Therapy and the Counter-tradition

The Edge of Philosophy

Manu Bazzano, Julie Webb

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317396444
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Therapy & the Counter-tradition: The Edge of Philosophy brings together leading exponents of contemporary psychotherapy, philosophers and writers, to explore how philosophical ideas may inform therapy work. Each author discusses a particular philosopher who has influenced their life and therapeutic practice, while questioning how counselling and psychotherapy can address human 'wholeness', despite the ascendancy of rationality, regulation and diagnosis. It also seeks to acknowledge the distinct lack of philosophical input and education in counselling and psychotherapy training.

The chapters are rooted in the Counter-Tradition, whose diverse manifestations include humanism, skepticism, fideism, as well as the opening of philosophy and psychology to poetry and the arts. This collection of thought-provoking essays will help open the discussion within the psychological therapies, by providing therapists with critical philosophical references, which will help broaden their knowledge and the scope of their practice.

Therapy & the Counter-tradition: The Edge of Philosophy will be of interest to mental health professionals, practitioners, counselling and psychotherapy trainees and trainers, and academics tutoring or studying psychology. It will also appeal to those interested in psychology, meditation, personal development and philosophy.

Part I

The threshold experience

We experience the threshold when we openly question ourselves. This may be deliberate on our part or brought about by a crisis. Its undertones may be ecstasy or deep sorrow. The experience of the threshold makes us (painfully, joyfully) aware of our limitations; it makes us aware of how much we can’t be aware of.

At times the threshold experience is accompanied by the illusion of transcendence – the sense of a durable, stable reality outside the world of phenomena – and by a yearning to secure access to this ‘eternity’. Believing the latter to be separate from this world may be the pitfall of most transpersonal psychotherapies. True, this reality is transcendental: it is beyond our grasp, in the way shifts of power and desire, genetic flows and geological movements are. But it is not transcendent. Rather, it is immanent – part of the same plane of reality.

Glimpsing the scale of my ignorance – sensing the hedge of my self-made prison – is both sobering and exhilarating. I feel intoxicated, struck by the distinctiveness and ambiguity of the virtual, of the Dionysian – by the flux of forces that have no need whatsoever for a subject or a self, that have no need for me. I cannot translate the experience in the confused clarity of my everyday dwelling. I do it anyway, promising not to give in to the siren call of literalism. Why? Because it was rupture before rapture, a point where my irrational reasoning faltered, giving way to a thirst for poetry and a poetic response. Some of the accounts in the chapters that follow can be read as poetic responses: Keats’s negative capability, D. H. Lawrence’s attunement to the mystery and beauty of the body, Pascal’s tears of joy, Kierkegaard’s openness to the lilies and the birds, Nietzsche’s invitation to lean towards an abyss of light. The sleep of logos generates wonders.

1

Changelings

The self in Nietzsche’s psychology

Manu Bazzano

Neither self nor ‘no-self’

That a psychologist without equal speaks from my writings is perhaps the first insight gained by a good reader – a reader such as I deserve him.

(Nietzsche, 2004, p. 45)

A key tenet in modern psychology is the belief in the existence of a separate self (or ‘subject’) – of a doer behind the deed. For Nietzsche, this belief represented the core of nineteenth-century bourgeois morality and had its origins in the Christian notion of the individual soul. As an autonomous soul, I alone am responsible for my actions. The fact that I am answerable for what I do sounds obvious; so does the idea that I exist as a separate, self-governing individual. Autonomy, freedom and responsibility contribute to my sense of dignity; how can these notions be disputed? I will, however, neither dispute nor defend these ideas here: I will not assert the existence of an autonomous self, nor will I endorse a belief in ‘no-self’. This is because I find both stances uninspiring, as well as one-sided. Moreover, they have been argued to death. Dualistic approaches try hard to substantiate the self (often through overidentification with Descartes’ ‘thinking thing’ and its post-Cartesian variations, including the notion of an autonomous psyche). Other accounts choose to bypass the self, usually by emphasizing its interdependent or intersubjective nature, by describing it as ‘being-in the-world’ and so forth.

Obviously one cannot draw on Nietzsche to bolster a Cartesian view of the self, though many still insist on a caricature of the Übermensch as superman or wonder woman. Equally and less evidently, one cannot draw on Nietzsche to prop up a simplistic bypass of the self, as it is sometimes the case in ‘transpersonal’ perspectives. It is for these reasons that (drawing from Nietzsche’s writings yet varying from familiar interpretations) I will attempt a different route.

