Tag: mindfulness

Psycho-Analysis Began in Hypnosis

On By Christopher LansdownIn Philosophy, Science, UncategorizedLeave a comment

In my (low-key) quest to understand how on earth Freud’s theories were ever respected, I’ve recently read Five Lectures on Psycho-Analysis. It’s definitely been interesting. (If you don’t know, this is the transcript of five lectures he gave on five consecutive days at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts in 1909 which were meant to give a concise summary of Psycho-Analysis.)

Something I did not realize, but which makes perfect sense in retrospect, is that Psycho-Analysis began in hypnosis. A tiny bit of background is necessary, here: In the 1800s and early 1900s, the term “hysteria” seems to refer to any idiopathic problem in women with severe physical symptoms. Basically, when a woman developed bad symptoms and called in a doctor and he could find no physical cause, the diagnosis was “hysteria,” which basically meant “I don’t know, in a woman.” At this point, since the symptoms don’t have physical causes it is assumed that they must have mental causes and so doctors of the mind would step in to try to help, supposing, of course, that the patient or her family could afford it.

Freud begins with an interesting story about a patient that a colleague of his, Dr. Breuer, was treating. It was a young woman under great stress (nursing her dying father) who started developing a bunch of really bad symptoms that sound, to my ear, like a series of small strokes. She couldn’t use her right arm or leg for a while, sometimes she couldn’t use her left side, she forgot her native language (German) and could only speak English, etc. She also developed a severe inability to drink water and survived fro several weeks on melons and other high-water foods. And here’s where it gets interesting. Dr. Breuer hypnotized her and in a hypnotic state she related the story of having gone into a companion’s room and seen the woman’s dog drinking from a glass. This disgusted her terribly but she gave no indication of it because she didn’t want to offend the woman. He then gave the young woman a glass of water, brought her out of hypnosis, and she was able to drink normally from then on.

Freud moved away from hypnosis for several reasons, but the big one seems to be that most people can’t be hypnotized, which makes it a therapeutic tool of dubious value. The particulars of how he moved away is interesting, but I’ll get to that in a little bit. Before that, I want to focus on the hypnosis.

The history of hypnosis is interesting in itself, but a bit complex, and the relevant part is really how it was more popularly perceived than by what it was intended as. In its early stages, hypnosis was seem as something very different from normal waking life and, as a result, excited an enormous amount of interest from people who desired secret knowledge of the universe’s inner secrets. There were plenty of people who wanted to believe in a hidden world that they could access if only they had the key (spurred on, I suspect, by the many discoveries of the microscope in the late 1600s and the continued discoveries as a result of better and better microscopes). Hypnotism, where a man’s mind seemed to alter to a completely different state, and in particular where it could receive commands that it would obey without remembering in a subsequent waking state, was perfect for just such a belief. Here there seemed to be another behind, behind the mind we observe, which seemed to govern the observable mind’s operation. This is the sort of stuff out of which real power is based—if you can control the real source of the mind, you can control the mind!

This context really makes Pysho-Analysis’s model of the compartmentalized mind and further its insistence on the power of the sub-conscious mind make sense.

As I said, Freud abandoned hypnotism, and the means by which he did it really should have been a tip-off to his whole theory being wrong. What led him to discard hypnotism were some experiments he became aware of in which a person who could not remember what he did under hypnosis could be induced, without any further hypnosis, to remember. Freud only took this instrumentally rather than considering that it undermined the whole idea of the powerful subconscious and went about bringing up the “repressed” memories which were (putatively) causing physical symptoms by talking with the patient without hypnotism. I suppose that the idea of this secret knowledge was too attractive to give up.

How to Balance Gratitude With Ambition

On By Christopher LansdownIn Christianity, Philosophy, UncategorizedLeave a comment

I was watching a Chris Williamson Q&A video recently and a question he was asked was how to balance gratitude with ambition (or aspiration for improvement, if you dislike the term ambition). The exact phrasing of the question was:

How do I manage the dichotomy between being grateful for how far I’ve come and wanting to become more? The dichotomy between working for my future and being present in the moment.

There are several answer to this, and the thing is, they’re all primarily religious. It’s actually kind of interesting how often hard-won, top-level secular wisdom is beginning religious education. The Jewish sabbath is exactly this. God created the heavens and the earth in six days, and on the seventh day God rested, so human beings will work for six days and rest on the seventh. (Bear in mind that rest implies contemplation, not merely sleeping.) There you go, there’s your management of the dichotomy between working and gratitude. (The Christian moving of the day of rest to Sunday is an interesting and rich topic, but all of that rich symbolism doesn’t materially affect the current subject.) To put this in secular terms, a regular 6-to-1 balance of time dedicated to work with time dedicated to contemplation will keep your balance. If you keep it regular (that is, according to a rule), it will ensure that the effects of contemplation do not wear off. And guess what: you need to impose rules on yourself to make yourself do it because human beings don’t perfectly auto-regulate. (Just don’t make the rules so rigid you can’t live; the sabbath was made for man, not man for the sabbath.)

Another answer, here, is to keep God always in mind. This will make you strive to be perfect as your Father in heaven is perfect and also make you grateful for all that He’s already given you.

Here’s where Jordan Peterson’s language of “God is the highest good” falls a bit short, since keeping the highest good in mind will stimulate ambition, but it doesn’t tend nearly so much to gratitude. For gratitude you need to keep in mind the nothingness from which you came and which you could, apart from the positive action of The Good, become again. This requires a leap of faith that the world is not evil, though. If you can do this, you’re not going to be secular for long, and the whole exercise of trying to put this into secular language will be unnecessary. If you can’t take this leap of faith that the world exists because of good, then you’ll never actually be grateful anyway. People try to use “grateful” as an intransitive verb, but it’s not. It’s a transitive verb. You don’t have to conceive of God as a person to be grateful to Him, though it helps. But if the world is just a cruel joke with no punchline which no one told, gratitude is nonsensical. But here’s the thing: if you aren’t sure whether life is a cruel joke with no punchline that no one has told, that is equally paralyzing.

To see why, consider this thought experiment: you receive a text message from a friend which says something complementary about you, but there are enough odd word choices that you think it might just be his phone unlocked in his pocket interacting with auto-correct. Try to feel grateful for this message which you think might be a real compliment and might just be random noise that accidentally looks like a message. You will find that you can’t do it.

Nevertheless, it can still be interesting to say what is true, even if it will do no one any good: the way you keep perspective is by comparing, not to one thing, but to two things. If you want to keep perspective on your achievements, you must compare them both to the fullness of what you can achieve as well as to the nothing which is the least you could have achieved. Comparing to only one will not give you a proper perspective, because neither, on its own, is the full picture. Only by looking at the full picture will you have a correct perspective on where your achievements are within it. This is as true of metaphorical photographs as it is of literal photographs.