Everyday Mysteries

A Handbook of Existential Psychotherapy

Emmy van Deurzen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781135240462
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Psychologie
• Subtopic: Psychothérapie

This book provides an in-depth introduction to existential psychotherapy. Presenting a philosophical alternative to other forms of psychological treatment, it emphasises the problems of living and the human dilemmas that are often neglected by practitioners who focus on personal psychopathology.

Emmy van Deurzen defines the philosophical ideas that underpin existential psychotherapy, summarising the contributions made by Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger and Sartre among others. She proposes a systemic and practical method of existential psychotherapy, illustrated with detailed case material. This expanded and updated second edition includes new chapters on the contributions of Max Scheler, Albert Camus, Gabriel Marcel and Emmanuel Levinas, as well as on feminist contributors such as Simone de Beauvoir and Hannah Arendt. In addition a new extended case discussion illustrates the approach in practice.

Everyday Mysteries offers a fresh perspective for anyone training in psychotherapy, counselling, psychology or psychiatry. Those already established in practice will find this a stimulating source of ideas about everyday life and the mysteries of human experience, which will throw new light on old issues.

Part I
Philosophical underpinnings

Chapter 1
Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855)

A very individual approach

It is perfectly true, as philosophers say, that life must be understood backwards. But they forget the other proposition, that it must be lived forwards.

(Kierkegaard 1967, in Hong and Hong 1967–1978, entries 1030 and 1025)

Introduction

One day, in Copenhagen, in the early nineteenth century, Søren Kierkegaard decided to take it upon himself to shake people out of their bourgeois complacency. In order to do so he knew that he had to start with himself, questioning his own human tendency to take the soft option. This is how he later described the moment of his commitment to that process.

So there I sat and smoked my cigar until I lapsed into reverie. Among other thoughts I remember this: ‘You are now,’ I said to myself, ‘on the way to becoming an old man, without being anything, and without really undertaking to do anything. On the other hand, wherever you look about you, in literature and in life, you see the celebrated names and figures, the precious and much heralded men who are coming into prominence and are much talked about, the many benefactors of the age who know how to benefit mankind by making life easier and easier, some by railways, others by omnibuses and steamboats, others by telegraph, others by easily apprehended compendiums and short recitals of everything worth knowing, and finally the true benefactors of the age who by virtue of thought make spiritual existence systematically easier and easier, and yet more and more significant. And what are you doing?’ Here my self-communion was interrupted, for my cigar was burned out and a new one had to be lit. So I smoked again, and then suddenly there flashed through my mind this thought: ‘You must do something, but inasmuch as with your limited capacities it will be impossible to make anything easier than it has become, you must, with the same humanitarian enthusiasm as the others, undertake to make something harder.’ This notion pleased me 10 Philosophical underpinnings immensely, and at the same time it flattered me to think that I, like the rest of them, would be loved and esteemed by the whole community. For when all combine in every way to make everything easier and easier, there remains only one possible danger, namely, that the easiness might become so great that it would be too great; then only one want is left, though not yet a felt want – that people will want difficulty.

(Kierkegaard 1846: 165–166)

No wonder then that Kierkegaard liked to write under the pseudonym Johannes Climacus (John the Climber), though he did take on other pseudonyms at various other points.

Overcoming the human dilemma

Kierkegaard’s contribution to psychotherapy is in his poignant observations of the human struggle and the acceptance of this struggle as the core of existence. Kierkegaard shows us how we can paradoxically rise above the ordinary contradictions and difficulties of living, by facing them rather than by trying to eliminate them. When Kierkegaard talks about people or about how to achieve a life worth living this is directly relevant to psychotherapy and sometimes looks like a blueprint for psychotherapeutic work. To understand Kierkegaard’s conception of a person’s progress towards self-improvement, we must begin by looking at his conception of the self.

Kierkegaard’s philosophy was essentially dualistic, for he believed in the separateness of body and mind. But in spite of his strong disagreements with Hegelianism, which was fashionable in his day, he used Hegel’s notion of dialectics and regarded it as essential that the dualism of body and soul should be overcome and surpassed. For Kierkegaard, the dialectical movement of overcoming was not a gradual, historical and cultural one, as Hegel described it. The transcending of the dilemma of either/or would happen suddenly and through hard individual effort and development and it would lead to the subjective experience of faith and the flourishing of one’s spiritual life.