Warning

I should warn readers at this point, especially those expecting a confirmation of their views of Nietzsche as instigator of unbridled individualism and uninhibited narcissism or as harbinger of a now rather fashionable brand of existential ‘authenticity’: you will be disappointed. Equally frustrated will be those who prefer to read him as an existentialist avant la lettre, the purveyor of a relational, spiritually tinged notion of ‘no-self’ or ‘relational self’.

What name should one then give to the reading of Nietzsche presented here? For reasons that I hope will become clear, I suggest the term negative psychology.

Reading well, reading slowly

Before becoming a philosopher, Nietzsche was a precociously gifted classical philologist. Despite his later disparaging of this branch of learning’s inherent sophistry, and despite the fact that the publication of his first book The Birth of Tragedy meant lifelong exclusion from the guild of philologists, he relied on philology’s methods throughout his creative life: reading well, reading slowly and deeply, cultivating interpretative rigour. His grounding in philology provided him with the foundations for his genealogical approach to the notion of the self. In exploring the latter, Nietzsche revisits its historical formation – an almost geological, as much as a genealogical, approach, tracing the ‘story’ of the subject as we know it (i.e. the autonomous actor existing separately behind the action) as the ingenious creation of the prevailing Christian and bourgeois morality.

A thirst for enemies

The soul is not eternal but contingent. For Nietzsche, the very idea of a ‘soul’ (from which that of a self derives) is an indispensable construct in the development of our species, the result of a “forcible sundering from [our] animal past” (Conway, 1999, p. 55). Our ‘inner life’ is a by-product of inhibition.

All instincts which are not discharged outwardly turn inwards – this is what I call the internalization of man: with it there now evolves in man what will later be called his ‘soul’. The whole inner world, originally stretched thinly as though between two layers of skin, was expanded and extended itself and gained depth, breadth and height in proportion to the degree that the external discharge of man’s instincts was obstructed.

(Nietzsche, 1996, p. 57)

For Nietzsche (long before Freud), we were forced to partake “schizophrenically in the taboo pronounced by civil society” on “all those instincts of wild, free, prowling man” (Conway, 1999, p. 55). This was as much a process of repression as of ingenuity on our part. The ingenuity came from our ability as a species to cover up our motives with the noble and gracious gloss of moral righteousness. Here is an example: we habitually think we are free “to express or not to express strength” (Nietzsche, 1996, p. 29). Often the second option is not really a choice but a cunning move that masquerades as virtue my inability to exercise strength. Say, for instance, that during the course of a public discussion you voice a strong disagreement with what I am saying. I may defend my position and listen to what you have to say. I may notice, however, that I am now beginning to feel irritated, even angry; you clearly do not recognize the depth of my insight. My exasperation is now increased by the vague feeling that you may be right after all. I fear defeat, so I retreat, explaining my decision in terms of moral principles. ‘I abhor confrontation – I will say – I am a Buddhist. It’s no good wasting precious time arguing. I’ll send you thoughts of loving kindness instead’. Thanks to my ostensible moral superiority, I have missed the chance of being congruent, even perhaps of reaching that greater level of understanding that comes from real dialogue – i.e. from a conversation that, according to Bakhtin, who first coined the term ‘dialogical’ (Bakhtin, 1982), does not end in mutual agreement or does not necessarily find common ground. I have also conveniently avoided confronting my inability to deal with anger in a constructive way.

I may, on the other hand, choose to pay tribute to the shallow ‘pluralism’ now in vogue: I will nod politely and pretend to appreciate your perspective while remaining leisurely unaffected by your intervention. I will respond to your objections with a knowing smile and conclude that there are as many views as there are people on this wonderful planet of ours. My admirably democratic position will leave both of us happy and unscathed in our carefully cultivated cocoon of ‘individuality’ – all the while paying lip service to a goody-goody notion of dialogue.

Or – I may accept the openly declared agon and be involved in the challenge you posed. I will honour my “thirst for enemies” (Nietzsche, 1996, p. 26), engage with you fully in honourable conflict – I will fight and disagree with you because I respect you.

