Coercion, Conformity, Compulsion: Thoughts on 'Liberation' and the Grief of Learning to be Human

 Today my therapist told me that I seemed to feel disempowered or stuck, or something, in my life. "Where is your freedom?" or some similar question was asked. I became visibly frustrated with the word freedom. 

I told her that I rarely use the word freedom. I don't talk much about liberation. I generally agree with what these words point to: the easing of  coercion and violence; the abolition of oppressive structures'; the reorganization of society. Yet I resist the language of freedom and liberation. 

I am reminded of an paraphrase Maggie Nelson in The Argonauts: 'most worthwhile pleasures fall somewhere in between helping ourselves and helping another.'

Much of the complexity I am trying to work through is implicated in that concise phrase.

I don't know what it would mean to be free or to be liberated because I don't know what it would mean to not be connected to others and thereby obligated to others.

I do not lament obligation. I think that the question is owing the right people the right things. 

Liberation, of course, doesn't imply complete dissolution of responsibility, relation, dependence, and obligation. These things are centrally human. They cannot be done away with without some consequence. 

I have often explored these questions around liberation in the language of 'roles', and how all of human life is structured by formal and informal roles. We play many roles throughout our lives. My grandmother's memoir that I was recently reading indeed begins with her listing all the roles she has occupied in her life. 

Roles are inherently normative, they imply rules and standards of evaluation. Oppression, the opposite of liberation, has something to do with the roles that are available in a society, how people are 'cast' in the different projects that constitute society. 

 

Liberation would probably have something to do with roles in society being more equitable, not the dissolution of roles as such. Our society is certainly too complex for the roles to just dissolve; the famines would be awful if there were no truck drivers or boat operators or grocery store employees. So the goal is the reorganization of role structures, or the division of labor, and not the dissolution of role structure as such. I am ignorant of anarchist theory, but I think I've heard that anarchism retains a place for roles, for the division of labor and cooperation. These exchanges and relationships are just freed from illegitimate hierarchy.  

The really difficult question really is that of hierarchy, of leadership. 

I want to find a way around or through these difficulties with the notion of liberation, and I want to do so by writing through three words: Coercion, Conformity, and Compulsion. It's not clear to me precisely how these words blend together, but it is clear to me that they do. In sussing out their overlap I hope to move from a negative to a positive understanding of roles and more complex understanding of what liberation would mean given that roles will persist.

 

Talking about roles is a way of talking about our needfulness, our lack of self-sufficiency, our necessary dependence on others around us. No human being can really live alone, totally apart from others. Because we are needful, necessarily social or political, we must take on roles. The notion of 'role', moreover, extends to any complex whole of parts. We thus speak of the 'role' of the drums in a song, the 'role' of those eggs in this recipe, or the role of a sentence in a paragraph. In each case we point towards a whole of parts, an interconnected and interdependent whole.

Humans are complex. We take on roles within ourselves (the role of anger, the role of my anxiety...); we take on roles for those around us; and there is a relationship between these intrapsychic and interpersonal roles. 

Coercion

 To speak of coercion is to speak of violence. To coerce is to induce or 'persuade' someone to do something through force or threat of force. Our society is rife with various forms of coercion. Economic exploitation is probably the most pervasive form of coercion in America, so much so that large swaths of the population don't really talk about it, or would defend it. I acquired but have not read Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations, a foundational book in economic theory. Smith, I have heard, regarded the fear of destitution as an important motivator in individual's participation in the market. It is reminiscent of Hobbes' state of nature in which life is nasty, brutish, and short.

So, coercion can be quite explicit, as when someone pressures someone to do something. Or, coercion can be quite diffuse, spread out in a network of assumptions, practices, and institutions. Capitalism functions certainly based on endemic and silent forms of coercion.

Conformity

The basic object or goal of coercion is 'conformity' in some sense. In individual cases we see someone pressuring someone else to 'conform' to their standards, expectations, or practices (i.e. someone who doesn't normally smoke accepts a cigarette after being pressured, conforming in that moment). Similarly, the background coercion of capitalism asks for conformity; for us to be a certain way, think certain ways, speak certain ways (which is to say the same thing three different ways). 

 

Conformity is peculiar or difficult because we also like a sense of belonging. Belonging may involve a similarity in opinions, appearances, or practices. But belonging is qualitatively different from conformity. The former would be 'authentic' or natural or organic or something like this; the latter 'inauthentic', false, fake, or something. 

What, then, does it mean to be authentic, natural, or organic?

It seems that he human being is by nature pretty conflicted, divided, confused, discordant.

I think that being authentic or natural has something to do with compulsion.

Compulsion

Compulsion is a peculiar concept in that it initially seems to bear a strong resemblance to conformity or coercion. We can imagine saying, for example, that 'that person compelled them to give them their money.' To compel, to be placed under 'compulsion', could mean to be coerced or made to conform.

Compulsion, however, also has other uses that reveal different aspects of the experience. We also speak, for example, of how a person, piece of art, or idea is compelling. To find something compelling is to find it interesting, exciting, and demanding of our attention. There is something in a person/text/idea that we respond to, or something in us that responds to it. It seems that both 'compelling' and 'compulsion' (obviously) share a common Latin root compellere a combination of com (together) and pellere (drive). To find something compelling or to be placed under compulsion both have something to do with things being 'driven together'. Curious. I'm not entirely sure what to make of the etymology as I was just looking into it as I was writing this.