Kierkegaard’s observations of human development remind one of the modern description of complex dynamic processes, which are now known to develop discontinuously rather than continuously: ‘In the sphere of historical freedom, transition is a state. However, in order to understand this correctly, one must not forget that the new is brought about through the leap’ (Kierkegaard 1844: 85). Kierkegaard sees humans as the synthesis of psyche and body, which leads to the generation of spirit. For Kierkegaard one achieves full humanity only to the extent that body and psyche interact in such a way that spirit results in the dialectical and productive overcoming of what starts out as an opposition and a dilemma. We begin by being interested in our bodily, sensual, aesthetic pleasures, which we pursue blindly at the exclusion of all else. In the process we discover the limitations of this pursuit and we discover the mind’s capability of ruling our pleasures through the imposition of a rational code of conduct. In our ethical phase we may oppose our original inclinations quite fiercely and warfare between the two extremes ensues. This tension eventually brings us to an insight into the limitations of both the aesthetic and the ethical, when we realise that it is precisely our suffering of these contradictions that make us the spiritual creatures that we are. With a leap into faith we then discover our ability to surpass the contradictions and paradoxes of human nature and we commit ourselves to a truly religious dimension. The leap of faith is a necessary step to take if we want to become a true individual. It is risky, for it requires us to abandon our rationality, but it is a risk that pays huge dividends.

The finite and the infinite

At this point, Kierkegaard introduces another, more complex, opposition which it is our task to overcome, namely that of the temporal and the eternal. He explores the possible synthesis between these in some detail. People, as he describes them, are caught in the tension between the reality of their everyday experience and the demands of the universal and the eternal. In search of a way forward from this opposition, he comes to the conclusion that the paradox is actually the sine qua non of human temporal existence. Humankind is the place where the concept of the moment arises, because it is only when spirit is generated out of the interaction of body and mind that the synthesis of time and eternity produces the succession of moments that is typical and exclusive of human existence. When spirit is introduced, the eternal ceases to be mere present and becomes the possibility of continuous past, present and future.

Kierkegaard looks at the underpinnings of Christianity for the guidelines to our existential challenges. He analyses and reinterprets some of the biblical stories in existential terms. His version of the Fall and Adam and Eve’s expulsion from Paradise shows sin as the essential road that connects us to the spiritual. The possibility of spirit is introduced when the temporal is taken over by sin, for he who sins ‘lives only in the moment as abstracted from the eternal’ (Kierkegaard 1844: 93). By sinning, Adam asserted the synthesis between his body and his mind: he decided to follow the demands of his senses, against the explicit prohibition from above. Instead of staying merged with the eternal or the ethical, Adam, in this, manifested his spirit and posited the moment, the temporal, making the opposition between the temporal and the eternal a possibility. If he had not sinned he would have remained the same into eternity. If this had been the case then anxiety would not have come into existence, for anxiety is synonymous with nothingness, which is brought into being through sin. In other words, it is when we give in to earthly temptation that we finally become human and gain access to the mysteries of life and death. The price we pay for this is that of our own mortality.

It seems, therefore, that humans are a synthesis of the eternal and nothingness, which results in temporality. Temporality can be experienced fully only to the extent that the tension between the eternal and nothingness is fully experienced. Anxiety is the direct by-product of this experience.

Anxiety may be compared with dizziness. He whose eye happens to look down into the yawning abyss becomes dizzy. But what is the reason for this? It is just as much in his own eye as in the abyss, for suppose he had not looked down. Hence anxiety is the dizziness of freedom, which emerges when the spirit wants to posit the synthesis and freedom looks down into its own possibility, laying hold of finiteness to support itself. Freedom succumbs in this dizziness.

(Kierkegaard 1844: 61)

The role of anxiety

In other words anxiety is a necessary condition of our sinning and aspiring to becoming synthesis and spirit but, at the same time, it stops us from achieving the synthesis, because of its characteristic weakness. As Kierkegaard puts it: ‘Anxiety is a feminine weakness in which freedom faints. Psychologically speaking, the fall into sin always takes place in weakness’ (Kierkegaard 1844: 61).

