Wilber, You Procrustean Nut, Lay Off the Graphs for a Minute, Will Ya?

I’m really spiritual. I mean, really. Like I started meditating when I was seventeen, and did a whole slew of retreats by the time I graduated college. And then moved to a Zen monastery and lived there for years. And then went to India and Nepal and got blessed by some really important lamas. I have a spiritual wife. I have spiritual friends. I meditate morning, noon and night. Truth told, and I’ll tell you, I’m so spiritual sometimes I just about dissolve in the radiating bliss that we all inherently are without even a thought for my mortgage.

So why do I hate Ken Wilber?

Maybe it’s history. Wilber and I go way back to 2001, when I was a 23 year old spiritual neophyte and ready sycophant. I read Sex, Ecology, and Spirituality, widely considered to be the man’s magnum opus (though his ideas have since developed), in a fit of worshipful elevation. I read it on planes, buses, and the tent I was pitching around Hawaii at the time. I underlined and highlighted the prose into oblivion, then bought a second copy and started highlighting that.

In the next years I plowed through a number of Wilber’s other tomes, mostly restatements of the ideas in SES, and earlier seeds of that work. Simultaneously I began my own textual study of but one of his many influences: Mahayana Buddhism. And, over a period of several months in 2004, while living at the above-mentioned Zen monastery, the house of cards came crashing.

In essence: If Wilber could get Nagarjuna and the Madyamaka school so utterly wrong, if he could more or less portray Nagarjuna’s philosophy of no-position as a kind of essentialist idealism equivalent in scope to Advaita Vedanta, what else could he misuse, mistake, and misappropriate?

As it turns out, quite a lot. Wilber is, at heart, a synthesizer. He is a lover of ideas, and he wants the greatest ideas the world has ever known to all fit together in a neat series of perfectly interlocking little boxes. He is the Lego master of contemporary philosophy. The problem: if you read Piaget carefully it’s hard to believe he leads to Habermas. If you read Habermas carefully it’s hard to believe he leads to Zen. Whitehead and Sri Aurobindo, in fact, have nothing to do with each other.

So, what Wilber attempts to weld together with a bunch of really impressive charts and graphs and diagrams and psychospiritual grids actually falls to pieces the moment you enter any one of the little Lego blocks. In fact, every one of those Lego blocks is its own world, a world of richly complex epistemologies, contextualized and undergirded by its time, place, and purposes.

One might think at this point: “Thank you for this incisive critique of a philosopher that no one in professional philosophy actually takes seriously, but what does any of this have to do with psychology?”

What, indeed. I wouldn’t bring up Ken Wilber at all, except that he continues to lead the cutting edge (or fringe) of Transpersonal Psychology, a field that I should like much better than I do, since it has to do with meditation and the interpretation of altered states and traits of consciousness.

In fact, despite his attempts to frame his own work outside and above the murmuring hubbub of the Transpersonal field, Wilber is still the most quoted theorist of this amorphous and conflicted attempt at a contemporary spiritual psychology. And, in fact, one of my favorite professors sketched out one of the favored Wilberian hierarchies on the chalkboard at the end of this last term, seeming to imply that words like uroboric or pleromatic might somehow apply to something relevant to our actual experience.

And maybe they do. Maybe they do. But I am here to tell you, Dear Readers, that I will have nothing to do with Ken Wilber and his weird hyper-cerebral maps, his shrill claims of superiority, his uber-masculinist hierarchies, his funny knighting of questionable spiritual figures, his culty Integral Community, his abysmal lack of proper citations, or his impressive physique.

No, instead, I will have a cup of tea, and post this blog, and try to find some decent live music on this Saturday night in my quaint little adopted home of Ashland, Oregon. So Good night. And good luck.

Carl Rogers for President

Person-Centered psychotherapy rests on three simple constructs: Unconditional Positive Regard, Congruence, and Empathy.

And that’s it. Those are the necessary and sufficient conditions for therapeutic change.

The mind rebels (the cognitive behaviorists rebel). Surely there must be more to it! What about reality checking, questioning, focusing, mutual goal setting, confrontations and influencing techniques of all kinds?

In response, Carl Rogers offers one of the most influential and powerful ideas in the history of psychotherapeutic theory: The Relationship Heals.

The relationship heals. Anything that interferes with or complicates the relationship slows down the healing. The relationship heals because the client, every client, wants to heal. Human beings, Rogers tells us, are, in fact, good, constructive, and trustworthy.

This is not to say they don’t do atrocious things. Rogers was no stranger to violent offenders. He worked with all kinds. More than that, he opened his heart, and he opened it wide, to all kinds.

