Psychotherapy and psychoanalytic studies have found that traumatic experiences of physical and sexual abuse in the history of parents become trans-generationally transmitted to the next generation as fear, anxiety and sometimes actualising abuse behaviour. There is great need for intervention and psychotherapy treatment to help people heal from trauma and prevent further transmissions of traumatic states and experiences.

There have been important shifts in psychoanalysis moving away from how we think that the immediate family is the only relevant influence on someone’s development and being solely focused on internal conflicts of the person. This shift now expands to multiple generations as affecting family members and the effects of external trauma on the mind. In this way relational trauma is understood to be rooted in experiences that are in the family and also the social world, in collective experiences of persecution and abuse including but not limited to: racism and legacies of slavery, sexual abuse including sex trafficking and malignant sexism, wars including ethnic cleansing, virulent hatreds and prejudices and political persecution.

The violence of trauma fractures someone’s experience of being in the world and tears at the fabric of attachment, our intrinsic way of feeling safe. Ruptures in attachment relationships that occur in trauma become one of the key mechanisms of how it is transmitted to the next generation. The scars from traumas that are inside of people who become parents often affect directly their capacity to be consistent and engaged in their caregiving. Unresolved mourning, persistent states of anxiety, depression and terror interfere with attaching and trusting new relationships. While many survivors of trauma also transmit resiliency and want to create loving families and communities, more often trauma survivors carry both resiliency and the scars of trauma. It is the imprint of the dehumanising aspects of trauma; the violent victimisation of one’s integrity as a person as well as surviving when others perished that continues to haunt survivors.  These ghosts of their past get transmitted and can be seen in the successive generations.

Researchers have found biological markers of trauma, eg higher cortisol levels and changes in myelination, which can affect “gene expression”, and then become inevitable in the next generation. Trauma and stress and these biological markers in the mother can be inherited and predispose their offspring to a tendency towards PTSD-like reactions. Children inherit altered biochemistry that can leave them more vulnerable to registering fearful and anxious situations and to being more fearful and anxious themselves. This becomes the fuller legacy of trans-generational transmission of traumatic forms of attachment: an alteration in both the biology and the attachment systems. Some of these children are inherently more anxious while being raised by parents surviving their own traumas. Some of these parents will be able to transmit safety and provide for consistent attachment while others will transmit a confusing mix of messages of fearfulness and safety becoming trauma’s haunting legacy.

Research findings also suggest that psychotherapy and psychoanalytic treatments offer much needed help to people suffering from trauma and transmissions of trauma states. Talk therapies offer the safety necessary that allow someone to begin to talk about what has been endured. This needed processing of traumatic experiences happens with a caring therapist who can then witness, recognise and help the person to metabolise their traumatic experiences and regulate their emotional reactions.

Additionally, family and couple therapies help people learn how to talk about their traumatic histories in ways that are not overwhelming and allow empathic dialogues to open up between partners and grow. Family work is very helpful when some of these histories have remained as unspoken secrets, which leave children sensing the worst, feeling somehow implicated and yet not able to ask for answers or reassurance. There is also a need to help parents develop empathic capacities often limited given their trauma histories.  Being able to find empathy in their therapist becomes the beginning of self-empathy and self-care, both crucial for healthy functioning.

Jill Salberg, Ph.D., ABPP is a clinical associate professor and clinical consultant/supervisor at the New York University Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis. Her articles on Transgenerational Transmission of Trauma appear in international psychoanalytic journals and she has co-edited two books with Sue Grand, The Wounds of History: Repair and Resilience in the Transgenerational Transmission of Trauma, and Transgenerational Trauma and the Other: Dialogues Across History and Difference, (2017). Both books won the Gradiva Award for 2018.  She is in private practice in New York, U.S.

What, as you see it, is the most absurd of our therapeutic fantasies? To imagine that a patient suffering a deep disturbance of the brain’s balance could be cured by a passionate offering of nurture or concern? As I see it, at least, that just about fits the bill. Consider: a middle aged man unexpectedly collapses into a dreadful psychotic depression. His adoring wife and daughter, his therapist, do all they can to care for, pray for, show sympathy to, him…and just three months later he’s killed himself. What went wrong? Didn’t they love him enough?

I started there to get out of the way a deliberately poor reading of our title. So let’s now begin again, thinking on what it could realistically mean to propose love as madness’s cure. Let’s consider Morag.

In her autobiographical Beyond All Reason Morag Coate describes: emotionally remote parents unable to contain her childhood distress; the numbing respite of boarding school; early years of illness, disability and intense theological preoccupation; and an adult life marked by an absence of close relationships (“I hadn’t even been kissed until I was 27”), psychotic breakdowns, and alienating stays in psychiatric institutions. Too depressed to expect much from it, she nevertheless seeks the care of a psychiatrist – Dr Upton – who she finds to be a careful and caring listener, with the result that “I no longer felt inwardly alone, and hope began to stir in me.” The world now a brighter place, Morag now able to take an interest in things again, she goes to see the film David & Lisa.

