C. G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, Vantage Books, New York, NY 1965, p. 299f.
In 1960 I had an opportunity to spend several days camping on the Olympic peninsula on the west coast of the USA. Late one afternoon my wife and I arrived at a seaside campground where we hoped to spend the night. There was not an open site to be found. The third time through the camp we spied a car loaded and leaving a small site. We took it without question. Soon we discovered that it was a gem overlooking the Pacific Ocean from a sand bluff thirty feet above the beach. Later as I sat on that sand bluff in the wee hours of the morning watching the midnight sun set with golden rays skipping across the waves. With the sea breeze flowing around me, my wife nearby, I lost all sense of boundaries. Sky, sand, and sea, breath and body and breeze, merged with myself, my wife into one cosmic moment that was now and eternity.
My account from forty years ago is a commonly reported holistic experience. It is closely related to what the existential philosopher Martin Buber calls an I-Thou experience in his book by that title. A dictionary definition states: holism, the view that an organic or integrated whole has a reality independent of and greater than the sum of its parts.1
In this presentation I examine the connecting of the holism we know as our self. Each of us develops through our primordial past, starting with conception, continuing through birth and childhood. After abstract reasoning develops in adolescence the ego matures and can have consciousness. Consciousness as I use the term is the ability of the self to monitor itself in action. It is the ability of the person to identify part of the personality as Self- what is really me. The Self emerges from a "we", a holism created when sperm and egg, male and female, connect as an integral part of the mother holism. This basic connection with other is part of our phylogenetic history and requires an extended period of bonding. Looking at our phylogenetic ancestors brings to light the universal connection with the cycles of nature. Humans everywhere seek understanding of their connection to Other, to Ultimate Being2 In my Judeo-Christian heritage the gaining of knowledge self, ego consciousness, results in the loss of human naivete and the emergence of human responsibility for moral decisions. Our holistic connections are the building blocks of personality. Problems with self and other emerge when connection fails.
The idea that matter organizes itself into more and more complex structures gaining strength through organization appears in diverse places. I have discovered holism in Tielhard de Chardin's theory that complex structures develop more freedom. I also found it in Carl Rogers' client centered therapy as his self actualizing principle. An artist, Ron Huble, uses children's toys to produce three dimensional plaster wall hangings that take on a mystic quality, common objects that take on larger meaning. When I read Dorothy Bryant's The Kin of Ata Are Waiting for You, I discovered a mystical community that transforms people.
For many years I chaired a seminar that discussed science, spirituality and healing. Holism emerged in our discussions frequently, especially when we took a good part of a year to discuss the ideas in The Celestine Prophecy.3 I was disappointed that the group never became a unity but the composition was stimulating with therapists, professors, traditional and complementary medical providers. Quantum physics, aeronautical engineering, Jungian psychology were topics taught by professors. Religions included Buddhism, devotees of Sai Baba as well as Judeo-Christian practices. I found it interesting that with my theological training I was still considerably more doubtful of mystical elements than the physicist who came from India and was a personal acquaintance of Sai Baba. Each of us seemed to be more influenced by our roots than by our professional training, an observation that informs this presentation on holism.
While many people experience being connected holistically, there is little observation of the workings of a holism. To some it may appear incongruous to approach holism from a scientific perspective. the remarkable success of the physical sciences is built on a system of careful observation appropriate to the physical sciences. This includes recording careful observation of data and experiments so that others can duplicate, challenge, and refine theory. The attempts of social science to provide careful observation seems insignificant in light of the success of the physical sciences. LeShan4 points out that social sciences need to establish scientific procedures that are appropriate. A significant difference in social science is the fact that human awareness changes constantly making it impossible to retest the same person because taking the test changes the person. Holism which focuses on the synergy involved in combining elements provides special challenges.
With unexamined holisms we face the real possibility that our imaginations will wander from perception into poetry and eventually the fantastic. The danger of looking at holisms with a scientific bent is that mystery and power will be lost in reductionism. That danger looms whenever we equate reality with what is measurable, a temptation in this last year of the twentieth century due to the great success of the physical sciences.
