Passion, Defences against Passion and Aliveness

This Wednesday we will explore Passion and Aliveness. I’ll begin by asking us to reflect on desire and our relationship with desire. We will look at Freud’s model of Id, Superego and Ego and think about his concept of the battle between our instincts and drives on the one hand and the internalised voices of parental and societal authority on the other hand. We will look at the role of defences, splitting and projection in repressing and or redirecting libido and the consequences for our sense of self and our sense of aliveness.

Freud saw human beings as wolves to other men, a thin veneer of civilisation held in place by taboos against violent sexual competitiveness and rapaciousness being the corner stone of a fragile civilisation. All of life being a constant struggle conducted in the fraught space between erotic and destructive instincts. For instance although there may be a conscious lament about a unrewarding life or disappointing relationships there may also be a fierce unconscious attachment to seemingly “bad objects” and secret gratification in withholding joy and love to others, or stirring up guilty and shameful feelings in oneself as a kind of punishment which might provide relief from guilty feelings and also confirm fantasies of omnipotent control. Roy Schafer in Bad Feelings investigates defences against bad feelings, psychological structures designed to block all feelings totally, and the need for the therapist to hold an empathic respectful attitude towards the need for defense and to work through the defense as much as possible.

Relational Psychoanalyst Stephen Mitchell is eloquent on the persistance of vulnerability into adult life and the twin nature of desire and aggression.

In Can Love Last?: “Dependency is not a holdover from childhood; it s constitutive of desire for a real other person. And the vulnerability of dependency makes us feel endangered. In desire we are endangered. And being endangered makes us angry. We want to control, to have the power to hurt, perhaps to eliminate the other whose charms have disrupted our equanimity, who has undermined our sense of self and self-worth. Aggression is a response to threat, and sustaining desire over time produces a perpetually regenerated threat. ….Desire endangers us, and the aggressive response to that endangerment can destroy both the object of desire and ourselves.

I’ll be talking more about aggression in September. Winnicott the great object relations analyst of the independent school believed it had a vital role in healthy human relating and particularly in mature sexual relating. Winnicott thought a lack of passion and vitality came about because of false self functioning. In healthy development the mothering one is exquisitely sensitive to the child’s wishes and actualises them, in mothering which generates a false self, the caretaker misses the child’s wishes more or less completely and sees only her own image of the child, her own agenda.

In such circumstances Winnicott argues that the child cannot maintain genuine wishes and needs in an unreceptive environment –it is too painful. The true self is unattended to, either kept secret or repressed. Further the caretaker’s agenda must be dealt with; relatedness is essential to physical and emotional survival. So the child learns to shape himself or herself according to the contours of the mother’s vision, becoming mummy’s son or mummy’s daughter, a false self on a compliant basis.

In the Shadow of the Object Christopher Bollas, describes people who are abnormally normal. “They are usually rooted in being objective, both in their thinking and in their desire. They achieve a state ofabnormal normality by eradicating the self of subjective life, as they strive to become an object in their own being. In his cultivation of material phenomena the normotic has become an object, both for himself and for his others: an object with no subject, an object alive and happy in a material world.”

He also describes the way that moods can conserve a disowned internal self state that has been preserved intact during childhood. “When a person goes into a mood, he becomes that child self who was refused expression in relation to his parents for one reason or another.” He sees moods as “registers of the moment of a breakdown between a child and his parents, and they partly indicate the parents’ own developmental arrest, in that the paret was unable to deal appropriately with the child’s particular maturational needs.” What had been a self experience in the child, one that could have been integrated into the child’s continuing development, was rejected by the parents so became frozen by the child and is contacted again through the mood.

It is these states that therapists of the Winnicott, Kohut, Balint schools believe can be transformed in therapy when the therapist is able to attune to the emotional state, and wait for the client to put words to their experience. And if the client is able to make use of the therapist, to feel seen, heard and felt and to find that the therapist is able to accept the expression of difficult feelings as communication. Feelings can lose their associations of shame and or fear, do not need to be repressed and that this creates a more dynamic experience of life and love.

Before ending I wish to also briefly visit the work of Jung and Ken Wilbur and talk more about splitting of persona and shadow, life and death, and body and mind and the task of the centaur to open to and integrate the passionate animal and sentient mind in one body.

Happiness- is it found, made or an inner creation?

This Wednesday’s dialogue is about happiness and I will be outlining some thinking from the Buddhist realm about happiness as well as some thoughts from Psychoanalysis and from Psychosynthesis.

A lot of money is spent in the pursuit of happiness through materialism –the advertising industry happily cultivates our sense of inferiority, of envy, of something missing in order to encourage us to spend our way to personal fulfillment. The personal growth industry which includes therapy, books, retreats etc also encourages us to spend in the name of self-improvement as if happiness could be a spiritual goal. Yet how realistic can it be to be happy all of the time or even most of the time? I suppose it depends on how we define happiness and also how we look at suffering.

