The Star of Truth (2/2): Why It Matters So Much

Given that I justified republishing the sequence on Mapping Consciousness by stating that art, as well as science and religion, has a role to play in understanding consciousness, it seemed only right to republish this short sequence which goes some way to explaining why I feel that to be the case.

Last time I explored a new realisation. On the back of a fleeting comment I made, in a recent conversation, that Iain McGilchrist, in his recent book The Matter with Things, was stating that art can serve as bridge between our consciousness and the ineffable aspects of reality, I came to see all too clearly a truth that I have been blind to all these years: art is not just a meaningful but subordinate domain to science and religion – it is of equal importance. We need all three if we are to mobilise all parts of our brain to enable our minds to grasp almost any important and complex truth more completely in all its aspects. One of these domains is in itself not enough for most of us, at least.

Now I need to try and pin why that insight is so important.

Why It Matters So Much to Me

Not everyone will jeopardise the balance I am about to describe by piling all the eggs of understanding into one basket, though there is an unhealthy drive in our culture towards specialization, as McGilchrist points out in The Matter with Things, and a contempt for what seems like a more superficial dilettante approach. While I have probably never gone to that extreme, I have had a tendency to let my enthusiasm for newly discovered lands carry me away for long periods of time.

For example, when I came to realise that my too exclusive focus on literature was motivated by what books taught me about people, and then shifted my attention to focusing on psychology, the same monochrome method induced me to neglect poetry as no longer relevant to my life. Novels, plays and films were acceptable as stories about people though I no longer trusted them to be reliable vehicles of truth. When, later still, psychology and psychotherapy triggered an interest in Buddhism because of its obvious deep understanding of the mind, rooted in centuries of meditation, the resulting blend of spirituality and psychology tended to even ease narrative forms of art out of focus.

Each time I got a dream reminder to recalibrate – first the Dancing Flames dream pointed me back towards poetry and diluted my obsession with psychology, then, after my decision to tread the Bahá’í path had to some degree reversed the correction, my Hearth dream not only reminded me about the value of art but also that of nature too. Both of these dreams are explored in some detail elsewhere on this blog.

Even so, in my conscious mind I still had this prejudicial sense that psychology and spirituality were somehow more trustworthy guides along the path towards truth than the arts, no matter how much (guilty) pleasure I derived especially from poems, songs and paintings.

Now, at last, I seem to have consciously realised that I must keep all three in balance.  Different people will privilege different domains at different times and in different places, as I have tried to illustrate in the three different diagrams fronted by different aspects of the STAR: what is critical is that discounting any of them reduces our ability to draw as close to the truth as we are able and desperately need to. Various forms of destructive dogmatism and fanaticism lurk in the shadows created by these discounts. When science disparages spirituality, for example, as I have explained many times on this blog, the mind gets reduced to the brain. When religion dismisses science we topple into fundamentalism. When either of them closes the door on the rich symbolism and metaphor of the arts, not only do they risk depriving themselves of the language by which their understanding can be more effectively conveyed, but they also impoverish their own ability to tune into aspects of the truths they are discovering. For this reason, not only are there three versions, each with a different domain at the front, but the colours of each domain are not primary colours, as that would suggest they do not overlap as much as they do.

Reductionisms

Such reductionisms must be avoided at all costs and ideally everyone should be open to and seek information and experiences from all three domains, or risk descending into illusion at best, or dangerous delusion at worst. If I hear anyone disparaging any of these domains as pointless, I’ll know not to trust a word they say. It is interesting to note here, as just one example, that metaphor, myth, symbolism, story and allegory, the tools of literature as an art form, are crucially important in Bahá’í and other religious scripture. Without parables where would the gospels be. Physics, confronted by its awareness of the role of consciousness, seems to be leading the sciences towards a more spiritual perspective and a felt need to use more metaphorical language.

Any form of reductionism or potentially toxic over-simplification is to be avoided at all costs in all three domains. The richness of artistic vehicles of understanding and communication can be a strong antidote. A reductionist ‘science’, a materialistic ‘art’ or fundamentalist ‘religion’ is neither art, science nor religion. I think with this model, if I am immersing myself in any kind of genuine manifestation of any one of those three domains, there is no need to feel guilty, or slag myself off for betraying the other two and wasting my time.

Imbalances

Because the Bahá’í Writings talk so much about the harmony of religion and science as paths towards the truth that, even though they praise the role of the arts in expressing spirituality, I failed to see that there is more to the arts than that. This is where my obtuse misunderstanding of the Bahá’í path in this respect did not quite get me to this new level of understanding, and has caused me to limp along more slowly in certain respects than I would have been able to do otherwise.