Transactional analysis was born in the cradle of physical science where stasis is seen as the goal. The twentieth century started with a paradigm shift as physicists developed the theory we know as quantum physics with chaos as the norm. As the century is facing its last days this new norm in science is pervading all thought including psychotherapy and holism resulting in shifts of meaning and practice. While I use the same words to talk about Transactional Analysis, the meanings have made a major shift, becoming more fluid.
I walk an invisible line between fantastic subjective experience of holism and the limits of a cold replicating science. My hope is that you will be stimulated to explore where your boundary lies between mysticism and mechanics, that you will be encouraged to clarify holism applied to your life and work. For me there is a pattern. I find that we are created holistically, spend a good part of our life learning to differentiate self from others and then seek to regain a closeness we dimly remember from infancy.
Holism is neither good nor bad. While there is a tendency to idealize holism a closer look shows that there are many incidents of holism that do not lead to cosmic awareness or unity with the Ultimate.
When I started working on this presentation I still had an idealistic view of holism. I equated holism with Buber's I-Thou experiences. In fact I kept that perspective until I had to face the fact that I could not be present at the conference. Multiple Sclerosis is slowly destroying my body. While that is not a pleasant future, it offers me a very personal experience of holisms. Most of my life I experienced my body as a holistic system, one system that as I mentioned above that could also merge with larger systems and give me at least a glimpse of eternity.5
Now I experience conflict within the holism I call my body. As I touch my computer keypad I no longer can tell where I end and the keyboard begins, not because I'm merged with some cosmic holism but because of an invading holism. Touch that in the past happened out of my awareness now requires visual confirmation. A new holism competes for the use of my body. At this time the science of medicine does not know the nature of the holism. But the mystery shook loose my thoughts.
We all experience this conflict of one holism against another. Having the flu is being confronted with another holism, one that sees you and me as a delicious steak dinner. A flu virus is a very tiny holism that can disturb or even destroy the holism of the human body through a community of flu viruses.
What leads us to correlate holism with ultimate reality? Why do we yearn for this harmony of self with Self, other and Other? I think that by looking at how holism cycles through our lives we can find some clues. Not only clues to our yearning for connection, but also clues about personal distress that emerges when the developmental cycle does not evolve smoothly.
I was fascinated to hear Rupert Sheldrake6 describe genetic development at a seminar7 in the mid 1980's. In discussing what causes something to take a particular shape Sheldrake indicated that the genetic structure for arms and legs were identical. It will be interesting to see if that holds up with the full mapping of the gene structure. If it does it is a very strong support for holism. Even if every body structure has a distinct gene, genetic theory still supports holism. Hidden in discussions of the wonders of genetic research are clear indications that there is still a mystery as to how the gene results in a particular structure. Developing a person from genes is like developing a city from a street guide. The complex human life that emerges from the bare map of the genetic code is a whole that is greater than its parts.
Human life begins when two gene strands unite, when a sperm and an egg form a new holism and that holism lives within the mother holism for nine months of development- development that happens without thought, without consciousness, even without awareness for much of the time, reaction, imprinting, memory yes, but not awareness, cognition or knowledge, at least in the earliest months of formation. The ego, the "I" of the personality does not exist except in potentiality. The ego states of Transactional Analysis are nowhere to be seen. The egg and the sperm must go through millions of years of phylogenetic development in the days and months after conception and even after birth before there is an adequate structure to support ego development. This process of connecting, egg and sperm and mother's womb provides the first paradigm for the proto-state I call a phylon state. We are born connected.