This divergence between the meanings of compulsion and compelling is telling about human experience. It should help us see that some of the most important parts of life, are bound up with a peculiar kind of necessity and a peculiar kind of power(lessness). Aspects of life like love, deep thought, or creativity all possess a type of necessity in which a person, an idea, or a project is compelling, it simply appears to us as such, we find it beautiful. There is much choice involved in how we pursue a love, an idea, or a project. Analysis, reflection, and time often change what we once thought beautiful or worthwhile. But what strikes us as beautiful enough to be worthwhile possesses a strange sort of necessity. It simply is so for us. 

In acknowledging this peculiar necessity I am also implying a type of power(lessness). I put it with those awkward parentheses because I'm trying to convey the peculiar way in which this sort of necessity at first glance appears as weakness, as a fault or flaw, but turns out, on deeper reflection, to be the source of properly human strength and stability. 

 

I am thus formulating and arguing for something like the freedom to be compelled or freedom as the freedom to discern which compulsions are actually worthwhile. I am reminded of C.S. Lewis in The Abolition of Man in which he well summarizes the essential task of ancient Greek ethics as 'to learn to want what one ought to want.' We will most likely not be free from desire. Thus it is important to develop desire, actively participate in the coming of desires, and understand why we desire what we desire.

This view of freedom can be contrasted with images of freedom that imply a detached manipulator or observer. It often seems to me that I encounter people talking about choices or experiences as if they should somehow have been living from a detached, rational perspective. We all know what it is like to look back and find our actions befuddling. It can be easy for us to scold ourselves, perhaps, say 'You should have done such and such...' The internet is awash with jokes about people anxiously rehearsing interactions or conflicts in the shower and beyond. This type of scolding is wrapped up with spurious views of freedom in which we suppose we should be god-like, manipulative, masterful, or the like. This type of freedom, I think, can also be associated with capriciousness, the ability to do whatever you want whenever you want, to shirk all attachments and responsibilities and to set out into some sort of fictional self-sufficiency.

This type of spurious view of freedom isn't what I sense in leftist or liberal accounts of 'liberation'. This spurious view of freedom appears more in something like Ayn Rand, or other far right circles. I think that what I've said so far, about the strange compulsory quality of important parts of our lives, should raise questions about the meaning of liberation. If some of our deepest qualities as humans involve compulsion, obligations, 'debts' (in our sense here), then what would it mean to be liberated? 

When I look at situations in which I or someone else doesn't understand 'what I was thinking', or I'm talking to someone who is upset with themselves, I get really curious about what in that situation was so compelling. We are not 'simply rational' and we should not expect ourselves to be. We have to accept that situations have structures independent of us. These structures are partly physical, like roads, buildings and tools, but also partly symbolic, made up of our bodily habits and processes, and the words and symbols we use to develop those processes throughout the day.We live in intimate relationship with these situational structures, and our body is intimately familiar with how they work (just talk to someone who struggles to pee in public, the body understands the situation).

It is unimaginable to me that we would be without relationships, networks, always blending coercion and compulsion (in our proper sense). The goal of a society would be to limit the coercion, and to place more people in positions of being able to pursue what they find compelling. This is perhaps just some 'aptitudes' psychological theory or something. But I think I'm talking about something quite different.

To accept this view of freedom as developing compulsions is painful. It is to accept that there are very real limits to human happiness and autonomy. It is to accept that happiness and autonomy are not simply identical. Obligation, intimacy, involvement, and intertwinement all loom large in all human lives. I am aware, after the fact, that my last sentence contains a highly relevant pun. I speak of us as intertwined, an image of threads. And I speak of how this question looms. I don't understand why that word means both of those things for us, i.e. a thing that weaves and a thing that waits ominously. 

I think it is easy to take refuge in images of freedom that promise 'liberation' from obligation or responsibility. To become deeply familiar with freedom as a type of compulsion one has to grieve, has to come to terms with the limits of this process we are all going through (living). I, at least, have had significant grieving to do to reckon with what I have learned as I've grown up. There is so much pain in the world and in my family line and in my own life, it was often overwhelming and too much to really look at. It still is sometimes. But I also have a deeply intimate relationship with all that pain and difficulty and really see it as a place to honor and live from. 

 

So I am pointing to a concept of liberation that makes room for all of these compelling qualities about human life. We are not free to choose our loves, and we are not free to deny the compelling quality of an idea or project. We are free to sense into the intricacies and complexities of the situations we are living in and through.

I suppose my model for this type of freedom is a strange fusion of two important thinkers for me: R.G. Collingwood and Eugene Gendlin. 

Collingwood speaks of the highest form of freedom as 'duty'. By duty Collingwood means something like what I've described above: acknowledging that the most important experiences are accompanied by a strange form of necessity in which we find things 'compelling' or not. Collingwood knows that situations have these structures, and believes that freedom is a practice of 'consulting the situation', trying as hard as possible to understand what situation we are in. Real thorough understanding of a situation, and one's self in that situation, generally comes along with a sense of what 'one has to do'. Thus Collingwood says that duty implies a tautological formulation: 'this is what I have to do because this is what I have to do.' 

Much of my writing above, I confess, reeks of my learning from Collingwood, who I read incessantly in the early 2010s. He speaks often and forcefully of the compulsory quality of thinking, the compulsory quality of really 'dutiful' action.

