Towards a theory of personality.

"I might, perhaps, content myself by referring to Columbus, who, by using subjective assumptions, a false hypothesis, and a route abandoned by modern navigation, nevertheless discovered America" C. Jung, 1933 p.84.

The subjective assumptions and ancient routes of thinking presented in this paper reflect the issues I find most meaningful in the study of personality. Rather than proceed to impress my gentle reader with concise modern thinking and an up to date literature review, I have elected to write of ideas that resonate with my personal experiences and issues. In this process, I only hope to clarify my own thinking and entertain my reader, who certainly has his own convictions in the matters of personality.

It seems to me that the study of personality is a paradox: we are looking for a common pattern in those characteristics that make an individual unique. I have elected to address three forces which seem to be the determinants of personality: the genetic contribution, the cultural contribution and a spiritual contribution. Each of these factors plays a part in the resultant being. Trying to understand personality without consideration of each of these factors would seem a serious over-simplification at this point.

My personal issues are the cognitive dissonance between science and spirituality, a matter which becomes acute in the consideration of consciousness. I have endeavored to explore personality from a biological perspective and to consider the uniqueness of human consciousness relative to all other forms of life. A major theme in this paper is the value of self-awareness, reflecting my personal interest in the process of self-actualization. I attempt to contrast physical and metaphysical explanations of the self, ultimately recognizing the value of transpersonal approaches in my own life. The mixture of genetics, culture and spirit leads me down many trails.

I have separated an outline of my principal beliefs about the process of working though conflicts, anxieties, and coping with anti-social behaviors as a second paper. I would not feel that my work was valuable if it did not address the more mundane issues of the counselor-at-work.

Patricia Barlow-Irick
November, 1995
Albuquerque, New Mexico

"So you think that you're a failure, do you? Well, you probably are. What's wrong with that? In the first place, if you've any sense at all you must have learned by now that we pay just as dearly for our triumphs as we do for our defeats. Go ahead and fail. But fail with wit, fail with grace, fail with style. A mediocre failure is as insufferable as a mediocre success. Embrace failure! Seek it out. Learn to love it. That may be the only way any of us will ever be free." Tom Robbins, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues.

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Preliminary definitions: The anatomy and morphology of consciousness.

THE DEFINITION OF CONSCIOUSNESS, SELF-AWARENESS AND THEIR CONTRAST WITH PERSONALITY

What is a personality?

A personality might be described as the characteristic patterns of behaviors in which an individual engages. According to my definition, these behaviors include conscious thinking. These behavior patterns change over the course of a lifetime. The existing characteristics of the personality channelize ongoing trait development as these characteristics influence, if not control, the acquisition and expression of new traits. Because of this development by accretion, earlier acquired personality traits are much more difficult to change than later ones.

As an ecological metaphor, I would liken the personality to the vegetational features of the landscape. The flora of an area is dynamic through the successional stages of vegetation establishment, much like personality traits. The older overstory may control the understory through its patterns of water and light usage. The flora may consist of aggressive weeds in cases of heavy disturbance and adverse conditions or may have a diverse assemblage of coadapted species in balance with the changes inherent in the environment.

What is Self?

The concept of Self is a necessary accessory in this emergent view of personality, as the mutability of the personality would leave us without a stable foundation for trait establishment. The Self is the underlying multidimensional factors or principles that establish the fundamental nature, tone and individuality of the whole. In the landscape metaphor, the Self is the abiotic factors of the environment that circumscribe the habitat; the topography, the soil qualities, the precipitation regime, and the solar intensity. The Self controls whether a desert or a rainforest can exist. The factors are not additive in this model and they are of little value when considered independently for it is only in context that the properties of the Self emerge.

What is consciousness?

The terms conscious and unconscious, referring to awareness, have nothing to do with the concept of consciousness as used here. This consciousness instead refers to a metaphysical concept of spiritual essence. In the terms of the movie Starwars, it is the Force. In terms of my metaphor it is the landscape itself, which can be viewed from any scale. There is an individual consciousness like a horizon-to-horizon view of the landscape. One could, however, choose to look only at the landscape features of one's front yard, or, in a grander scheme, one could choose to look at a landscape on a regional or global scale. Consciousness is the origination of the Self and personality, but reflects also the effects of all the Selves and personalities that have gone before, just as the landscape reflects the geological transformations of earlier eras which were affected by the surface stabilization characteristics of the vegetation, the precipitation regime of the climate, and the fine-scale topography.

Extending the Metaphor to Other Important Definitions

In my pantheistic world view, there is no absolute separation between the human and the divine. We are each a part of the overall landscape. Our beliefs are like leaves whose morphology represent a compromise between the need to gather resources and the need for self-protection. Conflict is the disturbance of a stable condition and the resultant change to the landscape. Dharma is the balance of resource availability and limitation that defines what will be an ecologically stable state at any one time. Memories are the organic litter of yesterdays vegetation. Play with this metaphor, but we must now move on to other matters.

