Yalom on Approaching Meaning

About 45 years ago, psychiatrist Irvin Yalom estimated that a good 30-50% of all cases of depression might actually be a crisis of meaninglessness, an existential sickness, and these cases require a different method of treatment. We experience this lack of purpose as boredom, apathy, or emptiness. We are "not told by instinct what one must do, or any longer by tradition what one should do. Nor does one know what one wants to do," so we feel lost and directionless. Instead of addressing meaninglessness as the problem, though, we've been merely addressing the symptoms of it: addictions, compulsions, obsessions, malaise. In today's context, it might suggest that even social media issues could be problems with a lack of meaning. 

The last sentences of his lengthy tome, Existential Psychotherapy, sum up his solution: "The question of meaning in life is, as the Buddha taught, not edifying. One must immerse oneself in the river of life and let the question drift away." How he lands here is an intriguing path through a slew of philosophers and psychiatrists. Even without symptoms of a problem, attention to meaning is necessary as it gives birth to values, which become principles to live by as we place behaviours into our own hierarchy of acceptability. 

"One creates oneself by a series of ongoing decisions. But one cannot make each and every decision de novo throughout one's life; certain superordinate decisions must be made that provide an organizing principle for subsequent decisions." 

Yalom doesn't, however, suggest coming up with a list of values that can become meaningful to us, but that we immerse ourselves in life to become more aware of which values we already have. 

WHAT'S THE POINT? IT'S FOR US TO DECIDE

According to Yalom, we've hit this crisis point in meaninglessness because we have the leisure to think and because our work is no longer clearly purposeful, both of which are relatively recent experiences for such a large proportion of civilization. It's no longer just the philosophers of the day asking, What's it all for? What's the point of it all? He takes the existential position that it's up to us to figure it out. 

On Identity: Erikson, Freud, and Sartre

 I recently listened to a podcast of Dr. Louis Cozolino, a neuroscientist and psychoanalyst, discussing what he would teach if he were training psychotherapists. The first year would be phenomenology: the power of Carl Rogers' perspective to train how to develop an alliance through reflective listening while keeping countertransference out of the session. The second year would be physiology: developmental neuroscience and the evolutionary history of brains and bodies. The third year might be called intersectionality: the interpenetration of the spectrum of options that affect clients - brain, mind, family, culture - and a reaction against therapy as a mere opiate to calm the oppressed and exploited. The final year would be on narratives and stories that we live by and on that half second that it takes our brain to construct our experience of the present and feed it back to us. 

Cozolino insists that it's not enough to just sit and listen to people vent. After developing a non-judgmental alliance with the client, therapists need to be "amygdala whisperers," to be able to down modulate amygdala activation to stop any inhibitory effect on the parietal system that enables problem solving. In other words, they need to soothe anxieties while arousing enough interest for clients to be able to learn new information. Then it's time to challenge the client's old system of thinking, slowly and delicately, a little at a time, to help them expand previous conceptualizations of themselves and the world. There's a necessary plan and a strategy to the sessions. 

By contrast, in my MA psychotherapy program, we're currently learning Piaget and Erikson's stages of development that many of us first encountered in high school classes. There's little to no encouragement to look at these older theories with a critical eye, and we're required to identify stages without a clear idea of how that knowledge might practically help clients. I'm doing well in the class despite the reality that I don't understand how acknowledging that a client is in the "identity vs role confusion" stage can provoke a useful change in the client's perceptions. 

Yalom's Gift

I recently binge-watched all of Group, a show inspired by a novel by Irvin Yalom, The Schopenhauer Cure. So I revisited Yalom's non-fiction to see how closely the series aligns to his actual practices.

The Gift of Therapy is a fascinating read from 2017 in which Yalom dives openly into his existential psychotherapy practice, explaining the four givens that affect how we think, feel and act that need to be explored at depth: death, isolation, meaning of life, and freedom (xvii). In the introduction, he jumps right into death denial revealed through a belief in personal specialness (xiii). Our current culture of selfies is likely rife with this! An existential perspective is best for clients who despair from "a confrontation with harsh facts of the human condition" (xvi). We didn't see much of this type of discussion in the show. In fact, the therapist didn't talk much at all beyond reminding the group to be honest and forthcoming.

On Group Therapy 

Yalom clarifies the distinction between group therapy and individual therapy in that group is more useful when "patients fall into despair because of their inability to develop and sustain gratifying interpersonal relationships." He offers two instructive points: a just-right structure to alleviate anxiety yet not miss potential revelations if turn-taking is too regulated, and the importance of individual summaries at the end of session recognizing that each person has a different experience of what happened. Yalom also writes and shares his own summaries of each session to group members to maintain continuity from one session to the next.

A Fruitful Exploration of the Core

Maybe there are seeds of potential deep within ourselves, but maybe there's nothing there but a collection of signals. Regardless the outcome, we need to dig in to see what we can find. 