Eugene Gendlin, by contrast, is a profound philosopher who developed an embodied therapeutic-philosophical practice known as 'focusing'. I am currently being trained as a focusing-oriented psychotherapist, and recently had a paper on Gendlin accepted for publication. 

Focusing is a process whereby one engages in a quasi-meditative awareness of one's body. One will generally, with a companion or alone, sit down and bring their awareness into their body. Instead of staying in a meditative posture, however, one sort of gently inquires 'How am I doing? What am I really living with here in my body?' When one learns focusing one learns that the body will actually answer such questions in quite peculiar, detailed, and precise ways. 

It is important to note that in attending carefully to one's 'body' I do not just mean the physical body, for the body is not merely a machine. The body is also the situational body, aware of what room or space we are in, what day and time it generally is, and what we are up to. Our bodies are attuned to all of this and more that isn't or doesn't need to be in explicit awareness. So in going into 'the body' in focusing one is going into 'all of that' understanding of the situation that the body has. 

The essential concept of focusing is that of a 'felt sense'. When one goes into one's body and 'senses' into a certain situation or problem, one may encounter a peculiar 'felt sense' of a situation; some murky sense of 'something about that interaction...'. This may be a familiar experience. Can you recall a situation or relationship that was particularly difficult or striking, so much so that its hard to put exactly into words what the feel of it is? A felt sense is our 'bodily', funny feeling about 'what happened' or 'what that was'. 

Gendlin says a felt sense has 8 characteristics:

1. A felt sense forms at the border zone between conscious and unconscious.
2. The felt sense has at first only an unclear quality (although unique and unmistakable).
3. The felt sense is experienced bodily.
4. The felt sense is experienced as a whole, a single datum that is internally complex.
5. The felt sense moves through steps; it shifts and opens step by step.
6. A step brings one closer to being that self which is not any content.
7. The process step has its own growth direction.
8. Theoretical explanations of a step can be devised only retrospectively.

The process of focusing is about going back and forth between a felt sense of a situation and explicit formulation or symbol. So I may sit and attend to my body and invite my sense of 'that whole thing with my old friends and video games'. Immediately I can feel my body respond to my invitation to that situation. 

 

So I actually closed my eyes and took a few deep breathes and started paying attention to my body. I noticed how loud the clock ticks behind me sometimes, which I can barely notice now as I'm typing again. As I kept breathing and noticing my body I thought to myself 'What is it with that whole thing with friends and video games?'. I experienced a little sensation in my chest that quickly turned into an image of something strange, like a neck stretching up and down and twisting. I was curious and I thought to myself 'is this choking or something?' When that happened I got clearer about the image and I realized it was actually like a creature stretching to bite something and defend itself, and that it was actually sad when it went back from having to bite and defend. I sensed that for a moment and then it shifted again and got more detail and I was left with an image of a hedgehog in a hole in the ground that was like a little house with a wood floor and a little kitchen and chair and tv. And the hedgehog likes playing video games but every now and then has to go to his door to keep some foes from getting in, which he does not like to do. Especially because those same intruders are later just fellow hedgehogs to hang out with.

I felt all of this as interesting and enjoyable and kind of a relief. It was nice to sense into the situation and have these images come up and realize that they are actually communicating something to me. It's nice to know that this is really about feeling bad about having conflict with friends. My 'body' had responded to my inquiry once I had taken a moment to settle into it and really be there with my full awareness. 

You can also see how my process reflects aspects of the felt sense named by Gendlin. Border-zone, this was a situation where yeah, I sorta know sorta didn't how I was 'really' feeling about it (1). It presented itself to me as an unclear bodily felt whole (2, 3, 4), and steps emerged from it (5). Those steps took me in a direction where I could witness the process more clearly as opposed to the content (6), and it took me in a direction of having more understanding of my own sadness and my friend's difficulties (7). Lastly, after that process I'm able to formulate the situation differently in more theoretical concepts (8): 'Oh okay I'm sad because it hurts to have to fight back against one's friend because later you'll want to be close again'. The crucial point is that it wouldn't have been as impactful to simply deliver that theoretical formulation to me from the outset. In some ways that theoretical formulation is in some ways obvious. But what matters is that I went through those experiential, embodied steps to get there. We all know that it is really hard to persuade someone of something simply rationally. Therapists don't, and should not, simply tell someone what is wrong and what they should do. A therapist facilitates someone else's process, always by providing a safe non-judgemental environment, and sometimes through fancier things like focusing, emdr, mindfulness, or what have you.

The most important feature to highlight about focusing and the felt sense for my purposes is that it is experienced as compelling. A felt sense, Gendlin often says is 'exacting', 'demanding', 'precise', or 'intricately ordered'. Gendlin often uses the image of a poet who is trying to finish a poem. The lines written so far have a 'feel', a quality, and the poet has a felt sense of 'all that'. The felt sense of the lines 'implies' which line is next. The poet tries a line and can sense that the line does not fit. The felt sense is responsive in that it responds to our explicit or symbolic formulations. It will tell us what words are just right. You don't have to be a poet to experience this, nor even learn focusing. But being a poet or learning focusing hone precisely this capacity for engaging in refined or higher forms of compulsion.

