We focus on legislating for minorities. This serves to divide; since these are treated as separate groups. How does this fit with democracy, which surely is rule by the majority?
A just society is a society that if you knew everything about it, you’d be willing to enter it in a random place.” John Rawls
One of the problems is that there is a loosening hold on shared values wherein society protects and honours all, especially the weakest and those furthest from some “norm”. Without such fundamental shared morality then we are left as a nation of “isms” – racism, sexism and the like. A place where those who are left out have no choice but to band together and fight – as a separate group.
Europe’s moral code, and hence America’s, was founded in Christianity. This no longer serves to bind us, but is there a secular equivalent to “love your neighbour as yourself”? John Rawls put forward this idea.
“A just society is a society that if you knew everything about it, you’d be willing to enter it in a random place.” John Rawls
What a wonderful ideal. A society and politics I would follow and fight for…
It seems to me what we call “me” – our ego – is spun up as we develop from a foetus. Something like candyfloss at the fun fair where a stick is held within a spinning sugar stranding machine so that this wonderful pink confection arises seemingly from nowhere. I remember the mixture of awe and anticipation as a child as it magically appeared from nowhere.
If that’s a helpful image, then what is the stick from which our ego is spun? In a material sense of course it is our genes and the physical bodies of our parents. The sugar that adheres is our bodily experience. Our ego is a confection of embodiment. Our particularly experienced ego, our very selves in this life are the latest manifestation of emergence that has been unfolding since the Big Bang and the accretion of the earth and moon 4.6 billion years ago and the emergence of life 3.7 billion years ago. Life evolving through single cells and dinosaurs to humans. We are just the latest, and not the last, expression of life. What though is the point of our ego, It will die. What trace will be left, and for what purpose? This candyfloss will re-merge with all that is as our individual body fades. Why have this sweet separated space in which we become?
Carl Sagan said “ we are the way the cosmos gets to know itself”.
And that knowing is through relationship with other parts of the embodied universe. In that way something new emerges. Something like fabric created from weft and warp of individual fibres – each in turn spun from plaited ropes of our individualities.
Maybe a way then to think about this is imagining our individual candyfloss combined into a rope or plait with others?
Donald Winnicott developed our understanding of child development. He was analysed and deeply influenced by the thinking of Melanie Klein. What he is perhaps best known for is his concept of “maternal reverie”, the deep contemplative connection that mothers have with infants. This allows the neonate to have the confidence to start the journey toward their own ego and their separation from all-that-is. He also had the idea that what was needed was a “good enough” mother. That is to say, perfection isn’t needed, rather just showing up and connecting with love.
DonaldWinnicott
Counter-transference as a tool for empathic understanding
What is less known about him is his development of modern counter-transference. This is perhaps the fundamental way in which therapists help their patients. The word was originally coined by Freud, but used by him in a completely different way. Winnicott understood that non-verbal connection can be used to understand and help patients. Essentially it is using ones own feeling state as an indicator of the internal world of the analysand (patient). Feeling is the fundamental way in which we make our decisions. Feelings are non-verbal and therefore inchoate.
The extensive training of psychoanalysts does involve substantial learning, reading and discussion. Perhaps the most important parts though are the years of infant observation and of personal analysis. This latter allows therapists to understand what internal feeling states belong to them and to set these aside. By doing this they can use their own “self” to feel what their patient is feeling, to harmonise with them. This is Winnicott’s counter-transference.
This has all now been underpinned by research and neuroscience, for instance through the developing field of neuropsychoanalysis. But we don’t need science to tell us any of this. Haven’t we known this the dawn of time about the fundamental importance of empathy?
Another friend of mine took his life last month. I resonate with his despair. It seems to be that there is an issue for men in our sixties. What comes to me is that society asks a few individuals to adopt the guilt and weight of the wrongs of previous generations; and that this burden can be unbearable. It seems to me that men of my generation and background (I am 68 and middle-class British) are also coping with 1,000 years of female oppression.
James Hollis – insightful Jungian analyst – wrote “Under Saturn’s Shadow”, a book in which he surfaces the ways in which the patriarchy also oppressed men.