I think these insights might help me shed the burden of guilt that prevented me from spending more time enjoying and learning from literature, painting and song in the way I used to. Fortunately I haven’t got as close, as in my early days of my immersion in psychology, to the position McGilchrist reminds us that Darwin found himself in:

He draws from Charles Darwin’s Autobiography which speaks of the great pleasure he derived as a young man from poetry, music and art, something now almost completely lost to him (page 619):

My mind seems to have become a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of facts . . . And if I had to live my life again, I would have made a rule to read some poetry and listen to some music at least once a week; for perhaps the parts of my brain now atrophied would thus have been kept active through the use. The loss of these tastes is a loss of happiness, and may possibly be injurious to the intellect, and more probably to the moral character, by enfeebling the emotional part of our nature.

But still slightly too close for comfort.

Basically, I think I have come to a firm realisation that my path entails using an exploration of the arts, social sciences and spirituality, in an effectively balanced way, to help me enhance my understanding of reality and ease my own existential pain as well as lift the understanding and ease the pain of others. I think that has always been my unconscious priority, but my discounting of the arts tended to make my exploration of them feel like a stolen pleasure and reduce the efficacy of my search for deeper meanings both within experience and within the Bahá’í Writings.

Maybe the fact that ‘arts’ and ‘star’ are anagrams might make it easier for me to hold onto this insight now I’ve gained it. The cube below places sciences at the top because that is where our culture sees it as belonging, while religion has been sidelined. My hope is that this post will help redress that imbalance, and also bring the arts closer to the front in this dynamic.

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The Star of Truth (2/2): Why It Matters So Much

Last time I explored a new realisation. On the back of a fleeting comment I made, in a recent conversation, that Iain McGilchrist, in his recent book The Matter with Things, was stating that art can serve as bridge between our consciousness and the ineffable aspects of reality, I came to see all too clearly a truth that I have been blind to all these years: art is not just a meaningful but subordinate domain to science and religion – it is of equal importance. We need all three if we are to mobilise all parts of our brain to enable our minds to grasp almost any important and complex truth more completely in all its aspects. One of these domains is in itself not enough for most of us, at least.

Now I need to try and pin why that insight is so important.

Why It Matters So Much to Me

Not everyone will jeopardise the balance I am about to describe by piling all the eggs of understanding into one basket, though there is an unhealthy drive in our culture towards specialization, as McGilchrist points out in The Matter with Things, and a contempt for what seems like a more superficial dilettante approach. While I have probably never gone to that extreme, I have had a tendency to let my enthusiasm for newly discovered lands carry me away for long periods of time.

For example, when I came to realise that my too exclusive focus on literature was motivated by what books taught me about people, and then shifted my attention to focusing on psychology, the same monochrome method induced me to neglect poetry as no longer relevant to my life. Novels, plays and films were acceptable as stories about people though I no longer trusted them to be reliable vehicles of truth. When, later still, psychology and psychotherapy triggered an interest in Buddhism because of its obvious deep understanding of the mind, rooted in centuries of meditation, the resulting blend of spirituality and psychology tended to even ease narrative forms of art out of focus.

Each time I got a dream reminder to recalibrate – first the Dancing Flames dream pointed me back towards poetry and diluted my obsession with psychology, then, after my decision to tread the Bahá’í path had to some degree reversed the correction, my Hearth dream not only reminded me about the value of art but also that of nature too. Both of these dreams are explored in some detail elsewhere on this blog.

Even so, in my conscious mind I still had this prejudicial sense that psychology and spirituality were somehow more trustworthy guides along the path towards truth than the arts, no matter how much (guilty) pleasure I derived especially from poems, songs and paintings.

Now, at last, I seem to have consciously realised that I must keep all three in balance.  Different people will privilege different domains at different times and in different places, as I have tried to illustrate in the three different diagrams fronted by different aspects of the STAR: what is critical is that discounting any of them reduces our ability to draw as close to the truth as we are able and desperately need to. Various forms of destructive dogmatism and fanaticism lurk in the shadows created by these discounts. When science disparages spirituality, for example, as I have explained many times on this blog, the mind gets reduced to the brain. When religion dismisses science we topple into fundamentalism. When either of them closes the door on the rich symbolism and metaphor of the arts, not only do they risk depriving themselves of the language by which their understanding can be more effectively conveyed, but they also impoverish their own ability to tune into aspects of the truths they are discovering. For this reason, not only are there three versions, each with a different domain at the front, but the colours of each domain are not primary colours, as that would suggest they do not overlap as much as they do.

