One finds some overlap between psychic and material energy in the interactions of brain chemistry which have been correlated by modern research in biochemistry to the presence of identifiable emotional states. This science is still in a rudimentary state, yet this has not prevented psychiatry, with its traditional dogmatism to manifest an extreme confidence in its ability to prescribe certain drugs as "cures" for identifiable emotional pathologies. Generally speaking there is a tendency in modern psychiatry to vaunt the chemistry of emotion above emotion itself. Since we have chosen to adopt the currently unfashionable position that psychic energy is of a different nature from physical energy ( chemical, electric, mechanical, etc.) it is inevitable that we oppose this direction of psychotherapy, without disavowing its positive achievements.
We will attempt to demonstrate as well that this notion of an underlying living energy in the psychic process enters in a decisive fashion into the permanent debate between free will and determinism, volition and intention. In discussing its attributes we hope to shed light on some of the long-standing philosophical paradoxes in this debate. In the intersection between what is determined and what is free in human behavior we discern the attributes of creativity intrinsic to the living nature. Adopting this perspective we are all simultaneously determined and free: determined in the sense that body and mind are subject to all the forces of nature, gravity, electro-magnetism, chemical interaction, etc.; free in the sense that psychic energy ( and force) is a creative force, instrumental in bringing to fruition phenomena transcending the 4 basic forces of space-time-matter.
When pressed for a scientific definition of life , or life-energy , or the life force , the author is quite content with the following: Life is that entity which, when found in some physical body , it is immoral to injure . It is scientific in the sense that it is based on the universally acknowledged observation that human beings never feel that it is right to injure a living creature without a reason for doing so. Reasons, alas, are often all to easy to find.
" The authorities are wrong only in regarding the modifications the dream undergoes when remembered and put into words as being arbitrary, impossible to interpret further, and so very likely to put us on the wrong track in understanding the dreams. They underestimate the factor of determination in matters of the psyche . Nothing is arbitrary there. It can be shown quite generally that a second train of thought will promptly take over the determination of an element left undetermined by the first. I try to think of a number quite at random; it is not possible; the number that occurs to me is unambiguously and necessarily determined by thoughts within me that may well be remote from my present intention." (Freud, pg. 344. All references are to the Bibliography at the end of each chapter.)
The well-worn example of one's being unable to trace the origins of a number that pops into the mind, used as evidence for the existence of unconscious processes, is not really what we're referring to when we invoke the creative force inherent in the living nature. In this case we agree with Freud, that phenomena of this sort have their origins in some kind of unconscious mind - although we are inclined to hypothesize that there exist structures in the brain and nervous system, probably in those places harboring reflexes, that incorporate random number generators. Indeed we are fairly certain that this must be so, given that Evolution must, at an early stage of Life's presence on Earth, have been obliged to invent devices for symmetry-breaking, given that the need to make decisions ( sometimes of a life-and-death) by breaking symmetries occur frequently throughout each day of a creature's existence.)
Free will, for us, is not a broken symmetry, nor a breaker of symmetries. It does not therefore disturb us overmuch to learn that it has little or no part in pulling a number, word, color or sound out of a box. As we conceptualize the living nature, free will makes its presence known in the resolution of essentially spiritual quandaries, dilemmas, paradoxes, and obligations and urgent needs, whatever oppresses our innate freedom by a psychological bondage.
Shakespeare's "Hamlet" is all about this. Hamlet as portrayed in its script is not free. Throughout most of the play he rails against his keen sense of helplessness. The impediments to his freedom are physical, political and spiritual. Although the political and physical obstacles are much exaggerated to his mind since, in fact his primary bondage is spiritual. Freedom in the true sense emerges through an internal struggle, a struggle that is shared by the audience, and which accounts for the enduring hold Shakespeare's play has had upon the mind of mankind for the last 400 years.