This film shares the experience of two severely disturbed adolescents and their fraught participation in the human drama of our longing for companionable closeness yet need for the safety of inner retreat. Morag finds it uniquely sympathetic to its protagonists, noting that it implied an “absolute acceptance” of both David and Lisa, so that “by involving myself in their experience as I did, I was not only accepting my past sickness, but feeling it accepted too.” Afterwards she walks alone by the river feeling “human and humane”, her involvement in the film helping her to grasp just how ill she’s been, and to make thinkable for the first time her longstanding fear of absolute destruction and annihilation. When home she mentally takes Dr Upton by the hand “with the same confidence and comfort that a child holds someone’s hand when retracing their steps to the place where they have had a terrifying accident.” And now she discovers, behind her terrifying fear, her urgent need for closeness and connection, and recovers a sense of her infantile self who had “given myself and taken in return”, who “had needed and enjoyed and later felt that I had lost a mother’s love.” Now that love and its loss have also become thinkable she’s able to begin to work through the terrors that human relating had brought her. She allows herself to need Dr Upton, and “need him I did, quite unrestrainedly… I didn’t feel embarrassed or that my inner stature had lessened, rather the reverse. For there was something about this primal urge, stemming from the very source of life, that was bigger, brighter, deeper and stronger than any of the feelings of my remembered childhood.” Over time this relationship became internalised, leaving her with “a deep, warm sense of security that enriched all aspects of my life.” “I had”, she says, “been made whole.”

The first thing I want to note is that what matters about Dr Upton’s love for Morag is not the depth of his feelings but the quality of his attention. His love shows itself as his seeking for, and willing acceptance of, her as she is in herself, in her own way of being – it shows itself in the recognition he offers her. As a result Morag is able to feel “whole”, “human and humane”. But the second thing I want to point out is that this recovery isn’t inevitable: love must not only be given; it must also be received. As therapists our job is not only to offer our patients genuine recognition, but to carefully interpret their defences against receiving love. Yet even so we can only go so far; our patient must have some yearning for the human truth and life that come only from being met with love, and some ability to take them in and hold onto them.

How did Dr Upton’s love enable Morag to return to sanity? To grasp this we first need to understand how the recognition we offer someone relates to their being able to develop a richly humane inner life. Our worlds become fathomable and bearable to us in and through our structured emotional responses to them. In this way we negotiate our predicaments – by giving birth to fear and anger, sadness and desire. But if our experience is relentlessly negated, if we’re saturated by others’ projections, or if we come to manage our vulnerabilities with a punitive and stultifying superego – then our emotional life barely has the chance to take shape. It is after all only through our development of conscious, articulable, and apt emotional experiences that we stay in touch with reality, grieve our losses and bear our disappointments. But unless we and others offer our nascent feelings recognition, they can’t so much as begin to take meaningful shape – and the result is that, if we’re to not now utterly fall apart, we’ll instead need to take leave of reality, patching ourselves together with those makeshift constructions called delusions.

The reader of Morag’s book is naturally struck by what we might call her dignity. What I have in mind by that is the straightforward clarity she achieves both about her own value and also about her own values. Having attained a degree of certainty in being a lovable human being, she’s now able to live according to her own clearly understood ethic, her head held up high. Dignity and self-care are, we might say, the only valuable (ie non-perverse) forms of self-love we have. It’s through living a life structured by such dignity that Morag’s able to continue, spontaneously, unreflectively, to allow her natural emotional experience to flourish, so that by the end of her book she can say:

I have regained and strengthened my faith that life has a purpose and a meaning. I can honestly say I now have every reason to believe that living is worthwhile. Is that an irrational belief? Of course it is. Reason is a tool; a valued tool which it is our pride and privilege to use as best we may. But life and love and loveliness, whose existence reason confirms and must accept, are in themselves beyond all reason.

Further Reading

Morag Coate’s Beyond All Reason (Constable, 1964) is, sadly, out of print, although second hand copies may often be found.

Frank Perry’s (1962) David & Lisa is currently available in a new HD transfer on DVD.

Another valuable biography by a psychotherapy patient – one that makes clear the connection between the recovery of the mind and the development of a sense of lovability – is Eina McHugh’s To Call Myself Beloved (New Island Books, 2012).