So, if we’re actually good, what makes us bad?

Think of a plant. A plant with proper soil, sunlight, and water grows strong. It exhibits an inherent vitality and coherence. It’s beautiful. A plant in bad soil, with inconsistent light and inadequate water, looks sad and tangled, deflated, bent.

So too with the person. The person who finds herself in adequate conditions flourishes, she “actualizes.” When conditions are bad – when her actualization process is interrupted by a paucity of love and support, or explicitly challenged by damaging cultural norms – the mind splits. She loses contact with that inner compass which would make her – which is – bright and whole. She gets depressed or blows up city hall.

Psychotherapy, then, is the process of putting the person back in touch with himself. The therapist simply stays present with the client, fully present and attentive, with warmth and genuineness. The therapist repeats back what he hears in paraphrases; he reflects feelings. Through that resurrective process the client comes to find what is true for him. He becomes a whole person in the world, a person who cares deeply for himself and for others. He connects.

I love this vision. And I love Carl Rogers. Where many psychologists share ideas, Rogers shared himself. His writing is as much a manifestation of a human heart as a brilliant mind. And he did great research. He was the first to record sessions, study transcripts, and examine what really worked for clients, and what didn’t.

So I say, Carl Rogers for President! Elect Carl Rogers! Short of that, work from the heart, share yourself, be true, and love the world. Amen. Over and out.

P.S. To see a beautiful example of Carl Rogers in action, click here.

C.G. Jung: Beautiful Weirdo

Carl Gustav Jung was weird. He spent 20 years building a tower to nowhere, he painted his dreams, he thought long and deeply about alchemy, witchcraft, and UFOs. Though he wrote millions of words in his decades long career, the bulk of his thinking came down to images and impressions which became increasingly difficult for him to describe.

His contributions? The “complex,” a widespread idea in contemporary psychology, is Jung’s construct. He also laid the groundwork for the Myers-Briggs, a version of which I had to take recently when applying to a grocery store (yes, I applied for a job at a grocery store), inspired Bill W. and Alcoholics Anonymous, and gave us the word association test, in which I say a word and you say the first thing that comes to mind. He also, perhaps unfortunately, set the stage for a whole host of shabby New Age thinking with his ideas of synchronicity, transcendence, and the collective unconscious.

So who was this guy? And what did he actually say?

He said a lot. He wrote a lot. He was big, in every sense of the word: tall, loud, affable, rude, an inspired maverick, and for at least six years during the first World War, very close to really pretty crazy. Those six years marked a turning point for Jung, as they marked a turning point for the western world. One might argue the two histories are linked.

The good doctor had just broken with his friend and mentor, Sigmund Freud, and was descending into a creative madness, a hallucinogenic soup that would set the stage for his next five decades of work and life. Europe was sliding into the bloodiest war in its long history of wars, one that wouldn’t, for all intents and purposes, end until a quarter century later with the detonation of two atom bombs in the heavily populated islands of an Asian theocracy.

Out of this six year psychic archeology, this “confrontation with the unconscious,” Jung constructed a loosely patched net of theories about how we are as humans, and what it means. Unlike Freud’s sexual reductionism, Jung saw the human psyche as grand and terrifying, filled with thousands of lifetimes of built in and built up experiences, passed down father to son and mother to daughter, tribal generation to tribal generation, through the ages of famine, sickness, war, birth, death, love, marriage, infidelity, harvests and hunts, predators and prey.

These predispositions, these unacknowledged histories, Jung called “archetypes.” The archetypes reside out of reach of the conscious mind, even below what Jung considered the personal unconscious (that bantam cupboard in which we store our own experiences), in a vast ocean of shared sentiment he named the “collective unconscious.”

The collective unconscious, according to Jung, is off limits, unknowable. It’s like a locked basement. One can never directly access its contents. Nevertheless, the archetypes, though hidden, exert power over each of us. They are, in effect, universally shared ways of perceiving, interpreting, and sculpting meaning out of the flux of phenomena.

And what are the archetypes? There are hundreds, but just to name a few: the child, the victim, the alchemist, the avenger, the sleuth, the goddess, the adventurer. Pick up a comic book and you’ll find Jungian themes on every page.

But I must conclude. This is a blog, after all, and there are limits to what one might say in 700 words.