By restricting the psychology of emotion to the science of brain chemistry, psychiatry attempts to side-step Philosophy by cutting the Gordian Knot entangling Free Will, Determinism, Conscience and Responsibility. Herein medicine is only doing what it does best. It isn't concerned with 'deep questions'. In line with thousands of years of medical tradition it sets out fist to establish a classification of 'ailments', in this case the compilation of 'dysfunctions' of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) . . Alongside each description of them, like so many recipes of a cook-book, one finds the appropriate list of herbs, nostrums, drugs and medical interventions. In its mechanistic certitude it differs little from the behaviorist's "stimulus/response" schema, save that the new mantras are being chanted in the language of "dysfunction/drug".
However identifying mind totally with body cannot hope to capture the many dimensions of mental activity. If the psychic life be subdivided into the classical categories of intellect (reason) , volition (will) conscience (judgment) sensation and imagination , one discovers that both body and the mind share in sensation ( psychic pain and delight, physical pain and pleasure) and, to some extent, imagination ( psychosomatic symptoms, conditioned reflexes, etc.) , but that there are no somatic correlates to intellect, volition and conscience.
We do not normally attribute "thinking" or "understanding", to a muscle, tissue, blood vessel or bone; nor do we ascribe "will power" or a "sense of justice" to a ligament or lymph node. The special significance of "conscience" in this regard, is that it opens the doors of psyche and self to the consciousness of other beings; for if there is no awareness of suffering and pleasure in others, how can there be guilt, shame, justice or love?
Science will, and must continue to explore those aspects of mind which may be considered co-extensive with the brain, such as the activities of calculation and computation, in which the brain functions as a computer and no conscious effort need be involved, or the relationship between perception and sensation, the nature of memory and all things falling in the domains of neurology and cognitive science.
Yet if everything mental were physical and nothing more, the philosophical dispute would not be between determinism and free will, but between classical and quantum physics. One find such models in many places nowadays, most notably in the quantum models proposed by Roger Penrose in "The Emperor's New Mind" "Shadows of the Mind". ( Penrose 1, Penrose 2 ).
Nor can emotional illness be cured by the nostrums in some biochemical catalogue. One might speculate that life on earth, perhaps in the entire cosmos, is nothing other than the struggle of spirit to actualize itself through the vehicle of material forms, one is led to the conclusion that consciousness, sensation and emotion must be deemed primary, and brain chemistry as merely the technology whereby intentionality is realized. To 'feel better' may be the indispensable initial phase for the cure of disease, yet it can never be anything more than symptom-relief, not the cure itself. One doesn't cure cancer with a pain killer, though in many cases no progress can be made in the cure until pain is brought down to a manageable level.
Even the psychopharmacologists themselves admit to an inability to discriminate between euphoria, associated with dopamine uptake, and "anti-depression" associated with serotonin - as if "anti-depression" were an emotional state of its own! (Julien; Breggin ) Complete confusion reigns in that profession between 'feeling good', or 'feeling good about oneself' - which can be increased by donating an old sweater to the Salvation Army - and 'curing depression' - which may require working through one's grief at the loss of a loved friend or relative.
The life-span of an idea is often erroneously considered to be an adequate defense for its credibility. Stalinism has reigned in much of the world from 1922 to 1991, and is still going strong in North Korea, Vietnam, and to a large extent China. Creationism is as active and well in 2004 as it was in 1859 when it emerged in reaction to Darwin's Origin of the Species. Astrology has not diminished in strength since its invention in ancient Egypt and Babylon.
In the same way, Psychoanalysis, although it lacks any foundation in scientific method, observation, experiment or therapeutic effectiveness, continues to maintain its aura of authority. ( Fisher and Greenberg ; Crews; Masson )
Psycho-analysis exists in both popular and professional brands. The professionals affect to despise the popular interpretations of its ideas. Yet in actually making the comparison one finds little difference. One might bring together for examination such diverse literary works as Freud's own descriptions of the cases of Dora, the Rat Man and the Wolf Man, the ludicrous folk-psychoanalysis of the Hitchcock-Ingrid Bergman film Spellbound , the highly dramatic if surreal analyses in Robert Lindler's 50 Minute Hour (Dell, 1987) ; the Joanne Woodward film 3 Faces of Eve ,or the lachrymose sentimentality of the fabrication of the saga of John Nash in both biography and film : A Beautiful Mind . It appears that the continuing adherence of the public to the Freud/ Jung paradigm is largely due to its ready adaptability to popular superstitions and prejudices, its love of drama, and the insatiable hunger for tales of violence, murder and unnatural sexual desires.
