The Emergent Self

An Existential-Gestalt Approach

Peter Philippson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780367105846
• eBook ISBN: 9780429920608
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

This book tracks a particular understanding of self, philosophically, from research evidence and in its implications for psychotherapy. At each step, the author includes first the theory he is working from, then the clinical implications of the theory, followed by some links to the philosophical outlook inherent in the theory, and finally a more extended case example.It takes the view that the continuing self is partly an illusion, partly a construct, and that we in fact have to work to stay the same in the face of all the different possibilities the world offers us. The author believes that we do this for two reasons. First of all, continuity allows deeper contact: friendships, loving relationships with partners and families. Secondly, and balancing this, the predictable is less anxiety-producing, and that we avoid this existential anxiety by acting in a stereotyped way and avoiding some of the depths of contact.

Chapter One
Introduction: Self and Other

Now the “self” cannot be understood other than through the field, just like day cannot be understood other than by contrast with night. If there were eternal day, eternal lightness, not only would you not have the concept of a “day”, you would not even have the awareness of a “day” because there is nothing to be aware of, there is no differentiation. So, the “self” is to be found in the contrast with the otherness. There is a boundary between the self and the other, and this boundary is the essence of psychology. (Perls, 1978)

If there is no other, there is no I. If there is no I, there s no one to perceive. (Chuang Tsu, 1974, p. 25)

Who am I?

For over 2,000 years, people have been struggling with questions concerning the nature of our being. What is the nature of self or mind, or consciousness? What is the relationship between these and body? Are they two separate kinds of things (dualism) or aspects of one thing (holism)? Is there a difference between people and animals, and what is it? What happens when we die—is there some form in which we continue to exist, even after death? Do we have free will, and if we do, how can this emerge in a scientifically lawful universe?

In particular, people who work with the psyche or self—psychotherapists, psychologists, psychiatrists and counsellors of various schools—will, either explicitly or implicitly, have a sense of the kind of self they are working with. Is it a self that self-actualizes or self-regulates and needs attunement or relationship; or a self that behaviourally responds to stimuli; or a self that builds psychodynamically out of the meeting between desire and taboo? Does the self explored through therapy include or exclude the physical, the relational, social, or cultural context, the creativity of the client?

This book tracks a particular understanding of self, philosophically, from research evidence and in its implications for psychotherapy. At each step, I will include first the theory I am working from, then the clinical implications of the theory, followed by some links to the philosophical outlook inherent in the theory, and finally a more extended case example. I will first of all give a brief statement of the approach I am taking, and then take some time to frame it in a brief discussion of the state of the debate. I hope that, in doing this, I will be able to clarify my approach, in a field where there are many different but similar-seeming theories.

Emergent self

There are two kinds of words. Some, like “chair” and “computer” describe things. You can point to them, touch them, see them, use them. Of course, pointing to, touching, seeing and using are all relationships, and without these relationships we can have no sense of the things. But everyone without sensory impairment can see, touch, etc. a computer and give a similar description of what they experience.

The other kind of word is a comparison word. “Big” and “small” are examples of this. They have no meaning at all except in relation to their polar opposites. I am big compared to an ant, small compared to a mountain. If I say to you “I am big” you would need to know what comparison I am making before you can agree or disagree with me.

The theory of emergent or relational self that I espouse says that “self” is the second kind of word, a comparison with “other”. With no other, there would be no self, and vice versa. It is always to this comparison that we are pointing when we speak of self. Thus self is not a “thing” or a given, but an emergence in a given situation.

This approach to selfhood was central to the theory of Gestalt Therapy, as first expounded in the early 1950s by Friedrich (Fritz) and Lore (Laura) Perls and Paul Goodman. Fritz Perls later moved away from the centrality of this theory in his “guru” days in California, but it is the original theory that is now being rediscovered by philosophers of mind and researchers in neuropsychology and child development, as well as psychotherapists of many different schools (often without attribution). It is a way of thinking that is quite different from how we generally view self as a kind of “essence” of ourselves, and raises quite different questions. So for exponents of an essential self, the question is “How can self change through an interaction with a therapist?” For those who see self as relational, the answer to that is obvious (self always changes in relation to an other), and the question is rather “How do we have a sense of continuing self?”

In this book, I will be taking the view that the continuing self is partly an illusion, partly a construct, and that we in fact have to work to stay the same in the face of all the different possibilities the world offers us. We do this for two reasons. First of all, continuity allows deeper contact: friendships, loving relationships with partners and families. Secondly, and balancing this, the predictable is less anxiety-producing, and we avoid this existential anxiety by acting in a stereotyped way and avoiding some of the depths of contact. This dual nature of continuing self, in one context deepening contact and in another context avoiding contact, has an important place in my understanding of psychotherapy.