In The Last Asylum: A Memoir of Madness (Hamish Hamilton, 2014), Barbara Taylor movingly describes how, after more than a decade of psychoanalysis, she finally becomes able to stop blotting out her analyst’s voice, to trust that he genuinely cares for her as a separate being, allow herself to take in the good he offers, and in such ways to recover her sanity.

Many, of course, do not manage the courageous step taken by Morag, Eina and Barbara. In her fascinating Operators and Things: The Inner Life of a Schizophrenic (Arlington, 1958; reissued by Silver Birch Press, 2011) Barbara O’Brien describes her own partial recovery, but acknowledges it to be a patch-up job. Striking about her account is the loneliness that runs through it without ever yet being voiced.

Dr Richard Gipps
Dr Richard Gipps is a clinical psychologist and philosopher with a long-standing interest in psychotherapy, phenomenology and psychoanalysis. He co-chairs the Institute of Psychoanalysis Philosophy Study Group, and recently co-edited the Oxford Handbook of Philosophy and Psychoanalysis. He has a private practice in psychotherapy and is associate of the University of Oxford’s Faculty of Philosophy. Research interests include philosophical issues in psychopathology and psychotherapy. Works in progress include a philosophical book ‘On Madness: The Intelligibility of Psychotic Thought’ and a non-academic book ‘Love’s Possibility: From Loneliness to Hope’.

Roz Carroll, one of the speakers at our upcoming event Moving Out of the Chair: Freeing Up Creative Potential in the Therapeutic Relationship https://www.confer.uk.com/event/moving.html on Saturday 7 December in London

“…a ‘threshold’ appears first as a boundary and then once approached, you realize that it is only the limit of one layer of understanding while, at the same time, it acts as the doorway to the next, deeper layer.” (Chambers, M.)

Primate Change

I’m reading a book about Primate Change – the adaptation of our bodies to changing working and living styles and environments. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/nov/22/primate-change-world-we-made-remaking-us-vybarr-cregan-reid-review Like the trends and statistics concerning Climate Change, the information is disturbing. The shift towards a predominantly sedentary way of being is taking its toll on every dimension of our embodied and cognitive functioning, leading to increased pain, anxiety, poor concentration, and chronic health issues, from back pain to fatigue and bone density loss. It is changing the functionality of our bodies. Of course there are other factors involved but an overall decrease in daily movement – from standing and walking, to expressive movement, micro-movement, rhythmic movement, fine motor movement (dexterity) – has profound short-and long-term consequences, for individuals and for the species.

There is abundant evidence that varied, continuous, shared and sensory-based movement – not just “exercise” – enhances vitality, resilience, creativity and well-being (Homann 2017). In The Guardian recently there was an interview with neuroscientist Shane O’Mara, who elaborates on the “motor-centric” view of the brain: the brain evolved through movement, and movement enhances thinking. https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2019/jul/28/its-a-superpower-how-walking-makes-us-healthier-happier-and-brainier Moving activates many felt senses (spatial orientation, proprioception, kinaesthesia) that enhance cognitive mapping which in turn helps us organise and elaborate our thoughts and feelings.

Stillness

But doesn’t stillness aid deep thought and inner awareness? Yes. It allows us to tune in to inner movements and resonances, or find words for formless stirrings that may bubble or flicker or stream within us. Sometimes stillness is essential to drop down into our depths. This stillness is not the absence of movement however but a quiet attentiveness to subtle internal shifts.

The Buddhist tradition of meditation has long been associated with the idea of “sitting with”. The poet Gary Snyder believes that the origin of sitting still this way can be found in early hunting, in which the hunter had to stand or sit still for long periods, waiting for game to come.
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/most-buddhists-dont-medit_b_1461821
This link to being poised in readiness for action gives a very dynamic picture of stillness as focused attention, listening into the world through the body.

Freud and the early classical psychoanalysts felt that silence and stillness on the part of the analyst would enable the transference to emerge more clearly. Speech, in the form of free association, was privileged above movement, which was negatively identified with defending against insight in hysteria, acting out, flight or other kinds of non-verbal behaviour.

One concern that I have heard expressed about focusing on movement in psychotherapy is that it is about “doing” rather than “being with”. This is a misapprehension since the essence of working with movement in psychotherapy is listening and closely attending to what is felt in a gesture, action or posture. By analogy movement in psychotherapy is no more “just moving” than speech in psychotherapy is “just talking” – the layers of embodied holding, enquiry, and elaboration, both implicit and explicit, create richness and intimacy in the work.

A bit of history

The first Institute of Psychoanalysis was formalised as such in Berlin in 1923 (Heller 2012). A short distance away Elsa Gindler was developing a reformed version of Gymnastik that focused on awareness of movement, sensation and breath. Initially Gindler taught women only, including some whose partners were psychoanalysts (Annie Reich, Clare Fenichel, Elsa Lindenberg), as well as Laura Perls one of the founders of Gestalt Psychotherapy (GP), and others who would go on to shape Dance Movement Psychotherapy (DMP).