In several classes I took last term, the idea of a core self that's fluid came through discussions of the postmodernist view of the self. But I'm not convinced we're still living the pomo life, and I'm not sure we want to be. 

Taking liberally from Charles Taylor, and others, it appears that we once had some communal ideals, then flipped from seeking answers from God to proving them with science, then realized some pretty major problems with glorifying any kind of authority and renounced all of them, but now, drawing on the types of films being made and the stories told, it feels like we're readjusting back to a place with more solid values and truths. I hope so, anyway.

Frankl's Logotherapy

The second half of Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning was added in 1962 to provide greater detail of Logotherapy, in which patients must hear difficult things in contrast to psychoanalysts provoking telling difficult things (see the first part here). It's less introspective and more focused on our place in the world:

"Logotherapy defocuses all the vicious-circle formations and feedback mechanisms which play such a great role in the development of neuroses. Thus the typical self-centeredness of the neurotic is broken up instead of being continually fostered and reinforced . . . the patient is actually confronted with and reoriented toward the meaning of his life. . . . Striving to find a meaning in one's life is the primary motivational force in man. That is why I speak of a will to meaning in contrast to the pleasure principle on which Freudian psychoanalysis is centered, as well as in contrast to the will to power on which Adlerian psychology, using the term 'striving for superiority,' is focused" (98). 

Frankl's Phases of Life in the Camps

My lovely friend and former colleague recently passed away unexpectedly. The kindest people go far too soon. We also went to teacher's college together over 30 years ago, and his quips and just the calm and jovial way about him helped make the ridiculous assignments there far more tolerable. Sitting next to me as a trustee, he and I often chatted about the benefits of meditation; he and his wife actually saw Thich Nhat Hanh in person! 

He was a wealth of knowledge, and one of his recommended reads for me was Viktor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning, which I gobbled up in no time, but it was too late to talk to him about it. That's destroying me a bit these days, so I'll write it all here instead. 

Frankl survived several concentration camps, the near starvation and typhus that took many others, and explains how he coped and designed a form of psychotherapy in the process. The book is Nietzsche's "He who has a Why to live for can bear almost any How," which he quotes a few times throughout. He kept his mind on the future, imagining better days after the war, back with his wife again and lecturing about his experiences. I've read it trying to use his words to better tolerate the less acute, more chronic threat of Covid. It might seem trite or contrived to make such a comparison, but consider that more people have succumbed to Covid than Jewish prisoners in the camps and it continues because we are living blindly to it, unthinking. Some estimates suggests Covid has cost us over 30 million lives in just three years. 

The book is in two parts. In the first, originally published in 1946, he describes his experiences living in a death camp and the three phases of survival in camp life. He wrote it after being released and returning to Vienna to learn that his pregnant wife, parents, and brother had all died in the camps. In the second half he explains how to cope with it all, but I'll save that for another day. Page numbers throughout are from the 2006 edition.

Hannah Arendt's On Violence

Unfortunately, this is really timely.

Arendt wrote this short book in 1970, but there's nothing in it that needs to be updated today. Absolutely nothing significant has changed; it's just more. She was responding to the violence of WWII, Vietnam, the student riots in Paris, and, most specifically, the People's Park protests in Berkeley, where she was teaching at the time as students attempted "transforming an empty university-owned lot into a 'People's Park'." Sheldon Wolin and John Schaar wrote about how the event unleashed an unnecessarily strong police backlash:

"A rock was thrown from a roof-top and, without warning, police fired into a group on the roof of an adjacent building. Two persons were struck in the face by the police fire, another was blinded, probably permanently, and a fourth, twenty-five-year-old James Rector, later died. Before the day was over, at least thirty others were wounded by police gunfire, and many more by clubs. . . . Tear gas enfolded the main part of the campus and drifted into many of its buildings, as well as into the surrounding city. Nearby streets were littered with broken glass and rubble. At least six buckshot slugs entered the main library and three 38 calibre bullets lodged in the wall of a reference room in the same building. Before the day ended, more than ninety people had been injured by police guns and clubs."

That was on May 15, 1969, known as "Bloody Thursday." The Kent State shootings in Ohio were almost exactly one year later. Arendt tries to make sense of it all through a look at the changing view of violence in society.

On the Necessity for a Public Takedown

When, a couple months back, I read Katie Way's depiction of a date between "Grace" and Aziz Ansari, at first I felt badly for him to be outed as such a crappy date. How embarrassing. Then in the New York Times, Bari Weiss responded that Ansari was being asked to be a mindreader. My rejection of that idea led me to a more nuanced understanding of the issue. I commented there,

But then, as is so often the case, a discussion with students in my class clarified the issue even further.