WHAT IS IT THAT FILLS OUR HEADS:

Are the Memes in Control?

Biological theory of genetics and evolutionary processes spawned a concept involving the power of and properties inherent to self-replicating units. Genes are self-replicating units in the form of DNA and memes are self-replicating units in the form of ideas. This idea was advanced primarily by Richard Dawkins (1976) and merits consideration in respect to personality. It is summarized here.

The meme, as a self-replicating unit of cultural information, is replicated by the machinery of the thought process and transmitted from brain to brain by various means. Like the genetic self-replicating units, memes are changed through evolutionary processes, but cultural evolution is not equally constrained. Compared to biological evolution, the rate of cultural evolution is faster by orders of magnitude. Memes operate like viruses, taking control of the cellular machinery itself for their own replicative purposes since they do not possess the ability to copy themselves.

Meme transmission has low copy-fidelity compared to genes because they are subject to replication errors and blending processes. The memes which behave in such a way as to increase the number of copies of themselves will be the memes that persist and dominate the brains/culture in which they exist. The survival of memes in the meme pool results from their ability to fit in context with all the previously existing memes (psychological appeal). Attributes contributing to the survival of a meme include longevity, fecundity and copy fidelity. Memes can be virtually immortal when they are recorded in permanent media, from which they can be continuously dispersed. The longevity of any one particular copy of a replication unit is not important if there are more copies. Fads are examples of short term survival memes.

Memes take over brains and do not need to provide a biological advantage to the genetic survival machines they occupy. Selfish memes are those who occupy the replicative machinery in such a way as to preclude other memes from being able to replicate. Mathematical/logical models show that there is no way to preclude the advantage of memes that provide short-term selfish replicative advantages. Ideas that have immediate advantages will always displace ideas that have long-term advantages.

This seemingly antiseptic view of our cherished ideas and cultural values is heuristic in the understanding of personality. If our ideas have a life of their own, as a memes, we may have little control of the way they use our replicative machinery. Alternatively, if we come to recognize an idea as pathological, we may seek to limit its ability to replicate. In the terminology of the landscape metaphor, if a species behaving as a noxious weed becomes established in our landscapes, we can mow it before it sets seeds and introduce it's natural enemies. Psychotherapy might be very much like weeding a garden.

The evolutionary history of personality.

Dogs, dolphins and flatworms.

HUMANS ARE NOT THE ONLY THING WITH PERSONALITIES BUT ARE A UNIQUE SPECIES.

A Biologist's Paradigm

My two dogs have distinct personalities. One has a pathological need to fetch, the other manifests few signs of behavioral disorders. The mythology of dolphins holds them out to be spiritually advanced organisms. Even flatworms can have their behavior modified by experience. But how much of this personality is only "beauty in the eye of the beholder"? Where are the limits between the actual behavioral traits characteristic of the individual organism and our projections of human consciousness onto the animals we share our world with? Is there any real difference between us?

The phylogenetic patterns of resemblance between humans and other animals indicate that some personality traits are at least in part products of evolutionary processes (see Table 1).

Animals are clearly not automatons devoid of emotional content. The fact that emotions have evolutionary continuity between species, suggests that they originated at some point in history and conferred some evolutionary advantage to those organisms that possessed them and then were passed down from our very distant ancestors. Fear, aggression. and maternal feelings are shared between more phylogenetic lineages, suggesting an earlier origination than jealousy, affection, and especially earlier than curiosity. These older emotions are clearly related to protection of resources and the success of reproduction. Jealousy could only arise in animals which were generally monogamous during the breeding season and required the parenting of both parents. The biological advantage of affection may have been to create stronger bonds between parents in species requiring both parents. It is notable that affectionate behavior is also seen in monogamous birds, such as geese, and so may have independent origination in either the bird phylum itself, or it's ancestors, the dinosaurs. There is also strong evidence of the heritability (similarity between parents and offspring) of levels of activity, fearfulness and sociability in primates (Buss, 1988). Clearly there is evidence of some genetic influence and control of emotions, and thus to some extent, personality itself.