For many people that connection continues even after the birth separation although most people don't speak of it. I certainly did not until I read several studies on psychic phenomenon and extra sensory perception.9
I was well into my thirties before I first recounted my experiences of connection with my mother. For me the most dramatic indication was my knowledge of my mother's death. She had been in a comma for six months, awakening for my younger brother's graduation from high school and my older brother's wedding. Some time after the wedding I left the house on a Saturday morning to visit my friend Kay. As I pulled up to the stop sign at Litzinger and McKnight I knew my mother died. Not believing in such supernatural messages I continued to Kay's home, but the nagging knowledge persisted and I returned home, walked in the kitchen door and responded to my great aunt's "Jon..." with "I know mother died." Over the years that I have told the story I have been amazed at the number of people who have similar secrets.
But that is not the only experience I had. One symptom of MS which my mother had was the formation of phlegm along with the loss of the ability to clear her throat. Choking to death becomes a real possibility. When I was a young teen my father was often out of town for weeks. It was my job to make sure my mother did not choke. She always insisted that I could sleep upstairs in my own bed, even though there was no way I could hear her when in distress. Over the years I awoke and checked on her three times. Each time she was gasping for breath. How did I know? It was not through perceptions or neo-cortex discrimination.
Berne describes the ego as tabula rasa. If the ego begins as a blank page then the instincts and temperament which exist from birth are indications that there is a proto-state prior to ego development. As I contemplated how infants function and the difference in ego function that culminates in consciousness10 it appeared important to clearly denote the style of early childhood development and its influence on personality development as a proto-state11 distinct from ego development. There is a distinct focus with the fetus and infant on connection. The egg and the sperm must connect to form a new being which them must connect to the wall of the host womb. After birth the infant must bond with the care givers or it is doomed to abuse or death. The long period of dependency requires a secure family which led to tribes and communities. This emphasis on bonding and community is different from the ego with its concern about specifics and differentiation that culminate during adolescence and young adulthood in consciousness.
As a Transactional Analyst the descriptions of ego states in Berne's12 writings make it difficult to determine where ego emerges from the proto-state. Berne looked back at our development and ascribed everything that is incorporated into ego as being ego. I look at children and see what a child grows out of to gain ego skills. It is what a child grows from that I assign to the phylon state. Berne attributed eidetic imagery to the archeopsyche, the Child ego state. I think it is a phylon state attribute because it typically disappears or diminishes radically in the mid teens as abstract reasoning strengthens Thus, like others who have expanded on Berne's theory, I find myself reassigning some ego state functions.
A number of Transactional Analysts13 have used second order ego state analysis to explore the development of personality. The advantage of using ego state theory to reach back into childhood cognition is that it keeps in mind the ego abilities of abstract thinking and consciousness. By keeping the more complex goal of ego development in mind there is less danger of being caught in reductionism- where the whole is equated with its least attribute.
The difficulty in using ego state theory to trace all human development is that it obscures the radical difference in mid brain stem processing and does not even consider the basic temperament and instincts that are wired into individuals. The phylon state differences start with the bonding mechanisms and include learning by absorption, dichotomous or black and white thinking, and an emergency response system that supplies solutions without thought.
By looking at what is currently known about the mid brain stem functioning, we can see the organization which supports the prolonged infancy and dependency of human infants. This prolong need requires a cooperative family structure which historically eventually moved from tribe to community life. Every community has the potential to meet another community in conflict or cooperation. The temptation is to use political or religious violence to force community in order to quell ones existential fears. To date our best hope in promoting a world wide community depends upon democratic government with a goal of justice for all informed by a religion that teaches an ever expanding love of neighbor.
A person with a fairly normal development makes the transition from our primitive roots to ego abilities in a seamless transition. The study of developmental stages including Piaget's study of cognition and Kohlberg's study of moral development indicates that we remember our previous stage but forget that we operated from earlier stages. We are challenged by the emerging stage but can not grasp two stages ahead. Exceptions occur. When under great stress, a person may regress to earlier stages.