Barry Magid a zen Buddhist and psychoanalyst, in his book Ending the Pursuit of Happiness invites us to consider that our "pursuit of happiness" may actually be a source of our suffering. He takes an unusual look at our "secret practices"—what we're really doing when we say we're meditating-like trying to feel calmer, or more compassionate, or even "enlightened" (whatever we imagine that means!). He also uncovers our "curative fantasies" about spiritual practice-those ideas that we can somehow fix all the messy human things about ourselves that we imagine are bad or wrong or unacceptable.

Freud said, "Happiness is the deferred fulfillment of a prehistoric wish. That is why wealth brings so little happiness: money is not an infantile wish." Throughout life we are driven by the desires and fears established in early childhood. I suspect he would agree that happiness is a transitory state, that it signals to us that a need we experience is fulfilled.

In Civilization and Its Discontents Freud says “What we call happiness in the strict sense comes from the (preferably sudden) satisfaction of needs which have been dammed up to a high degree, and it is from its nature only possible as a periodic phenomenon. When any situation that is desired by the pleasure principle is prolonged it only produces a feeling of mild contentment. We are so made that we can derive intense enjoyment only from a contrast and very little from a state of things.”

Although at first glance this presents a rather pessimistic picture I am coming to an understanding that the flux of emotion, that the pitching of fortune, is in fact what gives happiness it’s bounty. In a blog, Cold house Journal one American citizen writes of his year trying to live without air-conditioning and his appreciation of warmth when it comes, of the seasons change, because of this. Is happiness then found through embracing our experience as it is rather than fighting to change or overcome it? This is the path of immanence and I think there is some truth in this. Of course a culture dominated by this worldview would not be good at striving for material improvement. Our dissatisfactions with the way things are having lead to some pretty nifty inventions. However perhaps as a civilization we are getting towards the end of the satisfaction that ipod, iphone, dishwasher, flat screen can offer. Technology offers individual comfort but often undermines the simple pleasure that comes connection with others and with the environment which also give us great happiness.

Other spiritual paths suggest that the way to happiness or spiritual fulfillment is through transcendence, put crudely getting over us. A therapist in Auckland Anna Cowan says she thinks about this as inviting a client to step up out of their experience (transcendence) in contrast to stepping down further into their experience (immanence). I like her model, it suggest two ways to shift our consciousness and to open to deeper or wider experiences of self.

Many psychological frames and spiritual ones encourage us to, in the words of Ram Dass “Be here, now.” Anxiety in an attempt to defend us from suffering represses or displaces suffering but this suffering continues as physical symptoms, inexplicable moods, repetition compulsion. If we can step down into the feelings and or memories isolated from consciousness by anxiety we become more resilient, more whole and more capable of enjoying the ordinary happiness of a good conversation, a walk in the park and a meal with friends.

We might also become less self obsessed and more open to others and to the joy that is found in opening to generosity to others and care for the environment.

Two quotes on happiness from the Dali Lama, someone who faces suffering but chooses happiness:

“I believe that the very purpose of life is to be happy. From the very core of our being, we desire contentment. In my own limited experience I have found that the more we care for the happiness of others, the greater is our own sense of well-being. Cultivating a close, warmhearted feeling for others automatically puts the mind at ease. It helps remove whatever fears or insecurities we may have and gives us the strength to cope with any obstacles we encounter. It is the principal source of success in life. Since we are not solely material creatures, it is a mistake to place all our hopes for happiness on external development alone. The key is to develop inner peace.” “We can live without religion and meditation but we can’t live without human affection.”

Let's talk about happiness

Lynne Holdem presents another series of winter lunchtime dialogues that aim to enhance our understanding about being human. Drawing from psycho-analytic and psycho-spiritual thinkers Lynne will talk in everyday language and then invite participants to contribute their own thinking. Interested community members and professionals are all welcome.
• August 11: happiness: is it found, made or an inner creation
• August 18: passion, defences against passion and aliveness
• August 25: awareness of hope: conscious and unconscious
• Sept 1: the healing heart –the role of compassion and acceptance
• Sept 8: aggression, shadow and wholeness
• Sept 15: sympathy and empathy: helping or hindering
• Sept 22: freedom - fear and courage in being oneself
• Sept 29: generativity, from consumer to active citizen

Entry is by donation to Supporting Families in Mental Illness in Taranaki. Your donation can be by cash or to SF Taranaki via Give A Little. Coffee and tea provided. Bring your lunch if you wish. Dialogues take place at Lynne’s rooms on the third floor of BNZ building, 50 Devon St on Wednesdays at 12.30 -1.30pm.
http:www.psychematters-lynneholdem@blogspot.com for more information or phone Lynne on 06 769-6050.

More About Me

I work on the third story of the BNZ in downtown New Plymouth. It's great being up high and close to the library and the museum and the best coffee shop in town, Ozone on King St. I'm mother to two girls and love cooking, sewing, reading weighty psychoanalytic books, poetry and good novels. At the moment I'm reading Captain Correlli's Mandolin and a biography of RD Laing. I love walking the dog on Back Beach, camping on the east coast in summer, cheering on the girls on the Waiwakaiho courts on a bright and cold Taranaki saturday morning.