She encouraged her students to “find the gesture they need in accordance with the profound rhythms of their being…to feel movement from the inside and let movements generate inner sensation …to observe which movements free the breath…and how this opens up the world of their sensations and then their thoughts” (Heller 2012). Her teaching fostered this ability to listen to oneself and others through the body and many of her students did this alongside psychoanalysis.

Another influential figure was Laban, a pioneer of the expressionist dance movement, who also focused on the process of movement, as a means of developing the kinaesthetic sense and awakening creativity (Bloom 2005: 22). The tributaries of these influences have gathered energy as they have continued to develop in BP, GP & DMP, as well as in Active Imagination in Jungian analysis.

More recent thinking across contemporary psychotherapy practice recognises that the therapeutic relationship is shaped by therapeutic “action”: an engagement of two subjectivities. This occurs through the back and forth of dialogue, and the implicit communication via expression, gesture, and breath: the flow of life is movement.

Sitting together with another can encompass layers of rich intersubjective communication. And yet, the translation back out into the world from the emergent intersubjective process will itself require movements of all kinds. These include: the courage to get up and get out, to move towards or walk away, to negotiate relational space and find agency and purpose in daily life. It also involves the subtle micro movements of implicit relational know how embodied in rhythm, gesture and interpersonal expression.

Moving out of the Chair

Movement is a hallmark of transition. Clients and therapists shift positions in their chair as their self-states change, as new topics are introduced or as their perspective, strategy or intentions re-organise. The famous “door handle” revelation as the client leaves is often seen in transferential terms, as the last word before a quick exit. Indeed this may be so, but perhaps it can also, or equally, be the freeing up of thoughts as the client stands and moves towards the door. The difficult subject pushed out of awareness suddenly pops up as the client is mobilised. Or words flow, now, as the legs stride. Or as the door handle is grasped, this tactile contact reminds the client of something else they are trying to get hold of…

Movement both stimulates and itself can be a form of free association. At the same time it also serves a relational and communicative function. Mirroring, sensing into and inviting elaboration of a movement that may not have been in awareness can open up exploration of many layers of intersubjective process.

If the baseline of the therapy is sitting in the chair, then moving out of the chair, opens up an immediate shift in the relationship. If I stand as the client stands, we are sharing an experience. If the client gets to their feet, they are already “making a stand”. If I initiate with my movement, this activates the client’s mirror neurons and may enable them to join me with less self-consciousness because I have gone first.

Standing facing the other may have many meanings: these often emerge quite quickly because the felt sense of change in gravity, position of limbs, relative height of client and therapist, and perception of the whole standing body, brings a lot of immediate sensory information, affect and association.

Or, if we both move to the floor to look at something together – perhaps something the client has brought in on their phone – we are coming closer, lower down, feeling the ground, together.

Moving out of the Chair is also a symbolic act, perhaps a revolutionary act for the largely sedentary field of psychotherapy. It looks towards the future.

For me personally it has come to feel profoundly significant as an act at a symbolic and practical level in relation to Primate/Climate Change. Psychotherapy as a profession is grappling with many urgent social and relational changes in society that directly involve the body. There has been a huge shift towards recognising and working directly with embodiment which has focused on somatic countertransference, affect regulation, micro-movements, and resources for working with trauma such as grounding and paying attention to breath. Eco-psychotherapy is bringing a very welcome breath of fresh air into this whole field, as well as offering its own direct alternative to sitting in the chair: namely, moving out into nature.

In a parallel development, as psychotherapy attempts to address its implicit bias towards Whiteness, there is a heightened motivation to de-colonise the curriculum. This must include how we are learning and teaching psychotherapy, as well as the theoretical content. It also includes acknowledging that European approaches to movement awareness – such as those developed by Gindler, which trickled down through people as varied as Feldenkrais, Kabat Zin and Selver – were influenced by holistic practices from the East involving movement, healing and martial arts (Heller 2012).

Experiential learning favours the right-brain, bottom-up group and process centred approaches. These are less shaped by colonial influences, though of course not necessarily free of them. The inherent potential of bottom up learning is towards inclusivity of embodied subjectivity and diverse histories and cultures.

Moving Out of the Chair Conference

To illustrate the bottom up approach (so apt for moving out of the chair…) our Moving Out of the Chair day https://www.confer.uk.com/event/moving.html will be organised around large group, small group and dyadic explorations, experiments and role play. We will track various experience of “moving out of the chair” as the therapist and as the client. We will try it out for ourselves: what forms it may take, what invitations, supports or inspiration might be needed? In particular we will face the dilemmas involved in enabling a relational and process led experience rather than a fixed therapeutic agenda to get out of the chair. Serious play, creative engagement and therapeutic resourcefulness will be encouraged.