Yet less scientific evidence exists for an Oedipus Complex universally present in the human psyche than for the divine nature of Christ, for which there is no evidence whatsoever. One appears to be dealing with a delusional or superstitious system. Whenever such systems are adopted by large numbers of human beings they go under the name of ideologies. Characteristically, ideologies may enshackle the minds of great populations for centuries, even millennia, although there may have been no more corroborative evidence for them at their beginnings than in the era of their passing away. A rich field for psychological research awaits anyone who wishes to inquire into what it is that causes so many people to unquestioningly accept such extravagant concoctions of non-sequiturs, arbitrary dogmas, and unanalyzed and unanalyzable fixed ideas.
Yet it may be the case that one ought to show more respect for ideologies, at least in their initial stages. Many of them succeed on the basis of an efficient synthesis of a wide-reaching range of philosophical and ethical thought, by means of rigid dogmas that carry the spirit of the age from which they emerged into the future.
Unfortunately ideologies then proceed to undermine whatever potential for good there is in them by hardening a thriving context of intellectual discourse into a sterile catechism of dogma which can then be employed to bury the era from which they spring, replacing a dialogue between competing creeds by a single, reductive, over-simplified doctrine. Whenever or wherever this succeeds, that era becomes more or less permanently inaccessible to future generations.
Christianity is in fact a magnificent synthesis of Hellenistic philosophy and Semitic religion, at the period of the greatest flourishing of each. It combines Stoicism (Seneca), Jewish monotheism and its accompanying ethical code, the fertility cults of the Ancient Near East as described in Sir James Frazer's Golden Bough, Platonism ( concept of the Trinity), neo-Platonism ( purification by ritual and magic). It also continues the belief, universal throughout the Hellenistic world of the divine nature of kings. This heavy burden of syncretism is leavened with charming metaphors and fables drawn from a 3000-year tradition of wisdom literature going back to ancient Sumer and the Egyptian legend of the wise doctor, Sinuhe.
Likewise, the Freud/Jung synthesis of psychotherapy which goes under the name of "psychoanalysis" is a fascinating hybrid redaction of all the components of the rich ferment of ideas in 19th century psychology: Mesmer's discovery of hypnosis, the study of reflexes and recognition of the existence of an unconscious mind, and the role of the phenomena of free association in the activity of the brain that precedes the formation of ideas.
Yet how many patients who voluntarily place themselves in the hands of psychiatrists know, or even care about the thought, discoveries and writings of Mesmer, Pinel, Esquirol, Braid, Bain, Hamilton, Kraepelin, Charcot, Bernheim, Janet, Maudsley? How many are content in their belief that Sigmund Freud is the alone discoverer of the unconscious and subconscious mind, of id, ego and superego, of the role of free association in the formation of ideas, when in fact every one of the notions was lifted without attribution from his predecessors? Evidence for this claim will be presented in a following section, where we review the history of the development of the concept of an unconscious mind dependent on consciousness.
Happiness versus unhappiness, conscience, fear and trust, or speculations on the nature of death and the possibility of an afterlife, do not enter into the concerns of cognitive science or neurology. Although the grounding of moral principles is not a fit subject for experimental psychology, the effects of such principles on behavior is. In itself this is enough to guarantee that the boundaries of psychology must in some instances overflow those of philosophy and religion.