Reductionisms

Such reductionisms must be avoided at all costs and ideally everyone should be open to and seek information and experiences from all three domains, or risk descending into illusion at best, or dangerous delusion at worst. If I hear anyone disparaging any of these domains as pointless, I’ll know not to trust a word they say. It is interesting to note here, as just one example, that metaphor, myth, symbolism, story and allegory, the tools of literature as an art form, are crucially important in Bahá’í and other religious scripture. Without parables where would the gospels be. Physics, confronted by its awareness of the role of consciousness, seems to be leading the sciences towards a more spiritual perspective and a felt need to use more metaphorical language.

Any form of reductionism or potentially toxic over-simplification is to be avoided at all costs in all three domains. The richness of artistic vehicles of understanding and communication can be a strong antidote. A reductionist ‘science’, a materialistic ‘art’ or fundamentalist ‘religion’ is neither art, science nor religion. I think with this model, if I am immersing myself in any kind of genuine manifestation of any one of those three domains, there is no need to feel guilty, or slag myself off for betraying the other two and wasting my time.

Imbalances

Because the Bahá’í Writings talk so much about the harmony of religion and science as paths towards the truth that, even though they praise the role of the arts in expressing spirituality, I failed to see that there is more to the arts than that. This is where my obtuse misunderstanding of the Bahá’í path in this respect did not quite get me to this new level of understanding, and has caused me to limp along more slowly in certain respects than I would have been able to do otherwise.

I think these insights might help me shed the burden of guilt that prevented me from spending more time enjoying and learning from literature, painting and song in the way I used to. Fortunately I haven’t got as close, as in my early days of my immersion in psychology, to the position McGilchrist reminds us that Darwin found himself in:

He draws from Charles Darwin’s Autobiography which speaks of the great pleasure he derived as a young man from poetry, music and art, something now almost completely lost to him (page 619):

My mind seems to have become a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of facts . . . And if I had to live my life again, I would have made a rule to read some poetry and listen to some music at least once a week; for perhaps the parts of my brain now atrophied would thus have been kept active through the use. The loss of these tastes is a loss of happiness, and may possibly be injurious to the intellect, and more probably to the moral character, by enfeebling the emotional part of our nature.

But still slightly too close for comfort.

Basically, I think I have come to a firm realisation that my path entails using an exploration of the arts, social sciences and spirituality, in an effectively balanced way, to help me enhance my understanding of reality and ease my own existential pain as well as lift the understanding and ease the pain of others. I think that has always been my unconscious priority, but my discounting of the arts tended to make my exploration of them feel like a stolen pleasure and reduce the efficacy of my search for deeper meanings both within experience and within the Bahá’í Writings.

Maybe the fact that ‘arts’ and ‘star’ are anagrams might make it easier for me to hold onto this insight now I’ve gained it. The cube below places sciences at the top because that is where our culture sees it as belonging, while religion has been sidelined. My hope is that this post will help redress that imbalance, and also bring the arts closer to the front in this dynamic.

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Leaps of Faith (2/4): the tide of faith goes out

Given my plan to explain more fully what prepared my mind for my encounter with the Bahá’í Faith in 1982 it seems appropriate to republish this sequence from 2013 which tried to capture my journey, but sold some aspects short possibly. The posts will appear on consecutive days.

As I’ve said in an earlier post, I was asked if I had prepared an account of how I came to join the Bahá’í community. I’ve now completed the story at least in draft. I was planning only to send it quietly to the Bahá’í Histories website and leave it at that, in the hope that very few would read it outside the Bahá’í community. But then I wondered why I should be so quiet about it. Yes, I think it’s a fairly ordinary story about a fairly ordinary person, and to that extent, why go public? But then also it is just about the most important thing that ever happened to me and connects very closely to two of the other most important events in my life. So, I thought, ‘Share it and see what happens.’ It might do some good and probably won’t do any harm. So here goes for part two. Part One stopped with me on the way to Hendon Library during a period of unemployment post-qualification as a clinical psychologist, completely unaware of what was in store.

It took me a while to twig, after some good advice, that I was applying for jobs for which I was perceived as too-experienced, having done five years of responsible mental health work pre-qualification. So, I did not finally land a job till the January after I had qualified that Autumn. Even so, I never seriously doubted that I’d done the right thing to leave teaching.

I had fled the teaching profession in 1975, after my dissatisfaction with the work led me to a weekend encounter group. In that group, I’d experienced a dramatic breakthrough into a previously unconscious well of pain whose exact causes and parameters are still unclear. As a result I had the first of my three most significant blindfold leaps of intuition to date: I had applied for something like 25 jobs in helping professions. I knew I wanted to make people the syllabus not books as had been the case as a teacher, but wasn’t quite sure how to do so. I applied for jobs with the Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants, probation, and social services amongst others.

