Breaking up with Psychology

Dear Psychology,

How to be a happy, successful, driven, individual, self?  That seems to be your chief question.  In your attempts to have us be “normal”, we are forever at risk of being too much of this, or too little of that.  You appear to have made an object of the self:  some “thing” to be acted upon, to be “treated”.  To make these assumptions, you have taken a seat on a pseudoscientific throne, supposedly outside of your own subjectivity, passing judgment through the impoverished language of a diagnostic manual.  More recently, I’ve noticed how you’ve gleaned some ideas from Buddhism, “mindfulness” you call it.  I don’t blame you; she is an old and wise mystic.   But, did you know that modern Buddhists tend to think the self is a complete illusion?  That must be painful for you to hear after all the work you have put into this “ego” business.  I see that some of your believers have found a way around this: “Look how great I am”, the Sam Harrises of the world seem to be saying as they pronounce the renunciation of an egoic self.  Am I the only one laughing? 

I want to propose to you that this self you have been so focused on pinning down, if not an illusion, is indeed a construction (Thompson, 2015).  However, the conundrum we find ourselves in is that, as problematic as the self is (the cause of suffering according to Buddhism), it remains a necessary and unavoidable illusion.  The trouble we seem to have got ourselves into is that the idea of this self as “non-existent” is too abstract and impractical for the practice of a talking therapy (or even for constructing this very sentence).  How does one structure a sentence without invoking the subject of experience, “I”?  However, perhaps we could explore ways of at least not treating this self as a “thing”?  Therefore, I would like to find ways of treating the self as “no-thing”: as the position of experience.  This serves as a significant break from your increasing trend (along with psychiatry and some forms of psychoanalysis) of viewing the self as a “thing” that can be treated, improved, normalised, or cured.  So, if I could have a brief moment of your “sustained attention”, I would like to critique the way you have coveted some Buddhist beliefs and remind you of your tumultuous la liaison with those French folk – Sartre, De Beauvoir, Merleau-Ponty, Camus and company.  When we revisit these existentialists, they elucidate that this whole self-story is important, but not in the way we might have originally imagined.  The necessity of a self is not in becoming a solid thing, that is acted upon and defends itself against a world, rather, if we listen to Buddhism and Existential Philosophy in bed together, the self is conceived as the position from which we respond to our experience of existing in a world - the very world that the self is born out of.   Self and world are, in this way, inseparable: it is through our contact with the world that a sense of self arises, and it is only via a self that the world is experienced.  They are interdependent and simultaneous events.  I’m sorry to break this to you, but what if you had it wrong all along? What if the self is not a true “thing” to be discovered, buried underneath all our defences?  What if the self is, for example, nothing but the sum of these defences? Or, what if the self is a relation to experience?  Maybe the self is the meeting place of sensation (contact with the world) and concept (ideas about the world)?  What if the self is the position from which world experiences world through a momentary illusion of a singular subjectivity? 

In relation to the concepts (language) we develop to understand experience, there are some other French guys we should not ignore, like: Foucault, Lacan, Derrida.  They will remind us, especially giving that talk is our method, that experience is structured through language.  Put simply, we need to keep in mind that this self-position can only be encountered through a “voice”. The self or subject is a constant attempt to articulate experience as a means of bringing itself into existence.  We unfortunately, then, have to make room for Lacan, who will insist that this attempt at articulation is always a failed project (Hook, 2018).  Our attempts to voice experience will always fail to meet experience.  There are no happy endings when it comes to liaisons with these French folk. 

Talking of love, I don’t think you got to meet Badiou before he died.  He was really wonderful at collapsing the boundary between Existentialism and Structuralism.  In other words, there are some philosophers who have tried to find a meeting place between premising the immediacy of experience versus focusing on how concepts structure experience.  Badiou (2012) took on the concept of “love”, a topic you and I seem to know very little about and, yet, all our diagnostic categories could perhaps collapse into one: love-gone-wrong.  Therapy may be nothing but an attempt at reimagining how to love or maybe, even surviving what love actually is.  But, if we are to talk of love, we should perhaps not limit ourselves to male voices?  However, don’t be too presumptuous in trusting that these female voices may bring the comfort you are seeking.  For Julie Reshe (2023), there is no subject (self) before sociality, we only exist in relation to each other.  Much like Buddhism, for Reshe the only thing we share is our constitutive “lack”.  “If the constitutive lack is what most profoundly defines us, then to touch the core of the other is to touch the lack at her core. This also implies that lack is what we most profoundly share.” (Reshe, 2023, p. 61).  She accuses you of perpetuating the illusion that healthy, nonpainful, relationships are possible.  Psychotherapy is always at risk of becoming just another religion in its false promise to bring an end to suffering.  It is not the ending of suffering that I am preaching for here, but finding of ways of being with our suffering. 