Sissy, Yeva and I bring the experience of many approaches to psychotherapy: Dance Movement Psychotherapy, Gestalt Psychotherapy, Body Psychotherapy, Person-Centred Psychotherapy, Relational Psychoanalysis and Attachment-based Psychotherapy. We are not aiming to teach a method but rather to open up the range of possibilities inherent in moving.

Bloom, K. (2005). The Embodied Self: Movement and Psychoanalysis. London: Karnac.
Heller, M (2012) Body Psychotherapy: History, Concepts, Method. New York: Norton.
Homann, K (2017) “Dynamic Equilibrium: engaging neurophysiological intelligences through dance movement psychotherapy” in Ed Payne, H (2017) Essentials of Dance Movement Psychotherapy: International Perspectives on Theory, Research and Practice. London: Routledge, pp37-52.

A reverie of nightwalking

In 2008, as part of my dramatherapy training, I found myself walking in silence at night across Dartmoor. We were given instructions to have a buddy and carry a torch. We were told that one staff member would go at the pace of the fastest, and that another leader would go at the pace of the slowest, and others would walk between us. We had already surrendered our phones, and we were asked not to use words to communicate. We walked in rare darkness, free of light pollution, along the country roads with their dry-stone walls, banked hedges, high roots, upward through the sparse woodland that leads to the exposed treeless moors themselves. We walked for a short while on the moor itself, and then back down again onto safer and more inhabited parts of that place.

It was an invitation to go within and without at the same time, through the simple act of walking, into a semi wild environment, in a group, and yet alone. The subtle arrangement of these conditions allowed for a mood of deep reflection; of safety, yet challenge. The act of walking and the suppression of words encouraged reverie, that state of being where images, memories and feelings flow unbidden before one’s mind as in a dream, yet awake. Yet the darkness and the tangible presence of root and path made the environment vivid and real, each step to be taken with care. Each step was a step taken simultaneously into oneself and into nature, memories, images and reflections mingled with the flash of torchlight and the darkened outlines of trees and hills.

It is no accident that walking as a leisure activity coincides with the birth of the Romantic movement, suggests Patrick Harpur. A society bound to the land could not romanticise walking, or, perhaps be so able to view nature as sacred in quite the way we do today. It takes a level of alienation from the land to be able to turn around and see it anew, as something beautiful and exotic. Certainly, this alienation from direct experience of nature has happened, and what we find sacred in nature rests, in part, upon this alienation. It is a yearning for a return to something half-known, half-imagined when we look back at the valleys, paths and woodlands we have just walked, like Wordworth’s nodding daffodils. Such a romantic vision of nature still reflects something of ourselves, that shadow we cannot get rid of, but wish to shake off, wish to not see.

Making peace with nature

In the attempt to formulate more-than-human ethics, lies the danger of an unthinking misanthropy, where we project purity onto nature, and cast ourselves as the devil, the disease that must be purged. As I approach nature, as a modern European, I cannot but know that I am part of a community that may destroy it.

Of course, Nature always has the power. We may yearn for a return to a deep communion with the living world, and we may approach nature in order to make peace with it. However, it is quite possible that the indigenous people who know and venerate the Earth approach nature not to make peace with it, as we need to, but to appease it, as they have needed to. The roles in the relationship to nature are here reversed – if you live in an environment of thick trees and vines that towers over you, where death may strike suddenly in the form of disease, or jaguar or anaconda, and you have no access to chainsaws let alone metal tools to clear your sight lines, your approach is likely to be one of bargaining and appeasement. ‘Nature’ seems to have the power.

The true psychopathology of our time, argued James Hillman, is not so much Narcissism – the endless staring at the self in our digital mirrors – but Titanism – the human self as limitless – greater than and above its environment. Narcissism we see clearly, but Titanism, despite it’s great size, seems harder to spot. It is embedded in our experience of life, and how we approach technology, industry, illness and work. The towering trees of the Amazon, or the Great Woods that once forested large parts of England, no longer threaten us. Rather, we unconsciously assume a position of the giant in relation to nature, whilst our gigantic technology, which seems the site of our greatest intelligence and achievement, ironically makes us stupid, brutal and unconscious. The engine of a car is now plugged in to a computer rather than taken apart and understood. GPS seems to render a compass a romantic indulgence. Something seems missing, something basic, yet hard to see.

The small bird in the giant’s

Small bird
Hops and flutters
In the branches of the
Winter tree.

Giant men with
Tar blackened hand
Crash around
With nets and cages
To thieve her feathers,
Capture her song.