Recently in New York's Central Park a few men grabbing women walking in the park excited other men into becoming a mob that mauled women. Under some circumstances groups raise the moral level, such as the group that collected to hear Martin Luther King give his "I Have A Dream" speech which is credited with launching the civil rights movement of the 1960's in the USA. Even though we appear to flow seamlessly from situation to situation, some thought about our associates can give us choice over becoming part of a mob or a movement of respect. What we can not change is our desire to be in community.
As therapists we see many people who have had a difficult development from infancy and therefore it is to our advantage to see clearly our primitive roots and development. This is especially true if you are a therapist who had a relatively smooth transition from childhood into adult professional life leaving you with few experiences from childhood to act as references to the more primitive systems.
Another characteristic of the proto-state to ego states is the way learning takes place. I like to call it learning by absorption because information is sucked in like a sponge sucks up water. Berne makes reference to this learning in his articles on intuition when he remarks about eidetic imagery.14 His interest in eidetic imagery and intuition comes when the proto-state has already merged considerably with the ego's ability to discriminate and organize details. Some people maintain the ability to absorb information into their teen years and a few beyond that.
A friend of mine recounted her experience as an early teen in setting the record for speed reading a novel of over 300 pages in minutes. The pages of the book were posted on a board that allowed her to view 32 pages at a time. She would look at each board for fifteen seconds. After "reading" the book in less than three minutes she would be questioned about the plot and characters. By her account to me she would then scan the book in her mind and read the answer from the appropriate page. This is a very different type of memory than I experience and most people report.
Trauma victims report a similar experience except they are likely to include odors, sounds, emotions, taste along with the visual content of the traumatic episode. One of the first emergency runs made by my son when he worked as an emergency medical technician involved recovering a child's body from a drain pipe. Ten years later he reported that he still occasionally experienced the stench of death from that pipe. These experiences from the past can be very debilitating. This is especially true when the ego can not identify the event.15
Twenty years ago when I first wrote and talked about holism and the phylon state as a proto-state to the ego, I thought that these experiences were "right brain" phenomenon. With the arrival of various means to scan the brain in action, it has become clear that trauma experiences are stored and processed in the mid brain stem. This process involves both the amygdala as an emotional response alert and hippocampus with a programmed response. The cortex is also involved, but the mid brain stem reacts quicker than the cortex by a split second. If the emotion is strong enough communication with the cortex is discontinued and the mid brain stem goes into emergency status using a previous solution from the hippocampus.
This emergency response system provides a fight-flight option that harks back to early human life. The advantage of the system is its quick response. When a mastodon charges you, you don't want to consider weather to climb a tree or a cliff. You need to act, or at least you needed to act when mastodons roamed the Ozark valleys thousands of years ago. We still use the automatic response system while doing some high speed tasks like driving on an expressway when a split second response is required. It also can be activated when someone or thing reminds us subliminally of a past trauma. If the trauma occurred early in life many dysfunctional responses can occur. If it happened prior to language formation there may not be any language information about the event. One of the draw backs of Transactional Analysis when it only focuses on ego states is the absence of any structure to account for the irrational other than inadequate nurturing. There is no structure for defective nature or the narrative constructions of an immature person.
A fourth characteristic of the phylon state is dichotomous thinking, thinking that is black or white. It is difficult to clearly identify how this is part of the phylon state. Indications of dichotomous thinking depend upon language, the same system that leads to ego consciousness. Following are some indications that there is a structural part of human make up that uses either or thinking prior to the development of ego states.
One important clue to dichotomous thinking is to observe the way young children respond to language, especially to choosing options. When a young child is given two options the choice comes easily and naturally: "Do you want to go to bed now or in ten minutes?" "Do you want you want ice cream or a story?" Asking an open ended question: "What kind of treat do you want?" is likely to get hemming and hawing from either not being able to identify wanted treats or from an overload of possible options. Young children think in or out, I want or I don't want. They can and do learn to manage multiple options. I see that ability growing out of dichotomous thinking.16
Even before expressive language is mastered, children are choosing sounds and associating them with nearby objects. Research into language formation indicates that infants select sounds to repeat by tracking their frequency of use by caretakers.17 This selection process results in a choice for a sound to be in or out. We know that the choice of sounds eventually results in a modification of the brain at about age six. A study of immigrant accents shows that children who arrive below the age of five acquire American English while older children speak with an accent of their native country.