James Hollis who wrote …
”Under Saturn’s Shadow”
In it he describes men’s isolation from each other and their feminine side – as we were expected to labour, fight and often die. Feminism releases men from this; however the role-expectation was crystallised in those of us brought up in the 1950’s and 1960’s. We feel the need still to fulfil a role (breadwinner, protector etc) that is no longer appropriate. It’s like having an appendix. Unnecessary, but it’s still there but without a role.
On top of this there is a projection of the wrongs of all those generations of patriarchy onto these role-less shoulders. This is our work; but some middle aged men find this too difficult to cope with.
James Hollis puts it like; this referring to the patriarchy which had an interest..
”not in the individuation of the person, but in the integration of the unformed person into the collective definition of tribal masculinity. Still, take away such psychically charged images of identity, take away the wisdom of the elders, take away the community of men, and one has the modern world”.
.. and again..
”Surely the greatest tragedy for men in regard to the feminine principle is that their fear alienates them from their own anima, the principle of relatedness, feeling and connection to the life force. This alienation from self obliges alienation from other men as well. Often their only connection with each other comes through superficial talk about outer events, such as sports and politics”
And our repair? It’s in the work..to live with vulnerability, to find our feminine and thus a different masculinity. To attempt to become gentle men.
Marion Woodman, a Canadian Jungian Analyst, was a source of deep and accessible wisdom. She recorded a series of talks as “Sitting by the Well”. These are compelling listening. They offer entrancing insights into the wisdom to be gained by listening to and through our body.
“The body has a wisdom of its own. However, slowly and circuitously that wisdom manifests, once it is experienced it is a foundation, a basis of knowing that gives confidence to the ego. To reach its wisdom requires absolute concentration: dropping the mind into the body, breathing into whatever is ready to be released, and allowing the process of expression until the negative dammed up energy is out, making room for the positive energy, genuine Light, to flood in” Marion Woodman
She points out that the word – matter – shares a common root with – mater ; which of course means mother.
In the years before her death in 2017 she talked technological evolution as matter itself coming to consciousness. This echos the work in the 1950’s by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin for instance within the “Phenomenon of Man”.
”Matter is spirit moving slowly enough to be seen”. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
Others also focus on embodiment as the intersection of spirit and world – for instance David Bohm, TS Eliot and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. What distinguishes Marion Woodman is that in her talks and writing she grounds this into easily understood and practical steps.
I really recommend anyone to listen to Sitting by the Well, . Most audible book services offer a free trial period, within which you can hear them…
All is always in flux. Change is really all that is permanent. We have two attitudes to this. In one, we are backward looking. We want to slow or stop change, to live in the past. This leads to life full of fear. We are nonetheless dragged along with the movement of all that is. I guess there is another approach, which is to bury our head and anaesthetise ourself. Drink, drugs, materialism..
The other approach is to dive in to the flow and look forward with hope, expecting good. This does require us to abandon and live at least partly outside our ego – becoming willingly identified with all others. Effectively to love our neighbour as ourselves.
None of us, certainly not me, find this easy. But it seems to me that this is at least an aspiration..
I understand that the “illusion of self” is a central tenet of Buddhism? It seems to me that this (the self) is an appearance of stability and boundary that arises out of continuous flow. This is borrowed directly from David Bohm ( “Wholeness and the Implicate Order”). John Dewey put it like this ;“The self is not something ready-made, but something in continuous formation through choice of action” .
Why then, and on what basis do Buddhists conceive of re-incarnation. What is being re-incarnated? No soul, no self. What then keeps coming back? This seems to me to be a fundamental inconsistency which arises out of focus on boundary rather than wholeness.
Surely, if self is an illusion – then this is a release from self, itself?! Indeed a release from death. What is not there in the first place cannot presumably cease thereafter?
Teilhard de Chardin would have it that all of matter is evolving toward consciousness. Separately he has it that there will be an “Omega Point” where each realises that we are all-in-all to each other – and that all energy is Love and God.
In that case surely our “self” is an illusion. We are already part of what Martin Buber would call the “eternal Thou”. We only have to realise it. Put another way, for Buber our “I” does not exist except in relation to “Thou” – with a reality of “I-Thou” that opens us to our relationship with the “eternal Thou” (I think I have that right?). In that case our “self” doesn’t exist. Indeed ignoring the “Thou” only gets you to a kind of Freudian thinking – “I-It” materialism – the self-reflective dead end of narcissism.