Her song’s like a life –
Gone in a moment,
Sun on green feathers,
And a dead tree that lives.

Her sudden, swift colours
Threatened by giant tarred hands
That want to squeeze
The Sun from her feathers,
To spill on the leaves.

The Giant is blindly drawn to the bird – to its beauty – to capture and extract the Sun from her body. As with any metaphor, it’s meaning, much like the night walk on the moor, points two ways. It points outwards to the soul of modern Titanism and inward to our own desire to capture and own what is beautiful.

However, appeasing nature may actually be a more congruent action to take than making peace with it! It is our ‘selves’ we will destroy through climate damage, polluted oxygen, downstream floods, harsh storms, sudden soil erosion. And yet, these ‘little’ individual selves are meshed into a much larger reality.

We destroy the biodiversity that connects tap water with the sea, the sea to the salmon, the salmon to the upstream soil they die in after spawning, the teeming microbe soil that swallows their bodies to the great trees the soil feeds that pump water back into the skies. What is threatened by climate change is everything we know to be alive. Our Titanism obscures the dimensions of this ecological self. Even a Titan is small within the dimensions of the Earth and the Cosmos.

The reality of beauty

There is a level of despair at this point of realisation – not so much at the gigantic destructiveness of human nature, but at the possibility of never making a mark on the world at all, in the greater scheme of things. This is a moment that invites us to muster stoicism and courage in the face of the cold winds of existential reality. And yet, this is still a vision of the world where meaning lies only within the province of human experience.

Romanticism takes a different path to confront this existential challenge: by forging a link between the inner and outer through the liminal spaces of imagination. James Hillman and Henri Corbin, challenge the idea that imagination may be flimsy or unreal. It is, they say, the ‘Imaginal Realm’, one that invites a mature vision of the imagination, not one limited to individual expression, but one opening a doorway to a personal relationship with the numinous.

In this view, the patterns of our lives and the great events in the world have an underlying mythic, archetypal quality, that and connects the mundane to the gods. This, in turn, regards the Imaginal as a gateway to Nature, where material reality re-unites with the numinous and the beautiful. This way of re-visioning Nature as the Imaginal allows us to participate within it, to become it.

When this happens, Hillman says, “It becomes more and more difficult to make the cut between psyche and world, subject and object, in here and out there. I can no longer be sure whether the psyche is in me or whether I am in the psyche as I am in my dreams, as I am in the moods of the landscapes and the city streets, as I am in ‘music heard so deeply / That is not heard at all, but you are the music / While the music lasts’ (T,S.Eliot)”.

Paratheatre and the soul’s yearning

My walk across Dartmoor was a piece of paratheatre. Paratheatre was a a form of immersive experience, based on ritual theatre and encounter. It was devised by Jerzy Grotowski in Poland during the 1960’s and 70’s. It makes use of the powerful processes that seek to completely break down the ‘fourth wall’. In its place emerges a creative communion between participants – a deep encounter, where participants are ‘disarmed’ from their everyday defences, by the flow of creative acts of movement and voicework.

In Grotowski’s original work, a space was set aside from the everyday – a holiday, or ‘holy day’ – in which people could discover deeper creative impulses. These startling events, took place in pastoral, remote or wooded parts of Poland, and attracted a great deal of people, many of them, changed for life by the experience. Nature is a key within paratheatre to unlock depth. It makes real the idea that creative impulses have oerganic roots in the body. Creativity becomes a discovery of the self’s deep contact with its environment, something that needs to be unblocked from the body rather than invented by the mind, as Kumiega discovers, in her report of her paratheatrical experiences:

“July 24 1977, 6:00pm
We follow moist paths through the woods
We are skittish – soon sensitized to the communal presence, a move from any direction
bringing a ripple of response.
Already there is a testing : of each against the other against any interference of a
structure, against those who know the way.
Even finally against the way: against the
multiple shades of green and all it’s textures,
against another acceptance of the horizon.
Until we come up against ourselves,
Our bodies.”
(Jennifer Kumiega in Schechner and Wolford ed. 1997)

Paratheatre is a path rarely trodden, one in which the creative potential of a person, understood as a form of encounter, is connected to the organic impulses that arise from the same source that govern the patterns of nature. It was as if what Grotowski was aiming for was the human equivalent of a murmuration of starlings – something deep within the human soul that could be discovered and made anew. Paratheatre was later adapted by Steve Mitchell into therapeutic structures within dramatherapy, for work with vulnerable populations, or be used for self-development.

My silent walk across the moor was the start of a weekend of paratheatre and the beginnings of a new awareness: that it is not enough to dispassionately regard nature. Rather, within the body’s deeper convergence with the reality of nature that we share, vision itself may be transformed. Here in this work and in my walk, I found an answer to the misanthropy that casts a blighted shadow over environmentalism.