Then, one afternoon, I went for an informal visit to a day centre for what they termed ‘the mentally ill.’ I cannot fully explain what followed. After only two hours in the building talking to staff and clients I just knew this was the work that I wanted to do for the rest of my life. Very strange, especially as that feeling turned out to be completely right. It took another seven years before I finally qualified but neither then nor later did I ever doubt the correctness of my purely intuitive decision – that leap in the dark that seemed to defy reason completely. This was not to be my only such decision as time was to tell.

With hindsight this period of unemployment after I qualified was probably a Godsend.

By this stage memories of my snow-bound prayer had faded, the situation was sorted, and I was almost back to my normal state of complacent scepticism.

Consequently I was totally unprepared for my own imminent experience of conversion as I ambled towards the library in Hendon that triggered it one late November day in 1982. I had no sense that history was about to repeat itself, that my affinity with my maternal grandfather, whose life my mother had described in loving detail many times, was about to expand from a shared love of books to a life-changing encounter with a new religion.

T S Eliot

It was my love of poetry that in fact paved the way to my encounter with the book that changed my world. As a result of my enforced idleness I had re-read T S Eliot’s The Wasteland whose footnotes somewhat misleadingly draw the reader’s attention to Frazer’s The Golden Bough. As I had long ago lost my copy of that book, which I had never got round to reading, I decided to go to the library and take out a copy just to see if it helped my understanding of Eliot’s poem.

Once in the library, I checked the catalogue and found the reference number for the book. I located the shelf. To my disappointment the book I wanted wasn’t there. In fact, there was, in this library containing thousands of books, only one book on the shelf with that category number: The Message of the Masters by Robert Scrutton. I took one look at it and immediately put it back on the shelf. Why would I want to read another book on religion? I’d just been through all that nonsense all too recently.

I stomped off round the library. Generally half an hour in this well-stocked bookaholic’s paradise used to provide me with my maximum entitlement of six books after several difficult decisions had been made to reject at least another three. For some reason, that day, the philosophy, psychology, sociology, fiction, poetry, drama and biography sections yielded absolutely nothing of interest. I went up the stairs to the record section, another usually reliable source of entertainment: not a single thing attracted me.

Having walked to the library on a cold day I was reluctant to feel it was a completely wasted visit, so I went back to the first shelf I had visited and picked up the book I had rejected. I grudgingly felt that I might as well borrow this one rather than leave the library empty handed.

When I got home I threw it dismissively onto the sofa, went off to make a cup of coffee, and turned on the radio. Nothing. The television: nothing. Flicked through my record collection: nothing seemed to fit my mood of the moment. The discarded book was lying next to me. I picked it up. I might as well read it, I thought, really disgruntled by this stage. What a pointless way to end the day!

Having picked it up I came very close to putting it right back down again. It clearly had quite a lot about spiritualism in it, something that my scepticism regarded as blind superstition.

What caused me to read on was that a religion I had never heard of, but which matched almost all my long-standing preoccupations, was described in compelling detail in its pages. There were many quotations from people with strange names I couldn’t pronounce, but I was drawn to the ideas and the evocative language in which these were expressed.

I skipped the stuff that would have put me off and homed in on the sections most concerned with Bahá’u’lláh and ‘Abdu’l-Bahá.

‘Abdu’l-Bahá

It was impossible for me to believe that this could be real. It was claimed that an exile and a prisoner, enduring innumerable hardships over many decades and without the access to scholars and massive libraries Karl Marx had enjoyed, had unfolded to humanity’s gaze what seemed to perfectly combine compelling spiritual principles with credible social action. This activism was apparently rooted in a nonviolent honest process called consultation that underpinned what seemed to me would be a truly beautiful system of administration, if it existed. All this was presented in such a powerful way that I was sure, given my constant scanning of the landscape of ideas, that I would have met with it already if it were real. After all I had been actively searching for something like that for as long as I could remember, without knowing exactly what it was I was hoping to find. Even the God-problem was probably solved because the Faith did not believe in the God I didn’t believe in, as far as I could tell.

When I look back at my whole life trajectory from the moment I shocked my mother by saying I was not a Catholic anymore to when I made the declaration of intent we shorthand as becoming a Baha’i, I realize now I had always been on a quest. In fact in some ways of course I still am. I was unconsciously searching for something then with rather more desperation than I am searching now, when I feel I am at least pointing in the right direction or digging in the right place.

The quest had its roots partly in suffering. Two of the most important people in my childhood had been dead for several years.