So, to put Collingwood and Gendllin would be to claim that when one wants to act dutifully, one wants to act from full embodied awareness of the situation, or handle situations in a 'focusing' or felt sense oriented manner. 

This would mean really pausing and sensing into your deeper sense of things, not settling at immediate reactions. Immediate reactions are generally overly logical, conventional, or rigid. It is so easy to just be on autopilot, reactive mode, saying yes to this and no to that, shutting down this conversation and indulging that one. Duty, responsible and relational action, would involve pausing, slowing down, sensing into the intricacy of the situation as one experiences it in their body, and really trying to be precise about how they want to meet the situation.

 

Duty and felt sensing is compelling. This is a peculiar form of freedom in that it is the freedom to listen carefully to what one is sensing. What precisely is the role of rational thought is an absolutely burning question that I must bracket. For I believe there is a role for formal systems, rules, roles, so on. But I don't have space here. 

This notion of duty, or being intimate with situational intricacy, to me, is the closest I can come to understanding the meaning of liberation. To be liberated would not mean to be capricious, or 'simply' free of obligation, whatever that would even mean. We find that the spurious obligations of our society (boys have to...) can be transcended and subsumed by a higher form of obligation, one's obligation to our deeper sense of things, the real source of sources of understanding.

I want to close with another brief note about the grief of this all.

To 'be intimate with situational intricacy' is difficult, I think, because all intimacy contains an acknowledgement of separateness and weakness. I have been sitting with some sense that intimacy and love have so much to do with death and grief. To be intimate with another person is to be in such deep relation to mortality. It seems like such a pleasure to be able to be intimate and vulnerable with another person. But it also seems like there is a peculiar question that rises, which is can we tolerate how frail and strange and vulnerable human life can really be? I feel tremendous grief in asking that question, a tremendous difficulty in acknowledging how much intimacy and comfort matters, and how hard it is to be in need of others so deeply.

To  be liberated, for me, is to grieve a certain sense of freedom and independence that I don't think really exists. To be liberated is to be in relation to others and myself in a way that allows something deeper in me to show its continuity in public. Our society is not liberated because so many people experience so much violence, are forced into positions in which their deeper processes are not actualized, in which life is spent in fear and survival alone.

To ensure or promote other people's deeper processes is to address the material conditions of people's lives, i.e. their housing, their healthcare, their ability to access resources, proximity to family and friends, their conditions of labor, so on. 

The most therapeutic thing that could happen in this country would be a genuine revival of support for a decked out welfare state. This would mean overcoming the legacy of the cold war that has skewed the country so far right. 

And then I run into the problem that I seem to keep running into, and that I won't be pursuing: the nature of political process differs from these intricate processes of felt sensing, of dutiful activity.

Gendlin puts it well when he says that politician really only work with the 'cut up options', the flat as opposed to intricate concepts. Collingwood would say they've not yet discovered duty and are stuck in 'regularian' thinking. 

I have tried to point at some concept of liberation that would also be a form of grief. It would involve recognizing the pervasive role of coercion in human experience, and attempting to become a 'compelled' person as opposed to a coerced person. People don't generally choose to be coerced, and would of course want to pursue what is genuinely compelling. Addressing this question, how conditions can be established so that people are coerced less and compelled more, seems like where I'm going.

Patterning Time: Individuals, Ancestors, and History, or On the Movement from the Implying of Artifacts to the Implying of Institutions - Section 1

 I recently had a paper published in a journal called Human Arenas. The paper is called "The early modern attack on teleology and the politics of contemporary psychology: Intellectual roots of current dilemmas." Feel free to contact me if you'd like to read it.

I have several other academic papers I am working on but frankly grow weary of the deep stylistic constraints. I want to write something else these days, poetry, more relaxed whatever. Below is 'Section 1' of a new project on time, experience, artifacts, ancestors, and institutions. It has already started to get weirder than I anticipated. I have two other projected sections where I will get deeper into questions first around ancestors and artifacts, and second around institutions and our modern concept of 'history'. The main idea I'm exploring is this: the modern experience of time is highly chaotic, out of step with natural rhythms, vexed by distress and 'pathology' (which are particular distortions of time). This chaotic experience of time has some connection to the role of artifacts in our individual and collective lives. Earlier and smaller human communities would have had a very different relationship with artifacts and the way they patterned time, preserved tradition and connection. Rather than artifacts, in this more proper sense, we deal with commodities. Artifacts imply a temporal containment and order. Commodities imply processes too complex to derive from the commodity alone. Thus the commodity assumes a mysterious quality and our relationship to it is alienated. An artifact, more properly, implies its process, makes its origins and purposes known. A commodity implies opaquely, it does not announce its origins. Thus I am inquiring into the experience of time as a way to pursue these questions about artifacts, ancestors, institutions, and history.

 

Here is part 1: 

Patterning Time: Individuals, Ancestors, and History, or On the Movement from the Implying of Artifacts to the Implying of Institutions


Time is perhaps the constitutive aspect of experience. Its ubiquity means that it is easy to not notice it, and incredibly difficult to think clearly about it.

Here I am concerned with what it means to ‘pattern’ time: to give it rhythm, to regulate its passage, to make change less violent, more manageable. There are many ways to think about how to pattern time, and here I will explore several ‘scales’ or ‘levels’ on which time can be patterned: as individuals, as communities, and comprehensively. Individual time will be discussed in terms of music, breathing, and ‘mental health’. The patterning of communal time will hinge on the meaning of ancestors, artifacts, and rituals. The comprehensive patterning of time will concern the notion of history, and the desire to perceive order in the total unfolding of events.