In our own times we have witnessed the creation of a new profession, the ethicist or bioethicist on the staff of hospitals around the world. It is gratifying to learn that hospital culture has come to acknowledge that there exist critical situations in which decisions cannot be made on the basis of scientific data alone, and require input on issues involving morality and religion, such as lifestyle, ties of affection, beliefs about responsibility, perceptions of levels of disability and suffering, the whole gamut of reasons for living.
Medicine, ( to its credit), cannot be conceived of as a "pure" or "hard" science in the manner of chemistry or mathematics. No way exists of drawing a line of demarcation separating sickness from health in the same way that one distinguishes alkalis from acids, or rational from irrational numbers. This is the strongest objection that one must raise against the mechanistic linkage of the "dysfunctions" in the DSM catalogues to the recipes of psychoneuropharmacology : if "mental health" can be reduced to a sub-discipline within organic chemistry, then in theory all of medicine could be so reduced. However medicine, by its very nature, not being a hard science, cannot be subsumed within one. Medicine is a mode of interaction, a form of dialectic, between humanity, the individual, the natural order, society and basic science. There are good reasons why medical settings permeate so much of the world's great literature.
That the full actualization of an individual's living nature, over and beyond the mechanical attributes of body and mind, is the core issue of mental health might be deemed an article of faith underlying all the ideas proposed in this essay. This actualization is of course delimited and influenced by brain chemistry, in the same way that it is delimited and influenced by physiology, climate, inertia and momentum, and other physical determinants. In no way is it synonymous with any of these, nor can it be co-opted by them.
To this extent the identification of mental health is on more certain ground than that of physical health. There will always be considerable disagreement as to what goes into the definition of a healthy body; but mental health can be simply understood as the working through, assimilation and elimination of all inhibiting unconscious restraints upon conscious awareness. ( The word unconscious as employed in this statement is a technical term as defined within the scope of this essay ) .
The 3 attributes of a fully realized living nature are compassion, creative insight and non-attachment. Non-attachment frees the mind from a dependence on the external world that can cripple its effective functioning. Compassion overcomes the narrowly restrictive confines of a self-conscious mentality by putting one in touch with the common nature of all other living creatures. In this way one's spiritual universe becomes multi-dimensional, in theory infinite dimensional. And Insight breaks the internal shackles constraining action, behavior, understanding and personal development.
Such goals can be reached in many ways. One finds them in abundance in the enlightened world religions, philosophies and ethical codes. As our focus is essentially scientific, we will not be investigating the various paths to enlightenment or salvation, although such considerations will necessarily enter into our discussion. What most concerns us here is the investigation of the psychological mechanisms underlying the transformations of the personal sense of identity.
This process will be shown to progress, ( in a fashion analogous to Thermodynamics ) through a sequence of rigorously articulated phases. It may be referred to , variously and depending on the context, as the Rebirth Mechanism , the Rebirth Cycle , the psychic process , etc. To our way of thinking it is intrinsic to the myriad manifestations of the life force itself throughout the universe. In animals, plants and even in micro-organisms, one will finds the basic constituents of the Rebirth Mechanism. It is a living universe that we inhabit and share, eternally engaged in its dynamic of awareness, creativity and self-definition.
" There are at least three different arrows of time. First there is the thermodynamic arrow of time, the direction of time in which disorder or entropy increases. Then there is the psychological arrow of time. This is the direction in which we feel time passes, the direction in which we remember the past but not the future. Finally, there is the cosmological arrow of time ...the direction of time in which the universe is expanding rather than contracting." ( Hawking, pg. 145.)
In the same way that procreation is the corporeal technology for the creation of new living beings, so this process of spiritual gestation, the psychic analog of procreation, moves through stages which may be roughly identified with insemination, conception, pregnancy and birth. This essential similarity finds its etymological parallel in words like "concept", "conception", "conceptualize" and so on.