I visit Auckland once a month for teaching and supervision and I'm involved in teaching with the Institute of Psychosynthesis. Last year I became a full member of NZAP and a registered psychotherapist. Psychotherapy has recently become a registered profession which offers protection for clients and means that all psychotherapists are qualified and work with the same code of ethics. Find out more about psychotherapy at NZAP and at Psychotherapists Board of Aotearoa New Zealand. Recently I have been studying with the London Institute of Group Analysis when they offered a training in Auckland in 2007 and 2008. I graduated with diplomas in Psychosynthesis counseling and psychotherapy from The New Zealand Institute of Psychosynthesis in Auckland in 1991 and 1999. Prior to this I worked as an English and Drama teacher in Opotiki, Bay of Plenty and in Auckland.

Guilt and Forgiveness

What would it be like to live in a world without guilt? What would it be like to live in a world without forgiveness? 

It’s a complex subject, guilt and forgiveness. At times we might feel guilty with no obvious cause. Other times we don’t feel guilty when evidently we should. Sometimes we can get stuck in a kind of guilty orientation to others which leaves us open to exploitation and over responsibility. We’ve probably all tried and felt ourselves fail at forgiving someone who has hurt us. Many of us may have been exposed to a kind of new age zeal which told us to forgive everything and let love cure all.

I understand both guilt and forgiveness have conscious and unconscious aspects. That both can act as defences against other feelings. I might say the right remorseful words that attempt to restore a broken relationship but are a kind of going through the motions in order to appease another person. I might feel guilty myself in order to protect my idealisation of a parent or authority figure who I look up but who has themselves failed me. I might consciously or unconsciously defend my self against my own guilty feelings by going on the attack.

Forgiveness is also a complex business. I can consciously choose to forgive but if this operates as a defence against embracing the hurt I have suffered or the rage I feel in response to that hurt, then all talk of forgiveness is to no avail. Freud’s wonderful paper on mourning and melancholia is useful here. When I have experienced harm from another something has to be mourned, my idealisation of the other, of myself, or of the relationship between us perhaps. In embracing my hurt and rage I surrender any omnipotent thoughts that I should be totally lovable and should live in a world where others behave responsibly and predictably. I embrace life as it is: chaotic, unpredictable, peopled with others in business for themselves, and myself as I am, capable of good and bad behaviour, helpless and helpful, loving and hating.

Psychiatrist Salman Akhtar , for example, sees forgiveness as a marker for certain types of psychopathology and outlines eight syndromes involving forgiveness:  “(1) an inability to forgive, (2) premature forgiveness, (3) excessive forgiveness, (4) pseudo forgiveness, (5) a relentless seeking of forgiveness, (6) an inability to accept forgiveness, (7) an inability to seek forgiveness, (8) an imbalance between capacities for self-forgiveness and forgiveness toward others” (p. 189).

Lansky has given perhaps the most detailed attention to the dynamics of forgiveness, linking them to the forgiveness to involve “first the letting go of mental states of ‘unforgiveness’ (resentment, hatred, spite, vengefulness, narcissistic rage, blame, withdrawal, and bearing grudges) and then the gaining of a capacity to tolerate the psychic burdens that attend that letting go: shame, dynamics of shame.  In papers focusing on The Tempest and Medea, he considers mourning, loss of omnipotence and of a sense of self-sufficiency, and the task of revising one’s assumption about the nature of relationships”

In our local library Stephanie Dowrick’s “Forgivess and Other Acts of Love” is a readable and nuanced exploration of six virtues culminating in a chapter on forgiveness which while encouraging us to free ourselves from resentment and rage, or obsessional clinging to our hurts and therefore to the relationship with the perpetrator also considers that forgiveness is a process which takes time, cannot solely be willed but is also subject to the ministrations of grace. Stephanie Dowrick is a New Zealand born and Psychosynthesis trained therapist and author. Here are some quotes about forgiveness from a more recent book on happiness.

“Forgiveness has it’s own timetable but you can make yourself ready. (‘I will start by  focusing on the present instead of going over and over the past.’)”

“Forgiveness happens in small stages. It starts with a determination not to let those past hurts or betrayals dominate your entire existence.”

“Sometimes our greatest rage and resentment is directed towards the people we ourselves have hurt or injured. We may believe that making the ‘wrong’ saves us from feeling bad. It doesn’t.”

“To begin the process of forgiveness you need to let go of the wish that the other person would understand what they have done and suffer for it. They may never understand. They may never suffer enough. That must cease to be your wish.”

My friend Crispin Balfour once suggested to me that our generation was facing a collective guilt, the damage we humans have done to the earth, and that the Green movement could be seen as a reparative gesture in the manner of Melanie Klein for the damage we have done to the nurturing breast of the earth. The question then becomes whether we can embrace this guilt, integrate it and transform it into wise action. Novelist Margaret Atwood in her massey lectures which have now been published as a book, explores a similar idea in the final lecture she takes a twenty-first 

century Scrooge on a journey to meet the Spirits of Earth Day past, present 

and future and concludes:

"Maybe we need to calculate the real costs of how we've been living, and of 

the natural resources we've been taking out of the biosphere." 