To speak about time is to speak about movement and change. To speak about patterning time is to speak about orderly movement and change, as opposed to disorderly or chaotic movement and change.

These reflections strike me as more urgent as I go further into my time, or as I age. As I’ve aged I’ve become aware of the great violence that afflicted my ancestors, the chaotic and painful movements and changes suffered by those before me. I have been fortunate to approach their pain through a particularly deep psychedelic experience during the summer of 2021. It was my own pain that made me wonder about the pain of those that came before. As I’ve studied my own pain I’ve found their pain to be implied, and as I’ve studied them I’ve found my own pain to be implied. I live further what they lived; I am implied in their living.

I wish to heal, to ease the violence of the flow of time, for myself and for others.

I will, hopefully, trace a line from the patterning of time on an individual scale as it leads to more communal and historical perspectives. I regard this as a preliminary exercise into a larger project that will involve doing much historical work, such as going through the memoirs and books left by my own ancestors. The ultimate philosophical upshot concerns the way in which local artifacts, known in ancestral and traditional situations, become unmoored from their implying; they cease to become intimately known in places, and instead become commodities.



Patterning Individual Time: Meaning, Music, Breathing, ‘Mental Health’

Society is real, but it is still made up of individuals. Thus in order to understand the workings of this thing called society, and how society patterns time, we need to understand how individuals experience time, patterned and otherwise.

Individual experience can be understood in terms of the quality of how time passes. This follows from the fact that consciousness, experience, and time are nearly synonymous terms. To be conscious is to be aware of time, to be able to track change. To have ‘experience’ is to be engaged in an ongoing flow of occurings and happenings; things that happened, things that are happening, things that will happen. Thus Bergson’s Time and Free Will, Heidegger’s Being and Time, and Gendlin’s A Process Model all treat time, or process, as essential and constitutive aspects of time. I have seen Rob Parker, a psychologist who studied with Gendlin, say ‘we are time…’

Many of our most important experiences involve a certain pattern of time. The psychologist Guy Claxton, for example, discusses the way in which a human voice is only intelligible at certain tempos or rhythms. If you play a tape too fast a voice becomes screechy and unintelligible; the same tape slowed down would reveal a voice too deep and garbled to be comprehensible. Human speech is intelligible within precise temporal parameters; it is a particular rhythm, tempo, and cadence, and we cannot understand it unless these temporal conditions are met.

Social and interpersonal situations similarly are governed by a specific cadence, rhythm, or pattern of time. When greeting another person, for example, there is an acceptable rhythm to the exchange of “Hey, how are you?” “Pretty good, how about you?”. Too much of a delay and one may seem disengaged, uninterested, or not listening. Too quick of a response and one is interrupting, talking over, or overbearing. This is true both in the short-term and long-term. An interaction in a retail environment has a specific rhythm. A long-term relationship—with a partner, friend, or parent—has a different set of rhythms and landmarks. Thus we celebrate birthdays, anniversaries, and holidays, all ways of patterning time.

The quality of an experience—whether it is good or bad, better or worse—can also be understood in terms of the quality of time. A painful or unpleasant experience, for example, may feel temporally stretched out, long, exaggerated. We might say that a meeting or date dragged on, and note how 30 minutes felt like 2 hours. Similarly, it is commonplace to note how time moves quickly in pleasurable activity or good company. ‘Time flies…’ we say.

The notion of patterning time is especially relevant in the discussion of ‘mental health’ or human well-being. Indeed, part of my desire in writing about this topic is a larger project of developing non-pathological language for discussing human well-being or goodness. I don’t want to talk about ‘mental health’, as I believe the concept smuggles in a variety of untenable philosophical positions (i.e. that human distress is an issue of ‘pathology’). Pathologizing —diagnosis, medicalization, so on—is an important practical and theoretical issue in my life as a psychotherapist.

It is possible to discuss traditionally ‘pathological’ issues in terms of the experience or rhythm of time. Depression, for example, could be understood as often involving a slowed, thickened sense of time; the future may feel closed, the present inescapable, and the past overwhelming. The experience of ‘mania’, by contrast, could be understood as a radical opening of the future where anything becomes possible, thoughts race, time flies by and leaves no trace in memory. Or severe schizophrenia may involve complete disruption of lived time, leaving people with large stretches of time unremembered and unaccounted for. All of these experiences, moreover, are intensifications of tendencies present in all experience.

The claim thus arises: Any given human experience, perhaps experience in general, can be understood as unique temporal patterns or rhythms. Everything seems to be some kind of becoming; every being originates, develops, and perishes in time. To speak of experience in terms of time offers a significant challenge to the language of ‘mental health’. To speak of ‘mental health’ is to imply a medical understanding of distress. To medicalize distress is to confine the questions largely to the physical body (i.e. physicians). To medicalize is thus to focus on structure and thereby space as opposed to time. Medical professionals of course are interested in patient history, and there is plenty of work done on integrative medicine. But the basic framework of medicine—and especially psychiatry and some psychotherapy—is essentially physical and therefore spatial.

