Changing Our Relationship to Our Selves

It's interesting that we can choose to alter our relationship to ourselves and alter our subjective experience and our outward behaviors. I use the process of working with and changing my internal state and outward behavior through the application of mindfulness/awareness, directed by both Buddhist and psychotherapeutic insights and guidance. Buddhism focuses on form not content. Buddhist mindfulness of the present moment either has no interest in the identification of internal contents – one simply experiences consciously the breath or a pain – or uses a noting procedure – “pain,” “judgment,” “hatred” – when those experiences are mindfully observed as present in the moment.

Psychotherapy focuses on content. What’s causing that emotional or physical pain? Why are you judging yourself? What is the meaning of that subjective phenomenon in terms of your unique narrative and needs? So a moment-to-moment practice of the self which combines the two modalities would have both the use of mindfulness in the moment to bring attention and raise awareness and the application of the guiding self-understandings of psychotherapy to direct the attention with an overarching purpose. In both cases we’re altering our selves by changing our relationship to ourselves.

For example, I have a tendency to delay doing things that need to get done. For years I simply acted this out unconsciously, not even knowing it was characteristic of me. Gradually I became aware that there was a pattern of delay behavior occurring in different contexts that was causing me suffering. I would have to do something before a certain date in the future. I would put off doing it because the due date wasn’t here and for whatever deeper psychological reasons that made me averse to action. I would feel anxious as the due date approached that I wasn’t getting it done and I might get into trouble if I don’t do it. Finally, I’d see that due date was upon me and scramble to get it done. Most of the time the thing got done, but if I’m going to do the thing anyway, why not do it immediately since I know it has to get done eventually and save myself all the anxiety and aggravation that I feel while I’m delaying. It didn’t make sense.

For a few years now I’ve been training myself to identify these situations as soon as they arise. For instance, I got a rebate on a new cell phone which I had to send in before June 10th. In mid-May I thought: “Oh, I have lots of time, no worry.” By June 2nd I caught myself thinking “I can wait, it doesn’t needs to be in till June 10th.” But at that moment I realized what I was doing and told myself: “No, this is one of those delay situations that’s going to cause you suffering for no good reason.” I imagined the due date coming and me finding I didn’t have some form I needed for the rebate and missing it. I then felt the resistance to sending it in immediately, the heaviness and aversion. Then I reminded myself that this is a little hurdle I can jump over and that I'd feel better once I got it done. So gathered up the forms and went to my desk and sent it in.

A small example, but illustrative of the combination of mindfulness and psychological insight required to alter a persisting, pain-inducing pattern that manifests in many areas of my life.

The Interplay of Personal Psychology and Philosophy

Sublimation is when the energy from our desires, needs and emotions is repressed and finds an indirect outlet in intellectual or artistic productions. Here’s an example of how my personal psychology is connected to my philosophical interests. The particular philosophic investigations serve, in part, as a compensation for and alternative solution to unwanted psychological behaviors.

My main philosophical interest is knowledge and I’m drawn to seeing how well a contextualizing or relativizing of knowledge can be defended. So Richard Rorty’s critique of philosophy’s attempt to ground or find foundations for knowledge attracts me. I like reading those who undermine philosophical attempts at certainty, absolutes, foundations, essences, finding the Truth, etc. There is a desire and an emotional charge and payoff when reading the underminers.

Psychologically, in my everyday thinking and behavior, the opposite is the case. I want to create something permanent, be a somebody so I’m not forgotten, find what I really want to do (as if there is the one thing that’s right for me), make sure I’m doing the right thing at any given moment through various ways such as knowing what I’m feeling and wanting, and acting accordingly. All of these behaviors have the quality or the assumption of one right way, establishing something permanently, finally getting it right, getting the right answer, doing what I (objectively) should do.

I also think that this drive for establishing the right way is problematic because I don’t think there is a right way and the underlying belief that I should find the right way is done unthinkingly and not working.

Richard Rorty once said late in his career that he’s really just tweaking the main points he’s laid out years ago. I noticed that my desire to reread Rorty’s work (keep reading the tweaks) – a desire I don’t have with any other thinker – had the quality of me wanting to be convinced of something I believe intellectually but don’t live practically. I want to absorb a relativistic perspective in order to compensate for and remedy the surety-seeking in my everyday life. The philosophic reading and writing would succeed where the personal psychological work of weakening the need to find the objectively right path had failed.