   <h4>Table 2.  How Humans are Unique.</h4>               
    Author                  Statement             
Unknown         Animals don't move towards        
                individuation or                  
                self-actualization.               
May, 1953       The difference between man and    
                animal: man can look before and   
                after, transcending the           
                immediate moment, remember past   
                and plan for the future.  Man     
                can choose a distant greater      
                good over a lesser immediate      
                one.                              
May, 1953       Man is the animal that foresees   
                his own death.                    
Dawkins, 1976   Cultural transmission is not      
                limited to humans: e.g. bird      
                songs.                            
Dawkins, 1976   Foresight is a unique quality of  
                man.                              
Jung, 1933      Jung contrasts man with animals   
                as having the ability to have     
                psychological problems.           
Peck, 1978      The human capacity to do the      
                unnatural, to transcend and,      
                hence, transform our own nature   
                sets us apart from the animals.   
Holmes, 1938    Man alone is able to consciously  
                work out his own destiny and      
                determine what manner of life he  
                shall lead.                       
Barlow-Irick,   Man is the only species that      
1995            packs a lunch.                    
Rudhyar, 1972   Whether life has purpose          
                differentiates man from animal.   
Dawkins, 1976   Genuine disinterested altruism    
                is another unique feature of      
                humans.  This quality arises      
                from the ability to transcend     
                the blindness of the replicators  
                and bypass the limitation to      
                evolutionarily stable strategies  
                of simple replicators.  Humans    
                alone have the ability to defy    
                these limits.  "We, alone on      
                earth, can rebel against the      
                tyranny of the selfish            
                replicators."                     

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The logical consequences of assuming that personality is genetic are not intellectually satisfying. The long-term evolutionary context of a behavior should, in theory, reflect an unconscious strategy to maximize biological fitness of organisms, since organisms carrying genes for beneficial behavior (to the reproduction of that gene) are going have higher survival and reproduction than those which have no such genes. This idea is typically applied to many behaviors including parental care and some forms of altruism (Dawkins, 1976). For example, there might be a gene for falling in love. The definition of falling in love, here, is a temporary collapse of ego boundaries which functions as a stereotype response of human beings to a configuration of internal sexual drives and external sexual stimuli (per Peck, 1978, p. 90). Carrying a gene for this behavior might serve to increase the probability of sexual pairing and bonding so as to increase the probability of it being transmitted to the next generation. While this mechanistic view provides a number of heuristic lines of thinking, it fails to satisfy our sense of our own personalities.

Phylogenetic Novelty in the Hominoid Lineage

Obviously, man differs from animal in the psychic complexity with which he views the world. The capability of foresight enables us to make predictions and plan for the future. The degree of adaptability that foresight gives us enables us to dominate the world.

Self-awareness - a human characteristic?

THE VALUE OF MAPPING THE TOPOGRAPHY OF ONE'S MIND.

As an evolutionary biologist, the existence of self-awareness raises a series of interesting questions. 1) Is self-awareness an unexpected result of the physical complexity of the neurological system, a by-product of evolution? 2) Could there be a selective advantage to self-awareness driving the favoring the spread of self-awareness genes? 3) Under what conditions would self-awareness promote biological fitness (i.e. the ability to survive and reproduce)?. 4) Might self-awareness be a sexually selected characteristic in humans? And; 5) Could self-awareness be a structure built by and for memes within the human psyche?

Humans seem to have an innate drive to develop self-awareness. In my innocence, I remember thinking that each person should be the ultimate authority on his/her personal self. How could there be anything left to know after twenty-plus years living intimately with one's own personality? Then as you meet with new conditions and find yourself on stormy seas, parts of you emerge that you didn't know existed. Your own depth might catch you by surprise. I have a religious conviction that our quest in this life is to become self-aware, and we can move towards that goal of our own free volition, or we can be unwillingly pushed by the tides of change which will force us to face our own shadows. This is a religious conviction, but it bears the weight of the following empirical test: to the extent to which the listener does not threaten someone's self-identity, there is no subject so universally enjoyed more than speaking of ones self and through the process learning the essential truth of one's being. I believe that this part of our personality is a consequence of our spiritual nature and cannot be explained by genetics or culture.

Emerson (1836) was perhaps the strongest advocate of being one's self. "Insist on yourself, never imitate." (Emerson, p. 199) He encouraged the development of self-trust through willingness to participate in non-conformity and willingness to be inconsistent. "I hope in these days we have heard the last of conformity and consistency. Let the words be gazetted and ridiculous henceforth." (Emerson, p. 185), but more than a century later even the most Emersonian of us find ourselves compressed by opposing forces pushing us towards conformity in opposition of the drive towards individuation. One of the biggest factors in the "homogenization of being" has been the television, which seems to have infected much of the planet with a meme defining the limits of desirable culture and lifestyle. You can test the power of the meme for yourself, dare to be different and you will feel the pressure for conformity mount. A strong ego is necessary to be able to deal with the collective unconscious energies and the aspects of individuality which is necessary for individuation (Rudhyar, 1936).

The Limits of Scientific and Physical Explanations of the Psyche.

Scientific Principles.

CAN WE SCIENTIFICALLY DISPROVE THE VALUE OF SCIENCE?