One was my grandfather, the convert to Catholicism, whom I have already mentioned. His later life had been marred by an accident that caused him to lose his leg and become unable to work any longer as a railway signalman. The family had to regroup with my Aunt Anne leaving school at 14 to get a job, as did my Uncle Harold, the eldest. My mother was the youngest sibling but had been deeply affected by this testing turn of events which left her with a constant state of anxiety about what drastic twists and turns of fate life might bring in its wake. It was therefore deeply saddening for both my parents, but perhaps especially for her, to lose my sister, Mary, in 1939 just before the start of the war.

My parents’ grief as a result of Mary’s early death at twelve years old, four years before I was born in 1943, and the pain of a world recently at war, overshadowed my childhood and seemed partly responsible for triggering this intense quest, both for understanding and some kind of resolution of my disquiet, that drove most of my waking hours and many of my dreams as well.

So, I was being driven, even at that early age, by an intense craving to understand, and to understand in ways that made real sense to me, not in the incredible doctrinal terms that people were trying to placate me with, and which contradicted my own experience in the ways I have touched on earlier. The credibility gap widened as puberty took hold and the sceptic came out victorious. My spiritual side, it would seem to me now, was quietly biding its time but was by no means defeated.

So, having shut the door of the Catholic Church behind me and stepped into the back lanes of agnosticism, it wasn’t long before I was on the beach of atheism watching the tide of faith go out beyond eye-shot.

It seems though that this was about to change.

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The Meaning of Psychosis (1/4): the continuum concept

Graph of the Model that states Psychosis is Distinct from Normal Functioning (Source: The route to psychosis by Dr Emmanuelle Peters)

The British Psychological Society (BPS) has stated that ‘clients and the general public are negatively affected by the continued and continuous medicalisation of their natural and normal responses to their experiences; responses which undoubtedly have distressing consequences … but which do not reflect illnesses so much as normal individual variation… This misses the relational context of problems and the undeniable social causation of many such problems’. The BPS Division of Clinical Psychology (DCP) has explicitly criticised the current systems of psychiatric diagnosis such as DSM–5 and ICD–10. It has suggested that we need ‘a paradigm shift in relation to the experiences that these diagnoses refer to, towards a conceptual system not based on a ‘disease’ model’.

(From Understanding Psychosis and Schizophrenia published by the BPS – page 28)

Given my current re-exploration of the impacts of trauma, including psychosis, it seemed appropriate to republish this sequence.

What has this to do with EMS?

EMS stands for Everybody Means Something. My work as a clinical psychologist was with people who were experiencing what our culture calls a psychosis. When I started work in the NHS most people felt that these experiences were meaningless. I disagreed. I found myself using those three words as a kind of mantra to remind myself of my conviction. It was a no-brainer to use them as the title for my blog.

Various experiences reinforced my scepticism about the medical model with its prevailing assumption that such experiences are largely biologically determined. I came increasingly to believe it was significantly incomplete, possibly seriously flawed.

Before I move onto psychosis in particular there is a story from my earlier experiences in clinical psychology, which served to reinforce my scepticism and which clearly illustrates how this default assumption can operate as a potentially damaging blinker.

Laura had been given a diagnosis of endogenous depression, ie one that was not explicable in terms of her life situation. She used to believe that her parents were more or less perfect. The work we were doing became very stuck and seemed to be going nowhere.

We had plateaued on bleak and distressing terrain, more tolerable than her previous habitat but too unwelcoming to live on comfortably for the rest of her life, and yet with no detectable path towards more hospitable ground.

Frustrated by the protracted lack of movement, I began to see discharge as a very attractive option. I discussed this with my peer supervision group. We decided that I should continue with the processes of exploration but make sure that I did not continue my habit of stepping in relatively early to rescue her in sessions from her frequent experiences of intense distress. I continued to see her, having agreed with Laura that I would allow her to sink right into the “heart of darkness” in order to explore it more fully and understand it more clearly. The very next session, when we first put this plan into action, after I had left her alone in her silence for something like half an hour, Laura came to a powerful realisation at the heart of a very intense darkness. She said: “I think my mother threw me away even before I was born.”

This paved the way for deeper and more fruitful explorations of the reality of her childhood, the nature of which I will come back to later in this sequence of posts.

Since I started this blog almost eight years ago now, my interests have ranged widely across many topics, and psychosis has only featured in a relatively small number of posts. Decluttering has triggered me back into my fascination with ‘psychosis’ as the recent posts on out-of-the-ordinary-experiences illustrates.

When I trawled through my backlog of journals I found no other article dealing with that topic. On the web as a whole my most important find is a book edited by Isabel Clarke titled Spirituality & Psychosis which touches on it in places. I will need to buy a copy of that and read it carefully before I can even begin to comment, but the Chapter headings and their authors on the Google version certainly whetted my appetite. How could I resist a book dealing with two of my favourite obessions?

