The Psyche in the Modern World

Psychotherapy and Society

Tom Warnecke

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9780429921865
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

The Psyche in the Modern World sets out to open consulting room doors and bring the concept of the Psyche, and its main advocate, the psychotherapy discipline, into public space and into the realm of interdisciplinary discourse. A culture of carefully guarded clinical confidentialities inadvertently turned the consulting room into a proverbial ivory tower which has done much to obscure the psychotherapeutic body of knowledge and contributed to the myths and misinformation that surround and veil psychotherapy in the public space. This book redresses the balance and confronts some challenging, and sometimes uncomfortable, questions about the dichotomies that both characterize our relationships with the Psyche and contextualize the provision of psychotherapy services today. The contributors present contemporary discussion on a broad range of current subjects, encompassing socio-political as well as philosophical, theoretical and clinical dimensions, in an accessible manner.

CHAPTER ONE

Psyche and Agora: the Psyche at the crossroads of personal and societal contexts

Tom Warnecke

Psyche enjoys a prominent but peculiar presence in the public spaces of our societies through a host of words that build on the term. In common use, Psyche stands for an inner dimension and for the emotional life of a person. Perceptions of the human inner dimension vary greatly, however, depending on the discourses the Psyche is placed within: modern societies impose great dichotomies between the personal realm of the individual and their social environments.

Literature, the arts, and the entertainment media thrive on portrayals of the personal and compel with the human element. Feelings, emotions, and inner conflicts inspire artists and attract audiences. Or they enhance a story with a “human touch” when included in the margins of history books or with a current news item. Modern societies ostensibly value the human psyche, feelings, and emotions. Or do they?

For this image of societal values changes significantly when we look from up close, from the perspective of the individual. In our daily lives, we disclose feelings and inner struggles at our peril and to our shame. Emotions are feared, trivialised, or avoided. Social norms dictate that we should pull ourselves together, not make a fuss, not become hysterical, weak, or unmanly. The private and the personal, our vulnerabilities and needs, are embarrassing to us in the social space and ought to remain hidden from others and perhaps even from ourselves. Social norms require us to control or tame our feelings and inner conflicts, and we reward ourselves, above all, for not needing from others. And those who deviate, those who cannot tolerate the intolerable, commonly become stigmatised as “challenging”, “disordered”, or “mentally ill” by their social environment.

The Psyche

So who or what is the Psyche? The term “Psyche” originated in ancient Greek culture and is used synonymously with soul and self. But the term has also become associated with meanings that are quite removed from the original sentiment. The Psyche is perceived by some as a “seat of the faculty of reason” but also as “mind”, “ghost”, or “spirit”, or described as a control centre “responsible for one’s thoughts and feelings”. Other distortions associate the term “Psyche” with ideas of body and soul as separated or segregated from one another—reflecting Christian rejection of pluralistic conceptions, but also beliefs that the body and its senses distract us from the supernatural. In theological and philosophical discourse, the Psyche is also described as an immortal aspect of human existence (Rhode, 1925).

In classical Greek thought, the Psyche was intimately connected to the notion of life. To have a Psyche was to be alive, and all living things were seen to possess a Psyche. The Psyche stood for a principle of life, or an “animator”, or an inner dimension of “soma”. Greek philosophers and poets initially used the word “soma” for a corpse and referred to the body not as a unit but as an assemblage of organs. By the early sixth century BC, however, soma had become redefined as a living body (Abad, 2003). This living body is inhabited by the Psyche, but the Psyche is not associated with any bodily organs. The changing awareness of Psyche and soma coincided with new-found appreciation for the agonies of erotic desire. Eros evokes bodily states of passion, anguish, confusion, or helplessness, imbues music and poetry with expressions of sensuality, longing, and consummation, individualises our experience, and awakens the body–mind to itself. The undeniable intensity of emotional bodily experience in passionate desire and unrequited love, it seems, fostered recognition of the Psyche as the body’s inner dimension.

The notion of the Psyche recognised that all living things had individuality. Western culture effectively took a quantum leap when Greek philosophers began to recognise the individual self as differentiated from its collective tribal culture. Heraclitus’ distinctive use of the word “Psyche” to denote a self with infinite depth was followed a century later by Socrates’ claim in 399 BC that his driving philosophical concern was to work on the Psyche. Aristotle refined the classic Greek conception further with a psychology that followed a predominantly physiological approach: the Psyche is a principle of the natural body and the Psyche’s affections are “enmattered” in the body, he emphasised. Aristotle also proposed that Psyche consisted of and was defined by interdependent functional faculties and identified these as independent motion, self-nourishment, reproduction, perception, and thought.

