James Hollis : What is Healing ?
Dernière mise à jour : 3 août
Edvard Munch - Melancholy (1894-96)
Extracts from :
James Hollis
Living between worlds
What is Healing ?
"(...) Admittedly, this particular animal, the human, is the most complex and needs the longest length of protection before it is able to manage on its own. Some animals arrive and minutes later are fending for themselves. We all forget, however, that nature brings us here with the requisite resources to survive. As Rilke put it to a nervous young poet’s querulousness, we are set down in life in the element to which we most correspond ourselves. Yet, as we all know, nature is not enough to get us through all the obstacles. We also need the blessings of fate to support us sufficiently until we can manage for ourselves, drawing increasingly upon the resilience that nature provides us.
Among our management systems is our imagination. Life itself is a big blooming profusion of stimuli so immense that we can never understand or absorb it all. This particular animal responds to the inherent traumata of life via the imagination. We are meaning - seeking, meaning - creating animals. Thus, we attempt to make sense of our experience, to understand the world in order to better survive in it. In doing so, we imagine fractal “stories” seeking to answer the questions of survival. “Who are you ?” “What is that ?” “Is it safe or hostile ?” “How can I live in the face of that ?”
Our “stories” arise from trying to make sense of our life, to make it predictable, perhaps more manageable. And, of course, the stories are the product of the limits of our imaginal capacity as chiidren — constrictions of time, place, cultural lens, and other delimiting factors. The “wrong” stories can turn us against ourselves. In time, we can outgrow many of these stories as we accumulate other experiences with a different slant, but the earliest stories persist and thread their way through our entire lives. We become servants of and prisoners to our “stories.”
(...)
Much of our lives are governed by what logicians call “the fallacy of overgeneralization.” What appeared to be true then is imposed over and over on other situations, creating a provisional verification of the original interpretive fiction. While we sometimes outgrow these stories, most of them — those involving phenomenological encounters between self and other and the traffic in between — persist in our lives.
We can see why, then, psychotherapy in later life involves working backward from the texture of our histories to identify the operative narratives, lifting them out and into consciousness, and challenging them with a larger frame of reference and enhanced resources than the child ever possessed. Indeed, reflection, therapy, and insight allow us the critique of our stories; they begin to separate us from our history and restore a connection to the internal sources of guidance.
The tenor of modern life is deeply vested in the idea of management and control. Our vast armamentarium of tools, from computers to modern medicine to ever-expanding technologies, feed the fantasy of increasing control over our lives, even as other aspects of our lives slip more and more out of our control. We must always remember that the human ego consciousness, which arrogates to itself vast presumptive powers, is rather a fragile wafer floating on a tenebrous sea. I have recently heard the following ego rationalizations: “I know what I think.” “I have no shadow.” “I am quite conscious.” And as a humorous sweatshirt I saw said, “I know I am right. Don’t you think I would know if I weren’t ?”
All of these assertions beg the question, “What do I not know that is in fact running my life ?” Fortunately, we are reminded again that we are “gifted” by psychopathology. What a strange statement that is, in the context of contemporary Western culture. How is psychopathology a gift? When we remember that the literal meaning of psychopathology is “the expression of the suffering of the soul,” we then begin to get a clue as to how this “gift” functions in our lives.
I have already described how our “stories” help us adapt, adjust, cope with the magnitude of life’s incursive demands on us. This species survived when parallel branches perished in the evolutionary smithy precisely because of its adaptability to ever-changing circumstances. Consider that if we were only creatures of adaption, without autonomous souls, then we would simply be creatures of habituation and channeled energies and values.
If, for example, we were instructed, as in fact we all are, on how to live our lives and in service to certain values and we had no soul, then the fulfillment of those instructions would be all that life would ask of us. But we possess an autonomous region of the psyche that apparently has its own agenda and expresses its displeasure when our adherence to our external assignment contradicts its intent. We can, and needs must, occasionally mobilize our energies in service to survival, regardless of the calling of the soul; over time, however, adherence to a set of aberrant assignments leads to escalating commentary from within. The more my ego focus insists on a certain behavior or commitment under the domination of an external claim or possession by a complex, the faster my energy is depleted, the more the body aches, and the less and less meaningful it all seems.
Psychopathology is a gift, then, because it gets our attention. It tells us that the soul is not pleased with where our energies are going. It seeks corrections of course from the executive - branch decisions, and the more we resist, the sharper the messages grow. The weight of our societal obligations is huge, and the power of our earliest stories of adaptation and conflict management is extraordinary. Hence, the power of the psyche’s expressions of dismay must grow apace. For us to simply medicate them away or rationalize them is to push the summons to alternative choices into a deeper hiding place.
In speaking recently with a man whose entire life has been governed by the demands of a very narcissistic parent, he complained of his anger leaking out inappropriately in situation after situation. This leakage derives from the vast cellar of anger he carries at having been enslaved to the power techniques of that parent. It is easy enough to say move away, act differently, and he has. But we also have to recognize how that early story of powerlessness before the demanding giant told him he was doomed to fruitless suffering.
I reminded him that two functional definitions of depression are “anger turned inward” and “learned helplessness.” As a child, he got the indelible message that the giant Other was impermeable, devouring, and relentless. So, he learned helplessness, and he turned his legitimate anger back upon himself, the only one he had permission to assail. Predictably, a history of depression and self - medication emerged as a by - product, sequels to a once - accurate story but a story long outgrown.
The central theme that threads through the second half of our lives is accountability for whatever the first half produced. (I use the term “half” of life in its psychological, not chronological, sense. The second half can begin as one faces aging