This black and white thinking seems to serve the purpose of deciding what it takes to belong. It helps provide a basis for cooperation and community building by establishing standard responses. We know from fetus studies that the fetus responds to and incorporates the music parents listen to during gestation. Even alcohol and drug usage can be encouraged by the mother using them during gestation. These influences show that even dichotomous thinking that will evolve during infancy is influenced by the community in which a fetus develops.
Dichotomous thinking appears frequently in counseling sessions as either-or thinking. As stress increases in a person's life the consideration of options decreases. With enough stress the client's behavior/thinking mimics infancy with two extreme options or being overpowered by multiple choices. The gray area were people find satisfaction and success disappears and only extremes seem possible. When this happens I suspect that the person is caught in the mid brain system of problem solving. The exception is that some very competitive people may be hopping from one extreme to the other looking for a way to win an argument.
I started this presentation with a personal example that I related to Buber's I-Thou experience. I then pointed out that holisms come into conflict as well as giving us connection to the cosmic forces of creation. I continued by showing that our phylogenetic roots includes our ability to bond between caretaker and child allowing us to build community. Our roots also includes learning that absorbs experiences without the critical evaluation found in the ego. A third characteristic is an automatic response system for problem solving. Dichotomous thinking that sorts experiences into either - or categories to manage the world was just covered. I pointed to the fact these roots are vastly different from ego with its individuation and consciousness. The ego represents the creative growing edge of our evolving species.
There is one more aspect of our holistic experiences to examine, our connection with the cycles of nature, with ultimate being, Other with a capital "O". From Stonehedge inhabitants to obscure American Indian tribes to Mayan culture of Central America we find massive architectural structures identifying the movement of the sun and moon and marking the changing seasons. These engineering wonders took as long as a century to create in cultures that had no written language. How such precise information was passed from generation to generation is not known. Our entertainment movies show these as cultures with a ruling class of people seen as gods who enslave people and force them to build for the ruling man-god.
Jaynes points out that these early cultures were theocracies directed by the voice of God. Hearing and obeying the voice of God resulted in a unified culture. With our ability to be conscious, to be aware of our self in action, it is difficult for us to comprehend a culture with a perceptual awareness that is not filtered through the Self.
I remember as a youth reading about the Mayan custom of appeasing the gods with the sacrifice of a young girl. I was disturbed by the calm acceptance of the honor to die. I imagined my own feelings and how those thoughts would lead to my struggle to get free. I imposed my ego organized life on to those people giving them individuated responses they did not have. The voice of God told them when to plant, when harvest, where to move, who to include and exclude. Life was organized, enhanced, and centered in communal life and regulated by this mysterious voice of God. By the time history became a written document the voices were the province of oracles. We do not know if earlier in human history everybody or most people heard the voices.
The voice of God receded in human history with the development of ego consciousness. The corpus callosum is one of the last parts of the body to complete its development which give some credence to its necessity for consciousness to evolve.18 The loss of God's voice frees us from the theocracy and also cuts us off from the close connection to the cycles of nature and community identity. It leaves us vulnerable to loneliness, even depression. Typically, people begin to reconnect with religion in their late forties or early fifties, a time when parents are dying and children leaving home. Loneliness, the awareness of being cut off from our roots in nature drives us to reconnect with our roots.
Ego consciousness allows us to consider a life separate from the group which gives us individual options. Consciousness also allows us to contemplate our death in a way that our pre consciousness ancestors could not fathom. Being able to contemplate our death gives rise to existential anxiety and the host of maneuvers we undertake to avoid facing our demise.
