deficits in learning and memory. His answer, given with an ugly look of impatience and contempt: “Psychology has 1000 problems in need of study, and that is number 999 on the list!” I remember wondering what then would be the 1000th problem on his list (witchcraft?), but I saw there was no point in continuing the discussion with this close-minded, unpleasant gentleman. If the paranormal has no reality, then obviously it is not something one can study; but if something is there, then I would say that it would be a very important problem in the effort to understand human existence.
1.
Let me tell a story that illustrates the sort of personal experience I have had that is relevant to this theme. It is the story of a synchronicity. One day years ago I received a strange letter from a friend, a psychoanalytic psychiatrist who lived in California. I was living on the east coast, 2500 miles away. There had been no contact between us for more than a decade, and yet here he was suddenly reaching out to me. These were his exact words, at the beginning of his letter:
“Dear George – I haven’t talked to you in a long time but just recently you have been on my mind. I don’t know what it is, but is something going on with you? Thoughts about you keep coming to me and I am worried something might be wrong.”
Something was indeed wrong in my life at that time. For the previous two weeks, I had been suffering with a tragedy that had happened in my family. One of my cousins, a young man in his 20s, had drowned off the coast of South Carolina. He and two others, in the employ of a company involved in offshore oil drilling, had been making ocean-depth measurements and been caught in a sudden storm. The line they were using for the measurements became wrapped around their boat’s propeller when they tried to return to shore, and there was no way to survive in the high waves that engulfed them. Their bodies were not found until more than a month later, when they washed up on the coast of Florida. My cousin was identified by the wedding ring he was still wearing.
I had love for this young man, and his death was horrifying and I have never gotten over it. I found myself picturing what it was like to have been on that doomed boat as the storm arose and the situation turned hopeless. Obsessing about the struggle with the entangled line as the wind grew stronger, I visualized being swept into the water and the life vests being ripped away by the violence of the waves. Then came the exhaustion, the choking, the terror, until finally, darkness and nothingness. A weird empathic identification with my cousin’s final moments of life consumed my days and nights in the aftermath of the catastrophe, and this was the subjective context of the arrival of my friend’s letter. My heart was broken and I kept reliving what had occurred, as I imagined it, with an almost hallucinatory clarity.
There is more. I was impressed by my friend’s seeming attunement to my distress, but at first regarded it as mere coincidence. Then I noted his use of certain words in the second paragraph of his letter, quoted below (italics added).
“I would have written or called before now, George, but I have been in the midst of family demands that were taking all my time. My niece and her three young children visited from Indonesia, and their arrival was like atidal wave. It has been so long since my own kids were young that I had forgotten how consuming child care can be. It felt like I was drowning. They have gone home now so I am no longer inundated, finally having the time and focus to write to you. Let me know how things are my dear old friend.”
After reading over his letter a few times, I saw the imagery he was using to describe the impact of the family visit as precisely matching the content of my obsessions with my cousin’s death. A feeling took hold, accompanied by a sense of awe, that my friend had unconsciously read my mind and that the correspondences I had noted were paranormally real. Without his recognizing it consciously in any way, I thought, he had used metaphors grounded in a telepathic resonance.
Here are some reflections on this experience. Beneath the excitement I felt in discovering the parallels between my identificatory reactions in mygrief and his choice of words to describe the pressures of his relatives visiting, I became aware that I passionately, almost desperately wanted the telepathy to be real. I thought to myself: “Yes, that’s how it works! A subtle resonance occurs and parallel sets of images arise, and the whole thing occurs unconsciously!” I stared at the words he had used, again and again: drowning, tidal wave, inundated, which seemed almost to glow in his handwritten letter to me.
But why was it so emotionally important that this correspondence of imagery be more than just coincidental? Why was I so fascinated by the use of just a few words? An answer to this question then came into my mind. If the apparent telepathy were real, it would show there is an uncanny connection between people, a level of experience at which the separateness of human beings is nullified. I had been in the agony of separation and loss, struggling to avert its finality by empathically projecting myself into my cousin’s deadly situation. A rip in the fabric of my universe and in time itself was mystically, magically repaired by an impressive experience of thought transference across the North American continent. I have observed that paranormal occurrences are very often reported alongside concurrent experiences of loss and trauma that disrupt the temporal continuity of our lives and shatter the certainties organizing our worlds. Dwelling on such psychical connections between separated events, I realized, weaves the pieces of a world that has been torn apart into a restored unity.
But does the discovery of a motive for believing in the reality of the paranormal say that the connections involved lack all intrinsic genuineness? The noting of synchronicities belongs importantly to the phenomenology of trauma, having a reparative function; but should we for this reason discount the reports as wish fulfillments? Is it possible that the subjective states brought about by extreme trauma sometimes open us up to something that is inaccessible in our normal, everyday lives? Is it conceivable that telepathic connections are commonplace, but that we only discover their existence when we are affected by disruptions in our worlds? I do not know the answers to these questions and I see no way to find them. It seems to me advisable, nevertheless, to keep an open mind on this matter.
2.
During my student days and for a few years after receiving my doctorate, I was sporadically involved in parapsychological research. I ran small experiments, trying to demonstrate the existence of telepathy, clairvoyance, and psychokinesis. Although these efforts very occasionally resulted in suggestive trends in the data, none of the tentatively established effects could be reproduced in further studies, and I eventually gave up on such investigations. I also devoted a fair amount of time to thinking about the paranormal, searching for a way of conceptualizing the phenomena involved. Here too I came up against a wall: No matter how hard I tried, I was unable to identify even the most rudimentary beginnings of a way of making sense of this field. A search of the very considerable literature of psychical research that has accumulated over the last 130 years also came up empty. All one has, when everything has been said and done, is a collection of unexplained, irreproducible correspondences.