My view is that people in the West are predisposed towards a view of self as “essence” through our cultural inheritance, although there are philosophers and researchers in the West too who point towards a different paradigm. So my next task is to give an overview of the field in thinking about selfhood.

The West

In Western culture, we tend to be the children of Plato (427–347 BCE). For Plato, Self is an example of the Forms, the perfect essences of which the world we see is merely an imperfect image. So the Self is the perfect, immortal and real essence of the person that shows itself in the imperfect world at times, and returns to pure essence at death. This view became part of the Christian religion, arguably due to the influence of Greek thought on Paul, whereas the earlier orthodoxy was that the faithful person would be physically resurrected at the Second Coming of Christ rather than being a “spiritual” person in heaven. In any case, this Platonic Christianity reinforced a cultural view of the individual as an immortal, perfect soul inhabiting a body which is a source of sin and imperfection.

The concept of mind/body dualism was given a somewhat different twist by Descartes (1596–1650), who saw mind and body as two different “things” (res). For him, the body was not a pale copy of an essence or soul, but something different. While his thought made the final “break” between the two (at least imperfect mirroring is some kind of relationship), he essentially left open the question of how mind and body could influence each other. This continues to be the thorny question for those who hold a dualistic view of the human being.

The other aspect of Descartes’ thought which is well-known is his cogito: “I think, therefore I am”. The more I doubt my existence, Descartes says, the more I affirm my existence as the one that doubts. This is an important argument for this book, in two ways. First of all, it is fallacious in an interesting way. The first part “I think” already contains an “I” who is thinking rather than just saying “There is thinking going on”, so the conclusion of the existence of “I” is a tautology. In Western thought and language, every verb has a subject, so our mindset prevents our seeing the fallacy. In Eastern thought and language, doing does not necessarily require an individual doer, so the fallacy would be much more visible. Descartes teaches us how easily we can be trapped by culture and language into thinking something is obvious that in fact is not.

Secondly, the argument can be rescued, has been used in a different form by the phenomenological philosopher Husserl, and will be used in a different form in this book.

The East

In much Eastern thought, the verb is the beginning, and the self grows from it. So when a monk asked Joshu (778–897), the great Zen master, “What is my Self?”, Joshu replied “Have you finished your morning gruel?” The monk said he had. Joshu said “Then wash your bowl.” It is in the immediacy of the acting, not in the thinking about acting, that self arises. The meditative method in Zen Buddhism involves sing (or walking), not allowing any thoughts to stick in the mind. However, the Rinzai Zen Masters emphasise that this voidness is not meant to be the aim of the meditation, and the Zen Master Bassui (b. 1327) called this aimed-for voidness the “deep pit of pseudo-emancipation” and enjoined his hearers to redouble their efforts at that point. For as soon as there is an achievement of this first level of enlightenment, there is the pride of achievement, not just the verb—the achieving. Notice that this is another example of the same logical problem that Descartes got into! As long as I work to stop the self/I being primary, I keep it primary, because it is the “I” that is working. We will later see how Husserl made exactly the same point, and in fact suggested pre well the same methodology as the Rinzai monks.

The Eastern emphasis on the doing as primary links well to our next topic, existentialism, and will be a significant part of the thinking of this book.

Existentialism

This philosophical school arose as a reaction to the Platonic idea of the primacy of “essences”. For the existentialist, as for the Zen Buddhist, existence and responsible engagement in the world are of central significance. But this has profound consequences, for it takes away a “safety net”, where we can be sure of who we “essentially” are. Rather, we are ourselves as we engage and make our choices without any guarantees of what is right, or what will happen next. Not surprisingly, for most existentialists, anxiety is an inherent part of being in the world. Each act of will is an actualization of selfhood, and an act of separation (Sartre called it “negation”) from the rest of the world, which will respond in a way we can never fully predict. It is important to notice that existentialist thinkers are not saying that we are essentially separate from the rest of the world. Paradoxically, if we were inherently ourselves, the act of choosing would be a less radical step, and the difficulty would be to explain how we can engage creatively in and with the world. Existentially, being oneself is an act of separation in order to make contact: Sartre calls this act negation, and Buber calls it “primary separation” (“urdistanz”).

However, for the existentialists Kierkegaard and Sartre, we can avoid anxiety by acting as if it is not really us making the decisions, and go along with the crowd as if we had no choice to do this. Sartre (1978) calls this “bad faith”, and indeed he saw where this denial of responsibility leads in the Nazi occupation of his native France, his imprisonment and later membership of the Resistance.