Not too long ago we would have returned to the religion of our childhood to solve the dilemma of being isolated. Now we are more likely to seek a spiritual path, an individual journey back to our roots. This is not because we have become too individuated. Science has developed a new paradigm that undercuts the mythos of religions resulting in a shift in philosophy known as postmodernism. Quantum physics the very science that brings us to study holism slowly changed our understanding of creation through out the twentieth century. All around the world quantum physics has undercut the understandings, the meanings for life gained through religious mythology. Religion needs to discover a new message of unity. This is not the first time scholars of religion have redefined its message.
In the Judeo-Christian tradition there have been three great eras of religion: 1. the blind obedience of theocracy, 2. magical appeasement and miraculous awe followed, lasting until the dark ages, 3. mechanical order and reason introduced the static and reliable God most of us have known.
As quantum physics filtered into more and more areas of knowledge during this century we have moved from a world view of stasis to understanding that creation is guided by what we call the chaos theory. With this changing world view from the Creator seeking a perfect stasis to the Creator continuing to unfold in a process of mystery, we now we face a fourth transition in the religious mythology that we use to order our lives. Losing our foundations for order and community creates great stress. It has caused some people to regress to previous stages of magic or obedience. We can see this regression in the growth of fundamentalism around the world.
With organized religion asea the cosmic tension between regression into past modes of psychological organization and discovering comfortable options to explore the future is also reflected in our work with people. The outdated religious mythos is not quelling existential anxiety resulting in increased difficulties that show up in behavior and attitude. Daily each of us has the opportunity to connect with Ultimate Being with old fragments from our phylon state or seek to discover the unfolding Creator through ego development. In this sense treatment, for me, always involves a spiritual journey.
Psychological growth at its best is religious intimacy. Religious intimacy is a moment of life before the religious experience is ritualized. Religion has two components, the religious experience such as my moment on the Olympic peninsula, and the attempt to hold on to those moments which result in rituals. If I were to return to the Olympic peninsula each summer to re-experience my moment with eternity of years ago I would lose the moment in ritual. My children might continue the practice because they experienced my delight in reliving a past moment. My grandchildren might turn the yearly trip into a sacred ritual that must be followed because they learned about it before ego consciousness. Rituals usually work to keep religious experiences alive because there is a common mythos that everyone uses to hold on to those personal connections we experience periodically with Ultimate being. It is the loss of the common mythos this century that has given healers of the psyche the job of being healers of the soul.
I have presented the human holism as consisting of multiple holisms. Developmentally, within an individual, human holism moves from the attributes from our ancestors that I call a phylon state to the creative edge of personality found in ego consciousness. I have hinted at conflict and disruptions and pointed to the current stress on our connection with the cycles of nature, with ultimate Otherness. Now we will explore what happens when this holism gets out of balance, is defective or damaged.
If the new born child's brain is not damaged and the child experiences adequate responses to each developmental task in a social setting that has the right mixture of support and conflict there will be a slow and seamless transition from the animal like phylon state to the civilized ego state. Then if there is adequate stimulation and encouragement to move from concrete thinking and emotion to abstract thinking the ego will develop a consciousness that allows the person to successfully meet the problems of social living.
Unfortunately many children will suffer from one or more of the following: brain anomalies caused by birth trauma, trauma from accidents, untimely deaths, or community disasters- hurricanes, floods, war; noxious substances of modern industrial life, old and emerging disease, personal experimentation with drugs, as well as miscommunications in family settings and outright abuse by caretakers. All of these interfere with the seamless development of the personality. The earlier they happen in life the more likely the phylon state will be affected. When the phylon state is involved we need to consider interventions that use methods other than insight. We already do use methods other than insight. Understanding what exists prior to ego helps us focus our interventions and nurturing.
A primary decision I make as I approach treatment is to determine if the person is over socialized or under socialized. Over socialized clients come with a well developed ego. They are prime candidates for transactional analysis and ego state analysis presented with a good dose of Rogerian unconditional positive regard. With a little bit of information and a lot of acceptance these people will sort out their problems and move ahead, living a fulfilling life. Depth analysis moves quickly into creative ideas about the future since there is less residue from the past. Our view of Victorians as rigid, sexually repressed, morally bound people would be the paradigm for the over socialized client. In the later half of the twentieth century over socialized clients are becoming as rare as the once prevalent immobile catatonic.