My interest in parapsychology shifted as I saw there was no way open to pursue this field of study in literal terms. I became fascinated instead with the experience of the paranormal, the subjective sense that something outside the bounds of ordinary life is occurring. Leaving aside considerations about objective validity, I asked what are the psychological conditions under which these strange and interesting effects are felt to occur? What are the psychological purposes or functions served by the belief in such capacities and events? What are the driving needs people may have that make them embrace the reality of telepathy, psychokinesis, clairvoyance, and precognition? I suppose in a way I was searching for the meaning of my own interests in this issue.
In the early years of my work at my college I taught a graduate seminar that addressed these questions through the methodology known as the intensive, in-depth case study. We found a series of individuals who claimed they possessed extrasensory perception and reported contact with a level of existence transcending the dimensions of ordinary, everyday life. My graduate students conducted a number of detailed, in-depth interviews with these persons, gave them projective tests, collected their dreams, and had them write extensive autobiographical essays. Included in this inquiry was a thorough exploring of the various paranormal happenings in which they believed. Our goal was to illuminate the psychological meaning and purpose of the paranormal by studying it in the context of the worlds and histories of people who had experienced it to an unusual, extreme degree.
I will describe just one of the people we studied. Remember, Adam, our focus was solely on the phenomenology of parapsychological events, not on their objective validity. In our relationship with our subjects we never questioned the truth of what was recounted, asking only for descriptions of all that had been felt to occur. A young woman, one of the first to become the focus of our seminar, reported a variety of extraordinary events and capabilities that extended back to her earliest memories ofchildhood. These centrally included strange journeys, in which her mind or soul traveled outside of her body, around her community and even around the world. She explained that her ability to travel in a disembodied state had been given to her by loving ghosts, who appeared in her bedroom when she was 4 years old. These were the spirits of ancestors who had died long before she was born. The ghosts, as their first action after informing her they had come to give her needed instruction, was to lift her out of her body and then accompany her in flight through the night sky. They showed her the way to various destinations, most importantly to a site she called “the Field,” a peaceful expanse of grass and trees where no one could find her and she would be safe from all dangers. The journeys also included visits to mausoleums in the Ukraine, where many of her relatives had been interred in years and centuries past. Their ghosts welcomed her on these international excursions.
This woman’s journeys outside her body were the nucleus of a secret world to which she belonged, a realm free of actual living human beings and populated instead by the spirits of the dead. Her secret life was replete with paranormal events and capabilities. She described being able to inhabit the bodies and minds of living people and immediately experience everything they were doing and that was happening to them. She claimed to have telepathic powers, abilities to read others’ thoughts by looking into their eyes. As a young child, additionally, she had been able to move small objects purely as an act of psychokinetic will. When asked about the most significant events of her formative years, she spoke at length about the many ghosts with whom she had communed from an early age. She was attending a community college at the time of her participation in our study, but her inner heart was invested in her secret world of companionship with spirits far removed from actual human contact. At the same time, it became apparent to us that her joining our study was an effort to come out of her isolation and reestablish links to the world of living people.
What was the personal, historical context of this amazing story? Her childhood history had been one of profound abuse and trauma, including years of sadistic beatings at the hands of both parents and also major medical illnesses and great trauma associated with devastating surgery experiences. Her young life had been under attack, from without and within, from the time of her earliest memories; and she had survived by cultivating a hidden life of special abilities and nurturing spirits. The paranormal occurrences and powers counteracted a killing lonelinessassociated with her secret world and served as well to magically restore a sense of agency and control over a nightmarish situation of relentless victimization and helpless suffering.i
The other subjects in our studies were not as extreme as this one, but they shared in common with her childhood experiences of disruptive trauma and loss. In all the cases the paranormal events served a purpose of overcoming shattering separations and undoing personal erasure by cultivating a sense of being in possession of special powers.
The traumas all of these people endured were such as to bring their childhoods to sudden and early ends, replacing whatever security they had known in their first years with utter desolation and loneliness. Again and again we saw the paranormal as repairing fractured worlds and restoring broken connections to others.
You might wonder what happened to the young woman I have just described, as she disclosed a formerly secret world with nothing held back. I don’t want to go into the details in this letter, Adam, but suffice it to say that we saw she received the help it turned out she was seeking. She eventually healed significantly from her long history of trauma and did very well in her life.
3.
C.G. Jung undertook the task of interpreting paranormal events, and he was led to his famous essay, “Synchronicity: an acausal connecting principle.” I studied his thinking closely years ago, and found it had only very limited content. Jung suggested that there is a meaningful connectedness between certain events we experience that is not covered by the category of causality, and that is pretty much all he said. Where does one go with such a negative description?
Jung was a true believer in the paranormal, and he described a number of experiences belonging to this realm in his autobiography Memories, Dreams, Reflections. One can ask then about the psychological meaning of his convictions in this regard. I would answer that Jung was another one preoccupied with overcoming an otherwise killing loneliness and healing a profound sense of personal disunity. If the events of this world form a network of acausal connecting links, then ultimately no one and nothing exists in absolute isolation. The universe, and all its creatures, instead form a unitary, organic whole. Jung’s focus in his theories of the archetypes of the collective, transpersonal unconscious served these same purposes for him. My friend Robert Stolorow and I explored this theme and its developmental origins in Jung’s early life in our first book,Faces in a Cloud.
Of course identifying the emotional purposes served by a set of ideas in no way invalidates those ideas taken in their own terms. What if Jung was right, and there is an acausal connectedness to events that becomes manifest in the paranormal? He suggested that the events in question exist in the sphere of meaning, rather than purely in the physical world of cause and effect. A challenge may be implicit in his very tentative formulations: To rethink the relation between mind and matter, between the subjective and the objective. If we can imagine the development of an embracing philosophy of science that overcomes this essential Cartesian binary, perhaps we can also picture the discovery of new ways of thinking about these phenomena that would be worth something.