As a scientist, I would like to test a hypothesis to validate the scientific approach to the whole of life and not just simply accept the precepts of science on faith. My model is of a somewhat mechanistic world, governed by physical laws. One prediction of this model is that there are physical causes for effects/experiences. Given enough study, one should be able to pinpoint the factors which lead to any particular state or experience. However, my experience, the data-of-my-life so to speak, is not consistent with this hypothesis unless we enlarge the set of permissible causes to include non-physical, spiritual factors. The set of causal variables which science normally accepts is not adequate to explain the details of my experience. In order to be consistent with my own experience, I feel forced to either reject the scientific approach or add a number of variables.

The experiences which falsify the model fall into the class of synchronistic events. Synchronicity is the principle of coincidences having little probability of occurring yet carrying a maximum content of meaning. Synchronistic experiences link ones psychic state with external events providing some level of insight not predictable from either the psychic state or the event itself. The result is an emergent property of the relationship between the two. I have become a student of the study of synchronicity in response to my experience of life and have been propelled into contemplation of a larger world-view than science has provided for me. The experience of synchronicity, in some sense, has broken down my intellectual resistance to a change of world view. Peck (1978) says that this is the function of synchronicity, which then leads to spiritual growth.

There are at least two ways to see this failure of science. According to Jung (1933), we constructed and cling to science and the principles of rational thought in order to protect our conscious minds, allowing us to experience an ordered cosmos. The failure in this model would be that we failed to account for the collective unconscious. An alternative concept is that the problem is one of the scale at which we are focusing. Emerson (1836, p. 74) says it well; "Empirical science is apt to cloud the sight, and by the very knowledge of functions and process to bereave the student of the many contemplation of the whole." This line of thinking suggests that it is the emergent properties, those that cannot be predicted by their parts, which are not accounted for by science. I tend to agree.

The Nature and Nurture Paradigm

THE NATURE-NURTURE CONTROVERSY IGNORES THE COMPLEXITY OF LIFE.

There has been a continual debate whether inherited traits (nature) or acquired traits (nurture) are greater determinants of behavior. Neither acts alone though, and it is the interaction between these traits that is the more predictive as a behavioral determinant. It is very typical of me to look at a theoretical model and then to say, yes, but it doesn't account for the complexity of the real world. I would suggest two levels of complication that must be taken into account by the paradigm. The first is that ideas (memes) may have a life of their own. Their power to effect the landscapes of our minds cannot be ignored. Secondly, each individual in part determines the quality of his experience and the impact of that experience, creating a complex feedback cycle between nature and nurture. For example a gene for alcoholism may lead a person into a lounge-lizard lifestyle, which may limit the type and quality of experience available to that person.

Born with a Blank Slate.

PRECONFIGURATION OF THE PSYCHE MIGHT BE MORE THAN SIMPLE GENETICS.

Given that some personality traits are genetic, there may also be predisposing factors that control experience in more subtle ways. Memes, in theory, have the power to influence genetic evolution, favoring the appropriate configuration of brain and nervous system (Dawkins, 1976), but who can say whether this power would allow them to become predispositionally "hardwired" into the chemistry of the brain. Or, if one recognizes consciousness, as defined earlier in this document, then our psyches may be merely parts of a greater whole with it's own organizing principles. In this vein, Jung (1933) wrote of art as an innate drive that seizes a human being and makes him it's instrument. We may be but faces of the collective unconscious, and we are certainly only reflections of the oneness of life. If we wish to be self-aware, we must explore not only our conscious, but try to define these things that preconfigure our experience.

Spiritual and Metaphysical Explanations of the Psyche.

Overcoming the hollowness of man.

THE USUAL LIMITS OF CONSCIOUS PERSONALITY ARE TRANSCENDED IN SELF-ACTUALIZATION.

While, I fail to find a biological explanation of the drive towards self-actualization, I cannot ignore it's presence. I find no explanation in my landscape metaphor which calls for one to be other than the simple creature one is. We must tread on the nebulous grounds of spirituality to understand this need to become more than the sum of our parts. We are driven by this need to see the world with pure objectivity, moving beyond the perspective of our own experience and become part of the collective wholeness of life.

Perhaps our lives are manifestations of the collective unconscious? Perhaps through self-actualization we have been differentiated from that sea of consciousness in order to fulfill a particular need in terms of the whole of collective unity? I don't know.

Nietzche's influence on everyone.

THESE PARADIGMS ARISE FROM THE PSYCHOLOGICAL NEEDS OF AN INDUSTRIAL OF SOCIETY.

My quest into the spiritual dimension of personality spurred me to read philosophers. Everyone who was anyone had written of Frederich Nietzsche and so I turned to his works. His negativism appalled me and I pondered how this man could have influenced anyone. I have a theory.