Concepts , particularly concepts of personal identity, whether in the form of a delusional shackle or as a vessel of liberation and adventure, emerge through our processes of conceptualizing , that is to say modes of conception that have multiple analogs with the stages of physical conception, that is to say , procreation . The insemination of by external influences, thoughts or experiences, of primitive suggestions, a development through stages of latency and conflict in the womb of the unconscious, and the eventual emergence into the light of conscious awareness of fully reified concepts , as well as their eventual impact, whether minute or revolutionary on the outer world, repeats the pattern one naturally associates with the conception and birth of children, new living forms with autonomous destiny and will beyond the control of their engendering parents.
The state between the cessation of awareness of a former identity and the re-establishment of awareness of self is intrinsically unconscious. Within the perpetually renewed drama of the journey through death and pregnancy to rebirth, there is a state that is essentially unknowing, unfeeling and, in some sense, transitional between death and life.
Therefore, any disruption of the normal functioning of this passage will lodge an unconscious region in the texture of consciousness, in much the same way as a bullet is lodged within a wound. This unconscious region may extend its tributaries through the entire personality of the individual, as it operates against the adjustment mechanism itself, enfeebling, paralyzing, engendering psychosomatic and psychomotor dysfunction and measurable learning handicaps. We pause for a moment to present a survey of some of the ways in which evidence for an unconscious mind has been treated historically.
... In addition to the desires that we generally have that are free, or at least voluntary in us, which arise from a previous knowledge [...] the Hurons believe that our souls have other desires which are, as it were, inborn and concealed. These, they say, come from the depths of the soul ...
... Now they believe that our soul makes these natural desires known by means of dreams, which are its language. Accordingly, when these desires are accomplished it is satisfied; but, on the contrary, if it be not granted what it desires, it becomes angry, and not only does it not give its body the good and happiness that it wished to procure for it, but often it also revolts against the body, causing various diseases and even death... " (Altschule I) .
The ancient Hittites are also known to have used dreams for psychiatric diagnosis. However they believed in a "sin" theory of mental illness and it appears that dreams were interpreted by the priests as evidence of past crimes that were being concealed or had been forgotten.
The celebrated physicians of antiquity, Galen and Hippocrates, also made allusions to an unconscious mind. As Galen uses the term it appears to mean what nowadays what we call reflexes. Hippocrates on the other hand pointed to the content and purpose of dreams as evidence of an unconscious will:
" Just as in the waking state the face is flushed, and the eyes are red, mostly when a man is afraid and his mind contemplates some evil act, even so the same phenomena are displayed in sleep. But they cease when the man wakes to consciousness and the blood is dispersed again into the veins. ".
The oft cited passages from the Meno where Plato develops his theory of knowledge as recollection, suggest that memories from previous lives lie deeply buried in the unconscious mind. This doesn't, of course, provide any insight into the ways in which the unconscious mind operates in daily life. Furthermore the "evidence" in the Meno , as in so many of Plato's Dialogues, is definitely ad hoc, that is to say, tailored to fit his philosophical agenda.
However there is a passage in The Republic in which dreams are connected in a direct manner with the existence of an unconscious domain within the human soul:
" There exist in every one of us, even in some reputed most respectable, a terrible, fierce and lawless brood of desires, which it seems are revealed in our sleep. " B y the middle of the 19th century the existence of mental processes preconditioning consciousness was well established in psychiatry . Evidence indicating that consciousness was only the final stage in a causal chain had accumulated in the research of psychologists, biologists and philosophers for 3 centuries. (Hunter and MacAlpine, Shorter, Altschule I and II , Kraepelin )
The notion that dreams might have symbolic or latent content in addition to what manifest or literal in them originates in the 16th century. Johannes Weyer, a 16th century German doctor known for his writings against the witchcraft superstition, had observed that the waking states of mental illness often reflected thoughts that had occurred in dreams, or would later appear in dreams (Altschule 1) .