I have found a few other titles on related themes via the British Psychological Society website and it is on three key papers from among those that I wish to focus now.

Graph of the Model that states Psychosis is on a continuum with Normal Functioning (Source: The route to psychosis by Dr Emmanuelle Peters)

We’re on a Continuum

Bethany L. Leonhardt et al, right from the beginning of their article[1] arguing that psychosis is understandable as a human experience (page 36), ask us to regard the symptoms of psychosis ‘as part an active meaning-making process, regardless of whether or not that meaning is adaptive.’

They explore how the use of literature, particularly novels, can help those who work with people who are having psychotic experiences tune into their predicament more empathetically. As a result of their use of this method, they offer some interesting perspectives.

For example, (page 47) they ‘suggest that exposure to novels and related literary genres may help prevent therapists from surrendering to the view that psychosis is not understandable as anything other than a collection of abstract symptoms or from infantilizing patients by offering of paternalistic direction or protection from life demands.’

As we have seen in the previous sequence on out-of-the-ordinary experiences (OOEs), the attitudes of others has a powerful effect upon how well or how badly a person is able to deal with their bizarre and often frightening experiences. An assumption that what people have experienced is meaningless is at best patronising and at worst confrontational and undermining. One of my own early observations was that most of the clients I saw were expecting me to dismiss everything they were saying, either by ignoring it, refusing to discuss it in any way that resembles their own terms or by frankly rubbishing and pathologising it. They seemed both surprised and relieved when I did my best to engage with them in an attempt to understand it, which is of course not the same as endorsing everything they told me as objectively true. It was though a way of taking what they said seriously and respectfully. For a fuller explanation of my approach click on the posts listed below.

On the occasions where I was unable to sustain this at a sufficiently high level I risked damaging the relationship. I can remember one such occasion. A client was convinced that the devil was plotting against him and kept bringing forward the evidence he thought proved it. My approach clearly aroused his suspicions as to my beliefs about the devil, and he repeatedly pushed me to disclose what my own beliefs were. After several repetitions of this over a number of sessions I concluded that my holding back was blocking further progress. I made the mistake of letting him know that I thought that the devil had no objective existence but was a metaphor to explain evil. He discontinued therapy at that point.

In retrospect I realised that I could have given a more authentic response from a deeper level of my thinking and stated that, while for practical purposes in my own life I did not operate on the assumption that the devil existed, I had to admit that there was no way I could dogmatically state or absolutely prove that he didn’t: agnosticism on that point would have been a better and perhaps more honest answer. Though I may have failed this client, I learnt something very helpful for future interactions.

Equally importantly, Leonhardt et (ibid) ‘acknowledge that our views largely draw on the idea that psychosis can be understood as existing along the continuum of human experience. Our use of novels and related literary genres indeed seems predicated on the idea that individuals experiencing psychosis are not inherently different from anyone else, and that some of the strangest and most bewildering experiences can be made sense of while reading literature and engaging in other reflective activities.’

This ability to find ways of empathically recognising that psychosis is a point on a dimension we all share in some way is a key requirement of a true understanding of what psychosis is in my view.

Next time I will explore the role of trauma in the formation of psychosis.

Related Posts

An Approach to Psychosis (1/6): Mind-Work & Trust
An Approach to Psychosis (2/6): Surfaces & Depths
An Approach to Psychosis (3/6): Complicating Factors
An Approach to Psychosis (4/6): The Mind-Work Process (a)
An Approach to Psychosis (5/6): The Mind-Work Process (b)
An Approach to Psychosis (6/6): Fitting It All Together

References:

[1] The article was published in the American Journal of Psychotherapy, Vol. 69, No. 1, 2015.

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Recommended Link: Why I Write about What I Don’t Know

There’s a powerful piece on the Bahá’í Teachings website this month by the novelist, Sidney Morrison. Advocating, as it eloquently does, the power of art – and literature in particular – to connect us, it shed light into one of the places I most love to examine. It includes a moving story, not quoted below, of how Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina helped a prisoner find some hope and understanding in his darkness. Below is a short extract: for the full post see link.

As a recently published novelist, I wondered before publication if a photograph of my black face should be reproduced on the book’s inside cover.

Why? Well, I wrote a historical novel called City of Desire about a young white woman who, because of the severely limited options before her, chose to become a prostitute in 1830’s New York. Based on a true story, her rise and fall fascinated me, and I wanted to understand her character, her choices, and the culture that molded her. As a man, too, I wanted to understand the struggle of women to be free.