The world to me is a more interesting place if telepathy and other parapsychological processes are real. When you ask if I believe in their validity, however, I have to say that I simply do not know. I hope this very limited response is not disappointing.
Write again Adam. I am continuing to enjoy these letters.
Letter to a Young Student #8
The Abyss of Madness was written by a ghost
Published on July 31, 2013
by George Atwood, Ph.D. in Strange Memories
Dear Professor:
Your letters continue to be wonderful and I will be forever grateful for them. I have also been rereading your book, The Abyss of Madness, and each time I return to it I find something new. The book is so accessible and reads almost like a conversation in many parts. I was wondering how you were able to write it in such an easygoing style and yet cover so many complex ideas. Tell me what it was like to complete this very fine work.
Your friend, Adam
Dear Adam:
The story of writing Abyss is a strange one. I did not actually write this book myself; instead, it was dictated to me, by a ghost. Here is the story.
In the Summer of 2006 while I was at my cabin in Maine, one night I was on the internet returning to a special website associated with a class I had taught at my college the semester before. The site included interesting questions I would pose for the students to discuss and allowed for online discussions in which I also sometimes participated. Now that the class was over, the discussion board was almost entirely silent; but yet it was still available to class members if they chose to log on. Very occasionally someone would do so, and if the stars were in the right alignment, I would show up too, and there would be a conversation about whatever happened to be on our minds. I thought of these websites of the past as ghost sites, and of those returning to them after the class was over as ghosts floating back to a location formerly full of life.
Anyway, on one such night I clicked in to a ghost website and found one of my former students there, a young woman in my class who had become very fond of me in the months before. I asked her if she knew that she was a ghost lurking in a graveyard. She laughed at this image, and then asked me something: “George Atwood, what do you think a ghost is, really?” After thinking about this interesting question for a few moments, the following ideas came to me, as if from a cloud:
“Ghosts are not spirits of the dead who come back to haunt us; it is rather that they are unrealized possibilities of our own lives. They are the people we might have become if we had made different choices, or if the specific situations directing us to our destinies had been changed in important ways. Ghosts are the paths not taken. They are the lives left unlived, and everyone has many ghosts. They are a little bit like virtual particles in physics: they do not exist in a positive sense, but they are not just nothing. They can in fact be powerful forces in a person’s existence, haunting and even disrupting the identities we have found for ourselves.”
Then I asked myself about my own ghosts: what are they, and who might I have become?
One of my numerous ghosts is certainly that of a psychiatrist, since my original goal as a young man was to follow in the footsteps of Freud and Jung, and undergo medical training as a prelude to specializing in the study and treatment of mental illness. As it turned out, my love for psychology was so strong I could not defer the fulfillment of my goals for the many years required to become a physician. So I became a clinical psychologist instead. But there was the psychiatrist I might otherwise have been, and I tried to picture that person as he would have turned out. Conversing online with my wonderful student, I visualized that psychiatrist: he appeared in my imagination as an aged, white-haired gentleman, looking rather like Carl Gustav Jung at the age of 81. A name came forth for him: Dr. E. I have no idea why he was given this specific designation, but as I continued to imagine him, he began to seem more and more real. So I decided to ask him a question:
“Tell me something Dr. E.: what do you think of ghosts?”
To my surprise, the old man spoke back! He began by presenting a theory of how so-called bipolar disorder can arise out of an attack on a person by a ghost. His idea was that first someone crushes a possibility of his or her being, generally in order to comply with the agendas and expectations of caregivers during childhood and thereby maintain an otherwise tenuous sense of emotional connection to them. Then that lost possibility gathers power later in life, and suddenly bursts in upon the present world of the person in the form of a manic attack. He continued in this vein and developed a really interesting viewpoint on the oscillations between mania and depression, and I found myself writing down all he said. It was a feeling of being dictated to rather than one of composing the words myself. Ordinarily when I write, it is a painful struggle to find the proper sentences, to create something that I can believe will make sense to the reader. Taking dictation from Dr. E was almost effortless, and his sentences and paragraphs emerged fully formed, needing no revision and showing a transparency that seemed remarkable.
This first encounter with my imaginary friend continued over the next few days and nights, extending to the ghosts that are the lost futures of people who have died. Such possibilities of life, cut off by tragedy, often take up residence within the living and have amazing effects. Many artists’ life histories show this pattern. At the end of our discussions of ghosts and tragedy there was a manuscript, and I had no plan as to what to do with it. So I filed it away and went about my business at my cabin in Maine, watching ducks swim by, bringing coffee to my wife, and walking my dogs in the morning. I had no idea that the essay that had been composed would form the basis of a chapter in my eventual book, entitled “What is a ghost?”
I will sum up what transpired over the ensuing years. Next came the theme of madness, of so-called psychosis, of the annihilation experiences that characterize the most extreme ranges of psychological disorder. I tried again to engage Dr. E. in a discussion of this matter, and he was receptive, but with one condition. He insisted on preserving his absolute anonymity, so that he could speak freely of his thoughts and experiences without having to worry about their repercussions on him personally. Dr. E. made it clear that he had little respect for most of his contemporaries and wished to make his viewpoint known just to young people who had not yet locked into rigid positions on what mental illness is and on whatpsychotherapy can and cannot accomplish. A wonderful conversation then unfolded, covering a variety of themes crystallizing around experiences of personal annihilation. I found him impatient with me a number of times as our dialogue continued, and once he even struck out at me in angry intolerance of what he experienced as the unbearable stupidity of my questions. Although I knew he was someone I was imagining, I could actually feel the sting of his withering criticisms and the physical impact of his angry blow on my head. Dr. E. was becoming more and more autonomously real.