"I don't really own anything, Scrooge thinks. Not even my body. everything i 

have is only borrowed. I'm not really rich at all, I'm heavily in debt. how do i even begin to pay back what I owe? Where should I start?

After this brief examination of guilt and forgiveness and returning to my

original questions, I feel that although the idea of life without guilt is sperficially appealing, I fear we need to allow ourselves to feel more guilt, not less; and perhaps we need to forgive ourselves for our ignorant waste of the riches of our environmental mother, the earth. In forgiving ourselves, might we then free ourselves to make an appropriate atonement, to repair what we can of the damage done.

Barbara Hammond tells me there are 36 pairs of fairy terns left in New Zealand 

and we are about to cut the funding which protects their nesting sites from predation and trampling. Where is our will? It is shown by the kinds of choices we make every day. There's freedom in this as well as responsibility.

Finally let me finish with a Hebrew blessing:

"May everything be permitted you,

 May everything be forgiven you,

 May everything be allowed you."

Creativity and Depression

We will begin with the psychosynthesis egg diagram and talk about blissful and/or terrifying experiences of Self, and the integration via will of basic unconscious and superconscious into personality. I will talk about Assagioli's concept of repression of the sublime in relation to depression and mania.

Since the time of the ancient Greeks humans have posited a connection between creativity and madness, and especially between depression with mania and creativity. I will speculate about the evolutionary role of depression and mania and the overlap with creativity. 

"When a superior intellect and a psychopathic temperament coalesce," wrote psychologist William James as the twentieth century began, "we have the best possible condition for the kind of effective genius that gets into the biographical dictionaries. Such men do not remain mere critics and understanders with their intellect. Their ideas posses them, they inflict them, for better or worse, upon their companions of their age"

This kind of view can romanticize mental illness and even more dangerously be used to create a rationale for resisting treatment resulting in some of the naïve excesses of RD Laing and others in the 1960s and 70s. In the immortal words of Tom Waits “If I exorcise my devils well my angels may leave too.“

However James also stressed the debilitating extremes of psychiatric illness. This moderate view, underscoring the need for balance in an effectively creative person, has since characterized much thinking on the subject of creativity and mental disturbance. As Sylvia Plath later said, "When you are insane, you are busy being insane - all the time... When I was crazy, that's all I was." 

However there seems to be at least some psychological research which points to a connection between creativity and depression especially to bi-polar disorder and this has implications for our attitudes to clients and to treatments.

Kay Redfield Jamison, a professor in psychiatry at Johns Hopkins University and herself someone who experiences manic-depression, has written an evocative memoir An Unquiet Mind but more recently an examination of Manic-Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament called Touched with Fire. I’ll discuss some of the research she sites that has been conducted posthumously on artists, poets and musicians and their volatile emotional lives. Other forms of research have investigated contemporary artists and their close relatives to see if there is any overlap between creative achievement and mania-depression.

University of Iowa psychiatry resident Nancy C. Andreason, found an extraordinarily high rate off affective illness among writers participating in the University of Iowa Writer's Workshop, and among their families. Andreasen, a Ph.D in English literature, obtained interviews with 30 faculty members at the prestigious workshop and matched them with control subjects in non-artistic professions. She found that 80 percent of the participating writers revealed they had suffered either depression or manic-depression (an emotional disorder characterized by extreme, sometimes debilitating mood swings) compared with 30 percent of the control subjects. Two of the writers eventually took their own lives.

Jamison, a professor of psychiatry at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine who has talked openly about her own manic depressive emotional instability, approached a group of 47 eminent Britons while on sabbatical at Oxford and asked them to complete exhaustive questionnaires about mood swings and creativity. Jamison's sample of cultural heavy hitters included members of the Royal Academy and contributors to the 'Oxford Book of Twentieth-Century English Verse. Jamison found 38% of these artists had been treated for affective illness including depression and bipolar disorder and 28% had gone beyond talk therapy to psychotropic medication or electroconvulsive therapy. This level of psychic distress far surpasses that in the general population, where rates of bipolar illness are about 1% and major depression are 5-15%

Creative inspiration - particularly artistic inspiration -- has often been thought to require the sampling of dark "depths" of irrationality while maintaining at least some connection to everyday reality. This dive into underground forces "reminds one of a skin-diver with a breathing tube" wrote Arthur Koestler in his influential book, The Act of Creation. According to Koestler, "the creative act always involves a regression to earlier, more primitive levels on the mental hierarchy, while other processes continue simultaneously on the rational surface."

People recognized for their creative genius often depict moments of inspiration as an electrifying convergence of rational and irrational thought. If creativity is to be found between the rational and the irrational; between the known and the unknown; between the conventional and the innovative, then the creative mind continually runs the risk of going "too far." As Koestler has put it, "skin-divers are prone to fall victim to "the rapture of the deep" and tear their breathing tubes off"

In a nutshell Koestler shows how in some instances “two and two can make five.” That is, by bringing together two phenomena not previously linked, a new whole emerges that is greater than the sum of its parts. This process of conjunction he termed "bisociation.