But I feared a possible challenge coming from self-appointed members of the identity police, the people who think they have the right to determine group membership and excoriate those who dare to penetrate barriers imposed for outsiders, “those people” who don’t belong, “the other” who can’t possibly understand what it is to be black, white, female, male, Muslim, or Christian, or any other difference. Take your pick; the list is endless.

I heard those “identity police” voices in my head: “How dare you? Who do think you are? How can you possibly know what it is to be a white woman? Stay in your place. Write about what you know, and only what you know. If you do otherwise, you are appropriating our space and taking from us what is legitimately and exclusively ours.”

Writers are usually told one tired nostrum in classes and workshops: Write about What You Know. The familiar makes your work easier and more authentic, advisors and teachers say. If you write what you know, you’re less open to criticism. After all, this is your experience.

But think about it. If all writers followed this admonition, then we would write only memoirs or autobiographies. Painters would paint only self-portraits. Actors would only play themselves. Instead, artists do much more, and have done so since the beginning of storytelling and artistry itself. Artists extend themselves into uncharted territory so they can imagine and empathize with others—so they can make a human connection unmitigated by the artificial barriers we erect to keep us apart.

Ultimately, I decided against removing my photograph. I refused to capitulate to a rising culture of tribalism, where people live in their own bubbles, hearing only what comforts them, reaffirming their assumptions and prejudices, reinforcing the righteousness of their cause and the status of their group.

These separatist impulses have exponentially intensified as we all have become more aware of a diverse and complex world. The world is uniting, as Baha’u’llah promised it would in the middle of the 19th century:

The purging of such deeply-rooted and overwhelming corruptions cannot be effected unless the peoples of the world unite in pursuit of one common aim and embrace one universal faith. – Baha’u’llah, Tablets of Baha’u’llah, p. 68.

Some people fear this fact of increasing unity, globalization and human connection, hating those who are different from themselves and trying to wall themselves off from others.

But literature, since the beginning of art itself, has demonstrated the exact opposite, focusing on our common humanity despite our differences. Literature tears down walls, and shows us we are all human and all one. We all feel love, anger, resentment, and hope; we all strive; we all want connection:

… the true worth of artists and craftsmen should be appreciated, for they advance the affairs of mankind …. True learning is that which is conducive to the well-being of the world, not to pride and self-conceit, or to tyranny, violence and pillage. – Baha’u’llah, from a tablet to an individual Baha’i.

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The Meaning of Psychosis (1/4): the continuum concept

Graph of the Model that states Psychosis is Distinct from Normal Functioning (Source: The route to psychosis by Dr Emmanuelle Peters)

The British Psychological Society (BPS) has stated that ‘clients and the general public are negatively affected by the continued and continuous medicalisation of their natural and normal responses to their experiences; responses which undoubtedly have distressing consequences … but which do not reflect illnesses so much as normal individual variation… This misses the relational context of problems and the undeniable social causation of many such problems’. The BPS Division of Clinical Psychology (DCP) has explicitly criticised the current systems of psychiatric diagnosis such as DSM–5 and ICD–10. It has suggested that we need ‘a paradigm shift in relation to the experiences that these diagnoses refer to, towards a conceptual system not based on a ‘disease’ model’.

(From Understanding Psychosis and Schizophrenia published by the BPS – page 28)

What has this to do with EMS?

EMS stands for Everybody Means Something. My work as a clinical psychologist was with people who were experiencing what our culture calls a psychosis. When I started work in the NHS most people felt that these experiences were meaningless. I disagreed. I found myself using those three words as a kind of mantra to remind myself of my conviction. It was a no-brainer to use them as the title for my blog.

Various experiences reinforced my scepticism about the medical model with its prevailing assumption that such experiences are largely biologically determined. I came increasingly to believe it was significantly incomplete, possibly seriously flawed.

Before I move onto psychosis in particular there is a story from my earlier experiences in clinical psychology, which served to reinforce my scepticism and which clearly illustrates how this default assumption can operate as a potentially damaging blinker.

Laura had been given a diagnosis of endogenous depression, ie one that was not explicable in terms of her life situation. She used to believe that her parents were more or less perfect. The work we were doing became very stuck and seemed to be going nowhere.

We had plateaued on bleak and distressing terrain, more tolerable than her previous habitat but too unwelcoming to live on comfortably for the rest of her life, and yet with no detectable path towards more hospitable ground.

Frustrated by the protracted lack of movement, I began to see discharge as a very attractive option. I discussed this with my peer supervision group. We decided that I should continue with the processes of exploration but make sure that I did not continue my habit of stepping in relatively early to rescue her in sessions from her frequent experiences of intense distress. I continued to see her, having agreed with Laura that I would allow her to sink right into the “heart of darkness” in order to explore it more fully and understand it more clearly. The very next session, when we first put this plan into action, after I had left her alone in her silence for something like half an hour, Laura came to a powerful realisation at the heart of a very intense darkness. She said: “I think my mother threw me away even before I was born.”