Further dialogues appeared over the next few years, each unfolding as a question and answer session between the two of us. These conversations, often interrupted by his hostility in the face of conventional thinking of any kind, covered important territories of my field: depression and suicide, dissociation and trauma, the psychotherapy of psychosis,dreams and dream interpretation, the philosophical assumptions of clinical practice, madness and creative genius. Eventually there were 9 transcribed dialogues with this anonymous psychiatrist, and a few of them were actually published as such in The International Journal of Psychoanalytic Self Psychology. In the community of self psychologists, there was actually some debate about the issue of his identity. One California analyst declared that he knew with certainty that Dr. E. was a pseudonym for the great theorist, Bernard Brandchaft, widely recognized to be a close friend of George Atwood. This was not correct, and I found it hilarious. The old one, however, had certainly benefited from having studied Brandchaft’s writings very carefully.
In the meantime, Dr. E. was becoming more real than ever. I had numerous dreams about him, arguments in imagination over his rigidity and intolerance of contrary viewpoints, and moments of gratitude for his openness about his clinical experiences and wisdom. I even began to picture where he might be living. It came to me that he was residing in a trailer park just south of San Francisco, living alone with a couple of dogs, a computer, a television set, a bottle of expensive single malt scotch. Who is to say? He might really be there!
It then came to pass that the 9 dialogues with Dr. E. assembled themselves into a whole, and I saw they collectively constituted chapters in what I thought might be a very interesting book. I had already assigned the essays to students in courses on psychopathology at my college, but the idea of publishing them as a book actually originated in a suggestion by my son, Christopher Atwood, then 18 years old. Chris was familiar with the material and he said, with great enthusiasm:
“Do it, dad! It will be just great!”
So I began to submit the chapters to various publishers. Although a number of reviewers appreciated much of the content of the transcribed interviews, all of them were nonplussed by the format: dialogues with anaging, often hostile and dismissive psychiatrist, one who moreover for reasons unknown needed to hide his identity. In other words, the project seemed just too weird.
I recognized at this point, painfully, that in order for this book to fly it would be necessary to jettison Dr. E. and rewrite the manuscript in the first person singular.
Although the original conversations with him had often been angry in much of their tone, I had bonded with him as my friend and the idea of letting him go was terribly distressing. I very much wanted him to survive into the book itself, and for there to be a mystery in the professional community as to whether he was real. Even Robert Stolorow, at first quite a fan of Dr. E., joined the chorus of voices asking for his demise.
As I contemplated the rewriting, my distress increased, and finally I had a dream crystallizing what the dilemma felt like: persecutory aliens had landed from space and were hunting down innocent people and planning to murder and then skewer them. In the dream I was trying to help the people escape their horrible fate. The aliens, I realized, were the publishing companies, as well as others who had been advising me to terminate my relationship with Dr. E. The ones being hunted and prepared for skewering were the 9 chapters in which my aged friend had held forth at great length. I went forward nevertheless with the rewrite, which turned out to be astonishingly easy. Eliminating the references to Dr. E., the transcribed dialogues seemed to fall together into a natural coherence that I had not previously seen. The resulting manuscript was then quickly accepted for publication. It helped me to have one final conversation with the old psychiatrist, in which I asked him for advice on how to handle the issue of his identity. This conversation appears on my personal website under the title: “Who Really is Dr. E.?”
Now, years later, the old man seems little more than a remote and unreal dream. Even so, I have to say very occasionally I feel an impulse to travel to California, just in case he might be there having a scotch or walking his dogs.
I hope this account has answered your questions, Adam.
George Atwood
Your letters continue to be wonderful and I will be forever grateful for them. I have also been rereading your book, The Abyss of Madness, and each time I return to it I find something new. The book is so accessible and reads almost like a conversation in many parts. I was wondering how you were able to write it in such an easygoing style and yet cover so many complex ideas. Tell me what it was like to complete this very fine work.
Your friend, Adam
Dear Adam:
The story of writing Abyss is a strange one. I did not actually write this book myself; instead, it was dictated to me, by a ghost. Here is the story.
In the Summer of 2006 while I was at my cabin in Maine, one night I was on the internet returning to a special website associated with a class I had taught at my college the semester before. The site included interesting questions I would pose for the students to discuss and allowed for online discussions in which I also sometimes participated. Now that the class was over, the discussion board was almost entirely silent; but yet it was still available to class members if they chose to log on. Very occasionally someone would do so, and if the stars were in the right alignment, I would show up too, and there would be a conversation about whatever happened to be on our minds. I thought of these websites of the past as ghost sites, and of those returning to them after the class was over as ghosts floating back to a location formerly full of life.
Anyway, on one such night I clicked in to a ghost website and found one of my former students there, a young woman in my class who had become very fond of me in the months before. I asked her if she knew that she was a ghost lurking in a graveyard. She laughed at this image, and then asked me something: “George Atwood, what do you think a ghost is, really?” After thinking about this interesting question for a few moments, the following ideas came to me, as if from a cloud:
“Ghosts are not spirits of the dead who come back to haunt us; it is rather that they are unrealized possibilities of our own lives. They are the people we might have become if we had made different choices, or if the specific situations directing us to our destinies had been changed in important ways. Ghosts are the paths not taken. They are the lives left unlived, and everyone has many ghosts. They are a little bit like virtual particles in physics: they do not exist in a positive sense, but they are not just nothing. They can in fact be powerful forces in a person’s existence, haunting and even disrupting the identities we have found for ourselves.”
Then I asked myself about my own ghosts: what are they, and who might I have become?