Beginning with Aristotle, the processes at work in the free association of ideas and thoughts have always been a source of fascination to philosophers, scientists and writers of fiction, ( notably in the school of writers associated with the interior monologue: Marcel Proust, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Henry James and others. ) . In the 18th and 19th century it claimed the attention of , among others, John Locke, David Hume, Hartley, Bain and William Hamilton. The importance of the phenomenon of the association of ideas for 18th and 19th century psychologists is described in Man against Humanity (Bromberg) :
"The associationism of Hartley and Hume which led to empiricism and the detailed study of sensation, the faculty psychology based on Christian Woolf's ideas (1734) and developed by many to a high point in the first half of the 19th century, had not yet been incorporated into a science of mental therapy. " The French doctor Broussais, ( a man with a somewhat unsavory reputation acquired as physician in chief to Napoleon's armies ) applied Hartley's ideas to the treatment of mental illness in a textbook published in 1828. In 1845 the German doctor Von Feuchtesleben described the ways in which the characteristic patterns of free association break down in severe mental illness, familiar to us as a symptom of schizophrenia.
The major discoveries in this period relevant to the hypothesis of an unconscious mind came from the study of reflexes in medicine and biology. Galen himself developed a neuro-muscular theory of reflexes which is still accepted as valid in its essentials. It is Descartes in the 17th century who is credited with constructing the first models for 'stimulus-response' behavior.
In 1844 Laycock maintained that every aspect of consciousness was merely a collection of reflex actions culminating in what he called 'ideagenous changes' . He was also the first psychiatrist to suggest that hysterical symptoms were rooted in childhood experiences.
The term Unconscious Cerebration first appears around 1842, in the writings of the doctor and phrenologist C. Engledue. To him consciousness is nothing more than a bi-product of an overwhelmingly unconscious process. His ideas were further elaborated by W.B. Carpenter between 1852 and 1855.
The Engledue-Carpenter theory of unconscious cerebration is discussed In Laycock's treatise "Mind and Brain", published in 1860. His own theory of reflex mentation he asserts, corresponds more accurately with the evidence that had accumulated in the 20 years since he first proposed it.
It doesn't appear that any real progress has been made in the last 150 years to resolving this paradigm split, which may ultimately prove to be a matter of emphasis: the view from the somatic direction of physico-chemical processes is completed from the psychological direction by psychic determinism.
In addition to the names already mentioned one can include those of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Creighton, Jacobi, and Bain. Writing in 1859, the philosopher William Hamilton presented 3 arguments in defense of the existence of an unconscious mind (Hunter and MacAlpine):
".. I shall first of all adduce some proof of the fact that the mind may, and does, contain far more latent furniture than consciousness informs us it possesses. I shall distinguish 3 degrees of this mental latency... "
Hamilton's 3 degrees are (1) Habits; (2) Extraordinary states such as madness, delirium, the hypnotic stages of somnambulism and catalepsy; (3) The process of free association and its connection with the emergence of ideas into consciousness.
All of the aspects of the modern way of looking at the unconscious mind were laid down in the writings of the English psychiatrist Henry Maudsley, whose major treatises were available at the time that Freud was setting himself up in his medical practice: These are The Physiology and Pathology of Mind , published in 1867, and Body and Will , 1883. His principal hypotheses are that:
Challenge therefore is Janus-faced, threatening what one holds dear yet with the promise of reward. Inevitably one is led to extrapolate from this dual phenomenon of destruction/rejuvenation in psychological adjustment to the notion of reincarnation , that is to say, the passage of the individual from one body to another through the process of death and resurrection. This hypothesis is neither defended nor denied in this essay. To the author it appears plausible.
Taken as a whole, the experience, from beginning to end, may appear as delightful or terrible, as soul-shattering or as inconsequential as 'the flap of a butterfly's wing". The structure of the accompanying process is always the same.
Those of us who are blessed with a life-long devotion to serious music are well aware of the phenomenon of listening to something like a Mozart String Quartet and being unable to predict what the next phrase or harmony will turn out to be. When it does comes, it strikes us right away as something thoroughly original yet, at the same time, thoroughly appropriate. This experience is the aesthetic correlate to the phenomena of original creation as the investment of psychic or living energy in psychological adjustment.