Koestler’s thoughts seem to have some parallels with the recent brain research of Oxfords Timothy Crowe. Crowe has developed a linguistic-evolutionary model that hypothesizes that speech is the origin of self-consciousness, and self-consciousness the origin of mental illness. He says the difference between humans and other primates is that our brains are asymmetrical and this asymmetry is crucial to language processing-left-brian expression or processing of right-brain concepts and perceptions. He proposes that all mental illness is the consequence of disruption of normal interaction between two halves of the brain.

A neuro-scientist Richard Davidson from University of Wisconsin has studied what happens in neural and chemical activity in our brains when we look at erotic photos or hear scary noises. Some people when exposed to a gruesome photo will have a reaction that dies down fast, others will have the same chemical rush but it will take a long time to come back down. Davidson believes people with slow recovery time are much more vulnerable to depression. Some people experience more highly activated right prefrontal cortexes than others in the population. They tend to experience more negative emotion and are more likely to experience depressed immunity and have higher levels of cortisol, the stress hormone. Davidson’s research then takes an interesting twist as he incorporates thinking about toddlers making their first one word utterances and pointing at the same time. He sees use of language as pleasurable. People who are depressed loose interest in talking, people who are manic talk incessantly. Across cultures the most consistent mood enhancer is speech. Dwelling on negative events is painful but talking about current pain alleviates it.

Simply talking about it activates left brain underperformance and helps free us from the grip of depression. Thus the evolutionary thrust that morphed us into talking primates, also predisposes us to depression, and gives us a means to escape it.

I learned about Crowe and Davidson’s research through the incredibly comprehensive “The Noon Day Demon: an anatomy of depression” by Andrew Soloman himself a survivor of intense and debilitating attacks of depression. Soloman, Jamison and others argue that depressed people have a more accurate view of the world and better judgment than do non-depressed people. The maintenance of positive self-enhancing illusions seems to be a key to being able to manage the vagaries of earthly existence or as T.S. Eliot said "Human kind cannot bear very much reality." Too much illusion leads to foolish risk taking and lack of empathy for others, too little leads a sense of futility, lack of motivation and a world emptied of meaning.

People who have been through a depression and have stabilized often have a heightened awareness of of the joyfulness of everyday existence. The long pause that a depression forces often causes people to do their soul-work, look deeper and change their lives in useful ways.

For those of us who work in the helping professions the generation of hope in the face of humbling pain and despair, the maintenace of loving regard towards those who are trapped in the isolation of a withdrawn and depleted self, challenges us to work through our own emotional difficulties, to find ways to value ourselves and participate with fullness in life and to be present to ourselves, our needs and to others and their needs, to open to our potential and our goodness as well as staying mindful of the strengths and potential of those we work with.

psychology with soul workshop in Wellington

A Wellington based seminar that will provide you with:
 A mindfulness practice for your own self–awareness and spiritual alignment
 Psychosynthesis models that can easily be integrated into your way of working
 The skill to see with heart as well as mind
 The ability to be more embodied and work with the embodiment of clients
 The capacity to use your intuition and imagination as tools

THERE WILL BE opportunities to experience imaginal process, experiential exploration, individual
and group refl ection, and to practice in pairs, as well as a chance listen to new ideas.
Psychosynthesis was formulated early last century by the Italian psychiatrist, Roberto Assagioli.
He explored the overlap of spirituality and psychology and became fascinated by the role of will in the
integration of what he called superconscious qualities such as our compassion and our love. Assagioli
believed that we repress the sublime as well as trauma and shadow. Therefore we can give attention
to what is calling to us from our heights as well as what may be driving us from our depths. If we can
identify and align with our values then we make choices that respect our needs but also acknowledge
our potential and help step that down into the present. You can read more about psychosynthesis at:
www.psychosynthesis.co.nz

Who should attend: This seminar is particularly relevant for counselors (generic, grief,
school), psychotherapists, mental health workers, and those in pastoral care who wish to refresh their
spirits and deepen their practice.

For more information on Lynne Holdem click this link

When: Friday, October 23, 6 p.m. — 9 p.m., and Saturday, October 24, 10 a.m. – 4.30 p.m.
Where: Wellington Friends Centre, 8 Moncrieff Street, Mount Victoria, Wellington
Cost: $120
Registration is by email: m.ackerman@paradise.net.nz or phone (04) 905.1008. Places are
limited to 20. Registration and full payment by September 24th.