Nietzche wrote just before the turn of the last century. It was an industrialized world around him. The religion of his agrarian forefathers failed to meet his psychological needs, just as it was failing to meet everyone else's needs. The religions of the agrarian world were based on life within an extended family, where everyone had their part to play in the collective whole. With industrialization, we had value as individuals, we had jobs as individuals, we were suddenly living as individuals. Our phylogenetic history and our religion failed to prepare us for this sense of isolation that comes from being an insignificant part. Our scientific minds add to this feeling as we ask, "Of what possible significance could we be, as individuals or even as a race, buffeted about by internal chemical and psychological forces we do not understand, invisible in a universe whose dimensions are so large that our science cannot measure them." (Peck, 1978, p. 331).

Nietzche proclaimed that God was dead. This daring act brought relief to his contemporaries and disciples, who were freed to look for more appropriate and satisfying memes. We were freed from feeling like we had to accept on faith that ultimate reality concerned things outside of our understanding and that our experience was just vanity, dreams and unreality (after Emerson, p.69). We were freed to find new memes that offered a way to cope with the isolation of the modern world.

Do we dare discuss things like Jung, the faces of God, and Joseph Campbell?

TRANSPERSONAL PSYCHOLOGY AND IT'S KINDRED APPROACHES ARE JUST MEMES TO STRENGTHEN US FROM WITHIN

Spiritual Approaches in General

A "spiritual approach" to life does not imply any type of ecclesiastical activity. Spiritual in this sense refers only to the idea that each of us reflects the oneness of life and that one's own self-awareness is meant to be transcended in order to recognize that oneness in all things. The value of this kind of meme is that it puts us into context with the whole of life. The strength of a transpersonal approach, as I understand it, is that it draws from the psychic resources within the individual to place them in this outer-world context.

An Astrological Approach

ASTROLOGY PROVIDES A SECONDARY INDEPENDENT DATA SET FOR UNDERSTANDING OF LIFE PATTERNS.

One transpersonal meme complex that seems to satisfy my particular psychological needs and to be consistent with my own experience is the practice of astrology. An astrological chart may be likened to the owner's manual found in the glove compartment of most cars. It may tell you what features one is born with, but it does not tell what roads will be driven down. Astrology can be used as a general tool for fostering an empathic understanding of another person's world. This approach explains much about the relationship between the underlying factors in one's personality and the circumstances in the outer world. It is extremely valuable in enlarging a person's sense of identity apart from the projections of one's family, peers and culture. Astrology can expose possibilities and potentials for development. As a good scientist, I cannot be induced to reject it on the grounds merely that other scientists reject it. The predictive models which good astrology can provide are too consistent with my perception of reality to falsify, and the nature of science is such that nothing can ever be "proved" but only falsified by inconsistency with accumulated data. In any case I find it more accurate than the radio weather forecast, and yet I still believe in weather.

A Mythical Approach of Archetypes

MYTHOLOGY CAN BE USED AS A MODEL OF OUR ARCHETYPAL JOURNEYS AND CAN SHED LIGHT ON THE OPERATING PRINCIPLES OF HUMAN EXISTENCE.

Mythic images are symbolic and poetic descriptions of the essential experiences and patterns of development associated with being human. In our modern lives, they have been largely replaced by scientific information and rational lines of thinking, leaving us largely bereft of the context to give our personal lives meaning. The study and popularization of comparative mythology can provide us with a way to understand these stories and the archetypal processes they describe. A mythical image is archetypal when it describes a principal or process universal to the human experience. A set of simple examples of archetypal processes are those involved in passage from one state to another, such as birth, death, and the transition between childhood and adulthood. In each of these passages, the human experiences a separation from known, comfortable conditions and enters a new realm. In a more subtle way, we undergo passages of the same nature throughout our lives as we leave familiar, but naive, views of life behind and develop a perpetually deeper understanding of our world. We may be forced into these passages by unwelcomed experience or we may enter them in the opportunistic drive to become greater than our present state of being.

Myth can help us understand the choice to embark on a new cycle of life (Dionysos). Myth can provide hints about the interplay between our conscious minds and intuitions, confirming the value and pointing out the weakness of our innate strategy we will necessarily use to negotiate the unknown in this new cycle (Hermes). We can explore the value of our past experiences in terms of their nurturing content (Demeter) and their basis for our ethical principles (Zeus the Emperor) and then find that we have to kill the dependency which binds us to our pasts in order to transcend its inherent limits (Orestes). Through myth we can see the issues and ineffability of the unconscious realm (Persperone) as well as feel the value of the spiritual practices of our lives (Chiron). Some myths relate to making choices. The dependence on appropriate values (The Judgment of Paris), the contrast between striving for impartiality through logic (Athene) and depending on one's feelings (Iris), and the potential to come to harmony as a result of facing conflict (Ares and Aphrodite) are a few of the choice related myths. Myth (Hercules) might show us the process of how egotism can mature into self-trust and integrity or it might bring us face to face with the unrelenting flow of time and change (The father-son relationships of Uranus Chronos, and Zeus). Through myths, we can develop an appreciation of the life-death cycles of regeneration (Hades), the value of self-sacrifice to common good (Prometheus) and the necessity to value our shadow sides in order to achieve completeness (Pan).