The recognition that the Psyche is “enmattered” embraced the complexities of human existence and advanced the classic Greek conception well beyond earlier, and indeed many later, ideas that the Psyche might lead some separate existence, as a segregated, ghostly occupancy of the body, for example. The Psyche is not only an animator or inner dimension, it can only exist in perpetual exchange and connection with its natural and social environments. The conceptual and philosophical framework of the Psyche created by classic Greek thinkers is intrinsically pluralistic. It is pertinent to many disciplines, but also contains paradoxes and tensions that remain unresolved to the present day.

Modern history saw the rise of dualistic conceptions that continue to cast their shadows in today’s world with ideas that mind and body are in essence or functionally separated. In the early twentieth century, the psychoanalytic movement revolutionised European understanding of human functioning. Freud, Jung, and other pioneers developed depth-psychological models of the Psyche, for example Freud’s well-known structural model of the id, the ego, and the super-ego. Depth-psychology recognised the Psyche as a dynamic, self-regulating system in which conscious, unconscious, and semi-conscious processes complement each other. Modern neuroscience has built on and added to this core understanding of human functioning.

In contemporary depth-psychology, the term “Psyche” refers to the forces in an individual that influence thought, behaviour, and personality. The eminent psychologist Hillman (1976) takes the stance that the Psyche belongs to the realm of a third, middle position between the material and physical, on the one hand, and the abstract and spiritual, on the other, and yet bound to both dimensions. And the Psyche proves an elusive subject even when leaving “spirit” and other supernatural meanings aside. As soul or selfhood, the Psyche cannot be quantified and any associated phenomena, however deeply rooted in our biology, are rarely amenable to measurements and generalisations. As an object of study, the Psyche is inevitably a conversing subject. Any notion of the Psyche cannot be neutral of the observer’s personal values, beliefs, and object relations, and irrespective of whether the Psyche is viewed through a philosophical, biological, psychological, or theological lens.

Research documents how the deeply personal can most powerfully impact our capacity to function. The universal experiences of shame and fear are at the root of common problems to feel joyful, real, and loved, or to experience life positively and meaning-fully (Brown, 2010). Crucially, shame and fear also create social isolation as they form formidable obstacles to feeling connected to others or to a sense of belonging to family and social networks. On the other hand, trading in personal authenticity for social or family approval is self-defeating and destructive. We need to get the balance right between socialisation and self-acceptance, Brown argues, to feel comfortable in our own skin. People who score higher on measures of authenticity have greater life satisfaction, higher self-esteem, lower depression and anxiety, fewer health complaints, and behave in more socially constructive ways (Cooper, 2013). Authenticity, self-love, and belonging are as vital to our health as nutrition or exercise and crucial to build resilience to help us cope with life’s set-backs, with rejections or losses. Embracing our tenderness and vulnerability is as essential to our well-being as developing knowledge and self-determination.

The deeply personal realm informs our personal perspectives and mediates events. It is quintessentially reflective and operates by gathering and weaving threads of meaning that can hold, explore, or transport both imaginative and emotional content or communicate what Alexander’s (1979) philosophy of architecture identified as the “qualities without a name” we nonetheless universally recognise. The Psyche can be seen at work in imagination and reflective capacity, in metaphor, and in works of art, in architectural design, or in theoretical physics, but is most easily discernible in moments of instantaneous connection when we suddenly feel moved by some natural event or human expression:

“The best moments in reading”, says Hector in Bennett’s play The History Boys, “are when you come across something—a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things—which you had thought special and particular to you. Now you have it, set down by someone else, a person you have never met, someone who is long dead. And it is as if a hand has come out and taken yours.” (2004, p. 56)

The Psyche may freely transcend the personal but is nonetheless irreducibly tied into human biology. “Without anatomy emotions do not exist. Feelings have somatic architecture” notes Keleman (1985, p. xii). Keleman’s observation acquires further potency when taken in conjunction with a statement by the renowned neuroscientist Damasio: “Feelings are often ignored in accounts of consciousness. Can there be consciousness without feelings? No. Introspectively, human experience always involves feelings” (2010, p. 242).