“A human being is a part of the whole, called by us ‘Universe,’ a part limited in time and space.
He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest — a kind of
optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our
personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves
from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole
of nature in its beauty.” – Albert Einstein

Dreams and working with your dreams

Freud considered dreams "the royal road to the unconscious". I'll begin this week's talk with a brief flirtation with Freud's seminal work The Interpretation of Dreams, first published in 1899. In Freud's view, dreams are all forms of 'wish-fulfillment' — attempts by the unconscious to resolve a conflict of some sort, whether something recent or something from the recessess of the past. Although Freud's view of dreams as the'logic of the unconscious' was debunked by twentieth century researchers into REM sleep there have been some recent brain research that rather supports his view of dreams as connected with unconscious wishes.

 

Then we will quickly visit the theories of his student Carl Jung. At first Jung seemed the heir apparent to Freud's new kingdom of Psychoanalysis but after a six year close collaboration the relationship between Jung and Freud disintegrated into animosity, in a rather bizarre enactment of Freud's oedipus complex perhaps. Jung went on to develop his own psychology calling it Analytic Psychology. One of his main points of difference from the Freudian view of dreams  was that Freud's concept of the unconscious was incomplete and overly negative. Jung also proposed the existence of a second, far deeper form of the unconscious underlying the personal one. This was the collective unconscious, where the archetypes themselves resided, represented in mythology by a lake or other body of water. For Jung the unconsious was not just about sex and aggressive drives. He believed humans are driven by their need to achieve individuation, wholeness or full knowledge of the self.

 

Finally I would like to discuss the ideas of the post-Jungian, James Hillman and his creation Archetypal Psychology which he set out in his book Re:visioning Psychology

 

Because archetypal psychology is concerned with fantasy, myth, and image, it is not surprising that dreams are considered to be significant in relation to soul and soul-making. Hillman does not believe that dreams are simply random residue or flotsam from waking life (as advanced by physiologists), but neither does he believe that dreams are compensatory for the struggles of waking life, or are invested with “secret” meanings of how one should live, as did Jung. Rather, “dreams tell us where we are, not what to do” (1979). Therefore, Hillman is against the traditional interpretive methods of dream analysis. Hillman’s approach is phenomenological rather than analytic (which breaks the dream down into its constituent parts) and interpretive/hermeneutic (which may make a dream image “something other” than what it appears to be in the dream). His famous dictum with regard to dream content and process is “Stick with the image.”

In the spirit of Hillman I will then describe and perhaps illustrate a process by which we can befriend dream images and allow deeper understanding of them rather than reduce them or analyse them inservice to the ego.

Narcissism: Cinderella in 2009

Watching television and dvds with my daughters lately I've been really taken with how many contemporary girls' movies replay this theme of transformation by the fairy godmother beauty industry and social redemption through the love of a rich man. It's also played out in our fascination with house and garden make-overs and the fantasy of a perfect and beautiful life that they seem to promise. 

There's nothing very 2009 about this image of Cinderella but I selected it from the thousands of images available because it shows Cinderella before her moment of transformation, in the ashes of her grief and humiliation. Images of her splendid triumph abound. We are fonder of these, perhaps they cater to our own narcissism. The birds in the picture above are helping Cinderella sort out lentils from the ashes so her step-mother will let her go to the ball. Like a lot of fairy tales it illustrates the psychological function of splitting: the "good fairy god-mother" and the "wicked step-mother and sisters." 

This has got me thinking about the different versions of Cinderella and their symbols. I want to talk in particular of the  Brothers Grimm version and speak about my associations to Narcissism in their story. We will explore loss of the good mother, envy, as well as projection and splitting through the story of Cinderella.  I will refer to the theories of the origins and treatment of Narcissism in the opposing theories of Heinz Kohut and Otto Kernberg and also the recent writings by the psychoanalyst Neville Symmington who lives in Sydney and has published many very readable books. I've included a couple of  my favorites. "Becoming a Person" includes two of his papers on Narcissism.

Can Love Last: romantic and maturing love

Can Love Last? – Romantic and Maturing Love

This week we ask ourselves this big question and I wonder how we might possibly reach an answer in one lunch hour when poets and philosophers have been attempting to understand this mysterious and unpredictable human impulse since we humans first learned to talk.

The Greeks cleverly distinguished four different types of Love: sex, erotic, philia or friendship and agape or caritas which can roughly be translated as care. In Love and Will Rollo May advocates an integration of sex with these other aspects to deepen intimacy. Written in the 60s this book describes the poverty that results from flying to the sensation of sex innorder to avoid the commitment of genuine love.

The British Object Relations thinkers of the Independent group became interested in feelings and how important it was to have access to the whole spectrum of feelings in order to be oneself and to relate to whole objects. I want to look briefly at the way Winnicott values aggression as an aspect of mature sexual functioning and at Bion’s thinking about the first emotional impulses: to love, to hate and the urge to know.

We have already learned a little about the operation of the limbic brain and attachment theory and so we know that creating the conditions that allow love to last is vital for our happiness and security and that alienation or separation from those we love causes us to suffer. But perhaps I am failing here to differentiate attachment and love and perhaps they are not at all the same thing. 