One of my numerous ghosts is certainly that of a psychiatrist, since my original goal as a young man was to follow in the footsteps of Freud and Jung, and undergo medical training as a prelude to specializing in the study and treatment of mental illness. As it turned out, my love for psychology was so strong I could not defer the fulfillment of my goals for the many years required to become a physician. So I became a clinical psychologist instead. But there was the psychiatrist I might otherwise have been, and I tried to picture that person as he would have turned out. Conversing online with my wonderful student, I visualized that psychiatrist: he appeared in my imagination as an aged, white-haired gentleman, looking rather like Carl Gustav Jung at the age of 81. A name came forth for him: Dr. E. I have no idea why he was given this specific designation, but as I continued to imagine him, he began to seem more and more real. So I decided to ask him a question:
“Tell me something Dr. E.: what do you think of ghosts?”
To my surprise, the old man spoke back! He began by presenting a theory of how so-called bipolar disorder can arise out of an attack on a person by a ghost. His idea was that first someone crushes a possibility of his or her being, generally in order to comply with the agendas and expectations of caregivers during childhood and thereby maintain an otherwise tenuous sense of emotional connection to them. Then that lost possibility gathers power later in life, and suddenly bursts in upon the present world of the person in the form of a manic attack. He continued in this vein and developed a really interesting viewpoint on the oscillations between mania and depression, and I found myself writing down all he said. It was a feeling of being dictated to rather than one of composing the words myself. Ordinarily when I write, it is a painful struggle to find the proper sentences, to create something that I can believe will make sense to the reader. Taking dictation from Dr. E was almost effortless, and his sentences and paragraphs emerged fully formed, needing no revision and showing a transparency that seemed remarkable.
This first encounter with my imaginary friend continued over the next few days and nights, extending to the ghosts that are the lost futures of people who have died. Such possibilities of life, cut off by tragedy, often take up residence within the living and have amazing effects. Many artists’ life histories show this pattern. At the end of our discussions of ghosts and tragedy there was a manuscript, and I had no plan as to what to do with it. So I filed it away and went about my business at my cabin in Maine, watching ducks swim by, bringing coffee to my wife, and walking my dogs in the morning. I had no idea that the essay that had been composed would form the basis of a chapter in my eventual book, entitled “What is a ghost?”
I will sum up what transpired over the ensuing years. Next came the theme of madness, of so-called psychosis, of the annihilation experiences that characterize the most extreme ranges of psychological disorder. I tried again to engage Dr. E. in a discussion of this matter, and he was receptive, but with one condition. He insisted on preserving his absolute anonymity, so that he could speak freely of his thoughts and experiences without having to worry about their repercussions on him personally. Dr. E. made it clear that he had little respect for most of his contemporaries and wished to make his viewpoint known just to young people who had not yet locked into rigid positions on what mental illness is and on whatpsychotherapy can and cannot accomplish. A wonderful conversation then unfolded, covering a variety of themes crystallizing around experiences of personal annihilation. I found him impatient with me a number of times as our dialogue continued, and once he even struck out at me in angry intolerance of what he experienced as the unbearable stupidity of my questions. Although I knew he was someone I was imagining, I could actually feel the sting of his withering criticisms and the physical impact of his angry blow on my head. Dr. E. was becoming more and more autonomously real.
Further dialogues appeared over the next few years, each unfolding as a question and answer session between the two of us. These conversations, often interrupted by his hostility in the face of conventional thinking of any kind, covered important territories of my field: depression and suicide, dissociation and trauma, the psychotherapy of psychosis,dreams and dream interpretation, the philosophical assumptions of clinical practice, madness and creative genius. Eventually there were 9 transcribed dialogues with this anonymous psychiatrist, and a few of them were actually published as such in The International Journal of Psychoanalytic Self Psychology. In the community of self psychologists, there was actually some debate about the issue of his identity. One California analyst declared that he knew with certainty that Dr. E. was a pseudonym for the great theorist, Bernard Brandchaft, widely recognized to be a close friend of George Atwood. This was not correct, and I found it hilarious. The old one, however, had certainly benefited from having studied Brandchaft’s writings very carefully.
In the meantime, Dr. E. was becoming more real than ever. I had numerous dreams about him, arguments in imagination over his rigidity and intolerance of contrary viewpoints, and moments of gratitude for his openness about his clinical experiences and wisdom. I even began to picture where he might be living. It came to me that he was residing in a trailer park just south of San Francisco, living alone with a couple of dogs, a computer, a television set, a bottle of expensive single malt scotch. Who is to say? He might really be there!
It then came to pass that the 9 dialogues with Dr. E. assembled themselves into a whole, and I saw they collectively constituted chapters in what I thought might be a very interesting book. I had already assigned the essays to students in courses on psychopathology at my college, but the idea of publishing them as a book actually originated in a suggestion by my son, Christopher Atwood, then 18 years old. Chris was familiar with the material and he said, with great enthusiasm:
“Do it, dad! It will be just great!”
So I began to submit the chapters to various publishers. Although a number of reviewers appreciated much of the content of the transcribed interviews, all of them were nonplussed by the format: dialogues with anaging, often hostile and dismissive psychiatrist, one who moreover for reasons unknown needed to hide his identity. In other words, the project seemed just too weird.
I recognized at this point, painfully, that in order for this book to fly it would be necessary to jettison Dr. E. and rewrite the manuscript in the first person singular.
Although the original conversations with him had often been angry in much of their tone, I had bonded with him as my friend and the idea of letting him go was terribly distressing. I very much wanted him to survive into the book itself, and for there to be a mystery in the professional community as to whether he was real. Even Robert Stolorow, at first quite a fan of Dr. E., joined the chorus of voices asking for his demise.