Once again, this existential outlook is an important part of the approach in this book.

Phenomenology

The starting point for phenomenology is the understanding that our experience is never of the world as it is, but of the world as filtered through our senses and our understanding of the world. Yet we can do more than this. We can pay attention to our style of filtering, and, by “bracketing” for our bias, we can get a clearer sense of the world in its givenness.

I would like to explore this notion of bracketing or époché (putting in a pocket) further, since it has not always been fully understood. First of all, it doesn’t mean to ignore ourselves, but has an implication that we should know ourselves and our habitual colouring of our experiences. It doesn’t mean that we can get an “objective” view of the world, but that we can get a lot closer to a description that has relevance wider than to ourselves. An analogy here would be a method for making optical lenses. Any roughness in the grinding of the lens (and there has to be some!) results in a distortion of the image. So up until recently, scientists needing very accurate lenses have needed equipment that grind glass with great accuracy. However, there is another method. The distortions of any lens can be measured and stored on a computer. The image can then be put through the computer, and corrected for the stored inaccuracies. This method produces a high level of accuracy without the need for a very good lens.

The most important thing that I want to notice here, though, is that if, as quantum physics and relativity show, the form of the world is always relative to an observer (who is also part of that relative world, not outside it), there is a second level of co-creation which is not bias, and cannot be “corrected” for but can be observed (this is the role of Husserl’s “transcendental reduction” and Rinzai Zen’s insistence on the dangers of staying at the level of “I have achieved enlightenment”). In the end, what can be pointed to after bracketing is always a field interaction rather than an observation of a fixed thing by a fixed “me”. This will be central to the approach of this book. As Husserl (1971/1927) put it in his article in the Encyclopaedia Britannica:

Phenomenological psychology in this manner undoubtedly must be established as an “eidetic phenomenology”; it is then exclusively directed toward the invariant essential forms. For instance, the phenomenology of perception of bodies will not be (simply) a report on the factually occurring perceptions or those to be expected; rather it will be the presentation of invariant structural systems without which perception of a body and a synthetically concordant multiplicity of perceptions of one and the same body as such would be unthinkable.

Existentialism, phenomenology and individualism

There has recently been some criticism of Existentialism from a perspective that tries to counter the “individualism” of Western thinking, and sees Sartre and Existentialism generally as “individualistic” (see for example Wheeler, 2000). But, as I have described above, this is to misunderstand the basis of the Existential approach. The choosing makes the individual, rather than the individual making the choice! From this perspective (shades of Descartes here), the more someone asserts an attitude of anti-individualism, the more they are asserting their individuality and their choiceful independence from the rest of the universe. But notice the difference. There is still a circularity, but, where Descartes’ is the circularity of fallacious reasoning, this is the circularity of a feedback loop. To explain this further, I will have to introduce one of my main themes…

Emergence and complexity

In the twentieth century, something quite strange and unexpected was discovered by scientists and mathematicians working in many different fields. At root it was not a discovery about the world at all, but about mathematics, and, in particular, about the properties of non-linear equations, that is equations describing systems that have feedback loops. A simple example of such a system is a car engine, where the pistons moving pull in the explosive gases that then make the piston move. A more complex example is population growth. If the environment is good for a species, the population grows, which then can affect the availability of resources like food, so population falls again, which makes food more available again…

What is significant for this book is that mathematicians discovered that out of comparatively simple non-linear equations can emerge ordered behaviour of great complexity and beauty, which Stuart Kauffman has called “order for free”. So to take the simple example of the car, the running of the engine emerges from the whole cycle of pistons, cylinders, fuel, sparking, etc. Although entropy (disorder) is increasing in the universe as a whole, such “dissipative structures” (Prigogine & Stengers, 1984) can locally produce greater order, dissipating the entropy to the outside of the area. The form of that order is also significant for our purpose. If we take the example of weather systems, these can be classified into recognisable patterns. However, within each pattern there is a good deal of variation, and it only takes a tiny variation at one moment to pull the pattern into a very different configuration. In the same way, a self-pattern can have a recognisable shape, whil...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• ABOUT THE AUTHOR
• CHAPTER ONE Introduction: Self and Other
• CHAPTER TWO Complexity and Emergence
• CHAPTER THREE Relationship and Feedback
• CHAPTER FOUR Chaos, Process and Structure
• CHAPTER FIVE Choice and Will
• CHAPTER SIX Death and Endings
• APPENDIX Gestalt Therapy and Emergence
• BIBLIOGRAPHY
• INDEX