Lewis, Amini and Lannon in their ground-breaking work A General Theory of Love distinguish between being in love and loving. “In a dazzling vote of confidence for form over substance, our culture fawns over the fleetingness of being in love while discounting the importance of loving”.  These wise men suggest that adult love asks us to come to know the other whereas in love demands only the brief acquaintance necessary to recognise emotional patterns of parents which release an intoxicating feeling “that the other fits in a way that no other will, the desire for skin to skin proximity and delirious urge to disregard all else.”

The Relational Psychoanalyst Stephen Mitchell has written a small book on this very subject and I will present some of his ideas about what constitutes romantic love and what causes the difficulties in maturing our loving beyond the initial pair bond.

Through his work we encounter the themes of safety and adventure, idealization and denigration, fantasy and reality, aggression and danger of desire, control and surrender and how these play out in our sexuality and intimacy.

Please bring along your own ideas about love and loving, perhaps a poem or a story to end our session.  

Anxiety and Feeling

In this week’s dialogue I’ll present some ideas about the causes and treatment of anxiety.

I want to start as usual with Freud and but talk particularly of the further development of his ideas by the British Object Relations psychoanalysts Melanie Klein and Donald Winnicott and also visit with the more contemporary ideas of relational psychoanalyst, Stephen Mitchell and some insights from neuroscience about the reptilian brain and the limbic system. Hopefully we will start to build a picture not just of what anxiety is and it’s relationship to sensing and feeling, but also of the different types of anxiety and what that means for the treatment needs of people who suffer from anxiety.

In a way we continue last week’s theme of attuning to the person who we work with and how they organise their experience of themselves, of others and of relating itself. All of us, of course, experience anxiety from time to time. To be alive is to experience uncertainty, separation and threat. The question then becomes how to live life with awareness of danger and also awareness of pleasure and possibility. 

Psychosis

Psychosis is the subject of our dialogue on Thursday July 30th. Since attending the Making Sense of Psychosis conference in february I have been reading Richard Bentall's "Madness Explained Psychosis and Human Nature" .
You can follow this link to his page at Bangor university. In my talk I will briefly present some of his central ideas:

~the artificial boundary between madness and sanity, neurosis and psychosis that was inherited through the DSMIII from nineteenth century psychiatrists Kraeplin, Jasper et al.

~the cultural nature and occurrence in otherwise healthy citizens of some symptoms of psychosis such as hallucinations, hearing voices and Bentall's thesis that madness is part of a spectrum of human nature and human behaviour and there is no clear dividing line between mental health and mental illness.

~the view of serious mental illnesses such as schizophrenia and bi-polar disorder as biological in origin and the impact this has had in denying such patients access to therapeutic interventions.

~some research findings on therapeutic interventions including the importance of: empathy and respect, normalizing, working with "complaints" of patient rather than "symptoms", modality match between patient and therapist, efficacy of various therapeutic modalities, therapeutic alliance, educating and working with families.

~I'll provide a hand-out with Bentall's models of 'pathways to different kinds of madness', depression and paranoid thinking. I'll briefly mention the role of 'self' attribution in depression and 'other' attribution in paranoia; source monitoring and theory of mind.

~we may get time to hear about recent research by John Read of Auckland University on sexual and physical abuse and attachment difficulties and the development of psychosis. Read stresses the importance of asking every patient about trauma history and addressing the post traumatic stress aspects through listening education and empathy.

Map of the Soul: conscious & unconscious

I'm beginning Psyche Matters Dialogues on Thursday July 16th with a quick look at the history of psychoanalytic thinking about the human mind, more contemporary neuro-scientific discoveries about our brains, and most importantly how this information is applied in counselling and psychotherapy and in general relating.

I'll begin with an introduction to Freud's pioneering work on hypothesizing a part of the mind which is not under our conscious awareness or control, the unconscious.
Freud came to this conclusion after working initially with hypnosis and later with directing his patients to follow their associations. As his hysteric patients remembered traumatic childhood events and spoke about them Freud noticed that their symptoms reduced.

Many people consider that the existence of the unconscious has been debunked by contemporary psychologists and scientists but it remains a useful concept for psychotherapists who use it to explain incongruence in their patients, the sudden arrival of repressed memories and who notice in themselves and others the tendency to act differently than our conscious intention.

Freud suggested that we defend against primitive wishes and urges (id) that oppose the internalized 'civilizing messages' of our parents and teachers (superego) by repressing such thoughts and feelings but that these revisit us through slips of the tongue, our reaction to others, our behaviour and so on.
I will briefly look at his structural and topographical models, Jung's addition to the model of the collective unconscious, and Assagioli's egg diagram which contributes the idea of superconscious, the potential in us that is repressed.

I will also do a quick dive into the work of contemporary neuroscientists and their work on explicit and implicit memory, our new understandings of the structure of the brain, the neocortex and the limbic system. My sources for this is a great book: A General Theory of Love by Thomas Lewis, Fari Amini, and Richard Lannon
Vintage Books, 2001



Other Dialogue themes follow this link: psyche matters

Psyche Matters

Short talks and professional development seminars for Taranaki counsellors, therapists, mental health workers, people who work in pastoral care and anyone interested in psychology, psychotherapy, psychoanalysis and psychosynthesis.