Conversely, it might be the case that if, through some kind of psychological development, I let go of the need to create permanence in daily life, my desire for relativistic philosophizing and the content of my beliefs about knowledge would change.

Deciding How We Decide

There was a presentation of a new book called “How We Decide” by Jonah Lehrer on Cspan 2 It reports scientific research regarding how people make decisions. A guy in the audience asked a question. He observed how when you ask people why they do things – come to this talk by Jonah Lehrer for example – they come up with reasons that may have nothing to do with the real reasons they did what they did. So the questioner may respond to why he came to the talk: “I wanted to get out of the house.” Or “I’m really interested in the brain and how we decide.” Or “I wanted to be at this cool event to pad my ego.” So people create reasons that may have nothing to do with the real reasons for their actions.

But doesn’t this presuppose that there is a true, right reason that someone knows or could know? Who knows that reason and how? Is it the cognitive scientist who’s studied decision making? Is it the psychoanalyst who knows our unconscious motivations? Is it the common sensical observer with their no-nonsense take on things? Which way of determining motivation do we believe tells us the “real” reason? Isn’t that a contested issue? Who decides once and for all which perspective is the correct one for determining our motivations? Each commitment to a perspective on why we do things is, at some fundamental point, an existential act of allegiance.

What’s important is to know what mode of interpretation, what story of how things are we are choosing. What are the advantages and disadvantages of this or that narrative and explanatory framework? The common sense explanation: “I felt like it,” has simplicity and avoids excessive rumination, but will be limited when more complicated situations arise that don’t yield to simple explanations or when simple explanations no longer work. More complicated psychoanalytic explanations may make intuitive sense but feel speculative or not offer a practical course of action if one is needed. The cognitive scientist’s laboratory findings may or may not apply in this individual case and could be contested on procedural grounds: perhaps the experiment is open to interpretation and criticism.

So each explanatory framework will have pluses and minuses. These pluses and minuses will be determined by the application of criteria from that explanatory framework or from one outside which, because of some overlap, will make demands on the framework being adopted. For example, the common sense observer may use the concept of the brain: “my brain’s not working right today.” The neurophysiologist can ask about the brain and pursue some logical line of inquiry which the common sense thinker, because of the array of reasons they are committed to, will feel obligated to answer. Since different interpretative or explanatory frameworks share concepts and criteria they make demands on each other that they feel obligated to answer in order to maintain their coherence and integrity.

The questioner presupposes the common framework of their being a “way in which things are” or “the real reason we do something” but who or what explanatory framework uncontestedly tells us that? It’s an absolutist assumption that can’t be redeemed.

Insight and Terror

Why so often is the patient’s realization in psychotherapy simple, a cliché? Because our psychic economy, our defenses, keep us from seeing it. It’s not the complexity of the thought that keeps us from understanding it, it is the terror of feeling what it means about our life for it to be true.

Zizek and Rorty on the Real

An interesting aspect in Slavoj Zizek’s writings is the way he says something about and uses the concept of “the Real,” yet the Real he describes is similar to the reality that Rorty describes which philosophers and other beings have tried to grasp. For Rorty the real or reality is a philosophically empty concept. We have different candidates for the Real: God, Matter, What Is, Truth, Nature, Knowledge, but the debates about it are inconclusive and it seems to just serve as an unknowable ultimate justifier for our beliefs. Rorty’s pragmatic solution is to stop talking about it.

Zizek’s Real from Lacan is a gap, lack or absence, in a way not there, yet it’s incorporated into a psychoanalytical-philosophical understanding that gives it a useful role in helping us to understand ourselves and the world. The Real as a lack or absence lay at the center of our symbolic order and is why we can’t create a finished intellectual system. It is that uncanny, indefinable attractive something that causes certain objects to attract and entrance us. It is the trauma around which we construct our selves and repeat our behavioral patterns which contradictorily both offer to resolve the trauma and help us to avoid confronting it.

So Rorty says reality as the really real is not there and not a good use of our time to think about. Zizek says yes, it isn’t there in the way people want – a substantial something, a graspable bedrock – but in its absence it is there and has a determining presence which we see in its effects. He analyzes its qualities of attractiveness and repulsiveness. It’s the psychology of what ultimately isn’t there but can’t be gotten rid of.

There’s an Eastern spiritual version of this. The ultimate stuff is paradoxical: The Tao, Nirvana, Atman, the Non-Dual are ineffable and yet named. We try to grasp It or surrender to It but the very effort to know It causes It not to be known. It is beyond conceptuality. But the Eastern practices do believe there is a final attainment or resolution, whereas Zizek and Lacan don’t think there is.