I heard someone whisper: “Look deeper. There is a shared source that links creativity and creation. It is in your body as much as in the trees.”

Lament for a Giant’s Sigh
By Toby Chown with thanks to Unpsychology Magazine

References

James Hillman, Re-Visioning Psychology, 1975.
David Kidner, Nature and Psyche – Radical Environmentalism and the Politics of Subjectivity (2000).
David Kidner, Nature and Experience in the Culture of Delusion (2012).
Tom Cheetham – The World Turned Inside Out (2003).
Jeronimo MM – Ayahuasca – Tourism vs Tradition, https://vimeo.com › Breaking Convention › Videos
Patrick Harpur, The Philosopher’s Secret Fire – A History of the Imagination (2002).
Christopher Innes, Avant Garde Theatre 1892 -1992, (1993)
Jennifer Kumiega in The Grotowski Sourcebook, edited by Richard Schechner and Lisa Woolford (1997)

“Intensified progress seems to be bound up with intensified unfreedom” notes Marcuse in his remarkable book Eros and Civilisation, one of the most profound and compelling books ever written on the problem of “civilisation”. The work tries to explain and unravel this apparent paradox – it’s both a brilliant development of Freud’s ideas on civilisation and a revolutionary challenge to them.

He starts by noting the essential, perplexing, double-bind of late capitalism – the more we have of it, the more entrapped we feel: “In exchange for the commodities that enrich their life, the individuals sell not only their labor but also their free time. The better living is offset by the all-pervasive control over living.” We become like the figure in the famous Laocoön statue, struggling with the giant serpents – the more we struggle to be free, the tighter the coils become.

It was Marcuse’s genius to see that the central problem lies with the nature of the processes and programs shaping and underwriting our very idea of “civilisation”, and that these processes are both psychological and political (as he acutely notes in his Preface, “Psychological problems therefore turn into political problems”).

Underlying all these processes is what Freud perhaps misleadingly called the “reality principle”, a deeply ambiguous and deeply repressive set of assumptions that hold this system of repression and control in place. As Marcuse puts it, “The replacement of the pleasure principle by the reality principle is the great traumatic event in the development of man.” That is, the domination of our bodies and bodily energies by the rationalising, instrumental Ego: “The ego which undertook the rational transformation of the human and natural environment revealed itself as an essentially aggressive, offensive subject, whose thoughts and actions were designed for mastering objects.”

Sadly, orthodox psychoanalysis has for much of its history seen this “essentially aggressive, offensive subject” as a healthy subject – has completely bought into its own PR – and the work of much analysis was to actually “strengthen” it. Marcuse reveals the essentially pathological nature of this entity, rooted in how it sees itself in relation to the world: “It was subject against an object” (ie this is how the ego sees and defines itself). “Nature (its own as well as the external world) were ‘given’ to the ego as something that had to be fought, conquered, and even violated – such was the precondition for self-preservation and self-development.” That is, the idea of “conquering” is built into its central program, its self-definition.

In terms of the extensive repression and misery that is generated by this stance, Marcuse acutely relates this to the ego’s view of the “Id” and its desire to dominate, demonise, and conquer it: “The struggle begins with the perpetual internal conquest of the ‘lower’ faculties of the individual: his sensory and appetitive faculties.” Of “Eros”, in fact. The conquest of these is, he suggests, the essence and mission of civilised “rationality”: “Their subjugation is, at least since Plato, regarded as a constitutive element of human reason, which is thus in its very function repressive.” The posh term for this subjugation, he notes, is “Logos”.

We can see this historical process of subjugation brilliantly reflected in the mythological story of the defeat of the Titans – gigantic bodily forces of energy – by the pompous, domineering, and hyper-rational Sky Gods, the newly dominant left-brain calculating, mastering processes and programs that were now in control of the human brain. The Titans were driven underground (became “sub”-conscious), where they remain in chains – as Marcuse notes, “The insights contained in the metaphysical notion of Eros were driven underground.”

But this “rationalising” program also enslaves the “external’ world as ruthlessly and efficiently as it does the “internal”: “The struggle culminates in the conquest of external nature, which must be perpetually attacked, curbed, and exploited in order to yield to human needs” – ie to the egoic rationality, the “reality” or “rationality” principle, or what Shelley called “the calculating principle”: how can I get as much as I can out of this situation?