Nevertheless, we have much still to learn from philosophy, and particularly post-revolutionary French Philosophy, when it comes to ideas about the “subject”.  My interpretation of French Existentialism is that the subject (or subjectivity) can be understood as the position from which conscious experience occurs.  Early phenomenological thinking was that this “subject” is most likely only discovered in relation to an “object” - that which is experienced.   It was later introduced into phenomenology that this “subject” can only ever be experienced in relation to an “other”.  However, anything that we can think or talk about can be considered an object of consciousness.  A simple distinction would be that subjects are conscious whereas objects are discovered within consciousness.  However, this distinction only serves as a convenience of logic.  For example, what happens when the subject of consciousness is the subject itself?  It appears that a conscious entity can still be conceived of as an object.  This is particularly relevant for how love goes wrong; when love makes a “thing” of a person or conscious being: when there are things I love about you, I carve you up for my own consumption.  This is also where you and I might have first gone wrong, in a psychological therapy that inevitably tries to make the subject into an object for itself.  We are now in the habit of doing this all the time: in our constant strife to be some-thing.  This seems to have become somewhat of a new religion: “self-actualization” you call it.  My clients have become like hamsters on a wheel of life, in a constant pursuit of this non-existent destination.  There is no actual self!  The aim of my thesis is, therefore, to examine the implications of a subject making an object of itself, and to attempt to do away with the habit of seeking comfort in the idea that there is any destination to be reached (whether it be the fantasy of becoming actual to myself or Buddhism’s idea of transcending myself through doing without the self altogether).     

Given that our work starts with addressing consciousness (and, therefore, what has been termed “unconsciousness”), there seem to be some unaddressed questions.  Questions we are unlikely to ever have the answers to, but questions worthy of being asked.  If we start with Descartes, my consciousness is a form of cognition (thinking) and the fact that I think is proof of my existence, “I think therefore I am”.  Nothing exists outside of my thinking.  However, if I take this idea for granted, I am still left with a chain of subsequent questions:  What is the relationship between my thinking and my existing?  Do I think myself into existence?  I may think and I may, therefore, exist - but how does that tell me anything about how to live?  I may think, but what is the origin of my thoughts?  Am I my thoughts?  I may exist, but are there ways of bringing about change to my existence?  As Badiou (2005) might ask:  Is there a way for something new to arise?  Can my existence be a form of creation?  Is there such a thing as an original thought?  Or, is everything about me already determined?  To take an idea from Buddhism: should I, perhaps, imagine everything already destroyed?  

These are not questions we are likely to find any concrete answers to.  After all, the therapeutic attitude is to ask questions without specific answers in mind. It is more the questioning stance than the answers that are important.  We’ve tended to increasingly try and find agreement and validation from science and medicine in finding concrete answers to our questions, but this fidelity to science and medicine seems to have ignored an important development at the turn of the 20th century: Phenomenology.  It was Phenomenology that took up the project of attempting to understand the relationship between subject and object (especially as it occurs in consciousness).  Phenomenology asks: How are the objects of the world given to us in consciousness?  These kinds of questions were first taken up by German philosophy.  For Hegel, reason is a purposive activity.  In other words, it allows the subject to be self-propulsive.  Reason allows for agency and, therefore, subjectivity propels itself, it is not moved by something else (as objects are).  Simply speaking, this equates to X is as X does.  But, in doing, in reasoning, in choosing to be who we are, we are relating a self to a self (as if it were an object) acting upon ourselves.  I think Hegel called this a “negation”?  The significance of this for my thesis is that it highlights the complexity of consciousness that arises when the subject becomes an object to itself (when we become the object of our own experience).  In creating ourselves, or even reflecting on our “self”, we negate ourselves: we move from subject to object.  The mathematician, Husserl (following from Brentano’s “descriptive psychology”), explored these kinds of questions in much less abstract ways than Hegel, giving rise to the field of Phenomenology.  Many philosophers and practitioners began to share an appreciation of Husserl’s work, including Lacan, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty and Heidegger.  Through its focus on experience, Phenomenology made way for a philosophical turn that became known as Existentialism.  We cannot, however, speak of Existentialism as one particular doctrine, but it did give rise to very radical and revolutionary ways of doing therapy.  Even though the controversial Scottish psychiatrist, R.D. Laing, may not have called himself an Existential Psychoanalyst, I view him as an exemplar of this existential turn.  He wrote particularly existential-phenomenological statements like: “Existence is a flame which constantly melts and recasts our theories” (Laing, 1967, p. 47).  He was also inclined to include Buddhist practices, particularly Zazen, into his work.  I think you were particularly upset with him when he refused to help you lock people up under the concepts of madness and schizophrenia.  