As I contemplated the rewriting, my distress increased, and finally I had a dream crystallizing what the dilemma felt like: persecutory aliens had landed from space and were hunting down innocent people and planning to murder and then skewer them. In the dream I was trying to help the people escape their horrible fate. The aliens, I realized, were the publishing companies, as well as others who had been advising me to terminate my relationship with Dr. E. The ones being hunted and prepared for skewering were the 9 chapters in which my aged friend had held forth at great length. I went forward nevertheless with the rewrite, which turned out to be astonishingly easy. Eliminating the references to Dr. E., the transcribed dialogues seemed to fall together into a natural coherence that I had not previously seen. The resulting manuscript was then quickly accepted for publication. It helped me to have one final conversation with the old psychiatrist, in which I asked him for advice on how to handle the issue of his identity. This conversation appears on my personal website under the title: “Who Really is Dr. E.?”
Now, years later, the old man seems little more than a remote and unreal dream. Even so, I have to say very occasionally I feel an impulse to travel to California, just in case he might be there having a scotch or walking his dogs.
I hope this account has answered your questions, Adam.
George Atwood
Letter to a Young Student #9
Trauma and tragedy in the life of the psychotherapist
Published on August 19, 2013
by George Atwood, Ph.D. in Strange Memories
Dear Professor:
I loved your last letter (#8), which shed light on the conversational style of The Abyss of Madness: it originated in a conversation! There is a hint of ambiguity still remaining, I noticed, regarding the realidentity of your Dr. E. You are very funny about this. I want you to know I also think he might be a real person, and living in California. Go look for him sometime, Professor Atwood, and let me know how the search works out!
You said in an earlier letter that people who become interested in working with severe psychological disturbances most often have experienced significant trauma in their childhoods. I want to hear more about this. What are the traumas that are involved, and how do they relate to someone taking up acareer in this field? Does this mean prospective psychotherapists should seek out their own personaltherapy and hold back from actually working with patients until their own wounds are healed? Are there injuries of such magnitude that those suffering them will never be able to work as psychotherapists? I would so appreciate your thoughts on these questions.
Thank you again. Adam
Adam:
There is a traumatic condition that has developed early in the lives of almost every psychotherapist I have known, or at least in the lives of those who become committed to working with very serious disorders. I will call this the situation of the lost childhood. There are two basic pathways along which it seems to occur.
The first and most frequent story is one in which a child is enlisted at a young age to support and sustain a depressed or otherwise emotionally troubled parent. I am speaking here of something extreme, wherein a reversal of roles takes place and the parent comes to depend on the child rather than the other way about. The identity of the son or daughter then crystallizes around making nurturant provisions, the activity of caregivingbeing the only way open to maintaining bonds of secure connection in the family. There has generally been an emotional void in the parent’s own background, and the child is then given the task of filling it. A compromise of the child’s autonomy and authenticity occurs as the little “psychotherapist” materializes, a slave to the needs of the mother and/or father. Impulses to disengage and pursue a separate life in this context are felt by the parent as unbearable injuries, always producing reactions of great distress and sometimes even of rage. When the child tries in some way to be a person in his or her own right, the parental response may be: “Why are you killing me?” This is a pathway closely resembling the one described by Alice Miller in her very fine book, The Drama of theGifted Child. The “gift” to which she was referring here is the natural sensitivity and empathy of certain children that lead a wounded parent to draw them into this role. Miller’s original title for her book was Prisoners of Childhood, a very apt description of the imprisoning effect of such an upbringing, which includes the dissociation of important sectors of the child’s personality as the child is not allowed to become the person he or she might otherwise have been. You can see, Adam, that the most natural thing in the world for such an individual, later grown up, is to seek out a career in counseling and psychotherapy. Their training for the work has been occurring from an early age. Thus is generated what I call aType 1 Clinician, one seen especially frequently in the field ofpsychoanalysis.
The second situation leading to this career is based not on serving the needs of a troubled parent, but rather on an experience of traumatic loss. Here too there is an imprisonment that takes place, and a resultant lost childhood that compromises the full development of the individual’s own unique personality.
The story runs as follows. A fundamentally loving relationship with one or both parents is in place in early life, a bond within which the emerging identity of the developing child is supported and the stability of family life is felt to be secure. An irrevocable change then occurs, something making it seem that formerly secure ties are lost, leaving the child bereft. A parent may grow ill and die, vanish for reasons unknown, be perceived as having disappointed or betrayed the child unforgivably, or undergo an emotional breakdown from which there is no recovery. The early world, now missing, becomes idealized in memory, contrasting sharply and painfully with the desolation that has taken its place. The longing for the parent who has inexplicably changed or disappeared intensifies and becomes unbearable. The loss of the mother or father at this point is restituted by an identification process, one in which the child becomes the one who has gone missing. A transformation of personal identity has thus taken place, in which the loving, rescuing qualities of the longed-for parental figure now reappear as aspects of the child’s own selfhood. By the magical act of turning oneself into the absent beloved one, the trauma of loss is undone and the shattered, chaotic world is set right. In this way a loving parental attitude is installed within the child’s personality, and his or her subsequent relationships in every sphere of life come to be dominated by a theme of caregiving. Any breakdown of the identification with the idealized figure leads to a resurgence of the chaos and pain of the original loss.
This too can eventuate in a most terrible captivity, for the trajectory of the child’s own development here has been interrupted and frozen by the need to stand in for the parent who has been lost. Who that child might have been or wanted to become as a distinctive person is thereby sidelined as the identification solidifies. Once again, Adam, I hope you can appreciate how easy it would be for such a person to fall into a career as a psychotherapist. This is the situation of a Type 2 Clinician.