So. I am attracted to Buddhism, but don’t buy their take on reincarnation; or at least I don’t understand it. More work to be done!
One of Jung’s (many!) insights was the drive to find balance from which to individuate; to grow fully into our potential. Balance is dynamic, and between different dimensions within each of us, and between us. Three of these dimensions have been popularised by Katherine Briggs and her daughter Isobel Myers with the Myers-Briggs Personality Test and Typology. These are , Thinking-Feeling and Sensing-Intuition.
Carl Jung. Dynamic Balance and Individuation
These are discussed in Jung’s book – “Psychological Types”. However Jung saw these as fluid states rather than ways of categorising people. He did not agree with Briggs and Myers. Rather weare, each of us, a complex of each of the 16 MBTI typologies.
It is balance between these states that we should seek as we change and grow. If we express too much of one aspect, this sets up a force pulling us toward the other. For instance if we spend too much time extroverted then we develop a need to spend time alone ( and vice versa). As Jung says:
”Identification with one particular function at once produces a tension of opposites. The more compulsive the one-sidedness, and the more untamed the libido which streams off to one side, the more daemonic it becomes” Carl Jung on Psychological Types
It is not that we all should aim for some kind of grey average at the centre of each of the dimensions. Rather, the opposite. Jung saw our whole purpose as what he called “individuation”; within which there is a search for increasingly anuthentic expression of our true Self. This involves bringing to consciousness knowledge of that which is within us, and its connection to the transpersonal. This is anything but some kind of dumbing down. Indeed..
“A conscious capacity for one-sidedness is a sign of the highest culture, but involuntary one-sidedness, i.e., the inability to be anything but one-sided, is a sign of barbarism” Carl Jung, Collected Works
The great existentialist philosopher – Martin Buber – speaks about dialogue and distinguishes it from love. I have included some quotes at the end of this note from his 1929 essay “Zwiesprache” (Dialogue) below, together with a short note about Buber and Jesus.
I think that love and dialogue are closely intertwined ..
Genuine dialogue is about meeting, arising from mutual awareness. This can happen even as two strangers glance at each other in passing. Perhaps this is what Jesus meant by “Love thy neighbour as thyself”; that is, become as fully aware of and in sympathy with your neighbour as you are with yourself.
Is this not a call to dialogue, which is after all a direct way to become fully aware of our neighbour. A deep awareness which is a form of mindfulness. A mind full of the other and thus a way to expand your horizon.
This sharing of horizons is really a form of love itself. A Love which (I believe) underlies all of creation.
As Pierre Teilhard de Chardin says
“Joy is the infallible sign of the presence of God”.
Buber quotes
Three types of dialogue. In his 1929 essay Buber describes dialogue as genuine meeting with full awareness. He developed this later (I and Thou,1937) into a whole philosophy of relation; where all meaning is contained in therelationshipbetween (zwischen) people and the “other”. Here is the first quote:
“There is genuine dialogue – no matter whether spoken or silent – where each of the participants really has in mind the other or others in their present and particular being and turns to them with the intention of establishing a living mutual relation between himself and them. There is technical dialogue, which is prompted solely by the need for objective understanding. And there is monologue disguised as dialogue, in which two or more men, meeting in space, speak each with himself in strangely tortuous and circuitous ways and yet imagine they have escaped the torment of being thrown back on their own resources.”
Dialogue and love. In the second quote he distinguishes between dialogue and love:
“I know no one in any time who has succeeded in loving every man he met. Even Jesus obviously loved of “sinners” only the loose, lovable sinners, sinners against the Law; not those who were settled and loyal to their inheritance and sinned against him and his message. Yet to the latter as to the former he stood in a direct relation. Dialogic is not be identified with love. But love without dialogic, without real outgoing to the other, reaching to the other, and company in with the other, the love remaining with itself – this is called Lucifer”
Buber, Zionism and Jesus. Buber was an intellectual Hasidic Jew. He was a lifelong Zionist, but who strongly disagreed with how the new state was constituted. He thus refused to become the first president of Israel. He “favored a binational state that encompassed and honored both Jewish and Arab ethnicities, and centred on mutual love and respect. He believed that Jesus was the greatest of all Jews and that his message was the flower of judaism. He describes Jesus thus:
“from my youth onwards I have found in Jesus my great brother”