This struggle is rooted, Marcuse observes, in the gulf between ego and being – the ego is not a “being” – it is a detached Eye – it sees Being as a fierce ocean, forever about to overwhelm it – the origins of the Flood myth – which is not an historical event, but a perpetual default myth that allows the Ego to maintain its position, to conquer being: “The ego experiences being as “provocation”, as “project”; it experiences each existential condition as a restraint that has to be overcome, transformed into another one”; “The ego becomes preconditioned for mastering action and productivity even prior to any specific occasion that calls for such an attitude.”

Crucial to understanding the true nature of ego is understanding its relationship to “rationality”: as Marcuse notes, the ego is “the thinking and acting subject” – it is the basis of Descartes’ famous “I think therefore I am”. Indeed, it is the ego that thinks this. And its form of thinking is always instrumental, calculated and calculating, inherently posited as a drive for mastery and control, for “rationalisation”. Marcuse calls this – the quintessential character of all hitherto so-called ‘”Civilisation’ – the “rationality of domination”: domination because it is power “exercised by a particular group or individual in order to sustain and enhance itself in a privileged position.” Which is also what the Ego does in classical psychoanalysis.

But then Marcuse even more breathtakingly and beautifully links this social and economic agenda to the principle of “rationality” through reference to what Freud – perhaps rather naively (though in some senses rightly) – termed “the reality principle”: “The various modes of domination (of man and nature) result in various historical forms of the reality principle” – “for every form of the reality principle must be embodied in a system of societal institutions and relations, laws and values which transmit and enforce the required ‘modification’ of the instincts”.

This aggressive, calculating, rationalising ego took control of the human brain and shaped the world in its image – a world seen in terms of use and resource (as in classical Darwinism), to be dominated, tamed, and controlled by the new program – the “reality principle”. Great for the heroic little Ego, terrible for the rest of the body, notes Marcuse, especially for Eros: “the pleasure principle was dethroned …because it mitigated against a civilisation whose progress perpetuates domination and toil.”

In such a world “reality” and “repression” become synonymous: the mechanisms of repression and control become normalised, and as such the whole idea of ‘repression’, Marcuse brilliantly perceives, “disappears in the grand objective order of things, which rewards more or less adequately the complying individuals and, in doing so, reproduces more or less adequately society as a whole.” Examples of such “complying individuals” today might be Andrew Marr, Jon Snow, Evan Davies, John Humphrys, Kirsty Wark. They control the “reality principle” – are the guardians of what sort of thought, or debate, is possible.

How can we get rid of them? Marcuse’s solution is equally breathtaking: it is to move “beyond the reality principle”, to see through its rationalising lies and normalised aggression, through a self-realisation of this historical and psychological process – which as Marcuse says, Hegel was the first to recognise. But he also says Hegel did something else extraordinary: he replaced the ideology of “use” – the myth of hard work, of scarcity, of functionalism, of control, of guilt – which had hitherto driven this repression, this “civilised” history – with a completely different “ethic”: In Hegel, the End of all this Progress is changed through self-realization – it is no longer Conquest (the master/slave opposition), but “forgiveness and reconciliation”:

“The philosophy of Western civilisation culminates in the idea that the truth lies in the negation of the principle that governs this civilisation. The traditional ontology is contested: against the conception of being in terms of Logos rises the conception of being in a-logical terms: will and joy.” Progress, therefore, now involves a shift away from the idea of Progress. It is a shift from Logos to Eros, from left-brain domination to right-brain embodiment, from Ego to Id, from thinking to being. Not a return but what both Hegel and Iain McGilchrist call an “Aufhebung” – not a return to a pre-‘civilised’ world but an advance into a post-civilised one, a dialectical, synthetical movement from the right brain to the left brain and then, vitally, back to the right brain again, but now on a deeper level, where “reconciliation” and realisation can occur. And so on and on and on.

Interestingly, exactly at the same time Hegel was writing his Phenomenology of the Spirit, William Blake was also busy dethroning reason and the reality principle – the rationalising Selfhood, in his terms – and replacing it with the liberation of the Body and the human imagination. And the central psychological mechanism of this rejection was also called “Forgiveness” by Blake, which he saw as an essentially revolutionary, “a-logical”, doctrine – it gave the repressive “reality principle”, the aggressive, moralising, righteous ego, absolutely no ground on which to act and exert its dominance over Eros, over Being. The result is not chaos, as the rationalising left brain fears, but joy – a huge wave of relief. As Marcuse notes, “Hegel’s presentation of his system in his Encyclopedia ends on the word “enjoys”.

Eros and Civilization by Herbert Marcuse (Routledge, 1987)

Dr Rod Tweedy is the author of The God of the Left Hemisphere: Blake, Bolte Taylor and the Myth of Creation, a study of William Blake’s work in the light of modern neuroscience, and the editor of The Political Self: Understanding the Social Context for Mental Illness. He is currently Commissioning Editor for Confer Books.