To take seriously the relationship between experience and time is thus ultimately a challenge to any sort of physicalist ontology. For if the pattern of time is truly integral to (identical with) experience, then there are processes at play that are otherwise than physical. Or, put differently, the relationship between experience and time shows that consciousness or life is genuinely causal in the world and not simply epiphenomenal of physical process.

The relationship between experience, time, and causality will now be made evident through an inquiry into artifacts. Artifacts, objects made or used by intelligent agents for purposes, will provide crucial information about the causal role of consciousness and its peculiar relationship to time. For the existence of artifacts presents us with evidence of a peculiar process whereby a living being regulates its relationship with time through the active appropriation of its environment. To understand artifacts, then, is to understand the possibility of a being that patterns time for itself, regulates its own experience. Because such an experience is fundamentally temporal it must be understood and explained temporally. If such a phenomenon exists and can be understood, then, fundamentally temporal processes must exist, excluding any possible reductive physicalist metaphysics.

In addition to these therapeutic and philosophical issues, there is also a personal-political dimension. My hope is that this inquiry will shed light on the particular forms of suffering that have afflicted me as well as my immediate and extended family members. I have often found life painful, and I remember finding it painful from a very young age. As I’ve aged, learned, and become a therapist I’ve learned a lot about trauma and intergenerational trauma. I believe that the pain I have experienced in my life is not just my own, but comes also in part from the suffering going back at least four generations. These, sadly, are the only generations I am aware of. But in those four generations there are a variety of displacements, emigrations, wars, illnesses, abuses, and troubles. Most, perhaps all, of what I know of them is thanks to the artifacts they left behind: the pictures and stories, the books and writings. Through those artifacts I have been able to pattern my experience of time, and bring some calm to what has often felt like chaos. Thus in asking after the relationship between time and well-being I am raising the question of ancestors, of generations, of graceful transitions in life and death..

A Note on the Core of my Project: Trauma, Social Welfare, and Social Domination

 It seems more and more obvious to me that one of the most profound implications of trauma research is that the language of 'mental health' needs to give way to the language of justice. Mental health assumes that problems are fundamentally in individuals: in your brain, in your behavior, in your genes, in your way of thinking. 

Trauma is not intelligible apart from a social-political context. The most severely 'mentally ill' in our society are the most consistently traumatized: women, people of color, trans and gender non-confirming folks. 

The writers who have made this most clear to me are Bessel van der Kolk, Resmaa Menakem, Judith Herman Lewis, Mark Fisher, and currently Gabor Mate. We have to stop talking about individual pathology and start making sense of the social determinants of human suffering. 

What stands in the way of recognizing these implications of trauma research? I answer: the fusion of governmental domination, behaviorally-medically oriented psychology, and a larger philosophy of scientific materialism.

Our current ruling paradigm, bio-medical-behavioral psychology, came to prominence in conjunction with the principle modern political institutions. Fisher and van der Kolk both write explicitly about this: psychopharmacology has triumphed. It is the most favored solution to 'mental health' issues, and it produces billions of dollars every year. The logic of psychopharmacology, in turn, depends on basic assumptions about the chemical-physical nature of life processes. I have been convinced that life processes have to be understood in their own right, and cannot be reduced (experientially or philosophically) to chemical-physical process.

I'm trying to understand more thoroughly the way that these various institutions came to constitute each other's legitimacy, how it is that bio-medically oriented psychology became so deeply intertwined with governmental institutions of domination, and how all of this is contingent upon philosophy that preaches the primacy of physical stuff, and the reducibility of experience.

The challenge I'm still sitting with is how to articulate this intertwining of political and philosophical dimensions.

But I'll say it again: Trauma, properly understood, poses fundamental challenges to how we understand the meaning of human distress, and how we understand nature in general and human nature in particular.

All this, I think, as the world seems to move closer to death on most fronts.

General Psychology, Cosmology, Anthropogenesis

 My reading pushes me deeper into the idea that 'general psychology' is not possible without an account of the cosmos, the origin of life, and the origin of human beings.

General psychology simply means the study of the 'psyche' in general. Every discipline has general and specific elements. Physicians study of general medicine before they begin specializing.Niels Engelsted's book Catching up with Aristotle helped me understand this question of general psychology more than any other recently.

Psychology, at least in America, lacks any coherent center, any coherent form of 'general psychology'. This means we have no accepted answer to the question 'What is the psyche?' Instead, we have a chaotic and often contradictory collection of sub-types of psychology: behavioral, cognitive, existential, humanistic, just to name the few closest to my concerns. 

The question of what the psyche is cannot be answered apart from more general questions about the world: what is the universe, how did it come to be, what does life have to do with cosmic process as a whole, and what is human life.

The various ways we answer the meaning of psyche, or psychology, contain implicit answers to cosmic and anthropogenic questions. Behaviorism and cognitive psychology, for example, imply a basically materialist view of the cosmos, and assume that life processes are generally reducible to physical processes. As Engelsted would say, they are basically forms of 'reactivity theory' in which the world is assumed to be basically predictable physical process. Existential psychology tends to bypass cosmic and anthropogenic questions and tacitly assent to materialist views of the cosmos. Human freedom arises not from nature, but from history. History is treated as a metaphysically unique realm in which choice and freedom are triumphant over deterministic physical process.