These are some of the myths I have found useful in understanding the patterns of experience in my own life and helping people to understand their positions. The myth must be well understood to see how it fits a particular situation. The discrepancies between myth and reality can also be informative. The process of analyzing the story line of your life, studying the myth which you are living, is also a valuable tool in coming to terms with underlying archetypal principles. The stories we organize our lives to tell are a powerful influences on us, and, fortunately, we have the potential to choose to alter the tale as it is told.

Summary

The genetic contribution to our personalities is evident in our phylogenetic history. Animals may or may not share our spiritual aspects, but our ability to process ideas and plan for the future sets us apart from all other species. Ideas have a life of their own and our minds are the battlegrounds on which ideas may compete. Our personalities will reflect the types of ideas we have been exposed to. Personality will be further affected by the spiritual aspects of our being, especially the part of the oneness of life which we have been destined to manifest. These three forces intersect in the center of our psyche and the resultant trajectory of energy is our personality. The qualities emerging from this intersection cannot be predicted solely by the qualities of the contributing factors.

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Concepts consistent with prevailing paradigms are made significant only by the fact they are taken to be the measure of all truth (Jung, 1933).

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Conflict, anxiety, and anti-social behaviors.

"As a consequence there are many people who become neurotic because they are only normal as there are who are neurotic because they cannot become normal. For the former, the very thought that you want to educate them to normality is a nightmare; their deepest need is really to be able to lead 'abnormal' lives." (Jung, 1933).

MOST CLIENTS WANT HELP IN DEALING WITH MUNDANE PROBLEMS.

We get into the gray area of judgment in defining psychopathology. I would include anti-social behavior as a manifestation of mental illness, but perhaps it is just a reflection of nasty memes. Could one be a perfectly self-actualized serial killer, knowing that murder and mayhem are the purpose in life to which one was born? It seems that we by-pass this issue by only attending to the psychopathology that allows its victim to behold it and to see the possibility of life without it.

There is a variation amongst individuals in the level of anxiety at which is the threshold of wanting to seek help. There is a variation in how much one is willing to muddle through alone and a variation in the amount of time one is willing to dedicate to resolving problems. Generalizations are hard to make, but somehow, sometime, and for some reason, an individual will reach out to get help. It is the counselor's task to assist without rescuing, to help without fixing. In general, the counselor's role becomes encouraging the client to refine and enlarge their understanding of the world, to help them see their own landscape and helping the client give himself permission to enjoy it.

Emotional development.

Normal emotions.

A DIVERSE AND BALANCED MIX OF EXPERIENCED EMOTIONS IS THE DESIRED STATE.

Normal emotions are emotions in balance. You feel this way now, and some other way later. We need to be in touch with those emotions. We need to feel the emotions experience gives us. We shouldn't deny them, we shouldn't intellectualize them, although we certainly must control them. Hopefully, we will be blessed with a diversity of emotions from fear of abandonment to pure joy. We will not need constant diversion to live with our thoughts. One emotion will not block all other emotions. We will not allow social and moral values to disorient and pervert our emotions. Our emotions will be recognized, but we will choose how and when we respond to them.

I disagree with Nietzche's statement of mental health being when one is unable to take one's own enemies, accidents, and misdeeds seriously for too long, because there is a moral imperative to avoid misdeeds (The Gay Science ). We must take our misdeeds seriously enough to avoid them in so far as possible, or only partake of those which can be taken light-heartedly. The moral code stems from our phylogenetic history as social animals. We cannot pretend it doesn't exist.

Getting stuck.

PSYCHOPATHOLOGY AS AN IMBALANCED ECOLOGY OF THE MIND

The landscape of our minds might grow like an unkempt field. The hostile conditions in our life might produce a morass of nettles and stinking dogweed. Our souls might languish in the forage conditions our psychic landscape provides, and when we compare our own desiccated condition to our neighbors productive fields, we might feel blight. Nothing a little water and weeding won't fix.

The causes of psychopathology might be errors on the part of the one who suffers. This problem might be the result of allowing emotion to dominate one's mind, loosing a balance. The cause might be inability to make meaningful choices . The cause might be clinging to an inaccurate view of reality. Mental illness can often be the result of the tendency to avoid problems and emotional suffering (Peck, 1978). In each of these cases, the inflicted party bears some responsibility for the nature of his/her pathology.