Bluntly put: for Nietzsche, (a) civilized living imposes on us the implosion of natural elemental forces: thus the birth of our so-called ‘inner life’; (b) the weak person’s inability to engage in honourable conflict brings him/her to cleverly think of ‘moral principles’ that his/her separate self decides to abide by. As we shall see, a naturalistic reading of this dilemma will enable us to understand the situation more in terms of quantum of force, and we will refrain from placing the cause of action in a separate self. Here is Nietzsche:

A quantum of force is just such a quantum of drive, will, action, in fact it is nothing but this driving, willing and acting, and only the seduction of language (and the fundamental errors of reason petrified within it), which construes and misconstrues all actions as conditional upon an agency, a ‘subject’, can make it appear otherwise. And just as the common people separates lightning from its flash and takes the latter to be a deed, something performed by a subject, which is called lightning, popular morality separates strength from the manifestations of strength, as though there were an indifferent substratum behind the strong person which had the freedom to manifest strength or not. But there is no such substratum; there is no ‘being’ behind the deed, its effect and what becomes of it; ‘the doer’ is invented as an afterthought, – the doing is everything.

(Nietzsche, 1996, pp 25–26)

In sickness and in health

Weakness/strength, illness/health: these physiological as well as psychological binomials recur with regularity in Nietzsche’s writings. If feeling weak, fragile, uncertain, I may choose, rather than acknowledging my weakness, to paint it with the colours of compassion or virtue. After all, this choice is tried and tested, having shored up the millenarian practices of institutionalized religion. If I happen to be allergic to long-established Judaeo-Christian pieties, I can always resort to ‘mindfulness’ or to equally effective secular forms of moralizing.

For Nietzsche, the notion of a self, separate from its actions, is a direct by-product of our weakness. He writes:

There is nothing strange about the fact that lambs bear a grudge towards large birds of prey: but that is no reason to blame the large birds of prey for carrying off the little lambs. And if the lambs say to each other, ‘These birds of prey are evil; and whoever is least like a bird of prey and most like its opposite, a lamb, – is good, isn’t he?’, then there is no reason to raise objections to this setting-up of an ideal beyond the fact that the birds of prey will view it somewhat derisively, and will perhaps say: “We don’t bear any grudge at all towards these good lambs, in fact we love them, nothing is tastier than a tender lamb.”

(Nietzsche, 1996, pp. 25–26)

Weakness as freedom

What kind of person must believe in an “unbiased subject [endowed] with freedom of choice”? (Nietzsche, 1996, p. 26). Answer: one whose main concern is self-preservation. And what kind of organism is motivated by self-preservation? The question will be asked by neurologist and philosopher Kurt Goldstein some forty years later. And his reply is: a sick organism. Nietzsche and Goldstein, these two elective disciples of Goethe – the latter a precursor of Gestalt as well as non-reductive neuroscience – thoroughly agreed on this crucial point. Pathology is for Goldstein characterized by the shrinking of organismic experiencing (Goldstein, 1995). And what defines, conversely, strength in a healthy organism is the desire to give, even to squander one’s resources: the will to power is at heart generosity (Bazzano, 2006).

Nietzsche’s extraordinary suggestion is that our culture’s fixation with the notion of an independent self is the product of the latter’s endemic sickness, of our demand that others be in awe of our feebleness. The notion of an independent subject depends on our magnificent self-deception that sees weakness as freedom (Nietzsche, 1996).

And now for something truly objective

There is a broader association with our habitual notion of a doer behind a deed, and it has to do with cause and effect. In The Gay Science, Nietzsche writes:

Cause and effect: such a duality probably never exists; in truth we are confronted by a continuum out of which we isolate a couple of pieces, just as we perceive motion only as isolated points and then infer it without ever actually seeing it. The suddenness with which many effects stand out misleads us; actually, it is sudden only for us. In this moment of suddenness there is an infinite number of processes that elude us. An intellect that could see cause and effect as a continuum and a flux and not, as we do, in terms of arbitrary division and dismemberment, would repudiate the concept of cause and effect and deny all conditionality.

(Nietzsche, 1991, p. 173)

Nietzsche’s position is not, however, straightforward naturalism. In a later work, Twilight of the Idols (Nietzsche, 2003), he critiques psychology and science in the same breath – the soul atomism of the former as much as the atomism of physicists (Acampora, 2004), both in turn dependent on the Kantian idealism of the ‘thing-in-itself’:

And even y...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Contributors
• Introduction
• Part I The threshold experience
• Part II Ethics and politics
• Part III Self, other, world
• Part IV Therapy, language, metaphysics
• Index