Therefore, I say Jung was weird. But I say he was only as weird as the depths of the human mind. While there are problems with his idea of the collective unconscious (where exactly is

it?) and syncronicity probably doesn’t stand up to a thorough statistical analysis, I must confess an affinity for Jung because he went beyond the bounds of the rational; he stepped outside of the everyday machinations of the tidy Swiss suburb where he raised his family and earned his living: he plunged, like Nietzsche, like Kierkegaard, yes, like Freud too, to the very limits of meaning; he walked out the side door of the workaday world, and stood up and stared into the face of the mystery.

A bold life, Dr Jung. And well played.

(note: the first image on this blog post is what came up when I searched: Jung Photo. I couldn't resist.)

Freud Was Such a Jerk

Actually, Freud wasn’t a jerk. I’m just practicing snark. I hear that snark is an essential component of the blogosphere, a reputable tool of discourse in these environs. And, really, Freud wasn’t not a jerk. He did, after all, excommunicate Adler and Jung and any number of other iconoclasts and dissenters from the holy halls of psychoanalysis. He did avidly prescribe cocaine to unsuspecting patients. And he did have a weirdly cultish relationship to his theory of infant sexuality.

But a jerk? No, that’s too simple. A genius, yes. A jerk, certainly not.

So, in 500 words or less, what was Sigmund Freud really about? As a person, it’s safe to say that he was about work. Work and his family. And not much else. Freud worked incessantly, often seeing ten patients a day before settling into his desk to write and rewrite the books that, at least for the first twenty years of his career, almost nobody read. He worked on weekends, he worked on holidays, and he looked forward most to his summers in the mountains outside of Vienna -- because it would allow him uninterrupted time for his work.

It seems Freud was, however, a good husband and a caring father. For all the flack he caught during his lifetime (he was incessantly accused of fracturing the foundations of society), he loved his children, adored his wife, and rarely missed the daily family dinner. He was, perhaps strangely, the quintessence of bourgeois values: dedicated, doting, a career man and a good citizen.

But what of those wild theories? The oedipal complex. Penis envy. Infant sexuality. All that seething psychic dynamism and unconscious conflict? It’s an odd irony that the theories Freud held most dear are those which have least stood the test of time and research.

Still, anyone who speaks English (or German, or French, etc) these days speaks the language of Freud. Yesterday I walked past a couple of women wearing long dresses and feathers in their hair just as one said to the other, “But you’re projecting, Patty, I’m not jealous of Michelle at all.”

That may be a disgraceful misuse of the terminology, but it’s still Freud. Projection, as Freud defined it, is a defense mechanism. It’s what we do with our own bad habits when those bad habits are too nasty to acknowledge. Or, in psychoanalytic terminology, it’s one of the fun little tricks we employ to ward off the conflict stirred up by a wildly demanding id and a shrilly schoolmarmish superego.

Others of this ilk are denial (the bald refusal to acknowledge what’s happening), repression (the act of keeping painful memories out of conscious awareness), and intellectualization and rationalization (forms of distancing oneself from painful situations or behavior).

These phrases, and with them the fabric of a worldview, have become so intrinsic to the way we speak and think that we rarely stop to consider the fact that they were invented by an Austrian Jewish doctor about a hundred years ago.

So, let’s raise a glass to Sigmund Freud!

What would we do if we couldn’t accuse our girlfriends of projection? What kind of life would this be without the handy construct of unconscious motivations? I for one am glad to know that my fourth grade teacher was anal retentive and that if I free associate long enough, some very strange transference will occur in relation to my libido . . .

And that’s all thanks to Herr Doctor Sigmund Freud.

References:
Freud: A Life For Our Time, Peter Gay
About.com
Wikipedia

Welcome.

This is a blog. It is a blog, or it will be. And when it becomes a blog, which it will soon enough, it will be a blog about Psychology. And Counseling. Counseling and Psychology, and the various theories, techniques, innuendos and insider mojo that make up the field.

I'll be talking about Freud in this blog. And Jung too. Adler, perhaps. Maybe even Fritz Perls and Carl Rogers if I make it that far.

But mostly, since this is a blog, and the attention span of its reader will average approximately 3.7 seconds (did you know that 86% of statistics are made up on the spot?), I will keep it short and snappy, and tell you what I happen to think about Freud and Jung and Adler perhaps and maybe even Fritz Perls and Carl Rogers if I make it that far.

In essence, this blog will track my progress through the wilds of a Master's in Mental Health Counseling at Southern Oregon University in Ashland, Oregon, my new hometown. Along the way we'll likely encounter some good ideas and some bad ones, and I'll likely get excited about some things and annoyed at others.

You, my faithful readers, who will number perhaps even eleven including my mom once I've built my empire, will enjoy exclusive access to this process, this progress, yes, I will say it: this journey.

Bon Voyage. And Bon Chance.