There may be other cases where the mind has been infected with a toxic meme. The meme, as a self-replicating unit, is not concerned with accruing benefits to the host in which it finds itself. Even the most benign of memes are but parasites for the survival machine they find themselves in. The concept of hell and it's related memes act as a self-perpetuating unit for blind faith, discouraging rational inquiry (Dawkins, 1976). Tie this hell-and-damnation meme to a meme for automatic guilt by reason of birth and the results are pretty depressing. In this modern day, talk-show hosts may be the primary source for the spread of toxic memes.

John Bowlby, a biologist turned psychologist, advocates using a medical model for the study of psychopathology. I do not know if this appeals to the biologist in me, or if it is just a good model. He contends that factors of many sorts contribute to the onset of a disorder and the interaction between these factors may be more powerful than the sum of their respective influences acting singly (Bowlby, 1990).

Table 3. Factors for the Study of Psychopathology.

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FACTORS           FUNCTION     (From Bowlby, 1990)    
Predisposing      Affects vulnerability               
Provoking         Functions as the proximate cause    
Contributing      Affects the relationship between    
                  predisposing and provoking          
                  factors, affects the probability    
                  of encountering provoking factor,   
                  exacerbates provoking conditions.   
Symptom           Accounts for the particular form    
Specifying        which an illness may take           

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This model appears to be valuable in analyzing psychopathology as a way to increase the understanding of the nature of the problem. A counselor needs to know what it is about a client that makes them vulnerable to the conditions which provoked the disorder, as well as the exact nature of those conditions. Are the causes conditional on other factors in the environment and are there other ways the disorder could be manifested? Only experience would show if this approach is practical.

Coming to terms with the mean and petty side of life.

When bad things happen to nice people.

THERE IS NO WAY TO AVOID LIFE'S PAIN AND THERE IS NO ONE TO BLAME

Terrible things happen. Our babies are born deformed. Our children catch fatal diseases. Our friends get killed by drunk drivers. We cannot pretend it doesn't hurt. Our obligation is to honor the pain of living. If we are the counselors, rather than the victims, our obligation is still to honor the pain of living. Honoring pain will lead to growth, while avoiding pain will, all to often, lead to mental illness.

Choices.

THERE IS A CHOICE OF HOW YOU ARE GOING TO EXPERIENCE LIFE.

Self-awareness brings the potential for self-responsibility. Accepting responsibility gives us power to participate in life, including the development of our own personalities. It is far easier to choose the less courageous act of ignoring problems, but sooner or later we will finally reach the bottom of the barrel, the limit to what we can tolerate, and we must face our problems if we are to find our way out. But what are we to be responsible for? This is a basic problem of human existence. Taking too much responsibility is just as detrimental as taking too little.

There are things in your life over which it seems that you have no choice. Your parents and your genetic predispositions are probably the most simple of these. Some of the new age paradigms hold that as expressions of the divinity, we chose these lives at sometime before our births. This line of thinking can then be extended to say that people in misery have chosen this life. The homeless souls carrying the burdens of alcoholism or drug-addiction are probably the most commonly blamed humans for making a bad life choices. Projecting blame onto people in misery only adds to their misery. Some things are best just accepted as part of the landscape, without deciding who is responsible for it.

Each of us have the choice of how we will experience our lives. Will we say "yes" to life and celebrate all it has to offer, or will we say "no" and resent the flow of time? Will we live our lives as if we had something better to do or will we choose to make the best of what we have? Will we postpone living in an effort to avoid life's pain, or will we step forth with the courage to live in the moment?

The ecological function of emotional pain - You might look at it as a learning experience.

"Perhaps a person gains by accumulating obstacles. The more obstacles set up to prevent happiness from appearing, the greater the shock when it does appear, just as the rebound of a spring will be all the more powerful the greater the pressure that has been exerted to compress it. Care must be taken, however, to select large obstacles, for only those of sufficient scope and scale have the capacity to lift us out of context and force life to appear in an entirely new and unexpected light. For example, should you litter the floor and tabletops of your room with small objects, they constitute little more than a nuisance, an inconvenient clutter that frustrates you and leave you irritable: the petty is mean. Cursing, you step around the objects, pick them up, knock them aside. Should you, on the other hand, encounter in your room a nine-thousand-pound granite boulder, the surprise it evokes, the extreme steps that must be taken to deal with it, compel you to see with new eyes. And if the boulder is more special, if it has been painted or carved in some mysterious way, you may find that it possesses an extraordinary and supernatural presence that enchants you, and in coping with it - as it blocks your path to the bathroom - leave you feeling extraordinary and supernatural, too. Difficulties illuminate existence, but they must be fresh and of high quality" Tom Robbins, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues.