A winter series of lunch hour talks and conversation that introduce themes to further our understanding about what it means to be human. The contributions of some psychoanalytic and psycho-spiritual thinkers will be explained in everyday language to provide inspiration for your own thinking. After a centring exercise Lynne will present some thoughts on the theme and then invite participants to contribute their fresh thinking on ageless subjects.

This is an opportunity for low cost sampling of my style of presentation for those involved in the helping professions
and interested members of the public. Entry is by donation to SF Taranaki, Supporting Families in mental illness. Tea and Coffee are available. Bring lunch if you wish.

July 16: A map of the soul: unconscious and conscious
July 30: Psychosis: latest findings, a role for psychotherapy?
August 6: Anxiety and feeling: taking charge of your experience
August 13: Can Love last? Romantic and maturing love
August 20: Narcissism: Cinderella in 2009-06-30
August 27: Dreams and working with your dreams
Sept 3: Depression and creativity
Sept 10: Guilt and forgiveness


Dialogues take place on Thursdays 12.30 -1.30 at Lynne’s rooms, third floor, BNZ building.
Places are limited to 20. Either phone 06 7696050 or email lynneholdem@mac.com to confirm your place.

Psychosynthesis

An elegant transpersonal psychology which attempts to address the levels of human existence; the unconscious, conscious and superconscious. Psychosynthesis therapists are interested as much in what is emerging as potential in a client's life as they are in understanding his or her past and what has shaped them. Relationship in the here and now between the therapist and the client is observed with heart and used as a vehicle for opening more self awareness, alignment with values and choice for the client.

Psychsosynthesis was first formulated by Roberto Assagioli, a contemporary of Jung's who became very interested in Will as the integrating and directing function of the psyche.

Assagioli was born in Venice in 1888. He studied psychiatry and

was interested in the intersection of spirituality and psychology. One of the few psychiatrists to participate in the first pioneering wave of enthusiasm for Freud's new science of psychoanalysis and the second wave of humanistic psychology in the 1960s and 70s. he published two books one of which is till used in many Psychosynthesis training today and is called The Act of Will. In it Assagioli charts aspects, dimensions and levels of will.

A Matter of Heart

Working with Trauma:

• assessing clients needs and strengths
• pacing trauma exploration and safely balancing this with building self capacity
• working with body feelings and mind in the context of trauma

The seminar aims to:

• familiarise participants with some recent discoveries in trauma therapy
• assist the development of a practice of self-care
• increase awareness of counter-transference and develop deeper understanding of the emotional communication of the client

Learning will be supported by handouts and will visit the theories of John Brierre, Judith Herman, Babette Rothchild and contemporary psycho-analytic writers in the trauma field.

This day will include case material, time to reflect on your own practice and to integrate the days learning in a practical way.

When: Friday, September 4, 9am - 4pm
Cost: $100

Psychology with Soul

An introduction to seeing the client's presentation with a psycho-spiritual lens: a mindfulness practice for yourself and your clients, maps and models that can be integrated into your current theoretical knowledge and practice, and experiential exploration from the Psychosynthesis framework as formulated by Italian psychiatrist, Roberto Assagiolo early last century and developed further by his followers.

Psychosynthesis emphasizes working in the present and honouring the uniqueness and common humanity in ourselves and in those that seek help from us. We can acknowledge the past that has helped shaped our experience of ourselves and also our future, the emergence of what we might be if we align with our values and co-operate with the evolution of our potential.

Read more about psychosynthesis at
www.psychosynthesis.co.nz

When: Friday, October 16, 9am - 4pm
Cost : $90

"A human being is a part of the whole, called by us "Universe," a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest - a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty."

Albert Einstein

Psyche's Mirror

Working with dreams, images and imaginal process.

This seminar aims to give practitioners practical tools for working with their own and clients' dreams and spontaneous images; understanding of the contra-indications of working with images; Assagioli's psychological laws and their application to integrating images in service of being and becoming.

There will be an opportunity to work with your own dreams or images through self-reflection, in dyads, or within the group.

When: Friday, November 6, 9am - 4pm
Cost: $90

Learning and Supervision Group

You can also register for a small monthly learning and supervision group that will begin in 2010 to further develop your heights and depths of focus as a practitioner.
This group will meet once a month for two hours and will include a monthly reading, a teaching session and supervision time.

Learning takes place over the whole life of the councillor field worker psychologist or psychotherapist. Developing our practice of sitting with ourselves and with others requires us to develop "an internal supervisor" , to stay open to finding more of what we don't know of ourselves, of the client and the process between us.

Learning together in a small group (4‐6 practitioners) allows for deeper reflection,

multiple viewpoints and further integration of theory and practice. This group could offer an opportunity to be supported as you work towards your goals related to your professional development: NZAC or NZAP membership, ACC registration or perhaps an informal and self directed learning goal coming out of your observation of your learning needs, such as more confidence to work with trauma, with groups or understanding of transference and counter‐transference.