The French thinkers I have mentioned took up ideas from German Phenomenology and Existentialism and translated them into a new thinking culture.  The work of Jean-Paul Sartre was instrumental in popularising Existentialism in a post-WWII France.  This new trend in philosophical thinking seemed to favour the work of Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, and later Heidegger over, for example, Hegel.  It was a trend in philosophy that premised the exploration of lived experience over abstract concepts.  Themes like anxiety, authenticity, freedom, and agency were central to such thinking.  Writers like Sartre introduced a French version of existential thinking into the very fabric of Parisian culture.  Existentialism became a social movement rather than just a school of thinking.  Philosophy was no longer about concepts but went back to ways of doing and ways of being (like the early Greeks did).  In this way, philosophy attempted to become “experience near”.   

This existential movement also led to a break away from your cousin, Psychoanalysis, and how he was practising at the time.  Even though Sartre was not a psychoanalyst, the meeting of psychoanalytic thinking with philosophical thinking gave rise to a brief creative burst in the field of therapy:  Existential Psychoanalysis.  The contemporary Existential Psychoanalyst, Michael Guy Thompson (2023) a student of R.D. Laing’s, calls this existential development in Psychoanalysis a “renegade move”.  It seems to, however, have been short-lived and there are very few practitioners like Thompson around.  This is perhaps because the project of Existentialism somewhat undermines many of the original premises of psychoanalysis.  For example, Sartre challenged the existence of the unconscious as some sort of storehouse of repressed content, as Freud, and even aspects of Buddhism, have proposed.  The conclusions of an Existential Psychoanalysis are particularly radical, challenging the norms of society, being even less likely than other forms of therapy to provide its clients with warm fuzzy happy endings.  There are also those who followed the Laingian lineage, like Andrew Feldmar (2023), who dropped the psychoanalysis part altogether, distilling their work into something even more radical.  One of his credo’s being:  If you think you know, then you don’t know. 

My argument is that, if you follow the existential thread of Psychoanalysis, it radicalises itself.  Likewise, if you follow the existential thread of Buddhism, it secularises itself.  Michael Guy Thompson (1995) proposes that there is even an existential thread to Freud’s work.  Following the existential thread, eventually the “psych” can be dropped from “analysis”:  there is no longer room for the idea of a soul and less room for the idea of a singular self, or mind, to be analysed.  The subject left to be analysed is, therefore, not a thing but an experience.   However, the existential orientation to therapy appears to have been watered down over time in order to appease your need to retain your clients and pay the bills, giving way to an increasingly positive orientation to therapy.  Let’s just stick to the normative practices, under the false promise of everlasting happiness?  

What Buddhism and an Existential Analysis have in common is the appreciation of certain “givens”, chief of which is that suffering is at the core of experience.  I am not sure if the helping profession knows how to be with people in their suffering.  Like religion, we want to give those seeking help something to believe in, to hang on to, in response to the perpetually restless feeling of “lacking some-thing-ness”.  But what if the only thing we have managed to offer, so far, is to give the subject back its “self” in the form of a diagnostic language?  I propose something more poetic, something more engaging, something lived while we are inevitably dying.  It is not that I assume that French philosophers stumbled upon the Truth, it is more a matter of style, a manner in which they lived out their beliefs.   I propose that a sense of self is actually born out of our perpetual sense of no-thing-ness.  It is a felt sense of what it means to exist that is tinged with emptiness and it is found at the meeting place between world and experience.  The self is a sensation, and it can be conceived of as a constant “struggle to exist”.  I am proposing a therapy model that engages with this struggle rather than shying away from it.  It’s a question of “how” rather than “what”.  As attracted as I am to Sartre’s style, he did not translate his beliefs into a therapeutic practice.  Regardless of theory, as practitioners, our question remains:  How can this be of use?  How can I be of use without selling false hope, that is? 