Under socialized clients have major developmental gaps that leave them out of sync. They have multiple needs. They have not learned basic social skills for any of many reasons, lack of a socially mature family environment, lack of stable community resources including socially adept neighbors, adequate schools, personalized business, entertainment and recreational opportunities, a lack of inspiration which is usually a place of worship but can be a service club or a grandparent who turns a child's attention to the future. The under socialized may also have physical limitations, impaired visual and auditory perception are among the limits. There may also be gross or subtle neurological abnormalities such as the petite mal seizures related to some dissociative disorders or the recently discovered connection between birth trauma and schizophrenia. Also included in the under socialized are the abused and traumatized who fail to learn because too much energy is directed to warding off danger.
Each of the causes for under socialization result in such different configurations that it is impossible for me to give a paradigm. Even schizophrenia which fits so well into the under socialized category has so many faces that it does not give a good universal picture. Part of the problem is that even with schizophrenic clients where nature is clearly involved there is also a component of nurture. When nurture enters the picture we always wonder if the care givers created a rigidity in the ego system. There is a truth to that concern and a goodly number of clients will be a mixture of over and under socialization.
A difficult diagnostic problem for professionals who promote personal growth is determining if automatic responses are derived from rigid ego structures or phylon state learning by absorption. If automatic responses come from rigid Parent ego states the edict against rescuing is an important consideration as the client needs the encouragement to struggle with multiple alternatives and decide on a course of action that is appropriate for their own agenda. However, if the automatic response is generated by the phylon state which answers prior to learning how to think, then putting your client into a situation that expects thinking is abusive. Persons who learn by absorption need to be given structures about how to think about alternatives. They often need to experience different perspectives in order to have the internal data to consider alternatives. The task for the professional is to discover either age appropriate tasks that will supply the missed childhood experiences or will provide alternative problem solving if the cause is a neurological defect.
One of my more frustrating therapeutic endeavors is working with children whose output ability is compromised while the intake is intact. These are children who know things but can not express them. They are severely damaged by being called dumb early in life, if not at home, certainly after a few years in school. These are children who are treated as if they are caught in the phylon state when they have good ego development with a neurological disorder that keeps the ideas inside.
I have found very few teachers who can recognize the expressive problem. It usually takes competent neuropsychological testing to determine although once I became aware of the problem I could recognize it from working with the child. One clue is the frustration expressed is like constipation: "I can't get it out" rather than "you expect too much of me.' Another clue may be an ability to show you how to do something without being able to talk about it.
Schools will not treat the disorder until neuropsychological testing confirms it. Even after the disorder is identified there is little that can be done other than take time and refrain from calling the child dumb. I am still haunted by the frustration and anger of some eight and nine year old children who lived in families who refused to believe that expressive blocks existed. In such cases the broken holism of the child is further shattered by the break in the holism we know as family.
I hope that it is now becoming clear why using the structure of the phylon state is useful. It simplifies the task of working toward personal growth by clarifying the creative and regressive tugs on personality. While it simplifies understanding the tugs on personality it complicates the professionals task by calling for new levels of service and competency.
Those of you who have worked with schizophrenics may have noticed that they hear and respond to the voice of God. Jaynes thinks that schizophrenia is a rudiment of life before ego consciousness. I agree, however there are differences. Schizophrenics do not live in a community of like minded people which makes them stand out as weird. Further they have some ego abilities certainly more than our ancestors who lived when everyone turned to the voice of God for leadership. The ego ability of schizophrenics allows them to view themselves as weird. The combination of the archaic ability to hear God along with the limited ego abilities produce a voice that mixes family and cultural beliefs with a voice of authority leading to personal confusion for the schizophrenic person.