There would also be mixed cases, in which the early developmental history of the psychotherapist included both kinds of experiences, traumatic emotional exploitation by a disturbed parent and traumatic loss. I am myself an example of the second type, with the central loss being that of my mother when I was a boy. The great theorist D. W. Winnicott, if I have understood him correctly, was a clinician of the first type, affected most importantly by a mother who suffered from severe depressions. Which of my scenarios fits your life, Adam? Obviously there may be other pathways to choosing a life of service to the emotionally disturbed, but almost all of the clinicians I have known fall into one or both of my categories.
It runs through my mind as I write to you that the great German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche exemplifies the life theme I have called Type 2. He lost his beloved father at the age of 4, and reacted to the death by becoming his father once more; in the process however the child he had been disappeared as an active presence in his life. That is the downfall of this solution to loss: identifying with and thereby substituting for the missing parent leads to the disincarnation of the original child, whose independent hopes and dreams never have a chance to crystallize or be pursued. Nietzsche, catapulted at a young age into a precocious paternal maturity, became a psychotherapist for civilization itself, a kind of father-figure (Zarathustra) for all humanity in its journey into an uncertain future. His prodigious creativity spiraled forth from the tensions generated by his personal tragedy, and so did his eventual madness and destruction.
Anyone embarking on a career aiming to help people come to terms with their traumatic life situations and histories needs to do everything possible to address his or her own. In the early history of psychoanalysis, a requirement was established that analysts in training complete their own personal analyses before they could be officially certified. This seemed like a good idea at the time, decreed by Freud and Jung. These fathers of our field, however, exempted themselves from this requirement, which I think should upset analysts tremendously. Here is the problem. The analyst’s unprocessed trauma, like the parent’s, is inevitably passed on to the next generation. Freud and Jung, by refraining from applying their injunction to themselves, guaranteed that specific areas of their unconsciousness – those pertaining to their unhealed wounds - would be visited upon their descendants. This is why our field’s continuing interest in the lives of its progenitors is so important. Identifying zones of incompleteness in their self-analyses holds out the possibility of our emancipation from all they were unable to understand.
Clinicians must be aware of what has happened in their lives and grieve the losses they have incurred. Nothing else will do. You ask, Adam, if one must delay one’s clinical work until a healing has taken place. The healing of the traumas of which I am speaking is a lifetime project, and so the important thing is that the journey commence. Mourning needs to occur, both for the parent who was lost or was never there in the first place, and as well for the unobstructed childhood that never had a chance to unfold. The psychotherapist’s healing will be a theme in all of his or her work, most often in the background, but included nevertheless in any constructive developments in the lives of his or her patients. Psychotherapy is not a procedure performed upon one person by another; it is a dialogue between personal universes, and it transforms both. Our field has not caught up to this idea, but the time is coming in which it will be regarded as axiomatic.
Your final question about injuries so extreme as to preclude a career as a psychotherapist is unanswerable. No one can say in advance which traumas can be healed and which cannot. This will be determined not just by the details of what has happened in someone’s life, but also by the resources that become available in contending with the situation. If there is a relational home for the suffering one needs to endure – given by family members, friends, close colleagues, perhaps a psychotherapist – very profound healing of even the most severe of traumas often becomes possible. Your question about the potential therapist’s emotional injuries could be turned around, Adam: Is it possible for a person to become an effective psychotherapist without having passed through significantly traumatic experiences? I suspect the answer is No. A look into the childhood histories of the great psychoanalytic personality theorists reveals things that are consistent with my thoughts here. I suggest you study all of that, deeply.
Once again, Adam, I hope these reflections are useful to you.
George Atwood
I loved your last letter (#8), which shed light on the conversational style of The Abyss of Madness: it originated in a conversation! There is a hint of ambiguity still remaining, I noticed, regarding the realidentity of your Dr. E. You are very funny about this. I want you to know I also think he might be a real person, and living in California. Go look for him sometime, Professor Atwood, and let me know how the search works out!
You said in an earlier letter that people who become interested in working with severe psychological disturbances most often have experienced significant trauma in their childhoods. I want to hear more about this. What are the traumas that are involved, and how do they relate to someone taking up acareer in this field? Does this mean prospective psychotherapists should seek out their own personaltherapy and hold back from actually working with patients until their own wounds are healed? Are there injuries of such magnitude that those suffering them will never be able to work as psychotherapists? I would so appreciate your thoughts on these questions.
Thank you again. Adam
Adam:
There is a traumatic condition that has developed early in the lives of almost every psychotherapist I have known, or at least in the lives of those who become committed to working with very serious disorders. I will call this the situation of the lost childhood. There are two basic pathways along which it seems to occur.
The first and most frequent story is one in which a child is enlisted at a young age to support and sustain a depressed or otherwise emotionally troubled parent. I am speaking here of something extreme, wherein a reversal of roles takes place and the parent comes to depend on the child rather than the other way about. The identity of the son or daughter then crystallizes around making nurturant provisions, the activity of caregivingbeing the only way open to maintaining bonds of secure connection in the family. There has generally been an emotional void in the parent’s own background, and the child is then given the task of filling it. A compromise of the child’s autonomy and authenticity occurs as the little “psychotherapist” materializes, a slave to the needs of the mother and/or father. Impulses to disengage and pursue a separate life in this context are felt by the parent as unbearable injuries, always producing reactions of great distress and sometimes even of rage. When the child tries in some way to be a person in his or her own right, the parental response may be: “Why are you killing me?” This is a pathway closely resembling the one described by Alice Miller in her very fine book, The Drama of theGifted Child. The “gift” to which she was referring here is the natural sensitivity and empathy of certain children that lead a wounded parent to draw them into this role. Miller’s original title for her book was Prisoners of Childhood, a very apt description of the imprisoning effect of such an upbringing, which includes the dissociation of important sectors of the child’s personality as the child is not allowed to become the person he or she might otherwise have been. You can see, Adam, that the most natural thing in the world for such an individual, later grown up, is to seek out a career in counseling and psychotherapy. Their training for the work has been occurring from an early age. Thus is generated what I call aType 1 Clinician, one seen especially frequently in the field ofpsychoanalysis.
