Psychic Wholeness and Healing, Second Edition

Using All the Powers of the Human Psyche

Terruwe, Baars

• Publisher: Wipf and Stock
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781498288132
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

As noted psychiatrists, authors, and lecturers, Baars and Terruwe excitingly blend medieval and classical notions of the human psyche together with modern clinical discoveries as they probe the topic of psychic wholeness and healing. The authors explore the entire human psyche, including man's spiritual dimension, which is an area totally ignored by most modern psychiatrists--creating in modern man an ever-deepening sense of frustration in searching for effective psychiatric treatment for his emotional turmoil. The books' numerous detailed clinical case histories clarify the authors' therapeutic principles. The following questions, among many others, are considered in this work: How best to help a person who lives in constant fear that he has committed a serious sin even though he knows he has not? Does a person who wants to live a moral life, yet cannot refrain from doing things that he knows are immoral, suffer from weakness of willpower or from a neurosis that would lend itself to therapy?

CHAPTER I

THE HUMAN PSYCHE

The truth that we owe to man is, first and foremost, a truth about man.

(John Paul II, Puebla, Mexico, January, 1979)

To understand the notion of psychic1 or psychological wholeness, as well as the kind of emotional afflictions whose healing we describe in this book, it is necessary to be familiar with the powers and functions of the human psyche and their relationship with innate drives. Like everything created, human beings are by their very nature directed to a certain good. It follows, therefore, that the person also possesses a drive to obtain this good. This drive is not dependent on any conscious knowledge in human beings themselves, but presupposes the knowledge of Him who has created and directed human nature to this goal.2 It exists in humans as a blind drive which functions independently of knowledge or consciousness; it drives one on continuously and can never be made to disappear, nor is it dependent on reason for its existence. This natural drive is directed to that which is an essential and necessary good for the human person.

This drive is, therefore, directed first of all to life itself, for it is human nature to be a composite of soul and body; without this union a human being is no longer a human being. Second, there is a drive directed to procreation because a human being, by virtue of his or her nature, is a specific being who does not exhaust that nature, existing as it does in numerous subjects; and is, therefore, directed at this multiplication. It is a drive of the human being as social, not as individual.

Both of these innate drives, that of self-preservation and that of procreation, are therefore the most fundamental drives in the human being; they are present from the moment a person begins to exist. The drive of procreation, of course, will make itself fully felt only when a person is physically capable of the procreative act; however, potentially it is always present and may also manifest itself in an elementary form before the age of puberty. On the other hand, the drive for self-preservation is completely developed from the very beginning; in fact, in the baby it plays the predominant role. (Eating and drinking are biological necessities, unlike sexual gratifications.)

These innate natural drives are directed to the most elementary human goods: life and procreation. Human nature, however, extends beyond this basic level by reason of the sensory and intellectual knowledge which it acquires. Similarly, human drives do not remain restricted to these elementary drives of human nature but develop into a wealth of sensory and intellectual inclinations by which persons are able to perfect all the potentialities of their being. These are the so-called acquired inclinations and are all the result of a personal cognitive act: the sensory inclinations, of a sensory cognitive act; the spiritual inclinations, of an intellectual cognitive act. Their objects are goods which in some way or other can satisfy a human need.

The sum total of these acquired inclinations has been constructed, so to speak, on the foundation of the two natural innate drives. The latter have to do only with the most essential goods; they push the human person, so to speak, toward these necessary, essential goods. The acquired inclinations, on the other hand, have to do with everything that encompasses these essential goods and elevates life and procreation to their fullest human value. We might say that these inclinations pull the human person toward the perfection of his or her being. The natural or innate drives are independent of any knowledge in the subject while the acquired inclinations are activated by sensory knowledge.

To understand how human persons attain their good and how neurotic disorders due to repression impede attainment, it is important to understand the sub-sensory, sensory, and intellectual dimensions of the human person. The sub-sensory powers—nutrition, growth, reproduction—comprise life’s most elementary processes, which are directly concerned with the preservation and reproduction of the living being. These processes are found in every living being; therefore, animals and plants have them in common with humans. The more highly developed the being, the greater and more complex will be the differentiation in the organization of these functions. The sub-sensory physiological dimension has no direct bearing on this study. It has meaning only to the extent that the consequences of repression make themselves felt in human biological functions other than the senses.