Treating the voice of God dynamically is fraught with danger, especially for a theologically trained therapist. Clients become super sensitive to religious differences since these represent very basic structures for ordering ones life. A clinical presentation of a bipolar disorder had to be canceled because I ventured into an analysis of religious ideas presented and the client abruptly terminated. When a therapist differs not only with the client but also with God, God is likely to win. Non clergy have more lee way but still need to establish strong alliances with parts of the client's ego that sees a destructive element to the voice of God. The voice provides structure and safety for your client in a world that has been very unkind. The voice is available to advise about threats 168 hours a week while you will be available one to five at best. After carefully hearing the positive influence of the voice and establishing a strong positive alliance you can offer some gentle persuasion to hear how a disliked caretaker has sneaked into the voice. By teaching your client to discriminate between useful and harmful elements you help your client move beyond dichotomous thinking and loosen the grip of learning by absorption Another method came from Cathexis Institute and the practice of reparenting. During the time that I studied reparenting with Jacqui Schiff I experienced various ways she gained dominance over patients and trainees and required obedience. My personal standard did not allow me to consider terror like the knife threat Schiff recounts in All My Children. I now see that treatment at Cathexis imposed obedience through abusive dominance and thus mimicked the age of theocracy. My modified form of reparenting only works with highly motivated individuals, individuals who use my guidance voluntarily.
While I don't offer reparenting contracts anymore, I do follow a treatment progression that evaluates the unmet developmental tasks and help the person meet those through the way I relate to them. Like raising children this requires a mixture of being the authority and turning decision making over to the client. I often find myself turning over decision making responsibilities before a client is ready. I frequently underestimate the regressive pull of an unmodified phylon state. The ego's ability to discriminate just is not as active as I expect.
Rather than approaching the situation with a thoughtful "What's going on here?" clients are thrown into the mid brain stem emergency mode of operation. Once the amygdala- hippocampus system takes over, they are at a loss to return to the neo-cortex and ego functioning without some calming support. Talking about these neurological considerations does not help my clients, but the awareness of black and white thinking does. They can see that thinking in extremes throws them into a panic that activates the emergency response system.. Again they prefer hearing about their emergency response system to the knowledge gained from brain scans about the amygdala-hippocampus responding.
Sometimes I am surprised by a client needing to be socialized. A woman who came for marriage counseling and was an educator seemed to have clear understanding of her over working husband who prowled the night watering the lawn, self medicating himself with alcohol and marijuana. She persisted to work things out with him through several of his affairs. When he died, she fell apart. It became apparent that she put up with his behavior not just for the family and her belief that marriage is forever, but also because she relied on his ability to consider multiple alternatives. Without his presence, her black and white thinking emerged and the inability to consider the middle ground became evident. Encouraging insight and offering unconditional positive regard gave way to teaching her to look at experiences, to consider perspectives other than her own, to value the other person's perspective. Slowly she is building her own ego state structure to replace the structure she acquired by wholesale acceptance of structures from the authorities in her life, mainly a sweet but insipid mother. It is humbling to be fooled by a client playing grown up after as many years experience as I have had. The clues were there in her naive acceptance of her husbands explanations for behavior that usually indicates an affair.
The end of this presentation is fast approaching and my energy is leaving. I hope this gives you something to think about, to consider when you think of your clients as holisms that are pulled by the roots and stretched by their growing edge. I invite you to consider evaluating the problems they bring to you in terms of an over socialized ego or an under socialized phylon state to determine if you need to offer flexibility to the ego or learning experiences. It is exciting to me to be able to help others build a more satisfying holism of their self even as the holism I have known as Jonathon deteriorates. Thank you for your attention and I invite your responses to this presentation.
Jonathon Wagner, M.Div. LCSW
1248 Dawn Valley Dr.
Maryland Heights, MO 63043-3608 USA
Ph. 314/514-0211
email jwagner@counseliing-stl.com
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