This paved the way for deeper and more fruitful explorations of the reality of her childhood, the nature of which I will come back to later in this sequence of posts.

Since I started this blog almost eight years ago now, my interests have ranged widely across many topics, and psychosis has only featured in a relatively small number of posts. Decluttering has triggered me back into my fascination with ‘psychosis’ as the recent posts on out-of-the-ordinary-experiences illustrates.

When I trawled through my backlog of journals I found no other article dealing with that topic. On the web as a whole my most important find is a book edited by Isabel Clarke titled Spirituality & Psychosis which touches on it in places. I will need to buy a copy of that and read it carefully before I can even begin to comment, but the Chapter headings and their authors on the Google version certainly whetted my appetite. How could I resist a book dealing with two of my favourite obessions?

I have found a few other titles on related themes via the British Psychological Society website and it is on three key papers from among those that I wish to focus now.

Graph of the Model that states Psychosis is on a continuum with Normal Functioning (Source: The route to psychosis by Dr Emmanuelle Peters)

We’re on a Continuum

Bethany L. Leonhardt et al, right from the beginning of their article[1] arguing that psychosis is understandable as a human experience (page 36), ask us to regard the symptoms of psychosis ‘as part an active meaning-making process, regardless of whether or not that meaning is adaptive.’

They explore how the use of literature, particularly novels, can help those who work with people who are having psychotic experiences tune into their predicament more empathetically. As a result of their use of this method, they offer some interesting perspectives.

For example, (page 47) they ‘suggest that exposure to novels and related literary genres may help prevent therapists from surrendering to the view that psychosis is not understandable as anything other than a collection of abstract symptoms or from infantilizing patients by offering of paternalistic direction or protection from life demands.’

As we have seen in the previous sequence on out-of-the-ordinary experiences (OOEs), the attitudes of others has a powerful effect upon how well or how badly a person is able to deal with their bizarre and often frightening experiences. An assumption that what people have experienced is meaningless is at best patronising and at worst confrontational and undermining. One of my own early observations was that most of the clients I saw were expecting me to dismiss everything they were saying, either by ignoring it, refusing to discuss it in any way that resembles their own terms or by frankly rubbishing and pathologising it. They seemed both surprised and relieved when I did my best to engage with them in an attempt to understand it, which is of course not the same as endorsing everything they told me as objectively true. It was though a way of taking what they said seriously and respectfully. For a fuller explanation of my approach click on the posts listed below.

On the occasions where I was unable to sustain this at a sufficiently high level I risked damaging the relationship. I can remember one such occasion. A client was convinced that the devil was plotting against him and kept bringing forward the evidence he thought proved it. My approach clearly aroused his suspicions as to my beliefs about the devil, and he repeatedly pushed me to disclose what my own beliefs were. After several repetitions of this over a number of sessions I concluded that my holding back was blocking further progress. I made the mistake of letting him know that I thought that the devil had no objective existence but was a metaphor to explain evil. He discontinued therapy at that point.

In retrospect I realised that I could have given a more authentic response from a deeper level of my thinking and stated that, while for practical purposes in my own life I did not operate on the assumption that the devil existed, I had to admit that there was no way I could dogmatically state or absolutely prove that he didn’t: agnosticism on that point would have been a better and perhaps more honest answer. Though I may have failed this client, I learnt something very helpful for future interactions.

Equally importantly, Leonhardt et (ibid) ‘acknowledge that our views largely draw on the idea that psychosis can be understood as existing along the continuum of human experience. Our use of novels and related literary genres indeed seems predicated on the idea that individuals experiencing psychosis are not inherently different from anyone else, and that some of the strangest and most bewildering experiences can be made sense of while reading literature and engaging in other reflective activities.’

This ability to find ways of empathically recognising that psychosis is a point on a dimension we all share in some way is a key requirement of a true understanding of what psychosis is in my view.

Next time I will explore the role of trauma in the formation of psychosis.

Related Posts

An Approach to Psychosis (1/6): Mind-Work & Trust
An Approach to Psychosis (2/6): Surfaces & Depths
An Approach to Psychosis (3/6): Complicating Factors
An Approach to Psychosis (4/6): The Mind-Work Process (a)
An Approach to Psychosis (5/6): The Mind-Work Process (b)
An Approach to Psychosis (6/6): Fitting It All Together

References:

[1] The article was published in the American Journal of Psychotherapy, Vol. 69, No. 1, 2015.

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