Artifice and Authenticity

Just saw a movie about the life of Joe Strummer of the punk band The Clash: “The Future is Unwritten” (Great title.) It raises a knotty, disturbing set of issues for me. First, there’s my comparing myself to a great, successful, creative guy. But I’m not as prone to that issue as in the past since I now see more clearly my issues around wanting to “be a somebody” and have an escape route for it.

Second, is the painfulness of the combination of my hero’s personal failings – in this case his narcissism – and his great success in creating powerful, authentic, valuable art: The Clash’s music. The movie showed how Strummer made the decision to join the cool guys – Mick Jones and Paul Simenon - to form The Clash and abandon not only his then current band – the 101’ers – but also abandon his hippie persona and with it his hippie friends. Later, when he became moderately successful with The Clash and old friends approached him, he ignored them. They didn’t fit in with his new image. And in the home movies of the early years of The Clash and their marketing films, you can see their narcissism; the conscious creation of their superiority and their adoption of the attitude that the full-of-themselves famous exhibit. It’s remarkable how that persona infiltrates their bodies and minds so that you can see it dripping from their faces, gestures and walk.

(It was funny to see Bono of U2 in the movie talking about how great it was to see The Clash in Dublin because they weren’t like the usual rock stars driving their Rolls Royce’s into swimming pools. Maybe not, but the movie makes clear that the members of The Clash cultivated a thick and highly self-conscious image of themselves as cool, raw rockers. And yet they made a cool, raw rocking album.)

The interesting contradiction is that accompanying this conscious image-management is an artistic expression of integrity, authenticity and quality. It’s like my friend’s problem with T.S. Eliot. He loved his poetry until he found out Eliot was an anti-Semite. It ruined it for him. But should it, or must it?

Perhaps the two things – one’s personal behavior and being and one’s artistic creations – can be unrelated. And we make the mistake of thinking that they are connected. I always find it funny that people want to interview actors and read about them because they generally aren’t interesting people.

It’s our own narcissism which is the problem: we want our artistic heroes who create works that express our innermost being to personally embody those qualities. We meld their person with their art because their art touches our person. We are looking for an ego-ideal, a fully integrated image of right being and put those artistic heroes into that role of personal and artistic perfection. When their flaws show, it is a narcissistic wound for us the fan. They are the dream of our unrealized selves, realized imaginatively, and so they do great work for us and it wounds us when they fail.

The Mechanics of Psychological Self-Awareness

Swans Commentary, the online political and literary site, accepted my review of the movie “Slumdog Millionaire.” I’ve been reading and excited about Slavoj Zizek’s writings and I’ve been trying to add to my blog more. These events caused a regression to a problematic psychological approach to living which I became conscious of and tried to change.

I described the problematic psychological approach in a couple of posts in October of 2005. I was living along a spectrum whose two poles were “being an intellectual somebody” and “being an intellectual nobody.” The desired goal was to “be an intellectual somebody” and the feared failure was to “be an intellectual nobody.” The value of my life was determined along that spectrum.

This pathological spectrum is opposed by an alternative approach to life in which I try to “be myself” through following my desires. In the former approach, I imagine an external scale of recognition and rate myself according to it, in the latter approach, I follow my inner desires, interests, and what I “feel like doing.” Instead of being a split person who projects a self-judgment outside myself and then tries to live up to it, I look inward first to find the desires in the moment and then act motivated with their energy.

Recently I found myself at the computer on a day off trying to find something to do but not knowing what to do. I wanted to write or read something but didn’t know what. I’ve had enough experience with such states to know that, when they occur, I need to stop what I’m doing and just sit and do nothing. After sitting for a moment I saw that behind the pressured search for something to do was the repeated thought: “what should I do now, what should I do now…” I realized that with the recent excitements stated above, I was getting ahead myself. The desire to do things had turned into the belief that I “should” do things and so I needed to find things to do. Instead of recognizing and following desire, I was being directed by the pressure to “keep it up,” to “find something creative to do,” to find what I “should do now.” To manufacture the kind of life that I imagined I should be living. That “should” is maintained by a distance from myself. “Should” implies a model and rule to follow, some image to live up to; a molding of myself in its image. Opposed to this is the arising from within of desire: “feeling like” doing this or that and then pursing it; having an inclination to do this or that.

Realizing this seemed interesting so I felt motivated to write it down and it became what I did next, which is this piece.