Psyche in the modern world

The term “psychology” refers to the study of the Psyche or soul, but there is little evidence for soul studying in psychology literature. Academic psychology apparently viewed depth-psychology as a hazard to its pursuit of scientific respectability. Paraphrasing Hillman (1964), depth-psychology was the stone rejected by the academy-builders. Or perhaps Frank was right when he observed that “nothing is less appealing to the scientific mentality than uncontrolled emotion” (1971, p. 308).

Behaviourism, once the primary science in psychology, discarded many aspects that characterise human existence in favour of more “objective” realities and selected factors that appeared easily amenable to scientific study. Thoughts, emotions, motivations, or consciousness were all considered outside the scientific domain on the basis that their essential subjectivity rendered them inaccessible to be measured to any objective standards. Not surprisingly, psychological research commonly ignored and missed out on many of the intricate complexities that inform and guide human activity. Behaviourism has since developed into cognitive science, but this historic conception retains a powerful influence on contemporary psychology. Psychometric tools that promise to profile and predict psychological behaviour patterns continue to find favour with business managers, executive coaches, and in the human resources sector.

An alternative perspective developed in the mid-twentieth century when an emerging humanistic psychology took a more holistic approach to human existence. The pioneering humanist thinkers Abraham Maslow and Carl Rogers argued that both psychoanalysis and behaviourism were too pessimistic by focusing either on the most tragic of emotions or failing to take into account the role of personal choice. Humanistic psychology takes the position that people are inherently good, that psychology should focus on each individual’s potential, and advocates the importance of growth and self-actualisation.

Mainstream psychiatry promotes brain-based approaches to thought, emotion, and behaviour. Medical researchers look to biology and chemistry to decode human personality and behaviour, and search for biochemical treatments that could affect psychic distress and suffering. But the medicalised approach has so far only developed limited understanding of mental illness and produced little evidence for its theories (Williams, 2012). Schizophrenia, for instance, is diagnosed only by a process of exclusion. There is no laboratory test that can either prove or disprove this diagnosis, and researchers cannot say if schizophrenia has one or perhaps several aetiologies. Marcia Angell (2011), a former editor of the New England Journal of Medicine, questions contemporary psychiatric treatment: if currently marketed psychoactive drugs were so effective, she argues, we should expect the prevalence of mental illness to decline rather than rise.

While drugs are undoubtedly an important, or in some instances even a crucial, tool, they can rarely address the root causes of psychological or emotional distress and suffering. Treating symptoms rather than the causes provides the pharmaceutical industry with a profitable revolving-door business model but fails the patients and, equally concerning, saddles societies with steadily increasing public health budgets. Medicine is also successfully promoting views that mental distress and mental illness constitute brain-based pathologies, as the current trend to medicalise ordinary emotional responses and many normal variabilities of human life and social experience shows. Psychoactive drugs are regularly prescribed to deal with common social and psychological complaints, from exam stress to puberty, relationship problems, or bereavement (Society for Humanistic Psychology, 2012).

While dualistic “ghost in the machine” ideas have been thoroughly discredited by modern science, they nevertheless remain popular in general culture and pseudo-science. They impinge on serious engagement with any non-dualistic understanding of the Psyche and continue to resurface in various forms and guises, for example in the elevation of top-down effects of knowledge structures. In modern society, the pursuit of knowledge is mostly portrayed as an intellect...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• ABOUT THE EDITOR AND CONTRIBUTORS
• UKCP SERIES PREFACE
• FOREWORD
• INTRODUCTION
• CHAPTER ONE Psyche and Agora: the Psyche at the crossroads of personal and societal contexts
• CHAPTER TWO The politics of intelligence: working with intellectual disability
• CHAPTER THREE Clinical snobbery—get me out of here! New clinical paradigms for children with complex disturbances
• CHAPTER FOUR Why aren’t we educating? Psychotherapy, psy-culture, and the psy-ber world
• CHAPTER FIVE Psychotherapy, relationality, and the Long Revolution
• CHAPTER SIX Human-based medicine—theory and practice: from modern to postmodern medicine
• CHAPTER SEVEN Routes out of schizophrenia
• CHAPTER EIGHT Counting the cost
• CHAPTER NINE How broader research perspectives can free clients and psychotherapists to optimise their work together
• INDEX