This is an important issue to be raised. It still seems, based on this conversation with a room full of teenagers, a common problem on dates. Guys will ignore body language and use subtle leaning, pushing, guiding, and grinding as a way to progress an event that isn't explicitly desired by the pushed and leaned upon party. By using movement rather than words, it feels easier to act as if they merely misconstrued the situation. By taking it out of the realm of verbal communication, they can better claim a problem with interpretation instead of straight up consent.

On Comparing Existentialism and Stoicism

This summer, I went on one camping trip with a book on Stoicism, then another camping trip with a book on Existentialism, and I was intrigued by the many similarities. Then I came across this video that has some overlap with what I had noticed. As they say in the video, Massimo Pigliucci (MP) on Stoicism and Skye Cleary (SC) on Existentialism, both are philosophies that offer a way to live instead of just a way to think about the world. I'm putting it all together here with quotes (names linked to sources) to sort it out for myself. I'm just thinking out loud here. This is too long for any normal person to want to read.

These are both philosophies that allow surveyors to pick and choose from variations on a theme as neither has one authoritative dude overriding all others, and, it would appear, few of the big guns cared to adopt either label anyway. For the Stoics, defining yourself as one is avoided because it's pretentious. In The Role Ethics of Epictetus, it's clarified that we are simultaneously different things, and how we play each role is more important than what our roles are. The roles are often not our choice, but how we do them are, i.e. whether or not we're a virtuous son, mother, teacher, or waiter (MP). For Existentialists, we can't be defined by the roles we take on because we're more than the mere facts about ourselves (SC), so labels become meaningless.

On Boredom

 I'm not talking about the "nausea of ennui" discussed from Seneca ("many who judge life to be not bitter, but superfluous") to Sartre, that total lack of interest in anything that makes it difficult for some to get out of bed in the morning, but of that feeling that overcomes us when we are required to do something painfully tedious.

We often elevate simple boredom to the lofty realms of melancholia or depression, as if it's worthy of great sympathy and profound relief efforts, when a mere change of scenery (or attitude) can save the day. But often it's the word we use when we have unrewarding work to do.  It's a trapped feeling that we escape with any little thing we can - cat videos or video games - anything to avoid beginning.  And that's easily solved if we can just get on with it.  And sometimes the task is so repetitive, it takes all we have to get to the end of it - like marking 60 almost identical essays or tests.  We muscle through it to the end, sometimes rewarding ourselves with treats after every five papers to keep us alert and focused.

The Not-So-Awful Truth About Being Single

"If you're lonely when you're alone, you're in bad company."  Jean-Paul Sartre

In yesterday's Globe & Mail, Margaret Wente claims that people can get to a much greater depth of understanding and "perfection" of self through a married relationship than they can possibly do if they remain single.

"...the road to self-actualization isn't through perfection of the independent self, but through imperfect, messy, long-term relationships.  Everybody needs someone else to nurture, and someone to stand up for them, and someone to plan the future with, and someone with whom they share a past."  

Wente stumbles into one of the most annoyingly common false dichotomies surrounding this issue:  either you're married or you're alone.  And she continues that single people are lonely implying, of course, that loneliness never ventures into a marriage, that it's solely a quality of aloneness.  I've never been married, yet I know too well the messiness of relationships with myriad friends and colleagues whom I nurture, stand up for, and with whom I share a past.  We don't plan a future together in the same "until death" way that some married people manage, but that shared future in marriage is often illusory.  The future is unknowable.  Shit happens, and happily married people can still end up on their own.  

On Aggression: About Those Shootings

While a tragedy, of course, statistically we're still doing really well compared to others compared by geography or time.  It's frightening when violence strikes so close, but we're still living in a relatively very safe time and place.  BUT, if we want to ensure it stays that way, we feel we have to do something even if it's only to be productive in the face of adversity.  But can we actually create a society where people aren't violent with one another?

Last Wednesday, Margaret Wente suggested that all this gun violence is largely because of single-parent homes: "The evidence is plain that children born to unmarried women – of whatever race – do much worse than children with two married parents."  As a single mom, I'm dubious.

An Impressive Stupidity: On Sartre and Syria

I don't have a background in English literature, yet I just spent a semester teaching it - poorly.  And it struck me why I love philosophy and hated English.  During my semester I had many instances of doubt in my understanding of certain texts, and I didn't hesitate to ask colleagues for help.  The palm-to-forehead reactions at my ignorance was a set-back. It was insisted that either I DO understand it - surely I must by this point- but somehow I just don't recognize that understanding, or I should ignore this line of questioning completely and focus on the issues in the plot-line.  And I realized that if in studying English I suggest that I don't really grasp the symbolism or the connections in a simpler Shakespearian comedy, it's embarrassing, but if in studying philosophy I'm not entirely solid on Sartre's phenomenology, it's a much more impressive stupidity.  And because of that, I think, we're more free to discuss it at length and really get to the bottom of some understanding of it allowing for the possibility that we might not entirely understand - or I might not.