The second situation leading to this career is based not on serving the needs of a troubled parent, but rather on an experience of traumatic loss. Here too there is an imprisonment that takes place, and a resultant lost childhood that compromises the full development of the individual’s own unique personality.
The story runs as follows. A fundamentally loving relationship with one or both parents is in place in early life, a bond within which the emerging identity of the developing child is supported and the stability of family life is felt to be secure. An irrevocable change then occurs, something making it seem that formerly secure ties are lost, leaving the child bereft. A parent may grow ill and die, vanish for reasons unknown, be perceived as having disappointed or betrayed the child unforgivably, or undergo an emotional breakdown from which there is no recovery. The early world, now missing, becomes idealized in memory, contrasting sharply and painfully with the desolation that has taken its place. The longing for the parent who has inexplicably changed or disappeared intensifies and becomes unbearable. The loss of the mother or father at this point is restituted by an identification process, one in which the child becomes the one who has gone missing. A transformation of personal identity has thus taken place, in which the loving, rescuing qualities of the longed-for parental figure now reappear as aspects of the child’s own selfhood. By the magical act of turning oneself into the absent beloved one, the trauma of loss is undone and the shattered, chaotic world is set right. In this way a loving parental attitude is installed within the child’s personality, and his or her subsequent relationships in every sphere of life come to be dominated by a theme of caregiving. Any breakdown of the identification with the idealized figure leads to a resurgence of the chaos and pain of the original loss.
This too can eventuate in a most terrible captivity, for the trajectory of the child’s own development here has been interrupted and frozen by the need to stand in for the parent who has been lost. Who that child might have been or wanted to become as a distinctive person is thereby sidelined as the identification solidifies. Once again, Adam, I hope you can appreciate how easy it would be for such a person to fall into a career as a psychotherapist. This is the situation of a Type 2 Clinician.
There would also be mixed cases, in which the early developmental history of the psychotherapist included both kinds of experiences, traumatic emotional exploitation by a disturbed parent and traumatic loss. I am myself an example of the second type, with the central loss being that of my mother when I was a boy. The great theorist D. W. Winnicott, if I have understood him correctly, was a clinician of the first type, affected most importantly by a mother who suffered from severe depressions. Which of my scenarios fits your life, Adam? Obviously there may be other pathways to choosing a life of service to the emotionally disturbed, but almost all of the clinicians I have known fall into one or both of my categories.
It runs through my mind as I write to you that the great German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche exemplifies the life theme I have called Type 2. He lost his beloved father at the age of 4, and reacted to the death by becoming his father once more; in the process however the child he had been disappeared as an active presence in his life. That is the downfall of this solution to loss: identifying with and thereby substituting for the missing parent leads to the disincarnation of the original child, whose independent hopes and dreams never have a chance to crystallize or be pursued. Nietzsche, catapulted at a young age into a precocious paternal maturity, became a psychotherapist for civilization itself, a kind of father-figure (Zarathustra) for all humanity in its journey into an uncertain future. His prodigious creativity spiraled forth from the tensions generated by his personal tragedy, and so did his eventual madness and destruction.
Anyone embarking on a career aiming to help people come to terms with their traumatic life situations and histories needs to do everything possible to address his or her own. In the early history of psychoanalysis, a requirement was established that analysts in training complete their own personal analyses before they could be officially certified. This seemed like a good idea at the time, decreed by Freud and Jung. These fathers of our field, however, exempted themselves from this requirement, which I think should upset analysts tremendously. Here is the problem. The analyst’s unprocessed trauma, like the parent’s, is inevitably passed on to the next generation. Freud and Jung, by refraining from applying their injunction to themselves, guaranteed that specific areas of their unconsciousness – those pertaining to their unhealed wounds - would be visited upon their descendants. This is why our field’s continuing interest in the lives of its progenitors is so important. Identifying zones of incompleteness in their self-analyses holds out the possibility of our emancipation from all they were unable to understand.
Clinicians must be aware of what has happened in their lives and grieve the losses they have incurred. Nothing else will do. You ask, Adam, if one must delay one’s clinical work until a healing has taken place. The healing of the traumas of which I am speaking is a lifetime project, and so the important thing is that the journey commence. Mourning needs to occur, both for the parent who was lost or was never there in the first place, and as well for the unobstructed childhood that never had a chance to unfold. The psychotherapist’s healing will be a theme in all of his or her work, most often in the background, but included nevertheless in any constructive developments in the lives of his or her patients. Psychotherapy is not a procedure performed upon one person by another; it is a dialogue between personal universes, and it transforms both. Our field has not caught up to this idea, but the time is coming in which it will be regarded as axiomatic.
Your final question about injuries so extreme as to preclude a career as a psychotherapist is unanswerable. No one can say in advance which traumas can be healed and which cannot. This will be determined not just by the details of what has happened in someone’s life, but also by the resources that become available in contending with the situation. If there is a relational home for the suffering one needs to endure – given by family members, friends, close colleagues, perhaps a psychotherapist – very profound healing of even the most severe of traumas often becomes possible. Your question about the potential therapist’s emotional injuries could be turned around, Adam: Is it possible for a person to become an effective psychotherapist without having passed through significantly traumatic experiences? I suspect the answer is No. A look into the childhood histories of the great psychoanalytic personality theorists reveals things that are consistent with my thoughts here. I suggest you study all of that, deeply.
Once again, Adam, I hope these reflections are useful to you.
George Atwood