Humanistic psychology contains an alternative cosmology, and implies a different account of anthropogenesis. Carl Rogers believed the universe was not made of fundamentally non-living, predictable matter. He claimed that the whole thing shows a directionality, a movement towards order, complexity, and interrelatedness. Rogers called this the 'formative tendency' and he regarded it as the theoretical foundation for humanistic psychology. Rogers does not offer an anthrogenic account, but one is implied in his conception of the formative tendency.

I am currently reading Terrence Deacon's book Incomplete Nature. It takes up these questions at great depth, breadth, and length. 

I am hoping it will compliment my reading of Engelsted, as well as my growing interest in Soviet psychology, namely Alexi Leontiev's 'activity theory' (which I've only recently begun to study and reflect on). 

The most pressing clinical and political questions ultimately rely on the cosmological and anthrogenic ideas. The roots are deep, the links real. I worry that the clinical and political questions are hard to see in light of these deeper metaphysical questions. But the questions go all the way down.

What is the psyche? Is it the soul? Is it the mind? Is it behavior? Each of these answers implies comprehensive views of the world.

Living Therapeutically as the Reduction of Domination

Psychotherapy is something that a client may attend for 1, maybe 2 hours a week. But the goal of being in therapy is not to be in therapy. The goal of going to therapy is living therapeutically, living in a way that is healing, or, as I'll explore here, living in a way that reduces the domination of ourselves and others.

Human life is intensely bound up with domination. Our lives necessarily take place within society, and society is invariably organized around rules and roles: generic dictates that say do this, don't do that. Rules and roles are almost always hierarchical. Roles are generally co-ordinate, sub-ordinate, or super-ordinate. Two coworkers at a cafe or construction job work together, doing different tasks that are fundamentally on 'the same level'. There supervisor, however, stands 'above' them in the hierarchical organization of that situation. Their bosses role is super-ordinate (supervisor), while their role is sub-ordinate. 

This way of organizing—co-, sub-, and super-ordinate—gets replicated in our own psyches. We make certain 'parts' of us subservient to other parts. In some people anger, or their protector, has the most commanding role. In others shame may predominate. We all have a uniquely distorted community of emotions (forms) with a various hierarchical relationship. I have often avoided pain by giving my intellect a super-ordinate role: I have tried to rationalize and compartmentalize emotions, often not giving them due credit. Thanks to good therapy and other experiences I now have a more balanced hierarchy of emotions. Each part of me has a seat at the table. 

I used to dominate myself with my intellect, chastising my shame, inflaming my anger, and cursing the parts of me that feel small, afraid, and alienated.

I no longer dominate myself so badly. I, of course, still keep certain feelings in check. "I can't cry right now... I have to get to meeting my friend..." And so I 'tamp' down a part of me, I force it into a subordinate position.

 

Even our physical bodies seem to be organized hierarchically. When we are afraid our bodies stop digesting, stop exerting energy to socialize, and focus on the 'core processes' of surviving. Even our guts, our organs, are a community of forms that have their own relations with one another. One of the reasons breathing is such a common coping technique is that our breath is the only part of our autonomic nervous system we can control. In taking control of our breath, then, we place our lungs in a super-ordinate position over the rest of our organs, signalling we are safe to our kidneys, hearts, and brains in the only way we can.

We also have the opportunity to dominate others in big and small ways. Being rude to servers, commanding those who are economically obligated to help us, is one very common form of domination. But we also dominate others by tacitly reinforcing gender roles, racial stereotypes, or other social-political labels and hierarchies. These systems of domination are generally invisible, as they exist in a sort of symbolic-institutional matrix.

Learning to not dominate ourselves and others, learning to live therapeutically, means being able to make the invisible visible. We make the invisible visible through language, through phenomenology in the deep and genuine sense: by producing a logos that allows a phenomenon to be seen.

Learn to live therapeutically means articulating the invisible forms that govern the processes of our lives. In naming these invisible forms we reveal their hierarchical organization. In revealing the hierarchy of invisible forms we initiate the process of reorganizing them. If we reveal them in a kind and loving way (likely the only way), we invite them to reorganize themselves in a kinder and more loving way. The community of forms follows our lead, whatever this implicit 'I' is that is capable of love.

Symbol as the Birdnest of Humankind, and the Esoteric Text as Natural Artifact of Our Ambivalent Nature

I recently told my friend Eric about my developing thoughts on the relationship between life process and artificial structure.

Animals throughout nature seem to use tools, to take up and modify elements of their environment to elaborate and further their life processes. Otters and apes use stones to break open food; birds build nests to hold their young and attract their mates. Many forms of life find ways to 'use' things in ways they weren't 'intended' to be used. A blowfish's toxin is not meant to intoxicate a dolphin in a pleasurable way, but apparently dolphins have found a way to 'use' them in this way.

Human beings are apparently the most complex artificers, tool users, on this planet. We, too, make things in order to further or elaborate our life processes. Humans kill animals and wear their skins to keep warm; we create fabrics and materials to make slings to carry our young; we fashion instruments to cultivate and hunt food to eat. 

Eugene Gendlin's work on life process is absolutely decisive in my understandings here.

Perhaps the most notable human artifice is the symbol, or the separation of patterns from their instances. 😀 This smiley face, for example, is a symbol that is an abstraction from the life processes of the human body: the face that reveals the experiential processes of the organism. 