In addition to the physiological dimension, we find the sensory dimension in human beings similar to, but different by nature from, that in animals. This sense life is characterized by the fact that it enables the living being, human as well as animal, to step outside itself through the ability to know, desire, and pursue concrete, external material things. Thus, an entirely new life comes into existence—the life of sense cognition, sense appetite, and motion—through which the living being passes beyond the limitations of its own being and extends itself through sense knowledge, emotional arousal, and motion. This is the proper and distinctive feature of all sense life. The higher the type of animal, the more varied its sensory life. According to the principle of philosophical anthropology that emotions are always aroused by given perceptions and interpretations, and since the cognitive powers are more perfectly developed in higher forms of sensory life, the corresponding emotions will likewise be more refined until they reach their higher perfection in humans. Although human beings are animal-like in these emotions, they are not in essence (brute) animals.

The intellectual dimension of the human being transcends or goes beyond the sense life. The objects of sense perception and emotions are limited to concrete, sensory, material things. The human, not the animal, also grasps the nonsensory and immaterial meaning of things through universal ideas which abstract from the concrete and individual features of singular concrete objects.

It is self-evident that the universal and immaterial can never be known or desired by the sensory powers. There is a necessary and essential relationship between a power and its object because a power is directed to a specific object and necessarily belongs to the same order. If the intended object is concrete and material, then the intending power which is directed to it will also have to be concrete and material. If the intended object is not material, however, it can never be grasped by a sensory and material power.

Consequently, faced with the fact that human beings know the immaterial meaning of things through universal ideas, it is necessary to postulate the existence of an immaterial power through which they are able to know the immaterial meaning of things and ideas.

The same is true for the accompanying appetite. Human beings desire what they know. If they know immaterial things, their appetite will also direct itself to immaterial things. Therefore, because of the necessary and essential relation between a power and its object, human beings must possess an immaterial power of desiring.3 This power is called the will.

These two dimensions, the sensory and the intellectual, constitute the human person’s psychic or psychological life. By nature they are meant to function in unison, and when one’s development is natural and normal, there will be perfect harmony and integration between the sensory and intellectual powers of knowing and desiring, between sense knowledge and intellectual knowledge, between desire and will. Because this development is not always normal, deviations occur, of which neurotic disorders are some of the most serious. Before analyzing their mutual relationship, we shall take a closer look at both the sensory life and the intellectual life.

The Senses

In the human person’s sense life, we must distinguish, first of all, between sense knowledge and desire. Sense knowledge is obtained by means of the sensory cognitive powers. These are partly external (the senses of sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch) and partly internal. Although all senses are somehow rooted in the brain, the internal senses are associated more fully with the brain, but as yet we cannot specify their precise locations.

First of all, there is the central unifying sense.4 It is necessary to postulate the existence of such a sense, because we are able to discriminate between the several kinds of sensations that arrive from the external senses and at the same time unite them into a perceptual whole. Thus, by means of this unifying or centralizing sense, all the sensations individually received are blended into a unit of psychological experience. The importance of this sense for the formation of percepts cannot be overestimated. Experimental psychology has shown that sensory perception of an object always utilizes a variety of sensations from different senses.

A second internal sense is the imaginative sense or imagination, which enables us to re-present to mind sense objects which a...

Table of contents

• FOREWORD
• PREFACE
• INTRODUCTION TO INTEGRACJA PSYCHICZNA4
• Chapter 1: THE HUMAN PSYCHE
• Chapter 2: THE REPRESSIVE PROCESS
• Chapter 3: TYPES OF REPRESSIVE DISORDERS
• Chapter 4: THERAPY OF REPRESSIVE DISORDERS
• Chapter 5: CASE HISTORIES
• Chapter 6: PREVENTION OF REPRESSIVE DISORDERS
• Chapter 7: THE ASSERTIVE DRIVE
• Chapter 8: FREEDOM OF THE WILL IN REPRESSIVE DISORDERS
• Chapter 9: EMOTIONAL MATURITY
• Appendix A: HUMAN DRIVES
• Appendix B
• Appendix C: 'Guidelines' to Quicksand
• BIBLIOGRAPHY