In opposition to life-energy stands material energy: mechanical, thermal, chemical, electrical, gravitational, the energies corresponding to the 4 fundamental forces of nature, the activating element in all material transformation. Material or physical energy is not creative in the same sense.
Creativity is an indispensable requisite to fulfillment. Still, the realizations of the living state have to be translated into the cycles of transformation of a universe governed by dynamic laws, i.e. the cycles of potential and kinetic mechanical energy. When speaking of those inhibitions which restrict the free active of the mind, one has the sense that there is indeed an actual debasement of living energy to some physical form .External oppression or internal mental shackles upon the free creativity of this energy can cause great spiritual suffering: it is what we mean when we speak of an oppressive atmosphere. In the cyclic unfolding of the stages of adjustment, the basic personality disorders replicate the basic cycles of transformation from potential to kinetic energy of the physical world.
One responds to an active, living sensibility with living immediacy. Placed within a context that is cold or hostile one realizes at once how much we need awareness, understanding and compassion from our external surroundings to give meaning to life. For example, anyone delivering a lecture will sense when his ideas are being received by members of the audience, or when, to the contrary, they are getting lost in a haze of distraction or indifference.
We respond acutely and immediately to neglect, rejection, ignorance, stupidity, to mistreatment as mere physical objects to be exploited for gain. Likewise, even the worst of human beings automatically responds to genuine understanding, compassion, intelligence, insight, that is to say all of the living mental qualities.
This point is important and should be emphasized. One will find some response to authentic compassion or understanding even from a Hitler, Stalin or Milosevic. Reading the biographies of such monstrous dictators one realizes that every one of them was overwhelmed by panic and fear to an extent unimaginable to the rest of us. It may be naive to attribute any sort of conscience to such people, ( though Shakespeare in fact does so in his portraits of Richard III, Macbeth, Claudius and others ). However, sharing as they do in all the attributes of a common humanity, ( this indeed is what is most monstrous about them), they will feel compelled to respond, however minutely, to an empathetic presence. Indeed, had he been the lifelong prisoner of some mental asylum, that is to say the degree of power befitting his true condition, even a Hitler might have aroused pity.
We will therefore not hesitate to describe certain psychological phenomena as "animate", or "living", and others as "lifeless", "inanimate", "reactionary", "sterile" or "unconscious". We suggest that one can draw up an inventory of phenomena that belong belonging to the sphere of the psychological inanimate . In our view it is co-extensive with mental illness, including unwholesome states, backward, entrenched, obstinate, fixed ideas and reactionary thinking, and all the syndromes of denial, delusion and obsession.
The emotional affect associated with this perceptive faculty is Love . We restate the above in the form of a fundamental principle:
The automatic distribution of our perceptions of the impinging environment, the phenomenological cosmos , into the categories of Animate and Inanimate , lies at the foundation of all emotional communication between animate beings.
Simply stated, we love our pets because we see what is alive in them. If this is true for animals, how much more true it must be for other human beings? Certainly everyone has had the experience of sensing the presence of a family member, or someone who is very close to us, as something beyond the mere accident of their being in our line of vision. When this perception is particularly strong, we may even know that this individual is in an adjoining room without being able to see him (her) . Spiritually advanced persons are extremely aware of this, but it is surely a common experience for all of us.
In this essay it will be our intention to establish a connection between the presence of an unconscious inhibitory state in the process of psychic adjustment, to this hypothetical faculty of perception. Traumatic confrontations bring about an internalization of the blindness of the material cosmos. One can think of this as the direct transmission into our own consciousness of a kind of blind spot, which we speak of as the unconscious mind. Through the lasting effects of painful interactions with events or persons, a lifeless region takes root, then blossoms within the mind. Itself unresponsive, it is a source of spiritual suffering, while at the same time hindering fully aware, creative, and totally responsive adjustment to external reality.