Rather than seeking objective methods, we can explore the poetic logic of the therapeutic encounter, and if we are going to talk of poetic logic, then we should speak with the poets:  Leonard Cohen spent some of his later years in a Zen monastery.  He served as assistant (or carer) to the ageing Roshi.  Although he didn’t consider himself a monk, he shaved his head and adorned the robes in order to gain access to Roshi and his teachings.  This is where he wrote most of the poems from the Book of Longing (Cohen, 2006).  Cohen had indulged in all the sex, drugs, money and fame one could have dreamed of and, yet, still seemed to be filled with longing.  It seems that he entered into the monastic life as a means of coming to terms with the insatiability of longing.  Longing being our inevitable response to our inherent lack.  In Buddhism, they call this “sunyata”, emptiness: an incompletion that we attempt to fill with ideas of who we are and what we want to be in the projected future.  Zen taught him to take this “self” less seriously.  In an interview with Stina Dabrowski in 2001 (Dabrowski, 2015), Cohen describes how he distrusts psychological explanations, giving up trying to find the meaning of life and how “peace” comes from giving up the search for a “real self”.  As the lyrics to his song, “That Doesn’t Make It Junk”, describe: I don't trust my inner feelings.  Inner feelings come and go.  At this point in the interview, Dabrowski asks, “So, who are you now?” He chuckles, then looks up at her and, smiling, says “I’m your guest”.  He allows himself to be constituted by the given moment.    

Cohen still kept a bottle of Johnny Walker in his quarters and after 5 or 6 years returned to civilian life.  But I get the impression that his time there brought him great clarity.  By clarity, I mean a brutal honesty about life that even challenged Zen beliefs.  As the lyrics to Cohen’s “The Street” go:  I know your burden's heavy as you wheel it through the night. The guru says it's empty. But that doesn't mean it's light.   The emptiness that we all carry is far from light and so I am interested in a style of therapy that will help with its burden.  Emptiness does not imply absolutely nothingness because this emptiness textures our experience.  My argument, therefore, is that this “emptiness” is a “no-thing-ness” rather than a complete “nothingness”.  This “emptiness” is not absent of experience, providing an insoluble ambiguity that is difficult to language.       

An essential aspect to the ambiguity of our “no-thing-ness” is that we do not exist as singular beings, we are always in relation to an “other”.  This relation between self and other, whether this “other” be a person or a thing, is mediated by concepts.  In fact, concepts themselves easily become the other.  The concept of “god” is perhaps the most pertinent example in human history: the concept of the Other that we need to invent in order to find security.  These concepts, however, can drift us away from the immediacy of experience.  And yet, we don’t ever seem to reach a direct experience of anything, free of our preconceived concepts about them.  It is through concepts that we attempt to gain access to things and yet things, in themselves, are always free from the ideas we have about them.    The psychology of meditation is a dance between these two impossibilities.  We attempt to attend to a thing and then watch how concepts about it illude the thing itself.  For example, in insight-based meditation (otherwise known as “mindfulness”), the idea is to bring yourself back to a “thing” as an anchor.  This helps us come to terms with how concepts inevitably arise and make direct contact with this “thing” impossible.  It is an attempt (although never fully realised) to generate freedom from concepts. This is why, insight-based meditation is arguably secular, as any belief can be likened to a mere concept. 

We run the risk here of purporting what neurophenomenologist, Evan Thompson (2020) calls “Buddhist exceptionalism”: the idea that Buddhism is exempt from the pitfalls of any other belief system.  Meditation remains a concept and its practices are embedded in a religious, philosophical, and historical context.  When I conduct retreats, I sometimes find myself wanting to burst out laughing at the absurdity of a group of people, sitting in positions unnatural to their cultural origin, following my instructions on how to breathe.  And yet, I cannot deny the benefit of these practices.  However, they remain a skill rather than a science that might have some sort of special window into the mind.  What proceeds is an attempt to tease out the benefits of skilful contemplative practice through exploring the existential thread that runs through both European Philosophy and Buddhism.  This has taken me further and further away from your objectifying language and practices and brought me closer to my clients in our shared struggle to exist.  The overall methodology is to be “no-thing-ness” in relation to one another, under the fundamental ethic of “let be”.  To achieve this, we must move away from your impoverished language for what we are, venturing into a more poetic logic for exploring things as they are; finding new ways of relating to our existence with one another; and engaging in experiments in reconstituting what we could be, beyond the lingering of past experiences.  For far too long, the symptom of being human has been overprescribed to and misunderstood.  This thesis is an attempt to bring a non-pathologising presence to everything that we are, starting with our fundamental “lack”.  We could think of this new position as post-psychological, post-analytical, and even post-Buddhist: Contemplative Existential Practice.