THERE IS AN ECOLOGICAL FUNCTION OF ANXIETY- IT ALLOWS US TO LEARN FROM OUR CHOICES.

I bristle when someone tells me that pain is unnecessary if you achieve enlightenment. In our evolutionary history, we developed physical pain receptors for a good reason. Physical pain signaled us to take a different course of action. Don't touch the fire, don't chew on that prickly plant. Psychic pain probably has the same function in warning us to take a different course of action. It is part of our navigation system. If we disable it through a particular mind set, we may be putting our psychic selves in mortal danger. We may loose the opportunity to get the feedback we need to spur us to growth.

"Pain is the custodian of our undiscovered treasures..... Suffering is the footstool of our divinity. We may stumble over it and fall back into the womb of time to renew once more our tragic attempt at metamorphosis. Or we may step upon it, raise our countenance by damming the very stream of our tears and use suffering to reach the extended hand of Him who is our resurrected self." (Rudhyar, 1972, p96.)

Healing and other wound-licking behaviors.

THE PRINCIPLES OF ECOLOGICAL RESTORATION OF LIFE OUT OF BALANCE.

What does it take to heal?

Based on the model developed in my discussion of conflict, there are three modes of healing: healing through honest suffering following an wound inflicted by the outerworld; healing which consists of revising one's interface with reality; and the healing by modifying ones cultural concepts. In the first case, misfortune must be accepted and it's pain honored. Resolution of grief is an example of the first case. In the second case, an approach of comparing one's perceptions with one's choices will help disclose where either the map of reality can be modified to lead to better choices or the process of making choices can be modified to be more consistent with apparent reality. In the final case, a change in cognitive structures will lead to abandonment of dysfunctional concepts. In each of these cases, it is not avoidance of life's pain that is the goal, but rather strengthening the psyche to withstand the onslaught of life.

Peck (1978) provides a concise list of the self-disciplinary tools we need to solve life's difficulties: accepting responsibility; balancing; dedication to truth; and delaying gratification. It sounds so simple. I see the most critical tool as the dedication to truth. Individuals must be dedicated to the challenge of revising their world view and moving from the security of the known to the new whenever new truths resonate with their core selves. One needs to maintain a psychologically healthy level of self-disclosure in our dedication to truth. Only if we give up our naive desire to be seen as nice, can we start coming to terms with being real. As long as people opt to live lives of limited honesty and openness, the walls of denial will cast long shadows through their lives.

How can a therapist help?

A therapist is limited in the amount which they can help a client work through developmental stages which they have not experienced in some deeply intimate way. A less self-actualized person may be handicapped as a therapist to a more self-actualized client. The counselor may become a specialist in a particular set of archetypal experiences by defining the limits of the client population to be served.

Peck (1978, p. 173) captures my sentiments: "We are now able to see the essential ingredient that makes psychotherapy effective and successful. It is not 'unconditional positive regard', nor is it magical words, techniques or postures. It is human involvement and struggles. It is the willingness of the therapist to extend himself or herself for the purpose of nurturing the patients growth - willingness to go out on a limb, to truly involve oneself at an emotional level in the relationship, to actually struggle with the patient and with one's self." Jung (1933) also believed that the critical aspect was the willingness of the therapist to stand beside a human being and helping with what may be a daring misadventure without fixed ideas of what the other person's path should be.

A therapist must have a strong enough sense of self to be at once empathetic and non-judgmental. The therapist must recognize where cognitive structures need to be allowed to crumble and rebuilt of stronger memes. The feelings, attitudes, associations and fantasies projected onto the therapist must find an ego strong enough to contain them without damage. The therapist must reflect like a mirror to the psyche when the client needs self-awareness. The therapist must provide a guide to systems analysis when the problem involves decision making. The therapist must be able to accept the limits of time and resources.

My own counseling roles involve being a mother, a wife, and a friend. I can't say that my approach to issues always helps in the short term. It is hard to get people to accept responsibility under most circumstances. If a person is willing to be honest with themselves there is always possibility for growth. I get a great deal of pleasure from watching others grow.

Summary

The ability to experience a diverse and balanced mix of emotions appropriate to the situation is a sign of mental health. Psychopathology may be the result of cognitive errors and inability to make correct choices, or it may be the result of a toxic meme. There is also the possibility that it is the necessary life path for an individual to experience in order to reach a higher level of understanding. Healing consists of strengthening the psyche to withstand the traumas of life. A therapist can help in this process by understanding the nature of the problem then helping the client to change what can be changed and in accepting what cannot. The changes which can take place frequently involve the process of choice.