So it is one of the essential human paradoxes that we are weak when we sin and aspire to place ourselves in opposition to eternity and when we do so we experience anxiety and make it difficult to transcend the opposition. ‘In anxiety there is the selfish infinity of possibility, which does not tempt like a choice but ensnaringly disquiets with its sweet anxiousness’ (1844: 61).

Kierkegaard sees anxiety as a way of becoming more self-reflective about the process of overcoming the opposition between nothing and the eternal. In picking up the challenge of experiencing anxiety ‘the nothing that is the object of anxiety becomes, as it were, more and more a something’ (1844: 61).

It now becomes possible for the person to assert himself as a potent influence on the outside world. Kierkegaard likens the person of genius to an omnipotent in-itself that can rock the whole world. Nevertheless such a person is still dependent upon fate. Fate is the ‘unity of the necessity and the accidental’ (1844: 96) and can be likened to the force of ‘nothing’, which inevitably reasserts itself over humanity, no matter how much we accomplish. Genius recognises fate, because genius is itself an expression and anticipation of providence (1844: 99). Anxiety is its best guide:

this is an adventure that every human being must go through – to learn to be anxious in order that he may not perish either by never having been in anxiety or by succumbing in anxiety. Whoever has learned to be anxious in the right way has learned the ultimate.

(Kierkegaard 1844: 155)

Anxiety as the basic experience of our confrontation with our essential paradox cannot be avoided without cost. If we try to avoid it, we will either go under in it or we will be simply insensitive to existence and unable to truly live.

This is a remarkable insight, which is of great relevance to twenty-first century psychotherapy. Most forms of psychotherapy have the objective of relieving people of anxiety and reducing this experience to its lowest possible level. In fact, psychotherapy is often deemed necessary precisely because levels of anxiety are high in a person. Kierkegaard seems to suggest a rather different approach to mental health as he considers anxiety to be crucial to spiritual life and a sign that the struggle with human paradox is taken seriously. Anxiety indeed should be the starting point of therapy, not in order to alleviate it, but rather because anxiety must be considered the starting point of a well-lived life.

Becoming a true self

For Kierkegaard it is essential that people should learn to stand in the tension between the finite and the infinite, even though this generates anxiety. Rather than contenting ourselves with immediacy and the acceptance of our finite nature and role in the world we should reach out to the infinite but, instead of becoming entangled in a merging with the infinite, we should be able to reach out while remaining grounded in the finite. We should be like a bow spanned between the two extremes and in this way we shall become a self. We shall then be the individual that we specifically are and can be.

We should not hide either in God, or in the trappings of social role or status. We must recognise the singular individual that we are in the face of the eternal, without the paraphernalia of secular life and without the cloak of religion. It is only in standing alone and facing up to our personal challenges that we can be true to the self that we are. To achieve this can never be a simple matter of changing: change would imply that the self is nothing but an external that can be altered in the same way in which our appearance can be altered. Kierkegaard refers to this misconception as that of the man of immediacy.

The man of immediacy does not know himself, he quite literally identifies himself only by the clothes he wears, he identifies having a self by externalities. There is hardly a more ludicrous mistake, for a self is indeed infinitely distinct from an externality. So when the externals have completely changed for the person and he has despaired, he goes one step further; he thinks something like this, it becomes his wish: what if I became someone else, got myself a new self. Well, what if he did become someone else? I wonder if he would recognise himself.

(Kierkegaard 1849: 53)

What Kierkegaard clearly indicates in this passage is his scepticism of any form of upbuilding (as he calls it) or psychotherapy (as we would call it today) that is based upon a mere altering of a person’s character, appearance or personality. According to Kierkegaard we cannot essentially change: we may be able to appear in different ways, do different things or look different or even think in different ways, but deep down, essentially there is an entity which remains the same. It is that entity that can only be called a self and it is this self that people try to avoid.

This amounts to a revolutionary perspective in contrast with many contemporary forms of psychotherapy that aim, on the contrary, to adjust or superficially transform people, clearly from an assumption that selves are nothing but the appearance and the social skill and the self-assertiveness. For Kierkegaard the self is defined as:

the conscious synthesis of infinitude and finitude that relates itself to itself, whose task is to become itself, which can be done only through the relationship to God. To become oneself is to become concrete. But to become concrete is neither to become finite nor to become infinite, for that which is to become...