 

Symbols are crucial in our ability to organize ourselves socially and politically. When a group of people arrive at a camping site, for example, they may divide the necessary labor: you go get water, you go get the food started, I'll stay here and get the fire started. In that moment, each of these people acquires a symbolic role within the whole of that 'unit' of people, that 'society'. Roles are implicit in that moment: fire starter; water fetcher; cook.

 

A role is a peculiar form of symbolization whereby a particular person is made to fill a general role. The filling of roles is essential to human experience. We cannot be ourselves (particular, being) unless we also are something that we are not (generic role, non-being). I worked for many years as a barista, and currently as a psychotherapist. In one sense I 'was' a barista and 'am' a psychotherapist. In another sense I am neither of those things. Those roles are a symbolic artifice that I take on in order to further my life processes. 

 

It seems that human beings are the type of animal that cannot live without symbolically structuring itself. 

Because human life requires the occupation of roles, human life thereby requires sacrifice. I cannot be what I am apart from 'fitting' myself into the activity of the community. Therefore all of my potentials will not, cannot, be actualized. 

And this brings me to the point that I've been groping towards for many months or years now: the existence of esoteric texts, as uniquely human artifacts, is evidence of the type of animal that we are. We are a political animal, which also means we are a sacrificial animal and a symbolic animal. Because we are a political animal we have permanently ambivalent interests: we have the unique developments of our person, and the developments of our community. Both of these developments require sacrifices.

Esoteric texts, layered texts whereby individuals navigate the tension between individual and communal goods, are the natural artifact that is unique to the sacrifical-symbolic animal. An esoteric text allows a human being to develop a life process that is incredibly complex: How am I to further my growth as a unique, thinking being, when I am also a communal being that belongs? The esoteric text answers: I will further both of these processes by living a double life in which I care for myself in private while also preserving my belonging to a symbolic community.

Alexei Leontiev, an impressive Soviet psychologist I have recently made contact with, speaks of the 'double life of symbols'. On the one hand, they function publicly, designate roles, delineate abstract rules. On the other, symbols enter into unique relation with our individual souls, take on deeper meanings an intricacies.

The esoteric text is a perfect instantiation of this double life of symbols. And, I would add, it is evidence of the struggles unique to our animal. 

The esoteric text is the artifact that is essential to understanding the unique life processes of this kind of animal we seem to be.

The Emotional Difficulty of Writing, and the Relationship Between 'General Psychology' and Ontology

I produced five full length 'academic' papers in the last 6 months or so. I had intended to try and publish a few of them, but found myself profoundly frustrated with the process.

Showing my writing to others, in particular, occasioned challenging conversations, and feelings of alienation. I am inclined to alienation, so this is not altogether surprising. 

Yesterday I spent time with a friend (a pleasure) and spoke with him about my frustrations. 

I fear that I was irritable at the time, as I was expressing my irritation with how my writing is often met. "My writing," I said to him, "is the answer to a question and the solution to a problem." "How Collingwoodian of you," he humorously replied, as we just read R.G. Collingwood's Essay on Metaphysics together. Collingwood defines thinking as a series of questions and answers, and encourages other to write, not about him, but about the problems that he is addressing.

I want my problems to be shared. "I show people my writing and everyone takes issues with my formulations. 'This isn't clear...'. 'This metaphor doesn't quite work...'. 'This is ambiguous...'. These are proper critiques of my writing, and I want to learn to engage in the craft of writing, editing, considering audience. But I also get frustrated when I feel I am told that I am inventing problems, asking the wrong questions, or otherwise misguided.

I want to feel like I perceive reasonable problems in the world, and that my problems can be shared. But it is difficult when there is a lack of agreement in what problem,  what situation, we are even dealing with.

I have recently decided to not pursue a PhD, and to attempt to write beyond academia. I have also recently outlined a project of substantial length. 

There are a variety of to frame the project, but one is to discuss the relationship between 'general psychology' and ontology. 

I have recently been reading Niels Engelsted's book Catching up with Aristotle, an attempt to articulate a 'general psychology' that could offer greater unity to the fractured discipline of psychology. Engelsted argues that the Soviet psychologist Aleksei Leontiev and Aristotle shared a four-part scheme to capture the meaning of 'psyche', or soul, as they appear in the world: sentience (in basic life), intentionality (in conscious life), mind (in animals with locomotion), and human consciousness (in animals with a social debt economy). 

I am highly attracted to the project of general psychology because it is identical with the question, 'What is life?'

The question of general psychology cannot be raised without asking about the general nature of things, or the question of ontology or being. 'What is life?' cannot be asked without also asking 'What is the world?'

The fusion of general psychology and ontology is a feature of our present situation. I said to my friend, 'Behaviorism as a general psychology is predicated upon or consonant with materialism as a general ontology'. He asked me to repeat this. It felt like one of those simple and crystal clear formulations, obviously oversimplified, that I should hold onto. 

My friend was pointing out the theoretical extremes of my political analysis; my insistence on the significance of 'local teleology' for psychology and philosophy, my desire to attack materialist, crude 'empiricism', and the like. 

I understand this sentiment, and am also surprised by it. Pre-reflective experience is so theoretically intricate, so implicitly theoreitcal. Our entire situation feels so materialist, so behaviorist. 

How could we possibly approach general psychology differently without rethinking ourselves ontologically? 

And, yet, I speak so often of the impotence of philosophical analysis.